Forever by Jacquelyn Frank Read Free Book Online Page B

lumberjack under the table last … yester … ah fuck it. He just took pleasure in the idea that the lumberjack was probably stillthrowing his guts up. Luckily the lady of the stale perfume hadn’t cared whether or not Leo was drunk, she’d brought him home anyway. Which was good last night, but not so good this morning … evening …
    “I fucking hate time zones,” he grumbled under his breath.
    Now the trick was to find a way to extricate himself from woman and bed without waking her up. In his favor were vague memories of her drinking pretty heavily herself the night before. Odds were she was down for the count. He also seemed to recall some heavy-duty drunken sex in there somewhere. Actually, he was pretty damn proud of himself for it. Performance under the influence of alcohol could be a hit-or-miss situation. Especially that much alcohol.
    He had danced through more than one bottle of Jose Cuervo Especial during this particular contest. And if he remembered correctly, he’d won a fuckton of money when Mr. Lumberjack went down like a felled tree, the wooden floor of the bar shuddering with the impact.
People could be so predictable
, he thought. They figured the man with the height and girth was going to handle his liquor better than a man half an inch over 5′10″ with lean, whipcord strength and no fat to help absorb the tequila.
    They had figured wrong.
    Unfortunately, there was a price to be paid for being right. Actually, it was more like a steep cover charge. Number one, a hangover. Not a bad one because he’d remembered to drink a lot of water along with his shots and he’d taken aspirin before finally falling asleep. Number two, slipping out of bed without waking his hostess. Luckily this was something he’d had a lot of practice in. Infiltrating and extracting, without his targets being any the Styles ===================== */

vg. wiser. Honestly, they had both known this was going to be a straight-out tumble andnothing more, but he wasn’t interested in any pillow talk. She had already run through a lifetime’s worth of beauty-shop drama from where she worked, with the occasional segue to toss some serious venom her ex-boyfriend’s way. It was a good thing he’d been so hammered or he might have developed momentary discretion, looking for someone who had less juvenile drama in her life. Of course, those kinds of women were either A) taken or B) wouldn’t be caught dead in the seedy joint he’d sauntered into. And since he’d had no desire to juggle the difficulties of a better class of woman, this one had more than served her purpose.
    And it wasn’t as though he’d used her with no regard for
her
needs. He’d made her pretty damn happy. And to be honest he hadn’t originally planned to bed her. He’d been really wiped out from the flight back to New York from the land of Oz. But when a woman puts her hand down the front of his pants, what’s a guy to do? She’d have been insulted if he’d turned her down.
    Leo gingerly moved over her since his side of the bed butted up to the wall. She didn’t so much as stir as his catlike movements kicked into autopilot, years of training to move with silence and efficiency doing him some justice.
    As he pulled his jeans on he looked around, ver, you might

CHAPTER FOUR

    Marissa looked up from her conversation with the missing boy’s mother to see Jackson and Sargent running along the edge of the woods set back behind all of the properties on the street. Even as inexperienced as she was, she could see that Sargent was serious about whatever it was he was tracking. If Jackson went into the woods she would lose the chance to give him her impressions on the situation. She looked down at her shoes, wincing inwardly. She wasn’t wearing stilettos, but there was a good two inches on the heels of the shoes. Her only consolations were that they were a sturdy pair of wedges and that they weren’t exactly a favorite pair.
    “Excuse me, Becky,”