Hunted Read Online Free PDF Page B

so. They looked older than that. Which meant they didn’t fit within the time frame. According to what she had been told, this standoff had started approximately twenty minutes ago.
    Something to puzzle over later.
    She hadn’t exchanged one word with her father in the last six months, and she wouldn’t have talked to him six months ago if it hadn’t been in the line of duty. They were the opposite of close. When he had lived with Caroline, her mother, and her two younger sisters, he had been a verbally abusive and sometimes even physically violent bully. When she was eighteen, he had divorced her mother, left the family, and married again. On most days, she would have said that she actively despised him.
    But seeing him like this awakened all kinds of unsuspected emotions inside her, the simplest of which was a determination to get him, and the rest of the hostages, out of there alive.
    I don’t have to like him. I just have to do my job.
    Her chest felt tight. She ignored it.
    “If you’ve got something to say, say it,” Ware said with a glance at the phone, and Caroline realized that he was talking to her.
    Like the rest of Ware’s too-handsome self, the voice was pure Louisiana Cajun.
    She depressed the talk button on the phone.
    “This is Caroline Wallace, Detective Ware,” she said. “You want to tell me what this is all about?” Her father’s eyes widened. It was the only acknowledgment of her he made. Even if their relationship had been different she wouldn’t have expected anything more, given the situation. Revealing their vulnerabilities could only work in the hostage-taker’s favor, and Martin would know that. The knowledge that her father would be listening to everything she said, evaluating her skills, judging her as he had always judged her, caused her stomach to flutter unexpectedly, and realizing that she was having that reaction annoyed the hell out of her. For the sake of the other hostages, the ones lying facedown on the obviously expensive Oriental rug with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, the ones whose fear she could practically feel through the monitor, she needed to keep her emotions out of it. To do what she had been trained to do to the best of her ability, and forget about everything else. With that in mind, she almost went personal. Almost called the perp Reed, as she had years ago. But she didn’t: too many ears were around to hear, too many minds to speculate, too many memories to jog. Once upon a time, for a three-month period when the police superintendent’s family had been under threat and Ware had been one of the officers assigned to watch over them and keep them safe, she’dhad the most enormous crush on him. Done her best to seduce him, which, to his credit, he hadn’t allowed her to do.
    She’d been seventeen. He’d been twenty-five.
    Jailbait, he’d called her at the time.
    Since then, she’d seen him around. She’d grown up and gotten over him, of course, but she had always been aware of him. In a casual, heard-it-through-the grapevine kind of way, she’d known when he got married, had a child, got divorced. She’d known when his ex-wife and child had died in a traffic accident.
    She’d gone to the funeral, one of a large contingent of cops.
    That was three years ago.
    Now Reed Ware’s eyes looked straight into the monitor, as if he could see her. His irises were so dark brown as to be almost indistinguishable from the pupils. Framed by sooty black lashes and straight black brows, they were as steamy-hot as the Louisiana swamps from which he had sprung. Once, just having them look at her in a certain way had been enough to make her go all marshmallowy inside.
    Once.
    Not now.
    She was all grown up now. And he—he was the perp she was getting ready to help take down.
    How did this happen? she thought incredulously. How did Reed Ware—a solid cop with something like twelve years of exemplary service under his belt—wind up taking all these very