Under the Wire: Bad Boys Undercover by Helenkay Dimon Read Free Book Online

of the stiffness left her muscles as she turned around and fell into place between them as they started walking again. “A kidnapping. It was a wrong place, wrong time thing.”
    When Parker glanced down at her as if waiting for more, Reid jumped in. “You don’t realize it, but you just described half of our assignments.”
    “Ah, I get that.” Cara took a folding knife out of her pocket and passed it back and forth between her palms. “While on a government assignment in Egypt, a co-worker saw something she wasn’t supposed to.”
    Reid stared at Parker over the top of Cara’s head. “The ‘something’ was an assassination attempt on the Egyptian defense minister while the guy was trying toeat dinner in a dark, out-of-the-way restaurant with his mistress.”
    “Damn.” Parker whistled, just as he usually did when faced with rough information. “That’s some shitty timing on your friend’s part.”
    “No kidding,” Cara muttered under her breath. “Armed men followed her back to her temporary apartment, the one she happened to share with me at the time, and then windows exploded. Literally. Reid, here, flew through one.”
    “We’d picked up chatter about the plans for the attempted hit and were already on the ground. Bravo Team intervened but got pinned in the gunfire.” Reid knew Parker didn’t want the details, so he skipped those and went right to the heart of the mission. Bravo Team rushed in. Delta, Parker’s team, provided backup. Parker could get all of that from the cryptic sentence. “The result was a three-day standoff until we fought our way out.”
    Cara opened her mouth, looked like she wanted to argue, but then snapped it shut again. “That’s the highly abbreviated version that ignores the high body count, the unbelievable terror, and all the lies in the media about a neighborhood evacuation due to a gas leak or some stupid thing, but yes.”
    They walked in silence for a while after the intel drop. Parker continued his surveillance. Looked ready to accept all he heard and let the conversation go. Butno . . . “Did you propose between magazine reloads or wait until all the bad guys were dead?”
    Reid had sensed the amusement and still couldn’t avoid it. “Shut up.”
    “We got away,” Cara said, “and he played bodyguard for a few more days until we received the signal it was safe to come out of hiding, that the people involved in the assassination were caught.”
    Now there was a pretty way of saying it. Reid remembered a lot of blood, too. “She means dead.”
    Parker nodded. “Got it.”
    “Right, that was the G-rated version. The one I can think about without wanting to hurl.” She cleared her throat. “After that, he proposed.”
    “And you said yes. You seem to forget that part.” She certainly backed away from the answer fast enough. Not that Reid remembered the details, except that he could recite every word of every conversation between the time she said yes and the time she walked out.
    He’d assessed and reassessed everything he did and every sentence he’d uttered to figure out where they’d taken the left turn that ended it all. Sixteen months in and he still didn’t have a damn clue where it all went wrong. He’d been spinning up, ready to tell the team and figure out the safety parameters they could put in place in light of her research, and needed time in the field. All while she was stamping her get-out-of-relationship-free card.
    “We had a whirlwind few weeks then it fizzled,” she said in a softer than usual voice.
    That’s not how he remembered it. He was about to launch into a lengthy explanation of how she pulled back and started with the “highly emotional situations never work for a romance” lectures when they rounded the bottom of a hill and were confronted with signs of life . . . sort of. “Buildings.”
    “What?” Her head snapped up and her gaze followed his.
    “I think we’re here.” Parker pointed.
    Since she looked