Free Hotter Than Wildfire by Lisa Marie Rice

anyone going after Eve except himself.
    Sam moved to the chair in front of the monitor. He knew he wasn’t as good with computers as Harry was—few people were—but Harry trusted him to do this.
    “On it.” Sam set up the transfer of the image to the onboard computer in Harry’s vehicle. “You just make sure she doesn’t fall into Montez’s hands.”
    “You got it,” Harry growled, and raced out.
    Henry, the garage manager, must have had his spidey senses working overtime, because he had Harry’s Cherokee idling at the curb, driver’s-side door open, when Harry burst out of the front doors. Harry peeled out, keeping an eye on the GPS screen.
    “She’s going down Lark,” Sam’s calm voice came over Harry’s earpiece.
    “Yeah, I can see it.” Harry was driving as fast as the road and traffic would allow. The cab was four blocks ahead of him. The light was still yellow at the intersection ahead…
    Harry braked suddenly and pounded his fist on the steering wheel in frustration. A big delivery van suddenly appeared on the cross street, moving slowly. Harry would have run the red light, but now he was forced to wait.
    Though no sound penetrated the soundproofing in the car, he knew his tires were screeching as he took off the second the light changed. Heads turned as smoke rose in the rearview mirror.
    He was treating the vehicle badly, but who the fuck cared. The important thing was getting to where Eve was going fast enough to stop Montez’s thugs from grabbing her if they were waiting for her.
    With every second that passed, Harry was more and more certain that she was walking into a trap.
    He punched a number on the screen, the office. It took about five seconds to get through. All of RBK Security communications went through a proprietary satellite, which was owned by a company based in the Bahamas and seemingly located in Canada, and their calls couldn’t be snarfed out of the air like most Bluetooth-based comms.
    “Sir?” It was Marisa, who looked after the Lost Ones. She’d been a lost one herself and she was ferociously protective. No man trying to track down one of “her” girls would ever find out from Marisa that his victim had been to RBK.
    “Marisa!” Harry barked. “Did this Nora Charles call from a cell?”
    Tapping sounds, then Marisa’s calm voice. “No, sir. She called from a pay phone from…” More tapping sounds. “The Greyhound bus station on West Broadway.”
    A light turned yellow up ahead and Harry gunned the engine viciously, pounding his way through the intersection, wrenching the steering wheel to avoid a teenager driving a Mustang. The gap was down to two blocks.
    “Thanks, Marisa.” Harry felt a little spurt of relief. If Bearclaw got hold of Eve’s cell phone, they’d trace the number she’d called to RBK. Still, good luck with that. That one number, never used for ordinary business, was also registered in the Bahamas but routed through Canada. They’d never trace her through the number. But they could trace her through the phone itself, if she’d kept it on.
    He could only pray that she’d turned the cell off wherever it was.
    She was staying at the Curtis Hotel, he discovered, as the small red dot that was the cab stopped. With a voice command, Harry immediately superimposed a map of businesses over that spot and saw the name. It was only a block away.
    He pressed the pedal down as far as it could go, taking in the scene at the hotel at a glance. One hand on the wheel, the other pulling out his Kimber.
    No sooner had the cab pulled away than two men emerged from the shadows. Big men, armed. Overkill to pick up one lone woman. The first one to reach her pulled her arm up behind her back and slammed her into the side of a van.
    Eve turned white with shock and slumped, dazed.
    The fuckhead slapped her hard, pulled her arm up even more, bending down to give her instructions. He started man-handling her toward an off-white Transit panel van that had pulled up to