Free THE PERFECT TARGET by Jenna Mills

of brutality most people saw only in movies and on the evening news.
    She wondered if his scars ran deeper than the flesh.
    For some crazy reason, she found herself hoping they did. Not that she wanted him to hurt, not this man who'd willingly put his body between hers and a bullet. But she didn't want to think him heartless. She didn't want to think he could fire his gun and stop a human heart without experiencing a flicker of sorrow for a life gone wrong. She didn't want to think him so calloused that he no longer felt anything.
    She didn't want to think of the pain necessary to create such a hardened, impenetrable exterior.
    An emotion she didn't understand scraped against a throat already raw. She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them a moment later. Sandro still stood there, still hadn't moved. Silence filled the room like helium stretching a balloon to the brink of exploding. Every heat of her heart seemed to echo with punishing clarity.
    Or maybe that was his heart.
    Maybe both.
    Voices then, in a language she didn't understand. She didn't need to recognize the words, however, to hear the frustration. The anger. Danger.
    Sandro moved his head a fraction of an inch. From where she stood, Miranda saw his eyes glittering behind a scraggle of dark hair.
    The voices continued, growing more distant with every ragged breath she drew. As they faded, so did the tension riddling Sandro's body. His back still looked carved of dark, magnificent stone, but he didn't look coiled so tight, didn't look as lethal.
    Still, she didn't speak, didn't dare. Not until he issued the all-clear.
    Long moments passed, long moments during which her breathing leveled out and the thrumming of her heart gradually relaxed. Finally Sandro lowered his semiautomatic and turned to her. "You can come out now."
    Careful not to make a sound she eased into the shadows of the small room. "Are they gone?" she asked quietly.
    He crossed to the dirty window and narrowed his eyes, his gaze fixed on some point in the distance. "For now."
    Relief skittered through her. As a child she'd loved to play hide-and-seek, scampering through her grandfather's sprawling estate, slipping among the shadows of the basement or squeezing into obscure nooks and crannies, climbing the mammoth trees alongside the lake, but the stakes had been innocent and inconsequential, a candy bar or a wad of bubble gum.
    After her sister's death, the fun and games had stopped forever.
    "Who were they?" The voices could have belonged to anyone, she tried to convince herself. Tourists who'd lost their way. Locals who'd lost a dog. "What did they want?"
    Sandro turned from the window, but remained drenched in shadows. "They're gone, Miranda. Just leave it at that."
    His grim tone abruptly killed the fleeting hope that the men's appearance was nothing more than a coincidence.
    "They wanted me, didn't they?" she asked, and felt the chill of the realization all the way through to her bones. "They were looking for me."
    He started toward her. "They're not going to find you—"
    She stuck out her arm, warning him to keep his distance. She didn't want him to touch her. Couldn't bear it. She might crumble then, all those battered walls she'd thrown up against a fear she didn't want to feel might just come tumbling down.
    "I thought you said I'd be safe here!" The accusation tore out before she could stop it. "You said virtually no one knew about this room—"
    He ignored the pathetic barrier of her arm and pulled her against his chest. "The house is no secret," he said against her hair. With one of his arms around her waist, he ran his free hand along her back. "But the room is. Even if I hadn't been here, they would never have found you, not unless you'd made enough racket to the wake the dead."
    Miranda held herself very still, refusing to sink against the tempting warmth of his embrace. His shirt remained on the floor, leaving the side of her face in intimate contact with the wiry hair covering his chest.