Free WARRIOR (CROSSFIRE SEALS, #5) by Gennita Low Page A

they? Somewhere between friends and lovers. Or maybe more. She would like them to be more.
    “Just a friend,” she replied instead. “And also emailing my mom. She’s a bit protective and if I don’t tell her I’d be incommunicado for a few days, she’d be sending a hunting party.”
    Sean chuckled. “It’d be tough to look for you in these mountains. Swat Valley is a beautiful touristy place but the mountains, it’s a different story. Your mom would need a different kind of hunting men out there.”
    Yeah, like my brother. He’s a— and she grinned because Lucas’ voice came to her mind loud and clear— fucking Airborne Ranger. Oh, she was in so much trouble. That man was haunting her thoughts.
    “You haven’t met my Mom. She’s very tiny but she always gets things done her way. The men in my family fear her wrath.” She laughed. Her mother was so typically cliché Chinese dragon lady, she suspected it was mostly an act. “She’s very good at wheedling information out of my brothers and me.”
    “So you got that from her.”
    Kit looked at Sean again in surprise. “Hey, full of compliments tonight. I’ll take it, Mr. Cortez.” She cocked her head. “Now, tell me what information you’re wanting me to try to get.”
    Sean leaned forward and beckoned her to do the same so he could lower his voice even more. Curious, she did so.
    “The teenager we’re going to meet with tomorrow—Minah—I need you to ask her about her groom, or rather, groom-to-be.”
    “The interview would cover that, right?” Kit asked. Because of an opportunity presented by one of Sean’s sources, they’d decided to include swara , the custom of giving away a girl as payment for an offense in their investigative report on the recent killing of a famous Pashtun singer by traditionalists. “We have the names. What else?”
    “The name interests me. I need you to delve deeper into the crime committed by her family against the groom.”
    “Okay.”
    “Go beyond what she’s going to tell you. I want more information about the groom, his clan, his whereabouts.”
    “How would we connect our feature on the murdered singer with his background?” The Pashtun woman, popular among the city and country folks, and her father were gunned down. “I know her death was an assassination ordered by her former husband, who, from my interviews with the women, made me understand he’d felt humiliated and needed to restore his honor.”
    That was why they were going to meet with this young girl, who, reportedly, had just been given away to an older man to restore family honor. They were going to weave the themes together as part of the investigation. The plan was to tie both stories to show how marriages were arranged and their consequences to the women involved.
    “Latifah’s death might have been officially attributed to her husband. Although there’s no proof, I have reasons to believe the murder had Taliban-connected elements and I want to look at it from another angle.”
    Whoa. “That would change the focus of our investigation.”
    Sean shrugged. “I’ve changed my mind before. My sources told me this young girl’s husband, or whatever you want to call him, has radical connections. Some kind of middleman for the warlords and that he has many other side-dealings that had to do with all the skirmishes in the war zone.”
    “But what about the women’s plight?” That was Kit’s main reason she had wanted to be on this team, for this particular project. The subject matter was different from the usual political topics. “What about Latifah’s story? And all the other women’s stories that I’ve gathered?”
    Sean eyed her quizzically for a second and leaned over so close, his breath was hot against her ear. “You can have total control of that part of the report, if you get me the information I want from our girl tomorrow.”
    Then he straightened back up and sat back against his seat, eyeing her contemplatively. Kit