Even so, there was a sweet sincerity about him.
“Otherwise, how was camp?”
“Hmm, positive, from my point of view, at any rate. High tension, a lot going on, dozens and dozens of personalities clashing.” She waited while he had the waitress bring out a slice of cheesecake and a glass of mint water. “I certainly have more respect for Charlotte after being in such a concentrated area with those men.”
Charlotte would appreciate that, but even more so an explanation of how Joey could point Zaf out as the man who shot her and not go ballistic that he turned out to be her blind date. She preferred to shelter this facet of her world from her friends, but sometimes messy truths escaped, anyway.
“Desert Luck’s practically a town of its own,” Ozzie commented.
“Still makes for close quarters. The men—their bodies and their egos—have a way of taking up space.”
“They treating you right over there?”
“It’s fine,” she maintained. “Some don’t want me around and others want me around for all the dirty reasons. But alas, my virtue’s still intact.”
He smirked.
“So is ODC missing me, or what?” Then she started in on the dessert.
“Of course we’re missing you—and the daily supply of sweets.” Joey stress-baked, finding it a nice way to relax and rediscover the feeling of being a young girl buzzing around the kitchen, creating treats that her parents would sell at the flower shop.
“Folks got used to that first-thing-in-the-morning sugar rush. I might get boycotted for letting the Blues steal you away.”
She almost beamed and flipped to sentimental mode, but her supervisor never knew what to do with emotional women. He liked to say that was the reason his wife filed for divorce a few years back, though it was a poorly veiled secret that the woman had moved on to a wealthier man.
“Next time I whip something up, I’ll drop off the surplus—though I do like the idea of being missed. It’s nice, says y’all care.”
“Of course we care. We like— We’re glad you—” Ozzie crumpled his napkin, visibly uncomfortable with the awkwardness of reassuring a colleague that she wasn’t so bad to have around, after all. “You’re okay, Joey. Everyone agrees. Things ought to be back to normal once you come back.”
“Thanks, boss.”
“Ah, jeez, don’t act like I gave you a compliment or something. Last thing I need is for that to be going around.”
“Breaking news. Ozzie Salvinski actually gives two beans about his coworkers.” She nibbled the end of her fork, enjoying the withering look that earned her. “Fine, I’ll stop now.”
“Yeah, you’ll have to.” He pointed to his wristwatch. “Gotta head back to the office.”
“Ozzie, quickly, before you go.” Joey knuckled her dessert plate aside, slanted forward. “If I need to be hooked up—search warrant, surveillance, forensics, maybe—can I depend on you?”
“You planning on pulling something out of the trick bag for the Slayers?” he asked quietly, brows knit tightly.
“Hypothetically, okay, sure.”
“Joey, what the hell’s going on?”
I think a war’s been started and I need to know what my options are. “I might need protection. Can’t get into specifics, mainly because I don’t have them. But it’s just…just a feeling, I suppose.”
“Do Marshall and Tem know about this?”
“No. It’s trouble they don’t need. If you can keep the lid on this, that’d be helpful.”
“All right.”
“So can I depend on you?”
“I’ll do what I can, Joey. Don’t forget the means of protection you already have.”
Meaning her weapon. She didn’t want more bloody violence in her memory, hadn’t resorted to deadly force since before her move to Nevada. “I’m talking to you because I don’t want it to come to that.”
He nodded but looked skeptical. “You’re ex-DEA, were chummy with ICE… Your network’s more elite, so you’re probably barking up the wrong tree. But whatever I can do, Joey, I will.”
Left alone, Joey picked at the half-eaten cheesecake. Her network was more elite—far more elite than Ozzie suspected. Only, she refused to tap every resource within reach.
Even so, Gian DiGorgio wouldn’t drop his grudge against her simply because he was served a boilerplate restraining order.
DiGorgio isn’t some playground bully.
She swallowed down some mint water, but still felt as though a brick was lodged in her throat. Dragging in a breath, she looked out the window. The Ferrari waited in its darkly seductive magnificence, yet she wondered if lurking in every crevice on the street was somebody who’d been paid to harm her.
Damn Zaf. Damn him for coming back to her now. Damn him for forcing her to face this.
And damn him for being the most cunning and well-connected man she knew.
Joey took out her phone. She wasn’t sure that the contact number her “blind date” had provided was still a viable way to reach him, but she had to give it a try.
“Jo?”
What did it mean that his voice could flood her senses? What did it even mean that she wanted him, flesh to flesh, yet hated the Machiavellian part of his personality that surfaced as some sort of wicked alter ego?
“It’s me,” she said, looking across at the people in the café, though not really seeing any of them. “About last night.”
“What you did—I deserved that. I pushed you too far,” Zaf apologized. “It’s got to be overwhelming as all hell.”
“It wouldn’t be if it were someone else. But it’s me, Zaf.” And she was frightened.
“When you’re ready to deal with this, call me. I still have the light beer.”
She had to smile at that. “Can you get to the Strip? I’m at a side-street café. Nickel’s.”
He paused. Then, “I don’t want to chase you, Jo.”
“No chase. No tricks. I’ll be here.”
