Free Hunt Me (Love Thieves #3) by Heather Long

back outside, he checked the car. Kit’s. Her bag and purse sat on the passenger seat in bold statement. Checking his phone, the GPS told him he was right on top of the tracker. Thumbing it off, he slid the phone into his pocket and leaned back against the car to wait.
    The redhead emerged with a tall cup in her hand. She saw him immediately. Her relaxed expression stiffened, becoming almost predatory. He stared at her as she strode toward him. “You must be Jarod.”
    Surprise flared in his gut, like a match being struck against wood, burning away doubt. “And you are?”
    “I’m Georgia.” She grinned. The faint yellowing of her teeth didn’t detract from the warmth the expression added to her face.
    “Good evening, Georgia.” He infused the words with a patience he didn’t really feel. “This isn’t your car, is it?”
    “Well, not exactly. But, I do have a slip signed over to me and legal permission to drive it for as long as I wish.” She took a long swallow of coffee. The lines around her eyes were tight with worry, and, despite the friendly curve of her lips, the corners of her mouth seemed strained.
    “Well, if I were to call the police….”
    “Look, I don’t want any trouble. You’re Jarod, so I can answer your questions. If you were the other guy, I wouldn’t have even come back out of the coffee shop.”
    The other guy. duMonde? His eyes narrowed as she juggled her coffee cup and reached into her purse to pull out—Kit’s cell phone. He recognized the case. Hell, he recognized her whole ensemble. Georgia wore a two thousand dollar pantsuit and four thousand dollar shoes. She thumbed the screen on and flipped from text messages to photos and held it up.
    “See, this is you.” Clearly a photo of him sitting across from Kit on the plane. When did the little vixen snap the shot? “And this is the other guy.”
    The other, indeed duMonde, but the photo came from a distance and looked saved from the Internet.
    “All right, so you can talk to me. Talk.”
    “First, let me say I am only the messenger. She promised me you wouldn’t shoot me for saying this.”
    The corner of his mouth turned up. “She’s right. I won’t.”
    “She said to tell you, ‘Make it three to three, now we’re tied.’”  Georgia punctuated the sentence with a pair of kissing sounds.
    His eyebrows climbed.
    “Hey, the kisses were from her. She made me repeat it four times, until I had it down.”
    A headache gathered in the back of his skull. “When did she do this?”
    Georgia swallowed another mouthful of coffee before answering. “Last night. She cruised the boulevard. Took her for a high roller. They like to slum it, sometimes. Course, I don’t do chicks.” She gave him the once over, and he ignored the speculative invitation in her eyes. “Anyway, she offered me a grand—cash—and all I had to do was swap clothes and drive her car around until at least 6:00 p.m. tonight. She told me there were two men who might be looking for her. You were okay, but I should avoid the other guy at all costs.”
    The pain in his head began to hammer. Twice, he’d underestimated Lady Hardwicke’s resourcefulness. He wouldn’t make the same mistake again. “And that’s it?”
    “Pretty much. She gave me her phone, and there’s a digital tablet in the car and some files.” She shrugged. “She waved me off, and it was the last I saw of her.” She closed her eyes a half second and glanced down during her answer.
    “Really?” He didn’t know her well enough to assume the deflection a lie, but the guilt trailing through her gaze told him to hang onto this thread.
    “Okay, maybe I circled the block a couple of times to make sure she wasn’t screwing me over.”
    “She just gave you a thousand dollars in cash. She didn’t have time to screw you over.” And Georgia was only a pawn in the game. No need to sacrifice her or make her task unnecessarily hard.
    The woman flushed a faint shade of crimson, and guilt