Midnight Fire Read Free Page B

never posts anything without some kind of proof. So we’re okay.”
    He hoped.
    Nick narrowed his eyes at the road and slapped his hand against the wheel. “You fucked her. That’s what this is about.”
    Jack sighed. “Yeah. About a million years ago. I fucked a lot of the women who were at the funeral. I was a man slut. So what?”
    “So you were imprinted on her, that must be it. Because no one else noticed you. And if that’s the case, she’ll be like a dog with a bone. Must have been some fuck.”
    Jack stiffened. Nick was a good guy but no one could talk like that about Summer. Jack swiveled his head and glared. “Say anything like that again and I’ll rip you a new one,” he growled, meaning every word.
    Nick’s eyes widened. “Dude. Sorry. Whoa, didn’t mean it that way. Hell, she’s an incredible woman. She followed the trail of Senator Rowland’s abuse of the family au pair like a terrier with a bone. If we have one less shit in the Senate, it’s thanks to her. I read
Area 8
regularly, love it.” He blew out a breath. “So—now that we’ve got that out of the way—we still got a problem. A big one.”
    Jack clenched his jaw.
    “Problem. We’ve got a problem. You see that, don’t you? Talk to me, Jack.” They were at the safe house and Nick pulled into the covered alleyway in the back. “What are you going to do about it? One of the most well-known bloggers in America knows you are not dead. How do we remedy that?”
    Silence.
    “Jack?”
    “I’m going to go talk to her,” Jack said finally.

Chapter Two
    Jack Delvaux is alive!
    But...Jack was dead. He’d died in the Washington Massacre.
    There’d been a memorial service for him and she’d cried bitterly over the golden boy who was no more.
    Summer sat in her cute yellow Prius in front of her apartment in Alexandria, shaking hands still on the steering wheel, mind whirling.
    Jack Delvaux, alive.
    Most people would shrug the thought off as a figment of their imagination. Most people, knowing Jack had been dead for six months, would have told themselves that they were mistaken.
    So anyone else who thought they’d seen a man who’d been dead for six months would have said to themselves—
that homeless man really looked like Jack Delvaux
,
but...nah.
He’s dead.
    But Summer couldn’t do that because she had irrefutable proof that she’d seen Jack.
    Her body. Her body had told her.
    The week they’d been lovers at Harvard, her body hadn’t been her own, it had been connected via some magic spell to Jack. Everything about her had changed. Her skin had felt different—too tight. Every time she saw him heat flashed through her, head to toe, an unstoppable blast that made her breath stop in her lungs. Her fingers and toes and breasts tingled and heat blossomed between her legs, as if seeing him threw a switch that made her body change. It had never happened to her before and after he’d dumped her, it had never happened to her again.
    And this afternoon, right outside Washington National Cathedral, her body had bloomed alive, like she’d been zapped by something. She’d channeled her 18-year old self.
    Her body had recognized Jack before her head did and it freaked her out.
    For a second there, outside the National Cathedral, she’d wondered if she was having a stroke. She hadn’t connected the boiling sensations under her skin to the tall homeless vet. And then...then she’d recognized him. First by his effect on her—the only man who’d ever made her feel as if she had an “on” switch and knew how to use it—and then by those intensely blue eyes.
    Crazy as it sounded, she believed she really had seen Jack.
    So—how could that even be possible? The only way it would be possible would be if he’d survived the Massacre but had been so badly injured in the explosion he was unable even to say who he was.
    If he’d been so concussed he couldn’t communicate, if he was disoriented, he’d end up living on the streets.
    The