Behind Enemy Lines Read Online Free Page A

laude from Texas A&M, fluent in Spanish and Chinese, top graduate in his Special Forces training. Heck, just finishing that grueling course was an accomplishment.
    He stirred in his sleep, and she leaned over him to stroke his brow. It was the one thing that always seemed to calm him. His dark hair slid through her fingers, cool and sexy. It was wavy now that it was growing out from the buzz cut he’d had when she first saw him.
    She shuddered at that memory. His body, mangled and bloody, wrapped in twisted steel cable, had sprawled awkwardly on the cement beside her helicopter. He’d lain so still, his limbs at unnatural angles. He’d looked dead. Doing that to another human being made her physically ill.
    In fact, she’d been gagging on the far side of the helicopter when the embassy doctor had announced that the man was alive.
    Alive!
    She’d been so relieved she’d broken down and sobbed like a baby. But then Doc Clark recruited her to work up a cover story and get him to a hospital pronto. She’d promised his men she’d look out for him, so she pulled herself together and kept her word. And here he was.
    His forehead was warm under her palm, but she was familiar enough with him to know it wasn’t a fever. He always ran to the hot side.
    Without the slightest warning his right arm snaked up around her neck. He yanked her down, twisting so she landed partially beneath him. She stifled a scream. Man, he was fast!
    She stared up at that piercing slate-blue gaze of his. He blinked, looking disoriented. Holy mackerel! That was a heck of a wake-up reflex he had.
    “Good morning to you, too. And do you always tackle people first thing like this?”
    The corner of his generous mouth curved upward. “When they look like you, I do.”
    His heavy, solid body pressed her down into the sagging mattress.
    “Any chance you could let me breathe, here?” she gasped.
    His weight immediately eased off her, but he didn’t release her. His thigh lay across both her legs, his foot tucked around her far calf in such a way she could barely move. One of her arms was trapped beneath him, and her free hand pushed to no avail against his muscular chest.
    “Good grief, Tom. Be careful, will you? I haven’t spent all this time nursing you back to health just to have you break everything again in some macho display.”
    Up close his eyes were the color of a stormy sky and more penetrating than ever.
    “Let’s talk, shall we, Annie?”
    His voice was dangerously soft. It hinted at violence if she didn’t give the correct answers. She gulped. He’d always seemed so harmless lying unconscious in a hospital bed. He’d responded like a puppy to her touch, eager, grateful even. Nothing had hinted at this side of his personality.
    “What would you like to talk about?” she asked, doing her best to keep her voice even.
    “The apartment’s free of bugs?”
    “Well, it’s got a cockroach problem, but I’ve laid in a good supply of bug spray.”
    His eyes narrowed, and he stared at her with that saber-sharp stare of his. Suddenly he looked very much like the trained killer she knew him to be. And she was alone with him in a grungy apartment in a foreign city. A flippant attitude probably wasn’t the wisest choice right about now.
    She cleared her throat. “No bugs. What do you want to talk about?”
    “Tell me everything.”
    Everything. Like how she’d nearly killed him? Like how she’d broken his bones and caused him weeks of suffering? Like how she was responsible for deciding his life was less valuable than her own? No way. She didn’t have a death wish.
    “‘Everything’ covers a lot of territory. Could you be more specific?”
    “When and where did you first see me?”
    “On the helicopter pad at the American embassy seven weeks ago.” A glimpse of a heat blob on the infrared radar didn’t really constitute seeing him.
    “What exactly did you see?”
    “You, lying on the ground with a steel cable wrapped all around