Free Hotter Than Wildfire by Lisa Marie Rice Page A

the curb. The other guy opened the van’s back doors. The van’s cargo bay was empty except for blankets on the floor. The guy opening the bay was holding a .45 auto down along his leg.
    Eve dug her heels in, clearly understanding that if she got in the van, she’d never get out again. She pulled against the arm holding her, outmatched, but not giving in. Harry watched her struggle, watched Fucker 1 backhand her again while Fucker 2 watched.
    Seeing that, seeing her hurt, Harry’s blood boiled. He shook all over with rage, except for his hands. His hands were steady and knew precisely what to do.
    In a second he’d braked, shouldered the door open and leaped out onto the street before the vehicle stopped rocking.
    He raced toward the man holding Eve. The man slammed her against the Transit’s side again and reached inside his jacket. His reactions showed he’d had training, but he didn’t have enough training to stop Harry. There wasn’t enough training in the world for that.
    Every instinct as a soldier told Harry to go for the armed guy first. It was practically written in stone. When facing an armed man and an unarmed man reaching for the gun, go for the gun that’s in sight.
    But Harry couldn’t stand to see Eve manhandled for even a second longer. He ran straight up to the guy holding Eve, moved sideways fast in a smooth leg sweep, catching him as he lost his balance, pressing against him hip to hip, then rolling his hip to hold the guy in front of him as a shield.
    Armed Guy had started shooting, controlled bursts from his automatic, but he was hitting the man in front of Harry. Harry braced against the impact of the bullets hitting the body he held in front of him.
    The armed man stopped shooting and turned his gun on Eve, but Harry’s gun was up and firing. A double-tap to the head and he dropped like a stone, only a star of pink mist dissipating in the air marking where he’d stood.
    The whole thing had taken no more than three seconds.
    Eve was on the ground, unconscious, but there was one more guy to worry about before Harry could help her. The van door slammed shut on the other side—the driver’s side. Harry dropped to the ground and put a round in each ankle, watching bone splinters pepper the ground. Ignoring the screams, he raced around the front of the van and placed a round in the screaming man’s head without a second thought.
    There was no doubt that these fuckers’ orders had been to bring Eve in alive if possible—dead if not. All three were armed—flipping back the jacket of the man who’d manhandled Eve showed a well-used holster and a Glock 17 seated in it, undrawn. He’d trusted his big fists to subdue a lone woman.
    Harry gave him a vicious kick in the side, sorry that the fucker was dead, because he wanted to kill him all over again. He told himself the kick was to see if he was still alive, but that was bullshit. Some primitive part of him wanted to cut the fucker’s chest open, rip his heart out and feed it to the dogs. Touch Eve and you died.
    He looked down and his heart stopped. Just stopped for a long, horrendous second.
    No.
    This couldn’t be. He closed his eyes for a second, sure that when he opened them again, he’d see bare asphalt at his feet and three very dead men scattered around the vehicle and that was all.
    Life couldn’t be that cruel. In the nanosecond in which this thought flashed through his head, every cell in his body rejected it as false. Life could definitely be that cruel. The cruelty of the world was never-ending, fathomless. The fact that something would break your heart was almost a guarantee that it would happen.
    He opened his eyes again, the scene unchanged.
    Eve, lying on her back, utterly still, blood staining her white shirt, staining her arm, pooling around her back. As he watched, a rivulet of blood broke from the pool and followed a groove in the asphalt invisible to the naked eye down to the edge of the curb, where it started dripping