Bait: A dark erotic thriller (Hunter & Prey Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

kidding me? I’m walking around here, all out in the open, with a target painted all over my body, and you call that a risk? Just coming anywhere near a thousand-mile radius of the city is a risk.”
    Agent Smith gave me a haughty look, then let her eyes roam over the lavish furniture of the suite. “I’m not paying for this.”
    “Of course you’re not. You couldn’t even pay for a decent outfit for tonight,” I shot back.  
    “Three hundred bucks should have been enough—“
    “Not even for the shoes,” I replied. “But don’t worry, I’m paying for this myself.”
    Her brows shot up. Clearly she’d had a look into my checking account before, although I was sure that she hadn’t gotten a court order for it.
    “With what? Are you going to put out again?”
    I hated that the accusatory tone made me defensive, but there was no helping that.
    “Personally, no, but it is the logical next step to get back into the saddle.”
    Possible tax evasion first, now prostitution—Agent Smith really wasn’t happy with not being able to rise to the occasion and tear me a new one for the slew of criminal activity I carelessly tread upon.
    “You didn’t mind that the tax payers paid the cost it took to fix up your hand.”
    “Send me an invoice,” I offered blandly.
    “So what’s your grand plan now? Don’t think I don’t realize that you’re avoiding answering me.”
    I ignored that jibe.
    “Tomorrow, I will meet with my old madam. Either she will help me, let me use her business as a front, or I will have to start my own. This suite is large enough to double as my base of operations should I have to do all the legwork myself. Hell, there’s even a second bedroom where the girls could fuck their clients. You see? The perfect setup.”
    I had proposed something similar already, but she’d shot me down then. Now she seemed to realize that I wasn’t just randomly grasping at straws.
    While the others had kept silent so far, I heard a snicker from one of the agents at that, but it was Adam who cleared his throat. When neither Agent Smith nor I looked at him, he stepped up to her where he forced himself into my field of vision.
    “You really want to take over the escort agency? After everything that’s happened?”
    He sounded hurt, although he was trying to hide it. I held his gaze for a moment, then had to look away. I knew that he realized that this was a step back from the path we’d been on together since fleeing the city. Sure, Agent Smith might have forced us to work with her and that came with concessions to be made, but it took that statement from me for him to realize that I wasn’t just physically withdrawing myself by setting up this suite.
    “I don’t know,” I lied, glad now that the lack of emotion in my voice also leeched the thread of guilt from my tone. “First, we have to catch Hunter. And I have to survive that, too. After that, who knows?”
    None of the agents protested my somewhat dry assessment of the situation, but Adam wasn’t so blasé about things. Heat crept onto his face, his eyes narrowing.
    “You do know. You never do anything without a plan,” he accused.
    “Except for falling in love with the wrong guy, you mean?”
    That retort was a loaded one, much more so than even our handler seemed to realize. How the fact that Adam was pretty much acting like a lovesick puppy around me while I was about as responsive as a dead fish could have eluded her was beyond me—but then it was entirely possible that she simply didn’t care. Our deal was that, in case we managed to get enough concrete evidence on Hunter so she could properly get him convicted, Adam and I both would get complete immunity, rendering his skills useless to her. That in itself must rankle—he had been her forced-into-service pet hacker for years. But maybe the baggage he now came with was no longer worth the anger over losing him?
    And, sure enough, dragging a big fish like Hunter on land would sweeten the