Sins of the Storm Read Online Free PDF Page B

mastered during those dark, broken years after her father’s death, she slipped from bed and walked to the door, laid her hand against it as she pushed up to the peephole—and saw him. Saw Jack. His eyes were narrow, focused, the lines of his face tight. He’d yet to shave. He’d yet to—
    “Fils de putain,” he muttered, pivoting toward the front office.
    She fumbled with the dead bolt and the chain, yanked open the door. “Jack—”
    He stopped and turned, pivoted so violently she took an instinctive step back. “Camille.”
    Her heart kicked hard as she saw the gun in his hand. “What’s going on?”
    With a quick survey of the truck and SUV-cluttered parking lot, he closed in on her. For the first time she noticed the uneven hitch to his gait. And something inside her stilled. He fought it, hid it, but it was there, the faintest trace of a limp.
    From Jack.
    She’d heard about the bomb, but she hadn’t realized…
    He took her hand and led her back into her hotel room, shut the door and turned the bolt.
    And deep inside, fascination tangled with dread.
    He shoved the gun into his waistband and squeezed his thigh, gave her no time to prepare. She’d imagined this so many times, imagined what the years had done to him, what Iraq had done…what it would be like to see him, to touch him.
    But nothing prepared her for the reality of facing a man who bore virtually no resemblance to the boy she’d once vowed to love forever. His jeans may have been faded and his black button-down wrinkled, his jaw unshaven, but that’s where the deception ended. There was a hardness to him now, a veil of isolation that hovered like mist on a cold damp day.
    “There was a break-in at the savings and loan,” he said, and though his voice was calm, quiet, she knew. Without any further explanation, she knew why he’d come to her, what he thought.
    She also knew he was right.
    “Live Oak?” She tried to sound only mildly curious, but inside, frustration scraped. She should have password protected the file, damn it. It had been the last one she’d accessed. All someone needed to do was open her word processing program.
    It was all there, her notes and theories, questions. Plans.
    “Just after midnight,” Jack confirmed.
    Somehow she kept her expression blank. Somehow she kept the hot frustration from consuming her. He was a cop, she reminded herself. He was just doing his job, knitting the pieces together in search of a coherent picture. “Did he take anything?”
    Jack’s eyes narrowed. “What makes you think it was a he? ”
    Because it had been a man who stole her computer. “Just a guess.” Turning toward the automatic coffeemaker, she reached for the small pot. “From what I’ve read, most bank robbers are.”
    “I never said the bank was robbed.”
    She stilled, forced herself to turn toward him. He stood less than two feet away, with that unsettling stillness all cops had, watching her through eyes darker than she remembered. Harder. And any illusions she’d harbored about him not knowing—or at least suspecting her involvement—crumbled.
    “You asked me to trust you,” he said. “But I can’t do that, cher… not until you start trusting me.”
    The slow bleed stunned her. It wound through her chest and tightened, made it impossible to breathe. “I don’t know what you’re—”
    “Yes, you do.” He eliminated the distance between them in two quick steps and reached for her, put his hands on her arms and pulled her toward him, not roughly the way a cop might manhandle a suspect, but with an intimacy that heated her blood. “Goddamn it, if you’re in trouble again, you need to tell me. If someone is trying to hurt you—”
    “No.” She ripped away and stepped back, tried to breathe. “No one is trying to hurt me.” Just stop her.
    “Then how do you explain this?” he asked, and before he even pulled the envelope from his back pocket, everything inside her stilled. Because she knew. He’d