Play It Safe (The Safe House Series Book 2) by Leslie North Read Free Book Online Page A

makeup artist with her to turn her into you for the meet-up.”
    Angela’s body went rigor mortis-stiff. No. No-no-no. That wasn’t part of her plan.
    “You can’t send someone else. Julian will know. Hell, Mike will know the moment I speak to him. I have to be the one at that flagpole or they will kill him.” Her voice pitched high, unnatural, helium-like. She paced the tile floor to try to chase it back to normal.
    “You show up at that flagpole, you’re both as good as dead.”
    “The team destroyed all documentation of the formula. Julian knows that. As long as I have that formula in my brain, he won’t kill me.”
    “And once you give it to him?”
    “I won’t. I’ll make it something close. Something harmless.”
    “And when Julian realizes it’s the wrong formula?”
    “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead.” She glanced around for a pen and notepad, her recording device—anything to tether her hands, her spiraling thoughts.
    “Angela, this woman is a highly-trained agent on a team positioned to flush out Julian’s contacts. We squeeze the contacts to talk and we find Julian.”
    “By then, Mike’s already dead.”
    “Giving into terroristic threats never ends well, Angela.”
    She felt her options slipping away, like a rockslide into a vast ocean of hopelessness. Getting to that meeting was paramount, if she had to approximate a lie to do it.
    “I want to meet with the agent first.”
    “No.”
    “How can she be expected to pull off me if she hasn’t met me?”
    “Too dangerous.”
    “For me? What about Mike? He is the goal, isn’t he? Or is he already a casualty of the intelligence-gathering process?”
    “Extracting him is a goal, Angela. But he’s not my goal. My objective is you.”
    Despite her absolute intent to storm the guy who stood before her and clobber her fists against his chest for forsaking her brother, his words landed against her heart like a mallet on a bass drum—deep, resonating, absolute. She wiggled a few breaths past the beginning stages of tears and paced away to think. She had to get to that meet-up, but she would have to hustle him, yet again, to do it.
    “The agent will have an earpiece, right?”
    “Most likely.”
    “If I’m there, close-by, watching, I can tell her what to say. They ask her a scientific question or something only she would know about Mike, she could blow everything with her answer and no one accomplishes their objective. We can bring my dress—the one they observed me in at the bar. Please, let me do at least this to save my brother’s life.”
    She tossed everything she had at the wall of reasoning, hoping something would stick in the logical part of his brain. In the contemplative set of his jaw, she saw consideration. In the critical lines of his brow, she knew he weighed risk-reward. In his unwavering stare that captured and held hers, she felt hope.
    “Ten minutes. Gather your things. Purse and the clothes you had on at the bar. Nothing else.”
    Angela’s lungs gulped two fast, light gasps of air on the intake, like a trigger of asthma that went nowhere. She bounded toward him, unaccustomed to action without a litany of steps, and found herself on her tiptoes, thanking him and kissing his cheek. Never had she been so spontaneous, not even when her roommate in grad school liquored her up on cosmos and paid for a lap dance from a male dancer. Samson’s bare chest wasn’t all that much different—bare, warm, hard-won muscles challenging every contour.
    The dancer, however, never reached back.
    Samson seized her elbows. His eyelids cut low across his stare; his voice edged out like a newly-sharpened blade. “You do as I say. Every second, or we don’t go. Agreed?”
    “Agreed.”
    She feigned the same authenticity as when they had established the rules of marksmanship. A clean shot at getting her brother back, nothing left to lose. Opponent chooses the target. In this case, her.
    At the right moment, she would