Free You Only Love Twice by Lexi Blake Page A

you.”
    He strode to her, his boots sounding even on the carpet. He
scooped her up and tossed her over his shoulder, her ass high in the air.
    Phoebe worried she’d bitten off more than she could chew.
    * * * *
    Jesse pushed through the double doors, his whole being
surprisingly calm. This was what he needed. He’d been sitting in his office
waiting for her to wake up, thinking about how he would handle this
interrogation with some modicum of civility.
    It was so good to know civility wasn’t going to be required.
    It wasn’t so good to realize that the minute she’d opened
that bratty mouth, he’d gotten hard as hell and he wanted to fuck her more than
he wanted to figure her out. There was a little voice playing in his head that
told him to just get inside her and all those secrets would open for him. All
he had to do was thrust inside her tight body and the mysteries of the universe
would reveal themselves.
    Yeah, he wasn’t going to do that. He was going to do his job
and find out who she worked for and then he would walk away from her. He wasn’t
going to hold her tenderly or hope she could love him. No. It was time to grow
the fuck up. How was it being through what he’d been through in Iraq hadn’t
managed to teach him what this one woman had? He needed to shut down and do his
job.
    But that didn’t mean parts of his job couldn’t be very
pleasurable.
    “Uhm, Jesse, don’t you think you should handle this in the
conference room? It’s where Ian planned on keeping her.” Adam Miles’s voice was
an unwelcome intrusion.
    “No.” He knew the old Jesse would have stopped, but this was
between him and Phoebe.
    “Adam, I can really explain. This is all one huge
misunderstanding.” Phoebe tried to bring her head up.
    That was an easy move to counter. He brought his hand down
on that sweet, sweet ass. Phoebe had the damn prettiest ass he’d ever watched
for hours and drooled over, and now he had zero reason to not spank that
gorgeous flesh. He heard that sound, that smack as his hand hit her and he felt
her shiver. She didn’t scream. Nope. He’d thought if he smacked her good, she
would call him a fucking pervert, but he’d been a dumbass idiot and this Phoebe
just moaned a little as the slap went through her.
    It wasn’t the type of moan that would cause him to stop
spanking a sub at Sanctum.
    Motherfucker. He knew he hadn’t been wrong about her. He’d
thought there was a submissive streak buried under her “I’m a good girl so
don’t fuck my sweet asshole” exterior.
    “The only explanation is I’m a dirty little spy and I need
to tell my captor everything in order to keep him from slapping my ass silly.”
He couldn’t be professional with her. It wouldn’t work. It would only serve to
put distance between them and now he could see that distance was what she’d
worked for the whole time. She hadn’t let him do more than hold her hand and
give her an awkward peck. She’d had him convinced he just wasn’t her type but
he could smell her now. Yeah, that wasn’t sweet or gentlemanly, but then that
obviously didn’t work for her. “She likes me slapping her ass. Take a deep
whiff, Adam, and you’ll be able to tell she’s aroused.”
    She gasped and her whole torso came up off his. “Jesse!”
    Yeah, she sounded like a pissed off girlfriend, but she
wasn’t his girlfriend. She was the woman who had played him and then nearly
painted her initials on his chest. And he was the idiot who had stood there and
almost begged her to do it.
    He cringed at the thought of how stupid he’d been about her.
He knew he was ping-ponging, caught between wanting to understand her and
wanting to throttle her, but most of all, he wanted to get his hands on her.
    He wanted to see just how much she’d lied about.
    “You might want to think this thing through, Jesse,” Adam
began.
    He was just about to tell Adam where he could shove his
thought process when Big Tag strode out of his office. A