Free Pursuit by Elizabeth Jennings Page A

immediate prospects, not even a healthy body to count on.
    So he’d bided his time—and he’d nearly lost her to the stormy sea. Well, now that he’d found her, he wasn’t going to waste another second. He’d been handed a second life, and he wanted Charlotte in it.
    She was sitting on the couch, watching him. Matt was glad to see that the shock was diminishing, as was the wild shivering. Luckily, she hadn’t spent that long in the water. Once she was dry and he had something hot and sugary in her, she would start recovering.
    He didn’t know whether she’d recover from his discovering her secret, though. She was perched on the edge of the seat as if poised to make a run, as if she could escape him if he chose to attack. The idea was so ludicrous he would have laughed if there had been anything even remotely funny about the situation.
    He had her dry clothes in a neat pile and put them on her lap, making sure he didn’t touch her bare skin anywhere. “Here you go.”
    She covered the clothes with a hand. “Thank you,” she said quietly.
    “Dry yourself completely and put those on now.” If there was one thing Matt knew, it was how to put command into his voice. Charlotte nodded.
    He went into the kitchen, taking his time preparing tea, making noises so she’d know he wasn’t looking. The kitchen was as tidy as the bedroom. She didn’t have much in the way of food supplies, but there was plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, neatly put away. When he came back in with two steaming mugs of tea, she was dressed, her hair was almost dry, and the worst of the shivering was over.
    She was tougher than she looked, his little Angel.
    “Here, drink as much as you can, as quickly as you can.”
    Charlotte took the mug from him, but her hands were still cold and awkward. The mug shook. Matt placed his hand under hers, steadying it. “Drink now.”
    She sipped, gingerly at first, wincing as the heat filled her mouth. By the time she’d finished the cup, her skin had lost that bone white color that had frightened the hell out of him.
    Matt drank his own tea, fortified by a healthy dollop from the bottle of whiskey he’d found on a sideboard.
    She’d avoided looking at him, but now she raised her eyes over the cup. Her expression was stark, white lines around that luscious pink mouth. “I can’t talk about it,” she whispered.
    He nodded his head carefully, as if what she’d just said was the most reasonable thing in the world.
    “Okay.” He kept his face bland, determined not to spook her. She was sitting on the edge of her seat, in flight-or-fight mode. She wasn’t going to flee and she wasn’t going to fight. He wouldn’t let her do either one.
    Most people thought soldiers were wild, gung-ho types fueled by rage and hopped up on adrenaline. Not Matt’s kind of soldier. Toughness took many forms, and patience was one of them. He’d once slow-crawled for three days past an enemy encampment. An inch an hour with a seventy-pound combat pack on his back, with no food and a sip of water every four hours.
    Right now silence and stillness were what were called for, so he didn’t talk and he didn’t move.

CHAPTER SIX
    Warrenton
    Barrett arrived exactly at midnight.
    The Philippe Starck clock on the mantelpiece had just sounded the hour when the bell buzzed.
    Taking a moment to straighten his tie in the pier glass in the foyer, Haine schooled his face to impassivity, then opened the door. Haine studied the man on his doorstep. No one had gotten it right.
    The whispers in the dark of the night had all been of an extraordinary man, a man who looked like a predator, a stone-cold killer. The man standing before him now could have been an accountant or a low-level civil servant. The only hint at something extraordinary was the whipcord resilient thinness—the same build Olympic track runners or Tour de France bike racers had. Other than that, he was ordinary-looking. Normal, mild-mannered guy, you’d think, then