The Buried (The Apostles) by Shelley Coriell Read Free Book Online

Hatch forgot what he was going to say. Hell, he forgot to breathe. The edges of the world blurred and dimmed. His heart slammed his chest, rattling his ribs.
    He opened his mouth. No words, except for the tiny voice in the back of his head.
    Back away from the pearls, and no one gets hurt.
    He wanted to laugh. He should have laughed, but he couldn’t. His throat was too dry, too tight. The woman tugged at the pearls, as if she, too, couldn’t breathe. At last she cleared her throat and managed to say on a breathy rush, “Theodore.”
    The boy at his side asked, “Who the hell is Theodore?”
    The blonde didn’t move. Hatch didn’t breathe.
    Alex stabbed his elbow into Hatch’s gut. “And who the hell’s the hot chick in pearls?”
    Hatch focused on the jab, on the pain, on the distraction. After removing Alex’s elbow from his ribcage, he winked at Grace Courtemanche. “I’m Theodore, and this is Grace, my wife.”

Chapter Five
    E x-wife.” The single word rushed over Grace’s lips as she steadied herself against the side of her car. She hadn’t seen Theodore “Hatch” Hatcher for more than ten years, not since the day he’d sailed out of Apalachicola Bay with the wind in his hair and her broken heart in his hand.
    Hatch continued to stare at her with eyes the color of a steamy July sky. But then, Hatch was summer. Lazy days and lustful nights. Sun and sand. And heat. A heat so intense, even with a decade’s distance, warmth crept along her cheeks, rushed down her neck, and pooled in her belly in a bubbly geyser.
    Hatch’s dimples deepened. God, she’d forgotten how easy it was to get lost in the depth of those creases, for a man like Hatch knew how to wear—and work—a smile.
    She straightened the pearls at her neck.
    “Yep, Alex, the lovely prosecutor is correct as usual. Tell me, Grace, do you ever get tired of being right?” He lowered his voice, his words pouring over her like honey, sweet and wild and golden.
    For a moment she forgot everything and simply listened to his words, the words of a charmer. Grace tried to go to the calm, cool place in her head, but her heart slammed triple time, beating up a heat that left her dizzy. From the moment they met on St. George Island the summer after she graduated law school, Hatch Hatcher had left her off balance. She’d spent the summer teaching tennis at an exclusive children’s camp, and he’d taught sailing. That hot, whirlwind summer led to a disastrously short marriage. It took them all of ten weeks to learn the universal truth: Mind-blowing sex does not a marriage make.
    She’d come a long way since then. She was older now, stronger and harder. She straightened her pearls, centering the clasp at the back of her neck.
    “What are you doing here?”
    Hatch gave her a breezy shrug. “Just taking care of a little crisis situation.”
    The boy standing next to him, the one he called Alex and who was Hatch’s spitting image, said something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like asshole .
    Hatch’s jaw flinched. The boy’s nostrils flared.
    “I see you ended up with the Bureau,” she said to break the tension.
    “Keeping tabs on me, Princess?” He waggled his eyebrows, the wicked grin back.
    Hatch and his stupid nicknames. “It’s hard not to. One of the country’s premiere hostage negotiators receives a good deal of media attention.” When she’d known him, he’d been a sun-soaked sailor without a paycheck or a plan, and she’d been shocked when she first heard he was working for Parker Lord’s elite team of Apostles. “I saw the talk-down in Atlanta last month of the high school boy with the bomb. It was all over the news. Good for you.”
    “Good for the twenty kids in that boy’s science classroom.” Hatch rested his backside against her car, crossing his legs at the ankles.
    To any bystander, he was just a guy kickin’ back and catching up with an old flame. But this man was an Apostle. He was one of the best crisis