Free Midnight Shadows by Lisa Marie Rice Page A

touring. She smiled, no matter what. The hotel bed was uncomfortable, the concert hall was drafty and there’d been no time that day for anything but a dry sandwich, but no one would ever know that from her smile and her behavior. Allegra was a performer and a performer, to his or her dying day, was never anything but fine.
    Yannis just looked at her for a moment, gaze so penetrating it was as if Douglas had given him orders to pull her thoughts from her head—and she didn’t doubt for a moment that if it were possible, Douglas would have ordered just that thing. Then he gave a nod and smiled.
    The bomb that had taken his leg had also taken a chunk of his neck. One side of his neck was puckered with keloid scarring and when he smiled, he pulled all that tough tissue askew.
    Allegra didn’t mind. Her own husband was scarred. And unlike Yannis, he hadn’t been good-looking to begin with. The one great gift of her period of blindness was the ability to ignore people’s appearance and delve straight into the heart of a person. Yannis and Douglas were both scarred and it meant nothing. They were brave, honorable men and Allegra didn’t give their scars a passing thought.
    Not everyone thought the same. She’d seen some of the rich women at the resort turn away in disgust when Yannis put on shorts to work on the place, his prosthetic leg clearly visible.
    They saw that, and not how hard Yannis worked. Just as they saw Douglas with his facial scars, rough, unlovely features and basso profundo voice, and dismissed him as a thug, hired muscle.
    Yannis had sunk all his savings from his military career to help his cousins build this glorious resort. They all lost their jobs in the Greek crisis. No one worked harder than Yannis.
    Just as no one worked harder at Alpha Security than her Douglas.
    No one knew that, for all his rough looks and huge body, he was enormously delicate with her.
    And, the big plus, he loved music as much as she did and could be considered even more knowledgeable than she was. He loved it all and he had a wider repertory than she did, though he couldn’t sing worth a damn and couldn’t play any musical instrument. But he appreciated and understood her music down to his bones. It was unmistakable.
    And well, there was the other big plus. Douglas was a god in bed. Had been a god in bed. Since the operation he’d treated her like a maiden aunt. An elderly maiden aunt.
    Yannis looked behind him at the sea, and in the instant his face was turned, another shadow flitted across her field of vision.
    Oh God, please no.
    The doctors had said the surgery would be risky, but she’d pulled through and regained a goodly portion of her vision. She refused to think that she was relapsing. That the hematoma was forming again. That the nerves had been too damaged for complete recovery. That the prolonged period of blindness had created permanent artifacts.
    All things she had been told could happen and she had resolutely refused to listen.
    No. She saw just fine. Just fine . The shadows were a trick of the light, that was all.
    “So.” Yannis turned back to her with a smile. “You’ve not only been studying Greek, you’ve been studying something else, too. I’ve been hearing some pretty nice sounds coming from your suite. You seem to be making progress.”
    “Oh!” Allegra’s eyes rounded and she touched his forearm. “You mustn’t say anything to Douglas, Yannis! Promise me!”
    Yannis’s dark eyes danced as he mimed zipping it shut. “Not a word,” he intoned. “I’ll treat it like SCI. More than Top Secret.”
    Allegra had been around military men enough by now to know that SCI was Secret Compartmented Information, stuff not even the President was cleared to know. And come to think of it, a former SEAL wouldn’t be a blabbermouth.
    “I want it to be a surprise, and I want to make sure I’m not going to make a fool of myself,” she confessed. “I can’t—”
    She couldn’t go any further