Free Midnight Fire by Lisa Marie Rice Page B

accessible fashion. I wanted to talk about the unsung heroes who work hard on our behalf. I wanted to be a sounding board for new ideas that would make our lives better. But I ended up being swamped by reports of politicians out of control and financial types openly stealing and smiling while they do it.” She shook her head. “That wasn’t what I wanted but it’s what I got.”
    Jack was burningly and inappropriately curious about her personal life. Was she married? She wasn’t wearing a ring but then she wasn’t wearing any jewelry at all. So maybe she was allergic to jewelry but there was a guy handy to cook her soup and rub her feet.
    Fucker. Jack hated him already. Summer was a catch for any man. She was gorgeous and smart and kind and she’d been really funny when they were going out, though they hadn’t had a chance to talk about funny things this evening, what with trying to smoke out a traitor and murderer.
    Of course, there was the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room—the way he’d treated her. He’d fucked her blind for a week and then...well, and then he moved on. He remembered clearly showing up at her dorm room door and seeing her delighted face and then—
    Jack pinched the bridge of his nose.
    —then her devastated face as she realized he was there to take her dorm roommate out. Because Summer had been pretty and fun but her roommate was hot too and—why not?
    Jack could barely remember how he’d thought in those days, those college days before everything changed. It was like childhood memories—vague and tenuous. And just like a child he’d reached out for what he wanted, the newest shiny thing, without any thought to the consequences. He had a vague memory of Summer’s roommate. She’d turned out to be a bitch, but by the time he realized that, he’d gone on to another girl on Summer’s floor.
    What a slut he’d been.
    He might even have slowly made his way back to Summer—because she’d definitely been the very best—but then life had intervened, the CIA had come calling and his previous life was over.
    And it was probably a good thing that he’d had so much sex in college because his CIA days hadn’t exactly been drenched in it. Sex had been hard to find and to arrange and more or less every available female around had been off-limits. Either because she was a colleague, or a potential enemy or a potential target for recruitment or that pretty chick in the bar needed to be vetted before he could ask her out...
    And he’d been undercover which meant lying all the time. It’s one thing to lie for your country to a potential enemy. It’s quite another to lie to someone who might be a perfectly nice woman. But who might also be a secret agent for a foreign intelligence service.
    But in the days before he dedicated his head and heart and—with hindsight—his dick to his country, he had slept around on an industrial level.
    And probably broken Summer’s heart.
    Fuck.
    He sneaked another look at her, in profile.
    Jesus she was beautiful. Was she so beautiful because he hadn’t been near a woman in six months? Was it because he was starved for female company? Hell, he was starved for any kind of company. Except for the few days in Portland, reunited with Isabel and her fiancé and the cool group of friends they had, he’d been utterly alone for six months.
    So maybe a bit of it was that but...nah. Summer really was beautiful, even more so than when she’d been eighteen. She had those bones that would still be beautiful at eighty. His mom had had looks like that and he knew his father had found her still beautiful at fifty.
    His father, his mother, his brothers...God how he missed them.
    Jack swiveled his head to look out the passenger side window so Summer couldn’t see his thoughts on his face. She’d always been preternaturally sensitive. Maybe because of the way she’d been brought up, always a foreigner, unprotected by her parents. The eternal outsider, observing.
    He,