Free Release by Beth Kery Page A

Genny, but fate always seemed to dangle her just out of his desperate reach.
    ’Course it hadn’t been fate that had alienated Genny on that New Year’s Eve. No, Sean had done that in spades.
    He collapsed onto the couch and dug his fingertips into his eye sockets. His eyelids burned with fatigue.
    You can’t go back in time and change it all. Childish to wish it, so better just stop it right now.
    Genny might have responded like a man’s fantasy come to life that New Year’s Eve in bed, but Sean knew as well as anyone there had been an unhealthy franticness to her desire; that she’d behaved in a manner that wasn’t consistent with her beliefs and values.
    He knew it, because it’d been the same for him. Not because he’d broken a personal code—not in the general sense. He’d enjoyed a couple of ménage à trois in his wild, hell-bent youth and the radar on his moral consciousness hadn’t even blipped.
    But because it’d been Genny—because it’d been them —yeah. It’d been a sacrilege of sorts.
    She’d been another man’s wife and he’d never so much as kissed her. But somehow, it hadn’t been Max who had allowed Sean to make love to his wife that night. It’d been Sean who had permitted another man to touch her in his presence.
    Sean had seen her hesitation on that night, but he’d sensed her inner fires even more. He’d made a conscious choice to quiet her uncertainty by feeding the flames until all doubts were burned to dust.
    He hadn’t been satisfied until he’d created a fever of lust in her. He’d treated her like she was the most experienced, voracious female he’d ever bedded, forced her to submit again and again to the desire that raged between them like an unquenchable inferno.
    And every time he saw a trace of the uncertainty in Genny’s eyes, he’d coaxed the flame higher yet again, never content until her ravaged, reddened lips shaped a plea for more.
    Sean hated himself for that. It’d been his own doubts he’d seen mirrored in Genny’s soulful eyes. But he’d let his baser instincts rule him instead. And he’d paid for it.
    Genny had even more.
    Max had paid for his machinations with his life, but Sean had a hard time feeling sorry for him.
    Max Sauren . . . whose clever, cool gaze had seen so much.
    Max.
    The man who was never truly content unless he held a trump card over everyone that was close to him.
    Sean should have suspected that Max had been up to something. He’d come to understand Max’s obsessive need to collect secrets. Max was fond of keeping the more crucial ones—his greatest treasures—in a leather-bound, high-security carbon attaché case he’d been given upon retiring from the CIA.
    Max used to be uncommonly proud of that particular gift.
    He’d been told by the director of the CIA that the attaché case was a replica of the “football,” the high-security, bulletproof case that followed the president of the United States everywhere he went. The president’s contained the codes for a nuclear missile launch. Max’s secrets may not have been crucial to every living creature on the planet, but they were explosive enough when it came to certain individuals.
    Sean’d been so preoccupied by his feelings for Genny that he’d been blindsided by what Max had pulled on that New Year’s Eve. He’d been caught in the big cat’s trap, and he’d unintentionally dragged Genny into it with him.
    He knew Max had planned to use the videotape he’d secretly made of them making love that night to blackmail him. What Sean didn’t know was whether Max had planned to use it to control his wife, as well.
    Had Max shown Genny that recording? If Max had, it certainly would explain the disquietude and anxiety he saw in Genny’s eyes sometimes when Sean looked at her.
    The question of what Max had said or done to Genny in those days following that New Year’s Eve haunted him. He may have his doubts about the evidence Albert Rook had shown him after Max was