One More Night with You by Lisa Marie Perry Page A

driving the black Ferrari.”
    â€œFerrari?”
    â€œCourtesy of Marshall and Tem Blue. I’m borrowing it while I do a job for them in Mount Charleston.”
    â€œYou’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.
    â€œIt was my decision.” She didn’t clarify that the Blues and her supervisor had been particularly crafty about getting her to consider.
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œGet close. Be a temporary fixture in your life. Since you’re single now—”
    â€œAre you?” she blurted. Way to go there, slick.
    â€œSingle? Yeah. I can’t do to someone else what I did to you, Jo.”
    â€œIt 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.
    â€œSince I broke up with my last boyfriend, I mean. Things were good with Parker.”
    â€œYet 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.
    â€œJust 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.”
    â€œSo 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?”
    â€œResearch. What you said before—I can do that for you.”
    â€œYou’d be my wedding date?”
    â€œI’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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œWhat’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