Free Intimate Enemies by Joan Swan Page B

oh, man, serious underwear-model material.”
    Okay, he didn’t know about that last part, but, yeah, she was talking about him. He did have unusual green eyes, passed down from his mother’s side. Rio stepped backward until his back hit the brick façade of a storefront.
    “Does he have a brother?” the other woman asked.
    “Nat.” Cassie’s voice held teasing reprimand. “You’re married.”
    “Married, not dead. Send me a picture so I can drool. When are you going to jump him?”
    Cassie laughed with a mischievous edge.
    Rio’s throat closed. His body temperature spiked. Another rush of blood surged into his hard-on.
    “Oh my God.” The unknown woman’s voice lifted. “Cassie Christo, did you already…?”
    “No…” Cassie’s voice started off innocent enough but ended with teasing promise. “Not…yet.”
    Rio clenched his teeth and leaned his head back against the wall.
    If only.
    “But I did kiss him,” she continued in that delicious I-couldn’t-get-enough tone. “And oh my God is right. You know how you can tell how good a guy will be in bed by the way they kiss?”
    What? Electricity arced through his body. Something about the words how good a guy will be in bed coming out of Cassie’s mouth made him feel like a rocket ready to launch.
    “This guy would be… will be …off the damn charts—the back-arching, toe-curling, sheet-fisting, multi-orgasmic charts.”
    Mother of God… Snapshots of Cassie, naked, in his bed, experiencing those very stages of pleasure, flashed in his mind. And, fuck, he couldn’t breathe.
    “Cass,” the other woman groaned Cassie’s name, just the way Rio would have if he could speak. “You’re killing me here.”
    “I’ll give you something more to think about while you suffer,” Cassie said. “I got a nice feel of his equipment during that kiss, and let’s just say his tool chest…is plenty full.”
    “Jesus.” Rio breathed the word and jerked the earpiece from his ear, because the woman had his equipment working at full torque from nothing more than her voice and her words.
    He pushed off the building, wiped sweat from his forehead, and started up the street again. That phone call had done nothing to provide intel—other than what he’d missed out on last night. What he would miss out on tonight. And every night in the future because of this damned situation.
    That and the fact that Cassie Christo was the hottest woman in the fucking Western Hemisphere.
     
    * * * * *
     
    Cassie peered around the side of the building where she waited inside the recessed doorway of Miguel’s taqueria.
    “Okay,” she said to Natalie as she spotted Rio well down the street, returning his phone into its holster. “He’s not listening anymore, but he’s headed my way. I have to go. I need to put in a quick call to Santiago. Thanks for the help.”
    “Hold on, missy.” Natalie’s voice dropped back into her serious lawyer tone. “First, you owe me another call today. That one, as fun as it was, doesn’t count.”
    Cassie clipped out a distracted, “Sure.”
    “And two, was any of that true?”
    “Everything, unfortunately,” she muttered, irritated and frustrated.
    “And three, did you report the accident?”
    “I was at the police station when they opened their doors.”
    Natalie sighed, clearly relieved.
    “And I ate all my Brussels sprouts.”
    “Ha-ha.”
    “I gotta go,” Cassie said. “I’ll call you later.”
    She disconnected, pulled open the battery cover on her phone and removed the battery. Beneath, tucked into a shadowed corner, a tiny listening device clung to the frame. She’d discovered the device when she’d swept her room for bugs the night before, something she’d been doing since Saul had started using the bugs in her teen years. She pried it loose, dropped it into her pocket and reassembled her phone.
    Then she dialed Raymond Santiago, an attorney her mother had used exclusively until Saul had insisted she change to someone