Free Bulletproof (Unknown Identities #1) by Regan Black Page A

his voice and scaring her. “I’d assumed the dead man in the street was your contact.”
    “No.” Her voice lost the bravado. “My contact delivered. I think.”
    “Interesting.” Though he tried, he couldn’t put the big picture together without all the pieces.
    “Which part?”
    He felt her assessing stare. She might as well have touched him the way his face warmed under her gaze. Her curiosity was clearly in fine form. “If your contact delivered, that means either your contact or the pair of idiots who tried to nab you killed the guy on the bike.”
    “Why do that? He wasn’t connected to me at all.”
    “Classic diversion technique. A bit like divide and conquer. Wasn’t that how you identified your source?”
    “It was.” She made a thoughtful, humming sound. “I looked for the person acting differently than the other onlookers at the accident scene.”
    “Smart.”
    “Didn’t you hear what my source told me before he – or she – died?”
    “No.” He checked his mirrors. He hadn’t heard any of her conversation with the person near the church. He’d been busy failing in his assessment of the threat he couldn’t pin down until it bashed him on the head. “But I don’t think your source is dead. I was alone when I came around.”
    “That’s impossible.”
    “That’s the truth,” he muttered. He had the blazing headache to prove it. The hit would likely have been fatal for a normal man. John decided from now on he would follow his instincts with this woman no matter how much she protested. Even if it meant suffering the pain of skin to skin contact, they would stay together and move as a team. No more giving her enough room to go haring off on a whim. Her life and his future depended on it.
    At the moment, his instincts were sure it was too dangerous to stay in this car much longer and far too perilous to continue without solid information about the story she was chasing.
    He didn’t consider her silence any kind of agreement.
    “My contact wouldn’t have done that,” she said. “Scared or not, he or she wouldn’t kill someone as a distraction.”
    Her words certainly weren’t.
    “How can you be so sure? You don’t even know if your contact is a man or woman.”
    “I stand by the assessment. I understand people.” She shifted in the seat. “Most of the time I’m right. In fact my contact mentioned you .”
    “Now that’s impossible. I didn’t kill the poor bastard on the bike.” Irritation and frustration twisted inside him... but it was the fear slithering across his skin that had him second guessing himself and the situation. “I was with you.”
    “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
    He glared at her, wondering how she did it. For years he’d felt nothing, been numb to anything resembling humanity or the emotional investment that came along with it. How did he manage to cross paths with the one person capable of tearing down his carefully constructed walls?
    But he hadn’t just crossed her path. This situation wasn’t that clean. He’d been planted in the middle of her path by a man he wouldn’t trust to give him correct change for a dollar.
    He cleared his throat. Any and all information mattered at this point. “Your contact mentioned me?”
    She nodded. “I was promised a name, but got a locker number. The contact said ‘John will know the rest’.”
    “That’s crazy.”
    “Filtering out crazy is part of the job. My contact sort of died – or according to you didn’t die – before anything else could be said.”
    “Sounds to me like your contact is sending you on a wild goose chase. John is a common enough name. Are you sure nothing else was said?” That grab had been so well staged, maybe she’d forgotten something in the adrenaline rush.
    “I’m sure,” she said, pulling out her phone.
    “Put that away,” he ordered. “In fact, take out the battery.”
    “I need my phone.”
    “You can get a new one. They could be tailing you