Play It Safe (The Safe House Series Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

schooled her on how not to kiss like her only other experience—a prof’s assistant at Cal-Tech, all cocker spaniel and leftover hamburger; and the final phase where she hoped for a magnitude-ten earthquake to take California, once and for all.
    Then again, that might have been the kiss.
    The litany of things wrong with kissing Samson Caine, not to mention the man, himself, would overflow an entire pad of sticky notes. He functioned on instinct, danger, life lived from the neck down. Angela functioned best around cerebral men who didn’t underestimate women and couldn’t find their Latissimus dorsai muscle if they tried. Safe, predictable men. Which is why Samson’s overpowering testosterone and the appealingly symmetrical bone structure of his face had disarmed her judgment faster than it took her to clip off every last target on the tree log.
    Never again.
    Angela vowed to steer clear of him until the house quieted. She would stuff the bed with pillows, exit the patio door because the front door squeaked, sprint to the main road, and, well, she had more letters after her name than alphabet soup. Getting to Los Angeles by midday wasn’t Goldbach’s Conjecture.
    She reached the bottom of the drawer and a handful of elaborately-carved Jiu-Jitsu metals on colorful neck ribbons when a knock sounded on the door. Immediately, her gaze flashed to the backpack.
    “Angela?”
    She mustered her best sleepy, innocent tone. “Yes?”
    “Can I come in?”
    “I’m tired.”
    “I’m not apologizing to a door.”
    She had five seconds, tops, before she aroused his suspicion. The backpack or the personal items she had pilfered? She scrambled to her feet, slid the heavy pack behind the bathroom door and plopped back to a seated position.
    “Come in.”
    Samson entered the room all special-ops—head on a swivel, eyes cagey, focused on things like windows and doors until his gaze swept the floor. In the quiet, her labored exhales made it sound as if she had done a hundred jumping jacks or had a good ten minutes on full speed with…
    “You okay?”
    “Sure.”
    He lowered himself on the corner of the bed as if he expected the click-set of a weight-displacement bomb. For the first time, he seemed out of his skin.
    “I see your nosy nature carried you past the bras.”
    “Seventeen of them, varying sizes, but only one woman in all these photos. Who is she?” The question was impulsive, rude perhaps, but it stemmed organically from an unquenchable thirst to know every challenge, from all angles.
    Samson's expression softened. He surveyed the collateral damage of Angela’s curiosity. His eyes darkened, from twilight on the mountain or twilight inside, she couldn’t say.
    "She was my wife."
    The gravity of was caused Angela’s stomach to shift. The word held the finality of something far more than a split. Silence settled over the room.
    Angela reached for her favorite photo—a wind-whipped day on a pristine beach, long tussles of the woman’s latte-brown hair scattered in all directions but tamed by the grip of her long fingers at the crown of her head, a coy smile over her shoulder that said she had found the secret to happiness and she would share it with all who followed.
    “She’s stunning.”
    “She jogged every dawn. One morning, three days after our honeymoon, she went for her morning run and never came back. Most days I went with her, but Rockwell had me on a late night surveillance. She left me to sleep in without waking me."
    "What happened?”
    "Smacked-out parolee mugged and murdered her. She fought back like I’d trained her. If she had just handed her things over to the guy and got out of his way…" His voice trailed to nothing.
    Angela didn’t know what to say or do. She wasn’t good at things beyond beakers and equations, but he seemed adrift, like maybe he had lost his gravity, too, so she stood and picked her way through the invasion of his privacy she now regretted and sat beside him on the bed.