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

too selfish to deprive himself of the chance to touch her where he knew her olive-toned skin was smoothest and softest. He wanted to shut down all his senses except touch, wanted to know if her subtle warmth and the rhythm of her heartbeat under his hand would heal his gaping wounds. Intently he searched her face for rejection that didn’t come.
    That first brush of his knuckles down that open trail at the front of her dress almost weakened him to uselessness. Watching her, he saw her lashes tremble and her lips press together.
    She wasn’t the glittering young woman who tasted like tequila and could strip off her inhibitions grinding out a salsa on an overcrowded dive bar’s sticky dance floor. She wasn’t even the dogged special agent who fearlessly went deep undercover but always returned to him to remind that good still existed in this goddamn world.
    She looked the same and rendered the same savagely primitive effect on his body, but she’d changed.
    Skimming his knuckles upward, he curled his fingers around the chain of her purse.
    â€œShy, Zaf?”
    He didn’t find the boldness in her tone authentic but accepted the words as a gauntlet thrown. He wasn’t shy; he was desperate and venturing into trouble he couldn’t mend.
    Zaf leaned, angled his head, and she met him halfway. Her glossy lips were slippery under his kiss, teasing him as if she was flicking a feather across his face.
    â€œCan’t seem to make a solid landing there, can you?” she uttered against his mouth.
    The almost and not quite and close misses were a game to her.
    But not to him. For Zaf, this was life and death.
    â€œJoey...”
    â€œShh. Tell me something. You hacked Willa Smart’s company to get to me. Was it for this, for a kiss from a woman you used to screw?”
    He’d done it because he was her protector. Compromising a matchmaker’s compatibility program was the means he’d taken to fulfill his obligation to her. Even if he’d lost his morality, he still possessed a sense of duty—whether he wanted it or not. “You were more than that. You’ve always known it.”
    â€œHave I?”
    The love that had once breathed between them had been inconvenient and confusing, yet the realest element in either of their lives. It had struck them unexpectedly. Neither was willing to let it go, and for that they were both to blame. Because something that good couldn’t last. Not for people like them who’d done what they had.
    â€œI got to you because I’m on a job,” he told her. Yeah, it was a vague explanation, but he wouldn’t divulge particulars now. “The kiss is because I can’t fight it. I’ve thought about you constantly since that night. It hasn’t been never-ending death, but it’s been a never-ending mindfuck.”
    â€œThey put you down, didn’t they? DC?”
    â€œIt needed to happen.”
    â€œDown deep, Zaf. You didn’t turn up at your parents’ place in Jersey or even in Pakistan. There was talk that you were dead but I didn’t think that. I knew you wouldn’t get time, either, that they’d rather have you on reserve than in a cell. About a year after... What I’m trying to say is I tried to bring you back and I couldn’t find you.”
    His mind spun through the past five years. The US government had dragged his ass up for a few missions that needed a sharpshooter of his caliber on the front line, but had thrown him back afterward at his request. He was freelance—off record, off the FBI’s payroll, damn near a ghost. He wanted it that way.
    â€œWhy’d you want to bring me back?”
    â€œTo ask you why you went dirty. You cut a deal with those bastards when I thought we were on the same side. You killed me when you turned, damn it.”
    So she still believed he’d defected to the drug-funneling terrorists he’d been quietly hunting since