Free Wanted by a Dangerous Man by Cleo Peitsche Page A

moment to work with him, I would have agreed to do it.
    The world seemed to freeze. This couldn’t be happening. Not to me. I didn’t fall in love, and I didn’t fall for bad boy criminals. But it was.
    I fell forward, squeezing him in an impromptu hug and burying my face in his neck so that he wouldn’t see my expression. I probably caught him off-guard, but after a moment, he squeezed me back. In another world, we could have had a chance.
    He stood, taking me with him. I hooked my legs around his waist, wanting him so much that my panties were slippery wet.  
    “We have to go,” he murmured into my ear.
    I reluctantly lowered my feet. Time to go to work. The good part was that if I was working, I wouldn’t be having utterly unrealistic fantasies about spending the rest of my life with this man who I barely knew.

    I called Rob when I arrived at the address. It was a five-story apartment building. Not modern, but not exactly old, either. A little run down. The surrounding buildings were warehouses, all of them either abandoned or in the process of being converted to condos.
    “Ok,” Rob said. “I’m half an hour away.”
    “Still? Did the grand you dropped on the stripper come with a little extra?”
    “I’ll have you know that she likes me very much,” he said. “She said I’m the only guy she’s ever wanted to fuck… if I’d had another grand.”
    I laughed and hung up. For all the joking, it wouldn’t surprise me if Rob ended up dating someone he met there. I had no idea what women saw in him. Not because he was my brother. He wasn’t unattractive, and his easygoing nature could be charming. But he was so unreliable when it came to relationships. Or work stuff, actually.
    A light turned on at the back of the building, and I unbuckled my seat belt.
    “Your brother said for you to stay in the car,” Corbin chided. He appeared to be sending an email on his phone and didn’t look at me.
    I got out and walked along the length of the building. I didn’t hear Corbin come up behind me. I hadn’t heard the car door close, either, but when I looked back, it was closed, and the light wasn’t on.
    “You’re looking in the wrong place, Audrey,” he said.  
    “What?” I turned to look at the front of the building, and Corbin grabbed my shoulders and rotated me so that I was facing an empty warehouse. “You think he’s in there?”
    He took off at a slow, graceful run, his shoulders hunched forward. After a moment, I followed, skidded on a patch of ice, then caught up.
    He stopped abruptly, and I slammed into him. “Careful,” he said. “If you break me, you’ll have to do my job until I’m recovered.”
    “Not funny.”
    “No.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cloth bundle. I watched in fascination as he unwrapped a set of lock-picking tools. He chose two slender picks. I looked around in confusion. I didn’t see a door.
    He backed up, head raised, and I saw what he had in mind. On the second floor, a row of windows covered in grates.  
    “Hold this.” He pressed the bundle into my hand, put the tools between his teeth, backed up more, then ran at the building. He jumped gracefully and caught the bottom of a ledge that I hadn’t even noticed.
    If someone saw him… I glanced around. There wasn’t anyone in the area, though. We were too far from the road.
    He pulled, and his body seemed to float up, allowing him to hook one of his feet on the narrow ledge. I was in pretty good shape, but I hadn’t been able to do a chin-up without grunting since I was in elementary school and weighed sixty pounds. But then I wasn’t wrapped in muscle.  
    His foot slipped off the ledge, leaving him hanging by his fingertips. He pulled—still no grunting. When his chin was level with the ledge, he rocked back a little, then swung himself up so that his long body pressed against the grate. I stared in shock.
    I shouldn’t have been surprised. The first time I saw Corbin’s sculpted