Read Online Knight in Blue Jeans by Evelyn Vaughn - Free Book Online Page A

after a night of lovemaking, but first her damned rules and then the Comitatus had gotten in the way of those hopes. Now she looked as real and vulnerable as he’d imagined. Someone he really could have had as his own. And so very, very hard to consider ever leaving again.
    Not that he had any invitation to stay.
    Not that he could accept, if she extended one. And yet…
    “I’ve missed you,” he admitted softly, wishing his words didn’t sound so thick with emotion.
    She sighed again, into his collarbone, and Smith tried toremember why he’d come to see her. He tried to remember why he’d decided to wait here, after checking her condo and then slipping into her father’s empty home. He’d wanted to ask something…to ask…
    But hell. He’d never been that honorable.
    His face burrowed into her jetty, damp curls. He breathed in the sweet scent of her—magnolias and shampoo and woman—until his lips found the bare column of her neck, between her throat and her nape, and he had to taste her, to drink her.
    She moaned quietly, drawing her spread hands slowly up his chest and toward his shoulders. He continued kissing her jaw, tasting her ear, and groaned his own contentment as she wove her fingers into his hair, guided his head as she tipped her face toward his.
    He first noticed the smudges as he bent to meet her lips with his own.
    He ignored it. Nowhere near that honorable.
    He claimed her as he’d hesitated to do for too long, too long ago. And the kiss was perfect. Right. At first their lips teased across each other’s, an echo of the game that they’d played together so often. Then, in another honest echo, they lost control of any games and opened to each other, parted their lips, opened their souls. Their tongues didn’t spar, they caressed. The taste of her, oh, Lord, the taste…
    He tipped his forehead against hers only to catch a breath, only to admire the naked pleasure in her thick-lashed, deep green eyes. But then he saw the smudges again, across the otherwise clean, creamy perfection of her heart-shaped face. Nothing so dramatic as coal, or soot. But something had bruised or dirtied her, nevertheless…
    His confusion didn’t last long enough.
    It was him.
    He hadn’t washed up after installing Greta’s new securitysystem. He’d worn the same old T-shirt, the same jeans, heedless of their dusty afternoon job. Now he’d dirtied her with it.
    Even he couldn’t miss the symbolism.
    Arden made an impatient, kittenish noise and stretched upward for his lips. Not being an idiot, he gave them. So sweet. Such treasure.
    But not for him.
    He ignored the inner protest, bent even closer against her, embracing her in his filthy arms as he kissed the living sin out of her.
    And kissed her. And kissed her. Exiled no more.
    Until something—a door, a floorboard, a window—creaked.
    Smith jumped, overly alert from his months of living underground, and the moment ended. After a quick glance around them, noting the complete lack of danger— old houses settle, idiot —Smith’s gaze returned to Arden’s in time to watch the moment ending in her eyes. They’d focused from hazy wonder into slow realization, and now they narrowed into annoyance.
    Probably at herself as much as him. But it was probably better for her if he took her share of that, too. So he deliberately grinned, devil-may-care, as he said, “Sorry ’bout the dirt.”
    Her cute nose wrinkled in confusion before she followed his dipped gaze to see the smears of dust across her creamy arms, her once-clean shirt.
    He expected anger. Deserved anger. Her anger would free him to get back to doing what he had to do: destroy the Comitatus, even her father.
    Even his.
    He didn’t realize just how desperately he needed the release of her fury until he didn’t get it. Instead, Arden Leigh smiled her beauty-queen smile, poised and artificial as manufactured sweetener.
    “Don’t you fret yourself about it,” she purred. “It’s nothing a little