Free Run From Fear by Jami Alden Page B

over. If he could control himself with her, if he could continue to improve, it would bode well for when he finally had Talia under his control.
    He’d make it last days, weeks, until she was begging for him to kill her and put her out of her misery.
    “Thanks for meeting me.” A feminine voice pulled him from his reverie. “I really appreciate the extra time. If I don’t get at least a B in this class, I’ll be totally screwed.”
    He pasted a bland smile on his face, careful to conceal the excitement twisting his insides into knots. This was just a meeting between teaching assistant and tutor. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing at all. “It’s my pleasure, Rosario.” He smiled at the beautiful, dark-haired girl as she slid into the seat across from him. “I would hate to have you lose your scholarship because you’re struggling with physics.”
    As she went to order herself a latte, he marveled again at his continued streak of good luck. Discovering that Talia lived nearby and that her sister was enrolled here at Stanford.
    It had been laughably easy to get placed as a replacement teaching assistant for Rosario’s Physics 43 study section. He was, after all, one of the top PhD candidates, his research in single molecule biophysics on the bleeding edge of the field. When Rosario’s teaching assistant had suffered a bad fall down the stairs, the professor teaching the lecture series was only too glad to bring him on board.
    And as though the universe felt the need to grant him yet another miracle, Rosario Vega was terrible at physics. The only way she’d pass the midterm, he’d explained after he’d graded her latest problem set, was if she met him regularly for extended tutoring sessions.
    She’d smiled and nodded, so eager to please, so eager to do well, it actually made him feel bad about the suffering she’d no doubt feel when he killed her sister.

    Jack could read the upset on Talia’s face from across the bar, and for about the thousandth time he wished hecould have gotten here hours ago. But Susie’s call had come right as he was debriefing the Blankenthorns on the new security protocols he had developed for the entire family.
    Every instinct had screamed at him to drop everything and rush to Talia’s side, but he couldn’t risk pissing off an important client for something that, according to Susie at least, might not be an emergency at all.
    But he’d been assured Talia was safe, though shaken up. And judging from the look on her face when she caught sight of him in the crowd, none too excited about seeing him.
    He wished he could say the same, he thought with a little inward sigh. Truth was, he’d found it hard to stay away these past few days. But after their discussion, he knew he couldn’t even do one of his “stalker runs,” as Danny Taggart called Jack’s discreet missions where he got a long enough glimpse of Talia to reassure himself she was doing okay.
    All of it, including the regular reports from Susie and Rosario, had to stop. Not because he would be okay not knowing how she was, but because after her reaction to the alarm installation, he knew she would be furious if she knew he was checking up on her behind her back.
    From now on, any interaction with Talia had to be face-to-face. Problem was, he didn’t trust himself to keep a lid on what was really going on inside him.
    But goddamn, it was hard. Today’s meeting aside, he’d had a lot of downtime this trip and it was driving him crazy, knowing Talia was a short drive away and knowing she wouldn’t welcome him sniffing around constantly like a dog.
    Even her frown at first sight of him tonight couldn’t diminish the primal, idiotic feeling he got in his gut whenever he saw her. It hadn’t started out this way with her, and he didn’t know when the switch had flipped, but somewhere along the line, Talia had gone from being someone who aroused his deep-seated protective instincts to being much more… important.
    And