San Antonio Rose Read Online Free Page A

sending a fresh flurry of tremors down her spine.
    “Some things are better left to memory,” she said on a falling note.
    “Not this,” he drawled as his hand found the small of her back and pulled her flush against him until she felt every rigid contour of his body.
    “Especially this!” she cried, determined to resist him even as the heat and the hardness of him revived passions that had too long lain dormant.
    She tried to wrench free, but he held her fast. Then she wedged both of her elbows between them and bored the heels of her hands into his muscled chest, but he was not to be deflected.
    Finally realizing that she was no match for his strength, she changed tactics. She looked around meaningfully, then lifted appealing eyes to his unrelenting ones. “Especially here.”
    “Where better?” he growled as his mouthground down on hers in a kiss that was as much an affirmation of life as it was an act of reclamation.
    The virile length of him burned into the vulnerable softness of her as his tongue flicked persuasively over her lips, delving into the corners, tracing the tight seam she made of them, outlining their shape with silken circles until they parted on a gasp of pleasure and he finally tasted her response.
    Jeannie’s resistance melted into a rippling pool of pure longing as she wrapped her arms around Rafe’s neck and swam toward the sleek, wet spear of his tongue. Her head tilted back sharply, her hat fell off, and her loosely pinned hair cascaded to her shoulders.
    Spring sang deep inside him when he caught the fine gold strands with his free hand and felt the sun’s heat captured there. Her heart tilted as she touched her tongue to his in a circling dance of rediscovery. Their bodies, having found the familiar fit of breast to chest and feminine softness to masculine hardness, swayed to a lovers’ refrain from another lifetime.
    “Memory didn’t severe me well enough,” Rafe murmured as he raised his head and tucked a stray tendril that had escaped his grasp behind her ear.
    But memory served Jeannie
too
well. She had a son to protect, and Tony’s interests took precedence over her own frail desires. Then there was Webb Bishop to consider. He wasthe last of a dying breed, a man she could rely on when the going got rough, and she knew he was waiting at home for her to say the word.
    Trembling with anger at her own traitorous arousal, she slapped that stirring hand away and stepped out of those strong arms. She picked up her hat and dusted it off, then hugged it to herself. Her somber gray eyes reflected the pain of what she had to say.
    “Go away, Rafe.”
    “We’ve got unfinished business, Jeannie.”
    “No,” she denied with a vehement shake of her head. “It was finished between us eleven years ago.”
    “Judging by the way you kissed me back,” he said softly, “we’ve only just begun.”
    “Don’t confuse me with that starry-eyed girl you left behind,” she warned him tightly.
    His blue eyes moved up and down her slender body in a way that made her wonder if she glowed with their electric force. “You’ve matured into a beautiful woman.”
    “I’ve changed, all right.” The excitement sputtered as she reminded herself that time heals, but scars stay. “And so have my priorities.”
    “Some things never change,” he said, rewording her earlier argument and using it to his own advantage.
    The early April breeze, heady with the scent of yellow roses and the aura of youthful passions, ruffled his sable-thick hair. Sunlightscintillated off the small silver earring that studded his left lobe. A mockingbird, perched on a nearby headstone of joined hearts, called to its mate.
    “Why did you have to come back?” Jeannie could have been eighteen again, so wistfully did she ask.
    “I had to see you.” A muscle jumped along Rafe’s clean-edged jaw. “I had to satisfy my curiosity.”
    “About what?”
    “About the man you married.”
    She stiffened instinctively. “What