Read Online You've Got Male by Elizabeth Bevarly - Free Book Online Page B

still remembered her name. Virtually none of them knew how her life had been in prison or even to which facility she’d been sent. Certainly none knew the names of her closest friends inside, as this man did. And how did he know about Andrew? She’d told no one about him. She’d had no one to tell about him.
    “Who are you?” she asked again.
    He smiled that sinister smile of his. “Well, now, Peaches, if you’d looked at my ID, you wouldn’t have to ask that question.”
    “Your ID looks like something that came out of a box of Cap’n Crunch,” she told him, ignoring the nickname.
    “Oh, and you’d know, since you pretty much live on stuff like Cap’n Crunch.”
    “Who the hell are you?” she demanded for a third time, more forcefully now. Her fear for her personal safety was quickly being usurped by her indignation at having her privacy—and her person—violated. If it turned out this guy wasn’t an actual threat to her physical well-being, she was going to bitch-slap him up one side of Park Avenue and down the other.
    He eyed her thoughtfully for a moment, as if he were weighing several possible outcomes to the situation. As he did, Avery weighed an outcome he couldn’t possibly be anticipating, no matter how much he thought he knew about her. And she was reasonably certain it would be the one outcome that ultimately occurred. For now, though, she contented herself in simply lying limp beneath him, hoping it might lull him into a false sense of security.
    It did.
    Because he told her, “I’m going to let you up, okay? And I’m going to show you my ID again, and you’re going to look at it. And then we’re going to have a little chat and then we’re going to take a little drive someplace, where you can chat with a few more people, too.”
    Oh, yeah. No worries here. Whoever this guy was, he’d driven way past a false sense of security and was now touring the state of delusion. This was going to work even better than Avery had planned.
    She nodded slowly and said, “Okay.”
    Still obviously wary—he wasn’t stupid, after all—the guy began to push himself off and away from her. She waited until he was seated beside her on the sofa, then carefully maneuvered herself into a sitting position, too, at the opposite end. She inhaled another deep breath and pushed both braids over her shoulders.
    “Okay,” she said again. “Let me see your ID.”
    He lifted his hands up in front of himself, palms out, keeping one that way while the other dipped beneath his open jacket to extract the leather case he’d held up to the peephole. Gingerly he extended it toward her, and just as gingerly Avery accepted it, opening it to study the information inside.
    The badgish-looking thing on the right was a rendition of a badge with a symbol on it, if not an actual badge itself, though it was one Avery had never seen before. And since her incarceration she’d done a lot of research into the various law-enforcement fields of the American justice system. Hey, she’d had some time on her hands. And she’d figured then—just as she did now—that it was always good for one to know everything one could about one’s enemies. As a result, she was familiar with some pretty obscure tactical outfits and task forces about which other people had heard very little, if anything at all.
    But this badge and its symbol were like nothing she’d ever seen. Although it had the traditional shield shape, there were few identifying marks on it. No numbers or letters at all. A border that resembled a heavy chain wound around the outer edge, surrounding what looked like a lance and a smaller shield at its center.
    The left side of the case was considerably more revealing. Or it would have been had Avery believed a single word of the information recorded there. Which she didn’t. According to this man’s identification, his name was Santiago Dixon and he worked for something called the Office of Political Unity and Security, a