Read Online Silent Pursuit by Lynette Eason - Free Book Online

of my men face-to-face but don’t know that I’ll be able to turn up much of anything else.”
    â€œOkay, thanks, Mac. Tell Jimmy I said hello.”
    â€œWill do. Good luck and call if you need anything. I’ll be in touch.”
    They hung up and Ian turned to Gina. “What do you think? Does any of that ring a bell?”
    She shook her head and shifted in her chair. “No, none of it. But that doesn’t surprise me. Mario would never share details of a case with me. Ever. Not even when I asked.”
    Ian rubbed his chin. “No, he wouldn’t. Of course he wouldn’t. All right, then, let me show you one more thing I did.”
    â€œWhat?”
    She leaned in closer while he tapped on the keys of thelaptop in front of him and breathed in his clean scent. He’d taken the time to shower.
    You’re not here to notice how good he smells. Focus.
    Ian brought up a series of letters and numbers on the screen. “I accessed my high-security clearance account and input the letter Mario left you. I was looking for some kind of code.”
    â€œA code?”
    â€œSure, we come across them all the time in our line of work. It wouldn’t have been any trouble for Mario to come up with one off the top of his head and leave it for you to find. Plus, you know how he loved puzzles and such. I wouldn’t put it past him to do something like that.”
    â€œOkay. And?”
    â€œAnd nothing. I ran it through the military-grade software for code breaking, so to speak, and nothing.”
    â€œSo what does that mean?”
    â€œIt means that the letter is just…a letter.”
    â€œSo, no code?”
    â€œNope, no code. Unless it’s in the wording and something only you can understand. Which is what I’ve thought from the very beginning. So the ball’s back in your court. It’s up to you to find any hidden meanings in Mario’s words.”
    She took the letter from his outstretched hand, this time careful to make sure she had no contact with him. The knowing look in his eyes made her flush, but she ignored it and her reaction to him by looking down at the familiar handwriting. Guilt pierced her. Here she was trying to elude someone who wanted her dead, working on figuring out what her fiancé had been up to, and she found herself attracted to a man Mario had actually cursed.
    Gina stood and walked to the door. “All right. I’ll just, um,take this back to my room and study it some more.” Which would be a waste of time, since she had the thing memorized at this point, but she needed to escape and it was as good enough an excuse as any other she might try to come up with.
    â€œRight, you do that. After supper, Nicholas has volunteered to go over some of this with me tonight and see if his fresh eyes can spot something mine can’t.”
    â€œGo over what?” She paused, hand on the doorknob.
    â€œHe going to dig into some legal stuff, court cases and bad guys that Mario helped bust. He had an idea that whoever is after you might be a family member, or something, of someone Mario either, um, killed or put in jail.”
    Darkness seemed to shroud her for a moment. “I know something was haunting him, something that just wouldn’t leave him alone…. And he didn’t know what to do with it.”
    Ian stood and avoided her eyes. “Yeah, we all have stuff like that.”
    Gina retraced her steps back across the room to touch his arm. “I’m sorry, Ian.” Then she left and made her way to her bedroom, her thoughts racing, the words from Mario’s letter burning in her mind.
    What could he have meant? She flopped onto the bed, ignored her growling stomach, and studied it one more time. What kind of message could he have hidden in this straightforward-sounding letter?
    Line by line she went through it again. Time passed as she concentrated, trying to put new meaning to the words.
    Nothing. She