*
Almost fifteen minutes later Joey saw him emerge from a deep gray pickup truck that she was certain she’d seen scale rocky terrain on a television ad.
Attraction made her heart hurt. That crisp button-down he’d roughened up by rolling the sleeves and opening the collar was too perfectly made for his tight muscles. The belt snaked around his hips called too much attention to the region of his body she’d touched with authority yesterday in the library.
The open-carry holster at his waistband reminded her of who they were and where they’d come from.
As he tucked his keys into his pocket, she saw a bulky watch, onyx beads and a pair of thin leather straps wrapped around one wrist.
Dios. Te dessio.
As if he’d heard her thoughts, Zaf looked at her through the window. She raised her hand, flattened the palm against the glass.
She could perceive nothing from his expression, and put down her hand before he entered Nickel’s and sought her table in that casual, unhurried way that threatened to make her smile.
“How you holding up?” he asked, lowering onto the vacant chair. “I left you with a lot to deal with yesterday.”
“And I’m dealing with it. Kind of.” She propped her elbows on the table, cupped her chin with both hands. “Were you worried about me, when you got to the house?”
“At first. Then, when I realized you were too smart to react carelessly and were sending me a message, I was pissed. Then I was proud of you for bringing me down a notch.”
“We were always big on give and take, weren’t we, Zaf?”
“Yeah.” He reached for her hand, brought it to him. By the time she noticed the mocha-colored smear of dessert topping on her knuckle, he’d already taken it away with a warm, openmouthed kiss. “What was that?”
“Irish cream cheesecake. I’d offer you some, but I massacred it.”
“Next time.”
Next time, as though they were lovers and had the luxury of moments like this that weren’t underscored with emoti
onal upheaval.
“So what did you bring, Zaf?”
“Sam Adams and information. Both in my truck.” He shot a glance out the window. “Where’s your Chevy?”
“At home. I’m driving the black Ferrari.”
“Ferrari?”
“Courtesy of Marshall and Tem Blue. I’m borrowing it while I do a job for them in Mount Charleston.”
“You’re working for them? One of DiGorgio’s godsons is in talks with the team, Jo.”
She’d heard Nate’s brother was meeting with the Slayers about a coaching position. The Blues’ hiring processes were baffling to front office outsiders, but their system obviously worked. They’d taken a losing franchise and turned it into championship-winning gold.
“It was my decision.” She didn’t clarify that the Blues and her supervisor had been particularly crafty about getting her to consider.
“I want you to be careful.”
She reclaimed her hand because it’d be easier to concentrate if she wasn’t preoccupied with urges to work her fingers into his dangerous mouth or yank free the rest of the buttons on his shirt. “How did you think this whole ‘protecting Joey’ plan was going to work?”
“Get close. Be a temporary fixture in your life. Since you’re single now—”
“Are you?” she blurted. Way to go there, slick.
“Single? Yeah. I can’t do to someone else what I did to you, Jo.”
“It gets lonely. Sometimes.”
He didn’t agree, or admit that sometimes he was lonely, too, and that left her feeling at some strange, vulnerable disadvantage.
“Since I broke up with my last boyfriend, I mean. Things were good with Parker.”
“Yet you went to a dating expert to find someone new.” There was no blatant hostility in his words, but she felt hotter in the face, anyway.
“Just a way to occupy the lonely nights. Plus, I was hoping for someone who’d stick around to be my date for my friend Charlotte’s wedding.”
“So Romeo and Juliet end up with a happy ending, after all,” he said quietly. “The wedding’s next month.”
She also thought of Nate and Charlotte as Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers. How could it be that after so much time apart, so much destruction between them, she and Zaf were still in sync with each other? “You know a lot about it. Keeping up with the society pages?”
“Research. What you said before—I can do that for you.”
“You’d be my wedding date?”
“I’ll do that for you, Jo.” The seriousness, the unhidden want, acted as a magnet, pulling her hand across the table again until her pale fingers were stroking along the veins on his arm. “I’ll stick around. I’ll occupy the lonely nights. Let me protect you.”
Oh. My. God. An emotionally tortured secret agent taking up the role of boyfriend to shield her from a sadistic crook? This didn’t qualify as the daily happenings of an average small-town girl from Texas. Except, she wasn’t an average small-town girl. She’d lost that part of herself.
“I can’t do this, Zaf,” she said, withdrawing her hand and standing up. “I can’t give you an answer on the spot. Let’s walk.”
He joined her outside but once they turned onto the Strip, they lost all illusions of privacy. People—from giddy tourists to bored-looking locals to eager street entertainers—were all enmeshed.
“What’s a man got to do to get you all to himself?”
Joey jabbed her cane down, stopping, letting sidewalk traffic coast around her. She stared at Zaf, watching him move easily with the crowd, completely unaware that she was no longer at his side. As pissed as she was at his bold question, she was amused that she could give him the slip. If she wanted to, she could disappear again and let him spend another sweltering Sin City night trying to track her down.
Several feet ahead, he did a double take, and folks shoved past him then edged out of his way as he cut through the stream of passersby until he was directly in front of her.
“Josephine, what the hell was that?”
