Hide and Seek - Lara Adrian Page 0,20
eyes that stared back at her from this stranger with a gun in his hand. Then realization settled in.
She knew him. The third member of her brother’s trifecta.
“Alec?”
Instead of greeting her as she reached them, he did a quick visual scan of her, from bed-mussed head to barefoot toes. Then he turned a questioning look on John. “I’m not gonna ask.”
John grunted. “Good. Because I’m not about to explain.”
“I heard a gunshot,” Lisa said. “Someone want to tell me what’s going—” Her breath caught in her throat. She pointed to the large, unmoving lump in the bottom of the ditch. “That’s a dead body.”
“It is,” John said, his low voice guarded.
“Did you shoot him?”
“I did,” Alec answered, his baritone drawl equally cagey.
Lisa glanced between the two men caught in their unspoken standoff. Then she glanced down at the body and the nasty looking pistol beside him. The man wore plain clothes, but his trimmed hair and athletic physique screamed military to her. “One of you two please tell me what just happened. What’s going on here? Who the hell is that guy?”
“An enemy of the Phoenix program,” John replied. “Or someone working for the program’s enemies.”
Alec cursed low under his breath. “You told her about Phoenix? Jesus fucking Christ, Ranger.”
Lisa frowned. “Who’s Ranger?”
“I am.” John didn’t take his eyes off Alec. “It was my codename in the program.”
Alec blew out a sharp exhalation. “She shouldn’t be out here, man. She’s in danger.”
“No shit,” John ground out. “The question is, what are you doing here?”
“You mean, besides saving both your asses just now?” Alec gave a slow shake of his head. “Maybe I need to be more concerned about you now. What are you doing up here with Talon’s little sister? Other than the obvious, that is.”
“That’s between me and her. How did you know where to find me?” John drew a small black object out of his jeans pocket and held it in his palm. “This belong to you or the dead guy, Stingray?”
Ranger. Talon. Stingray. Codenames and dead guys, and...
A chill swept over her when she realized what John was holding. “Is that some kind of tracking device?”
“I found it on your car. Then I had a vision of some asshole holding a gun against your head.”
Oh, yeah. Let’s not forget the whole ESP thing either.
She swallowed hard, eyeing the dead man in the ditch. “You’re saying this guy followed me here to kill me?”
“I had the same vision,” Alec said, still looking grimly at John. “A week ago. I’ve been having a lot of visions lately.”
“You’re clairvoyant, too?”
Amazing how calmly she was able to ask that, given that before last night, she’d attributed claims of psychic abilities to people with overactive imaginations or a desperate need for attention. Neither John nor Alec fit those molds. For that matter, neither did her brother, if everything John told her last night about Kyle and the Phoenix program was true.
Which it certainly seemed to be, considering there was a corpse armed with a pistol lying three feet away and Kyle’s two best friends discussing the whole thing as if there was nothing strange about any of it.
“The tracker isn’t mine,” Alec said. “I followed Lisa here last night from Cinci. Been staked out in the woods all night, waiting to see what she was doing up here. And with whom. Now I know.”
“What about him?” John asked, ignoring the jab and cocking his head toward the ditch.
“He showed up a few minutes before you came crashing through the woods like an elephant on the charge. Lucky for you, I already had the son of a bitch in my sights.”
“More like convenient.” John’s tone and expression were filled with suspicion.
Alec scoffed. “This fucker would’ve killed you both if I hadn’t been here.”
“I wouldn’t have given him the chance,” John growled back. “How do I know you’re not part of the problem, too, Stingray? You working for the dark side since Phoenix went down?”
Alec gave a slight shrug. “I could ask you the same thing.”
Lisa couldn’t take the sudden overdose of testosterone rolling off the two men. And she also had about a thousand questions swarming in her head.
They started pouring out of her in a rapid stream. “Why would this guy want to kill me? Is it because of Kyle? Do you think he might’ve known where my brother is? Oh, God... do you think he might’ve killed Kyle, too?” She looked at Alec then. “And what do you mean you followed