Free Avenging Angel by Tara Janzen Page B

curved into a sardonic smile. “Don’t you ever forget you’re a lawyer?”
    “Austin could have fired you for looking at those papers,” she said, lifting her chin to support her claim even as she realized how silly and empty her threat sounded.
    “Austin Bridgeman is going to kill me, Miss Lane,” he said dryly, all traces of his smile fading from his face. “And if I’m not as good as I think I am, he’s going to kill you too. Then it won’t matter which one of us knows what. You got yourself in good and deep by putting together Austin’s little secret company, and now the piper wants his due without your interference.” He lifted his hand and pointed behind her. “Get on the bed and lie down.”
    “I will not.”
    Dylan’s jaw clenched in reaction to her prissy, holier-than-thou refusal. He heard his teeth grind together and felt muscles tighten in his face. Damn the woman. Didn’t she know he could break her in five places and not even work up a sweat?
    She had been his sole fantasy for six long, frustrating months, but he was beginning to think he’d been fantasizing about the wrong woman. Elegant Miss Johanna Lane, with her silk dresses and silk-clad legs, wasn’t supposed to be scrappy. He had instinctively known it would be harder on him if or when she remembered him, but he was only beginning to figure out why. He’d thought it would be because of the night they had gotten so close to a kiss; he could still remember the sweet pressure of her body pressed up against his—because he wouldn’t have left her with only a kiss. He would have had all of her. In his dreams he’d had her more than once. He had thought the memories of all that sexual heat would make it more difficult for him to remember he had a job to do, more difficult for him to remember that the end of his life was a damn poor time to get involved with a woman.
    What he hadn’t counted on was the elegant Miss Johanna Lane having steel in her backbone, for there being an edge to all the softness he’d seen and all the softness he’d visualized. Lawyers were supposed to be tough on paper and tough with words. But Johanna had made fists out of her expensively manicured hands, and he thought there was the chance she might use them.
    Somewhere between the gas station and the bathroom, he’d started losing control of the situation. He’d lost completely the moment she recognized him. He needed to turn the tables around and get her back on unstable ground, and as long as she had thoughts about going to the police, he had to restrain her.
    He started turning the tables by lowering his gaze from her wide eyes to her breasts. He deliberately stared, watching the slow increase in the rise and fall of her peach silk T-shirt, hoping to unnerve her before she had him on his knees, begging. She had beautiful breasts, and he could still see the lace of her bra. The image left itself open to a lot of wild imaginings.
    He lifted his gaze back to her eyes and took a step forward, coiling the belt in his hands, remembering what he was about. Then he lowered his lashes and let his gaze sweep down the length of her body, with lingering moments on the curve of her hips and the juncture of her thighs. Her jeans fit her like a second skin without looking the least bit forced or strained. She was sleek and lovely, utterly female, and he was suddenly willing to risk everything to get closer to her, to feel her heat and hear her sigh.
    Forgetting the belt and the job at hand, he took another step, much against the insistent clamorings of his common sense, which was telling him he was the one losing his balance. He couldn’t deny that deep down inside, past the veneer of civilization and anyone’s code of honor, there was a part of him that had saved her life only to make her his.
    Johanna took a half step back, the only half step there was to take. The room was growing warmer, the tension rising, and he’d done it all with a glance of his midnight-dark