Black Jack by Lora Leigh Read Free Book Online Page A

us knowing it.”
    There was a way. Lilly always found a way.
    Travis pushed back the warm beer he had been nursing and made to rise when he felt the
    small hand that pressed between his shoulder blades, indicating he should remain in place.
    Settling back on the stool, he turned his head, restrained his smile, and watched as Lilly slid
    onto the bar stool that had been vacated beside him.
    “I didn’t think you were going to show.” He motioned for the bartender to take her order.
    Waving the man away, Lilly turned back to him, her gaze suspicious as she watched him
    closely.
    She was wearing her riding leathers. Leather pants, boots, a short jacket, and a black silk
    shirt that bared her midriff if she moved just the right way.
    “Neither did I.” Her green eyes were dark in the shadows. “Tell me who you are and what
    do you have to do with me?”
    There was something about him, something familiar, something she couldn’t put her finger
    on. She should know him, but she couldn’t remember him. She couldn’t remember meeting
    him.
    But her body seemed to know him. Each time she had seen him, this morning as well as
    tonight, her body had responded with heated warmth and that familiar sense of remembrance.
    This man had touched her, he had kissed her. Her body remembered it and she ached for
    more. That ache had followed her through the day, the remembered feel of his body behind
    her, at the store, impossible to recover from.
    “I’ve had many things to do with you.” His smile was rakish, his brown eyes filled with
    sexual knowledge. A sexual knowledge of her.
    Lilly looked up at the bartender as he set a cold beer in front of her.
    “Good to see you back, Lilly.” The grizzled bartender gave a wide smile and a wink. “I see
    your friend found you.”
    “That he did.” She lifted the beer to her lips and took a long, cold drink.
    The bartender moved away, leaving her with the man watching her now. She didn’t even
    know his name.
    “Travis Caine,” he whispered at her ear as though reading her thoughts. “In case you were
    wondering.”
    She was doing more than wondering. It had been driving her crazy not knowing even that
    scrap of information. “I know your name then,” she said quietly. “Who are you to me?”
    “We met six years ago,” he told her. “We’ve run together at odd times since.”
    Lilly pushed the fingers of one hand through her hair.
    “We traveled together then?” Her heart was racing, her lungs starved for oxygen as she
    fought not to breathe too hard.
    He nodded and Lilly tipped the beer to her lips, and finished it quickly before setting it
    rather hard on the bar and flicking her fingers at the bartender to the empty bottle.
    He’d obviously been watching for her. Within seconds there was another bottle in front of
    her. She wondered what tip she usually left him for such excellent service.
    She finished half the beer, set the bottle on the bar, then glanced back at Travis.
    “I fight?” she whispered back at him.
    “Rather well.” He gave her a strange half smile. Strange, because she felt she should know
    what that smile meant.
    “What did I do when I fought?” she asked him. “Did I kill?”
    She knew she had. She rubbed her finger and thumb together, knowing her fingerprints
    weren’t there any longer and they weren’t there for a reason.
    “You don’t remember anything about the past six years then?” he asked as he turned more
    fully to her, the backs of his fingers stroking down her lower arm.
    Did she remember anything?
    She remembered her nightmares. They were filled with pain, rage, and fear. She
    remembered a sense of drowning, of icy water closing over her head as she fought to breathe.
    She remembered a kiss, a touch and an underlying anger that made no sense.
    She remembered the sharp retort of a gun, and then nothing.
    “I don’t remember anything.” At least nothing that she was willing to discuss at the
    moment. Especially considering the