Free Seducing the Accomplice by Jennifer Morey Page A

disappeared before I caught up to him. But not this time. This time I found him.”
    “In Tirana.”
    He nodded a couple of times. “I followed him to an old warehouse. He met with two other men who gave him the money in the suitcase. I couldn’t take the chance of not catching him again, so I did what I came here to do and took the money.”
    “He was the target you talked about with Odie?”
    Again he nodded, and she knew without asking that he’d killed the man. The idea should bother her, but it didn’t. A terrorist wasn’t an ordinary man. A terrorist was someone whose warped ideologies made him evil.
    “His name was Abu Dharr al-Majid,” he said. “Anyone giving him money means it was going for an illicit purpose. Terrorism. He had to be stopped.”
    So he hadn’t really stolen the money. “I thought you said you weren’t a bounty hunter.”
    “I’m not.”
    “Do you work for the government?”
    He hesitated. “No. Dharr was a special circumstance. I’ve waited a long time to see him dead. An opportunity came up that helped me do that.”
    Special circumstance? An opportunity? Years he’d been after this man. One man. One terrorist. She was getting closer to peeling back the layers and finding the core of what drove him. “You must have really wanted to get him.”
    His face grew stony.
    “What happened? What did he do?”
    While he didn’t respond, thoughts bombarded her. He didn’t work for the government, so he’d come here unofficially. He had a personal vendetta with a terrorist. How had all that come to be? When had he crossed paths with such a man? Had he been somewhere during an attack? Or had his profession led him to this point? What had led him to work in the shadows?
    “What are you going to do with the money?” she asked as a roundabout way to get her answer and to give him time.
    “Give it to my employer.”
    “Who is your employer?”
    He raised his brow with a gently admonishing look. “This is when I tell you to stop asking questions.”
    She paused awhile, and then asked as gently as she could, “What made this terrorist significant?”
    “We had a mutual friend.” Turning away, he picked up the remote and started surfing channels again.
    It was time to start pushing. “Was it someone in your family?”
    “No more questions.”
    “You never want me to ask questions. I could ask you if you have all ten toes and you’d skirt the issue.” She was so sick of that. “You need to start telling me things. You owe me that much. None of this is my fault. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. I’d be at the hotel waiting for my passport…my real passport.”
    He stopped surfing. Leaning back against the couch, he stared ahead for a while. Her heart expanded with sympathy for him. She could feel his turmoil.
    Finally, he turned to look at her.
    “A long time ago, a friend of mine called and told me about a man who was holding a woman against her will. I owed him a favor, so when he asked if I’d go get her, I agreed.” He stopped and she watched the pain of memory wrench him.
    She leaned back against the couch with him and slid her hand onto his thigh.
    “It happened when I was still with the Army Delta Force,” he continued. “We stopped in Istanbul on the way to the location of our next assignment. That’s when I got the call. The woman who’d been abducted was his sister. When I met him to get the details, he told me the man who kidnapped her was her boyfriend. When she tried to end the relationship, he wouldn’t let her go.”
    Realization slammed into her.
    “Her boyfriend was Dharr?”
    He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
    “You rescued her?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why didn’t you kill him back then?”
    “He didn’t get in my way. I rescued the woman without incident.”
    She was missing something. “Then, why did you go after him after you rescued her?”
    “After my assignment was finished, I had a few weeks off. I went back to Istanbul and