Free Trouble in Tampa by Nicole Williams Page A

threats, unconscious, Rob Tucker.
    Followed promptly by: Errand, Target, wife beater, Mrs. Tucker, freedom, Eve .
    Shit, the Tucker Errand wasn’t the only one I was working. The man warming my hand happened to be my Target too. What the hell was he doing there? In Tampa? He’d been in Seoul when I passed out with him still on the other end.
    Had I managed, in one unfortunate instance, to compromise both Errands? They were both important to me—the Callahan one because of who was involved and the dollar signs tied to it, and the Tucker one because of the devil I was dealing with. If G knew Henry Callahan was sitting beside me in a hospital in Tampa when I looked as if I’d just gone toe-to-toe with a heavyweight boxing champ, she would probably breathe fire.
    G . . . what was I going to tell her? Good thing she was taking a vacation in Mexico and threatened that unless it was a matter of life and death, not to bother her. Since I was still, technically, alive, I used that as my excuse to not call her right that second to let her know what had happened. But I’d have to tell her eventually, and just what was I going to say?
    I had too many questions and no time or mental fortitude to work them out. It might have been the haze of the drugs or the haze of Henry, but something was definitely messing with my ability to think clearly and logically.
    “Eve? Did you hear me?” Henry asked quietly. “Who did this to you?”
    He looked at me, and the darkness that flashed through his eyes was staggering. Henry had always been a think first, hit second kind of person. Given the look on his face, if Rob Tucker were to appear and I pointed at him in answer, I had no doubts Henry would have a moment of hit first, think second. But Rob Tucker wasn’t there—thankfully—and Henry was waiting for my answer.
    “I don’t remember,” I lied, needing to salvage whatever was left of keeping the Errands separate.
    “You don’t remember what ?”
    I sighed. Henry was a natural problem solver. That was part of the reason he was the president of a Fortune 100 company, but that also carried over into his non-business life. Which was a pain in my ass given my compromising predicament.
    “Anything, Henry. I don’t remember much of anything right now.”
    “But—”
    I shook my head. “Please, thinking about it is only giving me a headache. I’m sure when my head is less foggy and I have time to work stuff out, it’ll all come back to me.”
    He looked ready to go one more round of rebuttal, but he closed his eyes and exhaled.
    What is he doing here? How did he find me?
    “What are you doing here, Henry? How did you find me?” Of all the questions I had, those were the ones I couldn’t stop repeating to myself.
    “I’m here because you’re in the hospital looking a bruise or two away from being in a coma.” His forehead creased. “And I found you thanks to a Callahan Industries microchip locator.”
    My eyes widened as far as they could given their swollen state. “You had me microchipped?” I would have shrieked that if my vocal chords were up to the task.
    “What? No.” Henry shook his head. “Your phone. Every employee-issued phone is microchipped in the event—”
    “In the event you might want to spy on an ex?” I raised an eyebrow.
    “In the event one of my employees goes missing. I have employees who travel a lot to parts of the world that aren’t exactly friendly to Westerners. The microchip was invented and installed as a life-saving device, not a spying one.” Henry gave me a You satisfied? look.
    “What you call life-saving I call life-spying,” I replied.
    “Whatever you call it, you can’t deny that that microchip did, in fact, save your life.”
    “My life wasn’t in danger.”
    Henry’s eyes ran up and down me again. They narrowed as he took in my face. “And what you call not in danger, I call getting beaten to the point of camping out on death’s doorstep.”
    He was right, of course, but