Read Online Taming the Fire by Sydney Croft - Free Book Online Page A

for his lover. There had to be something more here for Oz to send this operative to him.
    Which was crazy, that he was even considering Oz was sending him someone. “Let me talk to Zach about him—maybe time with the animals would do him some good. In the meantime, give him a wide berth.”
    Annika nodded and left. He prepared to go back to work, except that Marlena was staring at him. “What?”
    “You don't know the new recruit's name. You don't want to know it.”
    He didn't answer. “I thought you were going to get me a list of the guards who worked last night.”
    She nodded. “Okay, will do, Devlin.”
    “And take this with you—file it away,” he growled, handing her the new recruit's file. She didn't say another word, just took it from his hand and walked out of the office in a huff, and yeah, it was going to be a hell of a day.
    T HE MAN who'd been told his name was Ryan might be thirty-two years old, but his entire life amounted to eight months of unremarkable memories, several migraine headaches and two homemade DVDs of fetish porn, starring him and no fewer than six gorgeous, bound women.
    Thing was, none of his eight months' worth of memories included any of the sex he'd had on those DVDs, which was a total fucking bummer, because it looked like he'd had a pretty good time, even if the kind of kink he'd apparently been into didn't look like fun now.
    The utter lack of memories was the reason he'd ordered Itor's pilot to take a quick side trip to Frankfurt before continuing on to his final destination.
    Ryan ignored the turbulence as the jet descended into its final approach to the German airport. He was too busy flipping through the pages in one of two files he'd brought with him. One file detailed his official mission: capturing or killing a rogue Itor operative named Ulrika Jaeger. The other file detailed his personal mission: finding a woman named Meg Lapp and discovering why, when he couldn't remember anything about his past, he remembered her name. Or, at least, the name he'd known her by.
    Coco .
    And what the fuck kind of name was that?
    He pulled her picture from the file, a familiar sensation washing over him as he did so—a bizarre combination of hatred and lust. He had no idea why he might hate her, nor did he know why he threw wood every time he looked at the photo. Maybe they'd been married or something. Itor claimed he'd never been married, and while they hadn't ever given him reason to doubt them, instinct told him not to buy into everything they said. That instinct was also the reason he'd kept his search for Coco under the radar, even though he'd covertly used Itor's resources to find her.
    Good thing too, because Coco would never have been found by conventional means.
    No, his Coco was a clever little thing, whose shady cyberspace dealings kept her on the move and underground.
    He ran his finger over the image of her dark, pixie-short hair as though he could smooth the windblown locks. The picture had been taken from a distance while she'd been sipping coffee and pounding away at a laptop at a Parisian outdoor café. Her funky, red-framed glasses sat low on the bridge of her nose, and he'd bet that right after the photo was snapped, she'd pushed them back up.
    If the women in his DVD porn were any indication, he was attracted to tall, big-breasted blondes, but something about Coco fired his imagination. She was hot in a nerdy way he shouldn't find sexy if he was the bastard on the DVDs. Then again, his brain had been scrambled and rewired, and he didn't know what he found attractive anymore.
    According to Itor, eight months ago he'd suffered a traumatic head injury while on an assignment, resulting in amnesia that left his entire life a big, black hole. Itor doctors had repaired his body, but no matter how hard he tried to remember his past, all he could come up with was the name Coco, something he'd kept to himself.
    Itor had showed him evidence of his past… gruesome photos of the