Person of Interest by Debra Webb Page B

tight he barely managed to speak.
    She blinked, looked away again. “My…ah…breasts. He always touched me that way a lot. Even when we were just kissing.” She rubbed at her forehead, then quickly clasped her arm back around her.
    He couldn’t take any more of this. He’d hurt her and tortured himself physically. No more.
    “Thank you for sharing such intimate—”
    “Don’t you want to know how he kissed me?” She glared up at him then, the breath rushing in and out of her lungs. All semblance of calm or submissiveness were gone.
    Joe straightened away from the dresser. “We can talk about this some more later. There’s—”
    She rocketed to her feet. “He wasn’t that great when it came to kissing.”
    Her eyes looked huge in her pale face. He couldn’t tell if what he saw there was fear or humiliation. Maybe both, and it tore at his guts.
    “He used his tongue too much.” She paced the length of the room, then turned and moved back in his direction. “But I got used to it eventually.” She shrugged her shoulders, the movement stilted. “I was so busy with my work I didn’t have time to be too picky about my sex life. Really, what’s a busy woman like me supposed to do?”
    Her lips trembled with the last and he had to touch her. She was close enough.
    “Elizabeth, I’m sorry. I—”
    She drew her shoulder away from his seeking hand but didn’t back off. “Are you really?” The accusation in her eyes dealt him another gut-wrenching blow. She took a step closer. “If you’re so sorry then what prompted your considerable erection, Agent Hennessey?” She reached out and smoothed a hand over the front of his jeans, molded her palm to his aching hard-on.
    He moved her hand away but didn’t let go of her arm. “Don’t do this to yourself, Elizabeth. I explained to you that the female contact was someone he knew before you came into his life.”
    “And I know a lie when I hear one, Joe. ”
    He closed his eyes and exhaled a weary breath. Maybe he should have been up-front with her sooner. He should never have listened to Director Allen. Elizabeth Cameron was far too smart for these kinds of tactics.
    “I had known something was wrong for a while,” she said, her voice soft, the fierce attitude having surrendered to the hurt. “We hadn’t made love in two months when he died. I’d only seen him two or three times. He called, but never talked for long. I guess I knew it was over. I just didn’t know why.”
    It took every ounce of strength Joe possessed not to tell her the truth about David Maddox. He’d used her. He’d cheated on her all along. The latter camewith the territory. No man who hoped to keep a clean relationship with a woman stayed in field operations. It simply wasn’t feasible.
    “You don’t know that,” he argued, hoping to salvage her feelings to whatever extent possible. “There could have been a lot of things going on that prevented him from coming to you. Your safety for one thing,” he offered, grasping at straws. “Remember he sent me in to rescue you that one night when he was too far away to do it himself.”
    She nodded distractedly as if her heart was working overtime to justify what her brain wanted to reject.
    “I would certainly have taken precautions to protect you if I had been in his shoes. Think about it, Doc. He cared about you. You were and still are a valuable asset to the Agency.”
    Her eyes met his then and something passed between them, a sense of understanding.
    “I’m certain you would have, Hennessey.” She inhaled a big breath and then let it out slowly. “But you see I’ve been lying to myself for a while now.” She offered a halfhearted shrug. “I guess it made me feel less gullible.”
    Joe tightened his hold on her forearm, but carefully avoided pulling her closer as he would very much have liked to do. “Sometimes we believe what we want to believe, Doc, even when we know better.”
    She searched his eyes for so long, he