One More Night with You by Lisa Marie Perry Read Free Book Online

knowing he could only need and hurt and look.
    â€œI carry part of you with me wherever I go. I had two surgeries because I wanted you out of my body. But you can’t be extracted.” She circled him and faced the wall, feigning interest in a painting.
    Turning with her, he bumped her and instinctively fitted his hands over her shoulders. Contact. He hadn’t been prepared for the naturalness of her frame under his palms and her scent under his nose...the slow and calculated stroke of her ass as she leaned forward on the cane. “Josephine—”
    â€œYou didn’t answer my question. How does it feel?”
    If this was a pressure tactic, he expected something cleverer from her but could make some concessions. “Soft,” he murmured against one ear. He scraped her hair aside to access the other. “Familiar. I worshipped this. I’ve missed it.”
    â€œI meant, how does it feel to know you hurt me?”
    â€œLike a mistake I can’t undo.”
    â€œNot never-ending death?”
    â€œIs that what you want me to feel, Jo?”
    A snicker had them looking sideways where a handful of twentysomethings were openly watching them with goofy-as-hell smiles on their faces.
    â€œWe can’t talk here,” he whispered.
    â€œYou knew we wouldn’t be able to. But you went to shady extremes to get me here, anyway—which is pretty high on the creep-o-meter.” Joey straightened her posture and without warning pivoted away, leaving him standing there with a stiff cock and as hooked on her as he’d ever been.
    So she was furious and she needed space. He gathered his focus again, striding out of the gallery and putting her back into his line of vision.
    Where are you leading me? he wanted to ask, but she was too far ahead, and to raise his voice in a library and be shushed might detonate his temper.
    Pursuing the stacks, he watched her disappear down an aisle. Rows of nonfiction books confronted him as he followed her to the end then down the next aisle. She spied him over her shoulder, raised a hand to drag her fingers along the spines of the books but continued on.
    It was déjà vu, this chase. They’d shared this dance before. Now did she realize why he’d suggested they meet inside a library? Did she remember what he could never forget?
    Sensing the next aisle was empty, he listened for voices but the only close sound he heard was the tap of Joey’s cane. Awareness slowed her footsteps and the bounce of her fingertips on the books. Midway she all but stopped, but he kept his casual pace until he was standing before her. Barely turning, she put her backside to the shelves and as she began to drop her hand, he caught it.
    Sliding his fingers between hers in an intimate grip, he held her loosely against the bookstack. “We met in a place like this.”
    He’d been coming off a trafficking assignment in Russia when his supervisors had put him on an aircraft bound for Mexico to join a DEA team. The group had assembled in a library off-hours and during the late-night briefing a petite, fiercely beautiful operative had laid claim to him with just one appreciative smile as he proffered her a thermos of coffee she hadn’t asked for but he’d sensed she needed.
    He didn’t regret sharing weak coffee with Joey that tense night, or joining her afterward for a bottle of tequila and sex in a threadbare room with unscreened windows that let in voracious mosquitos and the fragrance of Mexican orange blossoms.
    â€œI remember,” she said, rolling her lips between her teeth as his other hand sought those old-fashioned little combs. Her hair poured over her shoulders like deep-gold citrus honey from a Mason jar—and smelled as sweet. “I remember how we started and how we ended.”
    A gunshot had ended them. So had his lies.
    Zaf hadn’t deserved her in the beginning and sure as hell didn’t deserve her now, but he was