Unleashed by Jami Alden Read Free Book Online Page B

time. If she didn’t get out of there, she would be sold, used up, as good as dead.

C HAPTER 3
    “S o are you going to help her?” Derek asked as they waited for the paper targets to make their way back on the line. He snapped another ammo clip into his Sig Sauer 45.
    “Did someone from Alyssa’s Hollywood crowd slip you some dope? No fucking way.” Danny yanked the target off the line and held it to the light, slipping his glasses down under his chin for a better look, then moved around to Derek’s side of the particle board partition to look over Derek’s shoulder. Derek’s target showed only two big holes. One in the center of the outline’s forehead, one in the center of its chest. He’d neatly divided his shots between the two kill zones and hadn’t missed a single one by so much as a millimeter.
    Showoff. There was a good reason Derek had become a sniper for the Seventy-fifth Regiment of Army Rangers.
    Danny’s shots, in contrast, were all over the fucking place, as scattered as his brain had been ever since Caroline Palomares—no Medford —had dropped in on his mother’s memorial service and dropped a great big nuke all over his day.
    “And that’s why you’ve spent the past two days digging up everything you can find about James Medford’s murder?”
    Danny didn’t answer right away. As far as his brothers knew, Caroline had made a surprise appearance to pay her respects to the dead and try to hire him to help her find the “real” killer. He hadn’t told anyone—not even his brothers—what Caroline had said about finding evidence linking her dead husband to his dead mom. He told himself it was because he didn’t want to give anyone false hope or waste their time chasing false leads—Christ knew they’d done enough of that for the past eighteen years. He didn’t want to get anyone else involved until he had something solid.
    Yeah, that was what he told himself, but as much as he hated to admit it, that wasn’t even close to the truth.
    The truth lay in the middle of a convoluted mess of emotions he didn’t even want to try to unravel. Starting with the one-two punch of ball tightening, knee weakening lust he’d experienced at the first sight of her, immediately followed by an upsurge of anger he would have sworn was dead and buried.
    “Seeing her again sparked my curiosity.”
    He didn’t have to look at Derek to know he didn’t believe him for a second. To avoid any more prying questions, Danny pushed the button to set another target and slipped his safety glasses and ear protectors back into place.
    Curiosity. Yeah, Danny was pretty fucking curious about a lot of things having to do with Caroline Medford. Starting with how she’d ended up married to the old fart in the first place. Never mind that Medford was good looking—for an old raisin anyway—a successful attorney, prominent on the San Francisco social scene and rich enough to have a mansion in one of the East Bay’s wealthiest communities.
    But he’d never pegged Caroline for a gold digger or a status seeker, even when she’d questioned his choice of West Point for college and his determination to join the Army like his father before him.
    Guys like you don’t join the army. Guys from my neighborhood join the army so they can go to school. Your dad has money. You can do whatever you want .
    She hadn’t understood, at first, his desire to fulfill the family legacy. Four generations of Taggarts, including his father, had served in the military. To him, joining the military wasn’t a last resort, something a man did because his choices were limited. It was the choice of a man who knew exactly what he was getting into and chose to face the challenge to be all he could be.
    Yeah, he’d quoted the Army recruiting poster back to her. So what?
    Caroline still hadn’t understood that—not completely—but she had understood his need to feel like he was doing something useful, worthwhile, on behalf of a cause greater than