Free Veil of Night by Linda Howard

remarkably tender, considering the hungry way they’d gone at each other. Still, she should at least have bitten him or something, just to even the score.
    Except she’d never been a biter. Or a screamer. Or much of anything, really. She was just an ordinary woman, cautious by nature, without an ounce of drama queen in her. Her dad was enough of a drama queen, thank you very much, plus her job brought her in daily contact with enough drama to keep Broadway stocked with characters for ten years. That was maybe the biggest part of her job: keeping her head when everything was going to hell in a handbasket, and everyone else was having hysterical fits. An events planner had to be an expert at finding alternatives, making things work, and doing what had to be done.
    “Caution” was practically her middle name. For goodness sake, before she bought her first car ten years ago, she’d researched resale values and repair rates for six months before taking the plunge—and it had taken Madelyn twice that long, a couple of years ago, to convince her that driving matching Jaguars would be a great business statement. She’d been right, of course; in the Buckhead area, status symbols mattered, and the Jaguars said that Premier was the events planning firm to hire if you wanted to make a splash. They’d bought the Jaguars used, and Jaclyn had approached the venture with her fingers crossed and her checkbook wincing. Two years later she had to admit that Madelyn had been right, overall, but both of their temperamental cars had seen time in repair shops.
    It was so not like her to throw caution to the wind and jump into bed with a man she’d just met. She hadn’t even slept with her ex until they’d been engaged. She’d been with her mother as Madelyn picked up the pieces of her heart after divorcing her dad, and subsequently watched Jacky make one bad choice after another when choosing who would join in the Stepmother Parade. To date, he’d been married a total of five times, divorced five times, and was probably actively looking for number six.
    Being involved, even peripherally, in personal train wrecks like that had made her doubly cautious when it came to men, and even then her own marriage had had the life span of a soap bubble. How could she have been so wrong? She’d thought she and Steve would be married for a lifetime, and instead the attraction between them had fizzled in an embarrassingly short time. Now she doubted her own judgment when it came to men, to the point that the last time she’d had sex she’d … oh hell, she’d been married. She hadn’t been with anyone since then. She wasn’t carrying a torch for Steve. She wasn’t a prude; at least, she didn’t think she was. She’d been busy. Very busy.
    There were a lot of reasons why she hadn’t connected with any other men, most of them valid. She’d been careful. She’d been smart. It wasn’t like her to be either impulsive or reckless.
    Jumping into bed with Eric wasn’t like her, but then it obviously was , since she had done it, and that was what alarmed her. Was she more like her father than she’d thought? The absolute last thing in the world she wanted was to become a slave to every whim that passed through her head, the way Jacky was. To him, want was the same as need , and he had few brakes on his behavior.
    She loved him—it was difficult not to love Jacky, because he wasn’t at all mean-hearted and didn’t intend to hurt people. He was charming, full of life, and completely irresponsible and focused on himself. He did hurt people, of course, but he didn’t see it because he was always moving on to the next party, the next wife. Jaclyn’s relationship with him was sporadic, and had been as long as she could remember; her security had come from Madelyn, who was the core constant in her life, who had stayed married to Jacky far longer than she should have and fought to maintain the same home and some semblance of stability in