Read Matt—The Callahan Brothers (Brazos Bend Book 2) for Free Online Page B

get to her pretty fast, too, because we can’t have her or any other members of her team returning to that island before we’ve dealt with this. Where is she?”
    “Rio.” Torie’s teeth nibbled at her bottom lip. “She’s shopping for a wedding gown. She should be safe enough for now, shouldn’t she? In fact, the bad guys will think it was Helen on the island, not me. No one but Helen knew I was coming, and when Marlow called yesterday, I pretended I was her.”
    Matt Callahan’s mouth settled into a grim smile. “That twins-switching-identities childishness really chaps my butt. I have twin brothers who used to pull that trick, but they grew out of it by the time they were ten years old.”
    Torie’s chin came up. “We didn’t switch identities. Not this time. I just thought it was easier at the time to pretend I was her rather than explain that I’d come to the island to determine whether or not he really was the slime bucket I suspected him of being.”
    “How far were you going to go to prove it?” he asked, his tone scathing. “Would you have slept with him as Helen like you were about to do with me?”
    Torie sucked in a quick breath. “That’s an awful thing to say.” She crossed her arms and tried to ignore the hurt. “You don’t know me. Why would you say something like that?”
    He stared straight ahead, a muscle working in his jaw. Silence stretched for almost a minute before he said, “You’re right. Sorry.”
    Torie wasn’t one to let things go. She liked answers. She wanted to understand. “What exactly has my father told you about me?”
    Though she wouldn’t have thought it possible, his jaw went even harder. “It doesn’t matter.”
    “No, I want to know!”
    “I don’t want to talk.”
    She wanted to challenge him, berate him, hit him, even, but he was wounded and piloting the helicopter, so she refrained. She settled for drumming her fingers against her thigh and tapping her foot and grousing beneath her breath.
    After not quite five minutes of that, he spit a curse. “I don’t like what you do.”
    “Look, sometimes it’s simpler not to explain who’s who.”
    “It’s not the twin thing. I don’t care about ... well ... yeah, I don’t like it, but that’s because of the stuff my brothers used to pull on me. I’m talking about what you do. For a living. Your father told me that. The paparazzi thing.”
    “Oh.” Torie couldn’t say she was surprised. It was a reaction she’d grown accustomed to over the years. Sighing heavily, she answered the question everyone eventually asked. “I wasn’t anywhere near Paris the night the princess died. I was still a kid.”
    “I didn’t think you—”
    “What right do you have to judge me, anyway? It occurs to me that our jobs share some similarities. We both eavesdrop, snoop, invade people’s privacy. At least when I shoot I do it with a camera instead of a gun.”
    “A camera can be just as devastating a weapon as a gun,” he snapped back, his voice all but vibrating with anger.
    Whoa. Touched a nerve there.
    “It’s a stupid way to make a living,” he continued. “Does the world really need to know when a celebrity couple buys a can of tuna?”
    “The world may not need to know it, but it wants to know it. Half the time—shoot, seventy-five percent of the time—celebrities want the world to know whether they prefer StarKist or Chicken of the Sea. You wouldn’t believe the number of calls I get from publicity agents to tip me on the fact that one of their clients will be vacationing on Nevis or visiting a topless beach on the Mediterranean. It’s gossip and glamour. It’s entertainment. Paparazzi are a spoke in the wheel of a multi-billion-dollar industry. I do a good job that serves a purpose and pays me well. I won’t apologize for it.”
    “Well, I think it’s B.S. that with all the troubles in the world, newspapers waste their space on drivel.”
    “Oh?” Sweetness dripped from her tone. “Like