At the gallery she stopped short, recognizing a nosy, stubborn, ebony-haired friend. “Charlotte, what the hell?” She hadn’t meant to growl, but stress had been all but choking her. “I told you I could do this without backup.”
The woman had the actual nerve to look befuddled as she turned around. “Sometimes I forget how talented you are at putting the ass in assumption. Who says I’m not here to get at look at CCL’s collections?”
“Are you?”
“All right, no, I’m not. I came to watch out for you.” Charlotte, in leggings and a Las Vegas Slayers polo shirt, had clearly driven straight over from the team’s training camp facility in Mount Charleston. “It’s what friends do. You would do the same, and, actually, you have.”
“And I recall you didn’t appreciate it all that much.” It was a careful reference to how affronted Charlotte had been when she’d discovered Joey had used FBI connections to excavate Nate Franco’s past—because Charlotte’s history with men wasn’t exactly glowing.
“Turns out, it was for the best.”
Yeah, if for the best meant stumbling upon a sophisticated illegal gambling ring that had yet to lead an almighty kingpin to justice. But she wouldn’t harp on that now. “Charlotte, this is a date in a library. I’ve engaged in riskier hookups than this. So far I’m underwhelmed, but I’ll be fine.”
“Underwhelmed?”
“Just a feeling I have that my life won’t change a damn iota once I meet mystery guy. And to think I waxed it bald for this.”
“Waxed it bald.” Charlotte’s mouth twisted in a smirk.
“Well, I’m an optimist.”
“About the location. You told me it was his idea to meet here. A library’s probably one of the least romantic spots in this city.”
“Beg to differ there. The brain’s the absolute sexiest organ. Get that stimulated and…wow.”
Charlotte blinked. “The brain? Aren’t you all about the cock?”
Joey’s laughter attracted a few unappreciative glares from the flow of people exiting the gallery. She silenced the outburst but didn’t apologize. Walking inside with Charlotte following close, she cataloged all the faces she found. Unless her mystery match had lied about his appearance—six-six, dark hair, dark eyes, beard—he hadn’t yet arrived and was late. “I thought I was supposed to be the bad influence in this friendship, but here you are making me disturb the peace. If you get me escorted out of here I can’t promise that I’ll ever forgive you.”
“Is this your not-so-subtle way of asking me to get lost?”
Was he going to show up at all? Had he somehow gotten a look at her and changed his mind about this whole thing?
She didn’t want her bride-to-be bestie to be hanging around doling out sympathy once it became undeniably clear that she’d been stood up.
“Charlotte Blue, get lost.” Joey lowered onto a bench but continued to register each new face that crossed the threshold. As more people drifted inside, body heat rose and thickened the air. “I should text him, let him know I’m here…waiting.”
“Good idea.” Charlotte hesitated as Joey opened her pocketbook. “Jo, that’s not your phone.”
“Bingo!” Joey whispered sarcastically. “This is a junk phone. Keeps things secure.”
“Are you ever not in federal agent mode?”
“It’s who I am.” It’s all I am. All I know how to be.
With a decisive jab, she sent a message.
I’m in the gallery.
The phone vibrated in her palm.
I know you are. You still look good, Jo.
Adrenaline surged as she mutely stood and clutched the walking stick. Her blind date was supposed to be a stranger, but somehow he knew her…knew to call her Jo.
Knew how to slip into a room undetected and hide in plain sight.
But the ability to vanish like a vapor when he didn’t want to be found was only one of Zafir Ahmadi’s exceptional talents.
Across the gallery, he was physically close but their hearts were galaxies apart. Five years had passed since Zaf had curled her naked body against his, since his voice had penetrated every particle of her, since she’d caught the silky strands of his inky black hair between her lips and come at the command of his touch.
His image started to blur, as though he was a figment of her most masochistic fantasy. But there was no hallucination to be blamed, just the stinging mist of tears.
He was real and he was here, though he had no right to be.
Beside her, Charlotte caught sight of him and was subdued to momentary silence. Zaf had that pupil-flaring, panty-wetting effect on women. “Hey, Joey, is that him? Your date?”
The tears danced in Joey’s eyes and with a slow blink she set them free. “That’s the man who shot me.”
Chapter 3
Zaf Ahmadi was a hollow man. Selling his soul for the sake of a vendetta had been a necessary trade—one he didn’t resent and wouldn’t apologize for. The end—avenging his cousin Raphael’s murder—would justify the means.
But Joey should’ve never been caught in the middle of his war. She was his to protect, and he blamed himself for hurting her. Firing his weapon in an Arizona parking garage hadn’t been a mistake, but striking her…loving her…had.
Tried and convicted as an adult on criminal hacking charges when he was a teenager, trained in the US military at the end of his years-long sentence and unleashed in black ops as an emotionally vacant sharpshooter, he was destined for an isolated, tortured life—but Josephine de la Peña had drawn him toward a utopia he’d never known existed. She was light and color and hope, and he’d screwed up and fallen in love with her.
