Read Online Warrior Mine by Megan Mitcham - Free Book Online Page A

floor-to-ceiling windows it sat near and propped on the top while he drank his coffee and watched the sun bring the city into focus. This morning it held his gear.
    Guns, knives, an oversized backpack, first aid supplies, boots, a wool blanket, and various camping tools lay scattered across the smooth wood top. Though he didn’t dare put more on the table, save for the two sheets of paper. The narrow metal legs likely couldn’t hold much more. Would the thing hold Carmen with his weight on top and the power of his body thrusting inside her?
    He tossed the pages onto the table, ignoring his burgeoning erection. But really, what guy could look away from his Johnson when it saluted? Not him. He shook his head at the damn fool, who obviously had no sense of self-preservation. The gnarled red skin at his middle caught his eye. Slowly the sex-starved appendage followed logic and, despite the cold, hung low and long between his legs.
    Vail ran his hand over the puckered skin, appreciating that it hadn’t harbored an infection. Unlike two of the five scars scattering his torso. If this shot had been one foot in the grave, those had been body in, lid shut, but for some ridiculous reason the dirt hadn’t piled on top. So, like an idiot set on provoking his own demise, he headed to his bedroom to finish packing, shower, and drive to Kentucky.
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    I t shamed Vail that his own world-class, elite operatives were so easily given the slip. Then again, he went to great lengths to keep the sleek Audi he’d driven out the back gate and right past the agent a secret. They also worked at a disadvantage since they were on alert for people trying to break into the building, not him trying to escape. Add to the fact that no one knew he lived here in the first place and they all thought he was dead, they worked at an extreme disadvantage.
    Glasses and a hat helped conceal his face, but everyone knew his obnoxious truck by sight and sound. The thing gave him away a mile or more down the road with its rumbling engine. Its burnt red paint made it pretty hard to miss too. If training didn’t keep his hand eye coordination on point, parking that thing on a busy street without using the cars around him as speed bumps did. It fit in the city about as well as a straw of buckwheat between the First Lady’s lips. He loved the damn thing and would drive it until the day he died. Judging by the way things were going, that could be any day now.
    The low-slung S5 whispered through the fallen leaves at the roadside and hugged the curves as asphalt hooked through the foothills nearly five hundred miles from his safety detail. He didn’t understand why Khani put them on him in the first place. Neither of them expected Carmen to come finish the job, not that Khani knew it was Carmen Félix-Ruez who’d shot him. She still dug for her own answers and prodded him for information nearly every day, not that she expected to gain anything from him. Yet, if the roles were reversed he’d take the same precautions and hunt for answers just as doggedly.
    East of Morehead, Vail turned south into Daniel Boone National Forest. The road dipped between a valley of matchstick trees. Their thick, supple vegetation had long since changed from green to eye-popping yellows and reds, and covered the ground in a brittle brown blanket. At the top of a low ridge the sparse winter foliage allowed him to see the clear lake to his right. The cabin sat only a mile from the expansive reservoir near the end of one of its near stagnant tentacles.
    Vail hooked left at the next two-lane highway and passed the gravel road that eventually forked and turned to a narrow dirt path leading to Carlos’s newest piece of real estate. With no obvious nooks or side trails to hide his shiny black car where it wouldn’t be spotted a mile away, he continued on toward a convenience store he’d spotted on the satellite feed he studied late last night.
    He’d been ready to leave the city before dawn,