Out of Chances (Taken by the Panther, #2) by V. M. Black Read Free Book Online

Air Force base, you said. They let you take me.”
    “I didn’t say?” Chay asked, reviewing their conversations quickly in his mind. “Oh. Guess I didn’t. Hey, Tara? I’m not with the government.”
    “Who are you, then?” she asked, walking again. “All of you? And why do you have an old underground Army base?”
    “I took it,” he said.
    “And they let you,” she said dubiously.
    “I didn’t ask,” he said. “Don’t worry, though. The government and I have an understanding. I get to keep what I want, even if they aren’t too happy about it.”
    “And you wanted me.” There was a slight tremor of a question in the words.
    He shot a look at her even as Annie made a small sound of disgust behind them. “Yeah, bae girl. I wanted you.”
    Her bright green eyes went wide for an instant before she cast them down at the floor in front of them, a pink stain visible under her olive cheeks.
    They reached the entrance to the spook shop, and Chay opened the door. Tara hesitated, suspicion written on her face, before stepping cautiously in.
    “Welcome to my lair,” Chay said.

Chapter Seven
    T ara stepped up onto the raised white-tiled floor and took the room in quickly with a single, sweeping gaze. She hadn’t really had any expectations, but somehow, the room still threw her. It looked a lot like one of the basement labs the mechanical engineering grad student that Tara had once dated had shown her.
    “Okay, then,” she said, edging out of the way to let the others in behind her. “You’re like some kind of secret group of...what? Because I’ve got nothing.”
    Luke and Annie stepped past her, Luke flopping down into one of the nicer desk chairs while Annie grabbed a silk robe and slithered out of the towel and into the robe before taking her seat near a third man who seemed vaguely familiar to Tara. The man didn’t even look up from his computer screen to acknowledge Annie or anyone else. Luke and Annie were soon immersed in the text flowing across their screens, ignoring Tara as if she were irrelevant.
    Which, to them, she probably was.
    “We’re the people who’re called when something with a little more subtlety than a platoon of Marines or a mob hit is required,” Chay said.
    She threw a glance over her shoulder at him. He’d let go of the door, and it was swinging shut under the power of an automatic safety closer.
    Shutting her in. But shutting him in, too.
    He’d let go of her elbow when he’s stopped to open the door. Up until that moment, she’d almost felt completely like her old self again, the panther driven into the far reaches of her brain. It was back now, pacing at the edges of her awareness. Deciding when to pounce.
    “Computer stuff,” she guessed to distract herself. “Like hacking?”
    “I prefer to call it intrusion engineering,” he said, a dark smile playing around his lips. “We’re black hat and white hat and every hat in between.”
    “My mother got a purple hat when she turned fifty,” Tara said reflexively under her breath, then shook her head. More loudly, she added, “I don’t think that’s quite the same, but...cool, I guess. I thought you were like some kind of super undercover agency or something.”
    “I am the freest agent there ever was,” Chay said, sitting at one of the chairs and resting his feet on the desk, legs crossed at the ankles. “And this is where I spend most of my time most days.”
    “When you aren’t off rescuing women from Air Force bases. Or was it kidnapping?” Tara couldn’t help that small challenge.
    “Depends on who you ask, but I’d definitely call it a rescue.” He raised his eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you?”
    Tara gave a little giggle, and she realized as she relaxed that it was the first laugh she’d had that wasn’t tinged by hysteria since she’d gotten to Chay’s Black Mesa. Whatever this place was, it definitely looked a lot less like a jail cell than her first set of rooms. “I guess we’ll see. Not