Free Nobody's Hero by Liz Lee Page A

he was going to make her say it out loud. “The kiss. I went a little crazy and I apologize.”    
    “You apologize?”
    Okay, he sounded a little mad, which wasn’t her intention at all. But she wasn’t going to say anything more about it.
    He, however, wasn’t done.
    “Damn, Darlin’. You can’t apologize for a kiss like that. You’ll make me think I’ve lost my touch.”
    She blushed an even deeper shade of red and shot him a pure go to hell look. “Don’t make fun of me, Riley.”
    “Aw, Hon. Don’t go confusing pure-D appreciation with making fun. You are one hot babe. You’ve always been sexy as hell. It was hard enough keeping my hands off you. Now I’ve got to go around trying to think about how to keep you safe, figuring out puzzles and writing stories all while remembering the feel of you sitting on top of me, your tongue inside my mouth, your left breast so close I could’ve….”
    Her heart pounded as heat radiated through her body. She held out her hand. “Okay. Okay. Stop.”
    And just like that, he did. “As long as we’ve got that cleared up.”
    “Perfectly.” She couldn’t sit there talking about that kiss without wanting to relive it. And that was out of the question. Time to change topics. “Tell me about you.”

    “Hmm?” Riley was having a heck of a time not marching across the room and kissing her breathless again. Talking about it had made it all the more real. He wanted her. Bad.  
    “Tell me about you.”
    “Me?”
    “You know, the cabin, the boat, your job, your life.”
    Oh man. She wanted the whole touchy, feely share conversation. One hot kiss and they’d graduated to the talk phase of the relationship. He wasn’t going there. He couldn’t.
    “I inherited the boat and cabin from a nice man.” Understatement, but it worked.
    “The man in the picture?”
    “Yeah. Sparky.” She wouldn’t remember Sparky. No one in town really knew him. They’d just benefited from his money over the years.
    “You spent a lot of time with him?”
    Man, this really sucked. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Kind of like a grandfather.”
    He wasn’t going to tell her how Sparky’d rescued him from the hell of a loveless home the night when Riley was twelve years old. How the old man had followed him out of the 7-Eleven and made him empty his pockets of the stolen merchandise and then made the deal that Riley clean the store every night for a month in exchange for his silence. How now that he was older he understood his father’s grief, but he didn’t understand his fist or his belt or his words. In fact, he was done with this conversation period.
    He looked at the clock over the stove. Rand should be calling with news soon. The loaded gun sat ominously on the counter next to his computer. He looked back at the lake. It was still crowded with typical early evening summer traffic. The boat from earlier was nowhere to be seen.  
    And then he turned his head just in time to see a man walking along the edge of his dock.
    The dog walker.
    He’d found them.

    Callah saw the alertness in Riley’s eyes, the way his back stiffened. An almost predatory feel to his entire being.
    And she knew.
    He was out there.
    The flight in fear, the boat ride, the clues they’d gathered, none of it mattered. The man who wanted her had found her.
    “How?” Callah’s whispered word echoed through the bare living room.
    Riley shook his head slightly, frowned. “I don’t know. But the news about your dad was a pretty good indication these aren’t your every day bad guys, Callah.”
    He was right and dammit that frustrated the heck out of her. “We can’t win.”
    “We’re not going down without a fight.”
    She laughed, shook her head. She’d made her decision. “You sound like Clint Eastwood, Riley.”
    She inserted the loaded clip into the revolver.
    Riley’s eyes narrowed as he watched her, his own gun ready at his side. “I can think of worse comparisons for situations like