Then his gun, his bullet, his error, had sent her to the ground on a blanket of her own blood, and he’d been slung back to the world he was meant for—a world void of everything he’d known with Joey. She had been shot but it was he who’d fallen off the grid for five damn years.
The single reason he’d come out of the shadows was to protect her. He’d wounded her, wrecked her in some sense, but it hadn’t been his plan. That plan belonged to another architect, and Zaf would let no one take her life.
He’d been in Las Vegas some months now, lying low but learning the characteristics of the city and the hierarchy of its people. He surfaced at casinos on the occasions that he wanted to play his intellect against sophisticated dealers ruling high-risk table games.
Mostly he tracked the bastard who’d made Joey his target. The threat to her had intensified to the point that Zaf could no longer effectively watch over her from a distance. He needed access, proximity, trust.
Good friggin’ luck getting even one of the three.
Not that he would blame Joey if she tried to run him through with her cane right now. He’d taken no sadistic pleasure in her pain, but welcomed her retaliation. He figured he deserved the wrath, and secretly he prayed it would assuage his agony.
Zaf stood motionless. It was up to her to come to him now. He’d done all the heavy work to this point, hacking into Dating Done Smart’s system, creating a profile and neatly bridging it to hers without leaving a trace that security had been breached. This wasn’t a federal job—he’d find no governmental cooperation should the company be alerted and take up arms against him. But he didn’t care. He knew an attack was coming and this time he would keep her safe.
Inside he shook with a craving to clear the damn room of everyone but his Jo. His Jo. She wasn’t anymore—when would that fact take root?
A line of people nudged past him for a closer look at an exhibit, then he could see Joey’s tears again. No longer offering a mesmerizing shine to the bitter snap in her russet-brown eyes, they streaked down her cheeks. The woman next to her held out tissues but he wanted to block them with his body and erase the wet trails with his tongue.
Whatever she said next had her friend reaching out as though to shield her, but Joey jerked loose and said something that sent the other woman out of the gallery. Identifying her was no chall
enge—he knew Charlotte Blue was a Las Vegas Slayers athletic trainer and Nate Franco’s fiancée.
And he knew Nate Franco’s godfather, Gian DiGorgio, was a billionaire Joey had crossed. He should be in prison now, staring at the blood on his hands. But his brilliance, duplicity and mighty alliances afforded him the slickest loopholes to escape the consequences of his crimes, and gifted him the opportunity to put Joey under surveillance because he intended to lay his bloodstained hands on her.
Joey navigated the gallery to him but didn’t speak.
To take the coward’s way, he’d ignore the stick, pretend he didn’t feel a bone-deep stab of remorse with each halting step he watched her take. But to be a coward required him to fear something, and the capacity to do even that had been drained from him. “I did that. I did that to you.”
“You did. The bullet’s still embedded. Fragmented. But I’m sure somebody in the network told you that.” Those eyes were relentless—punishing, even. Her accent was spiced with the influence of her Spanish-speaking family and Texas upbringing, her timbre controlled and nonthreatening. Deceptively so. “Qué pasa, Zaf? How does it feel, knowing you’re in me?”
He was beyond redemption for tensing up in violent, dirty lust. Gazing down at her, he absorbed her every erotic detail. Maybe this was punishment, the need to pull those little combs out of her brandy hair and spear his fingers through it, to hurt with a thirst to taste her again, to have perfect vantage point of her breasts exposed by that deep-cut neckline—and knowing he could only need and hurt and look.
“I 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—”
“You 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.”
“I meant, how does it feel to know you hurt me?”
“Like a mistake I can’t undo.”
“Not never-ending death?”
“Is 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.
“We can’t talk here,” he whispered.
“You 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.
“I 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 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.
“Shy, 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.
“Can’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.
“Joey…”
“Shh. 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.”
“Have 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.
“I 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.”
; “They put you down, didn’t they? DC?”
“It needed to happen.”
“Down 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.
“Why’d you want to bring me back?”
“To 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 they’d captured, tortured and murdered his cousin eight years ago. The feds hadn’t gone out of their way to clean up his image, but what did it matter now? There was so much that Joey didn’t know. But she’d been a thread in a web that was bigger than DEA and even now it was necessary to lead her with lies.
“The kiss,” she said finally as fresh tears welled. “Don’t fight it.”
There was something he didn’t altogether trust about her spurring him on, but as he’d said—he couldn’t fight it. Nor would he try. Giving her what she provoked, he let go of her hand to hold her head steady. She yielded, opening her mouth to bring him home.
Her taste became his, the slick stroke of her tongue as necessary to him as oxygen. No borders had been settled, so he let himself roam. Parting the halves of her dress, he bared a pair of firm tits. Palming them, preparing them for his mouth, he grazed a nipple with his tongue before catching it in a sucking kiss.
One More Night with You Page 4