Joey slid the end of her cane on the sidewalk in front of her. “Don’t cross this line, Zaf. If you do, you’ll be in my personal space and I won’t like you much. If it helps, I got a great look at your butt. It’s a nice butt.”
He drilled his fingers through his dark hair, wrecking his GQ millionaire look. Actually, the unbuttoned collar had done that. And the heat he was packing in his holster. And, yeah, that edge about him that had nothing to do with boardrooms and everything to do with hunting a threat.
A threat targeted at her.
“Jo,” he pleaded quietly, and she slid her cane back a few inches. “I’m here to protect you. How can I prove that?”
“One question at a time,” she said. The cane retreated a few inches more, and then it was at her side, and she was letting him into her personal space. “You want to know what a man has to do to get me to himself?”
“We need privacy if we’re going to agree on a plan. A sidewalk on the Strip doesn’t say privacy to me.”
“What does, then?” She watched him cross her invisible border, was suddenly and irrationally impatient for him to touch her the way he had before the violence had separated them. “Your hotel suite?”
“We could go with that, Jo. Nothing says privacy more than a Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob.” Zaf leaned forward, knocking back her curls from her face. “But I’ve got something else in mind.”
“What?” They began their trek back to the street that held their vehicles.
“Invite me into your house. I want to sweep for bugs, tighten up the security. But I won’t cross that line unless you ask me to.”
“So we have changed, haven’t we?” She stopped, but this time didn’t let him leave her. “You used to know what I wanted without me needing to ask.”
“I can’t take risks when it comes to you. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve been wrong before—hurt you before.”
“Archangel made me a victim,” she said pointedly. She had to do this, dredge up how his clouded judgment had failed them both. Who stood so close to her this moment? Zaf, the man who could laugh at a joke and fill her up with joy? Or Archangel, the messenger, the black-ops genius with a vendetta to settle?
“I’m not him,” Zaf said. “I’m not the other guy. You need to know that I wasn’t really in league with that group. I wasn’t going to move drugs for them, but they had to think I was on their side because they were going to lead me to the sons of bitches who killed Raphael.”
Raphael, his younger cousin from Pakistan who’d been murdered during a trip to the US.
“You didn’t turn? But no one told me it was a cover.”
“Only our team leader knew, Jo. It had to be that way.”
“You didn’t trust me with your plan…”
He hadn’t trusted her, then she hadn’t trusted him, and devastation had wound up touching them both.
“I messed up,” he said with regret. “Lying to you. Firing that weapon. I didn’t want to come back and reopen the wounds. I swear to you, I didn’t want this for you.”
But here he was, in spite of himself.
“What about what I want, Zaf?” Did he know? Did it even matter to him? She couldn’t find the words to guide him, but she ached, standing there unfulfilled and torn to pieces inside.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Jo.” The words grabbed her, yanked her closer until she was curling an arm around his waist. His mouth descended on hers. She didn’t care that they were on the street, in the way and on display for the mass of folks shopping and jogging and hurrying along.
Someone bumped them and they parted.
Breathing hard, she stared at the tears collected in his eyes. There was a war inside him. Remorse versus lust. “I believe you,” she told him. She wanted this—proof that he cared.
“After what happened to you, I let go of the hunt.”
Then he’d let go of Archangel, too, and was only Zaf.
Joey kissed him—that
sullen mouth, that lean bristly bearded jaw, his tears. Arousal made her limbs too heavy, but she couldn’t care about that when he lifted her just enough to transport her out of the middle of the sidewalk.
The robust sound of accordions and some indiscernible wind instruments grew louder as he set her down. Polka music.
But she couldn’t care about that, either.
If this moment with Zaf was what she could get, then she would take it.
The kiss was bruising and his hold too tight, however, she wanted to emerge on the other side of hurt because she couldn’t let herself be a victim any longer. She was a survivor. She’d survived a bullet, lies and losing the man she loved.
He turned her to face the window. They were still on the sidewalk, with cracked concrete under their feet, but in front of a store she was greedy for the semblance of seclusion.
The sun shone bright and she saw their reflection in the glass. They weren’t the people they’d been five years ago. Now they were too guarded and too hungry for something the other possessed.
Neither of them in love.
This was about arousal. It was about need and it was about desire. But it wasn’t love.
I can’t care about that. I can’t want that.
Joey heard the footsteps and voices of passersby, but she stood her ground, remained reflected in a storefront’s glass with a hard man behind her.
If he paid attention, if he really tried, he’d know what she wanted.
Zaf’s hand rose to her ear, tracing the shell as he leaned over her to take the lobe into his mouth. “After DiGorgio’s dealt with, I’ll stand back. I’ll let you live your life in peace. Swear to God.”
“Then this is all temporary?”
“It’s—” he kissed her neck and she arched into his touch “—an early jump on occupying those lonely nights. You good with that?”
“Good.” To demonstrate, she rested her cane against the store’s brick facing and pressed her backside to the wall of his body.
Zaf held her around the waist with one strong arm, and the other hand moved down the front of her with unmistakable intent. “What you said yesterday—keep your word. Don’t forgive me, Jo. And don’t love me.”
One More Night with You Page 8
