Chapter One:
Maddie awoke with a start when a hand that was much too big and beefy to be her own suddenly covered her mouth. She opened her eyes blearily to stare down at the alarmingly familiar, offending appendage. It was large enough to cover most of her face. The palm was slightly rough against her skin, but the nails on the end of those impossibly long, thick fingers were flat and neatly trimmed.
What’s more, his fingers smelled of where they’d been last night, bringing a flaming blush to the cheeks they covered. Dear God, he certainly hadn’t forgotten how to use them. He’d always known exactly how to get her to melt in his arms. Even after twenty years he still hadn’t lost his touch, not one iota. Her body always had been and always would be his. All he would ever have to do is crook his finger . . . which judging from the scent he’d apparently done last night. Not that she had a particularly clear image of most that had happened last night after she set foot in the casino.
For some reason, when she drank, which was rare, she almost always ended up in the company of this particular man. The memories that remained with her from these occasions were always of the triple “x” variety. She closed her eyes in an effort to blot out the smutty images and tried to swallow. That proved difficult however because some evil person had scotch taped her tongue to the roof of her mouth after dragging it over the carpet until it was good and fuzzy. Maddie then opened her eyes again, hoping against hope that she was wrong about where she was.
Turned out she was deadly accurate, and her blush turned to one of pure mortification.
Well, at least the all too intimate smell of herself was something she could do something about. With her fingers wrapped gingerly around his bough-like wrist, as if it was a snake she expected to spring to life at any given moment, she divested herself of that atrocious reminder of last night’s folly by depositing it over its owner’s hip.
Moving her head any one direction too quickly was definitely out, too, she discovered when the room began to spin around her after she tried to try to lift it off the pillow while levering that heavy arm away from herself. That small movement felt as if it had zapped all of the strength she would be able to gather for the rest of the day, but Maddie knew that that could not, would not, be true. She needed to get out of here, immediately! There could be no possibility of a repeat of whatever. She gulped hard as steamy, real-life videos played behind her eyelids about what had unquestionably happened last night. Obviously, she’d completely lost her sanity somewhere along the line and had ended up in the one place she was least likely to go voluntarily when sober.
Maddie suffered no illusions about how hard it would be to escape. A quick personal inventory revealed that she was, as she’d worried, completely naked. She quickly made a plan. She’d make a dash, a stealthy, quiet dash, but a dash nonetheless, for the bathroom and grab a towel if she had to, but hopefully this was a swanky enough establishment to offer its guests robes. Either way, she was going to beat a hasty, cowardly retreat, and hopefully never set eyes on him again.
Somehow it seemed that her exits from him didn’t seem to want to stick, but she didn’t have time to think about this now. Instead, she worried about how she was going to slip away from the spy who had loved her, once upon a time, more years ago than she cared to remember. He was damned good at what he did, and she couldn’t imagine that even Mata Hari could get out of a room without him knowing, and him being damned good and ready to let her go.
Still, she had to give it a try.
She began to ease away from him with excruciating care because she was afraid of alerting him to her escape. Her head was demanding that she move as if it was perched precariously on the tip of a
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