Hawk's Revenge: Lone Pine Pride, Book 3 Read Online Free PDF

kept tripping for local fauna. Get into the forest and you should be clear.” She put a hand over the backpack. “Run, Hawk. Run like hell.”
    “So you can hunt me?” He didn’t realize he’d growled the words aloud until he saw the hurt flicker briefly across her face, but she didn’t reply to the jab. All business, his Rachel.
    “We’re getting out, Noah. This facility is backed up to a National Park and they won’t want to draw the attention of the rangers, so you should have the advantage. I’ll buy you as much time as I can and be right behind you. By now they’ve figured out I’m not entirely on the straight and narrow. Hopefully they’ll be too distracted by me to come after you right away. When I can get clear of them, I’ll post to the old message boards.”
    “You expect me to believe you would sacrifice yourself for me? After everything you did to me?”
    Irritation flashed in her warm chocolate eyes. “It was never about you ,” she snapped. “None of it. Now go.” She slipped off her watch and grabbed his wrist, putting it on him. “Four minutes.” She placed a hand over the backpack he still held to his chest, almost as if it was a child she was praying over. “Make it count, Noah.”
    She went up on her toes so quickly he didn’t have time to react before her lips were pressed, soft and sweet, to his. He jerked away, tempted to spit out the taste of her, but she was already whirling, bolting back inside, the door clanging heavily shut as she left him there, quite literally holding the bag.
    Adrian cursed.
    He knew it was all a trick, all a lie. The Organization bitch would never have released him into the wild. He was probably carrying enough tracking devices to be seen from space—if that even made sense. His brain felt like it was three-quarters mush. Luckily his instincts were still online, and they were urging him to run like hell. Even if he was being used as bait, he could be bait that got the hell away from here. He ran.

Chapter Four
    There were certain defining moments in a person’s life, moments that gave you the opportunity to test your true nature and see if you were really the person you thought you were. In a crisis, would you save the day or be a lump of useless, shocky flesh? You never really knew until you were tested.
    Rachel had often wondered if she would truly be able to sacrifice herself for others. Or if, when push came to shove, when it was the moment of truth, if she would give in to self-preservation and fight for her own survival instead.
    When she’d first discovered that her “patients” at the Organization weren’t there voluntarily, she’d told herself the shifter captives wouldn’t be helped in any way by her disappearance—but she’d still called herself the worst sort of coward because she had let herself be cowed by the Organization’s thinly veiled threats.
    She knew now that her bosses hadn’t been bluffing. She’d had colleagues vanish when they started asking the wrong sorts of questions. The local authorities had never investigated—the Organization selected their personnel carefully. No family attachments, unless they could be exploited as leverage. The preacher and his wife who had adopted and raised Rachel had both passed by the time she was recruited into the less-than-legal side of the Organization.
    They were careful. No one would raise a ruckus if a scientist notoriously terrified of flying decided without warning to jet off to Mozambique to pursue a research grant. There was always a barely plausible story to explain the disappearance, and anyone else within the Organization who was thinking rebellious thoughts heard the warning in the faulty explanations. You could be next.
    In the Organization there were two options—toe the line and advance, or rebel and vanish. So Rachel had toed the line, and told herself it was for the best, that through her treatment she was at least better for the shifters than some other less humane