Reilly's Return Read Free Page B

it’s too late, and he fries her with his eyes and eats her.”
    “Thank you for sharing that with us,” Alaina said sardonically, fanning herself harder as her flawless complexion took on a decidedly green cast.
    Jayne bit her lip. “I’m sorry. It was a rotten movie.”
    Faith continued working with the baby wipes, swiping off a layer of makeup and fake eyebrow. She shrieked in horror when the man’s nose suddenly came off in her hand. “Oh, my God!”
    “Holy Hannah!”
    “AAAAHHHHH!”
    “Hey! Wait a minute!” Alaina exclaimed, hauling herself off the crate to get a closer look. “Isn’t that? It is! That’s no pervert! That’s Pat Reilly!”
    Reilly moaned again and shook his head in an attempt to clear the clanging bells out of it. Then he opened his eyes and looked directly into the face of Jayne Jordan.
    Jayne stared down at him for a long moment, saying nothing. She wasn’t capable of speech. She wasn’t even aware her two best friends were looking at her expectantly. Reilly’s incredible eyes glowed up at her, so blue they were almost startling, so intense she was sure she felt her heart stop just looking at them. Reilly. Her head swam at the implications. He was back, just as he’d promised.
    Reilly had returned.
    She took one long, hard look at him, all the old hunger and fear rushing to the surface, and fainted dead away.

TWO
    “W HAT HAPPENED ?” J AYNE asked as she opened her eyes and stared up into Faith’s concerned face. “Did I fall asleep? I had the strangest dream. I hope it wasn’t an omen.”
    “It wasn’t an o-men, it was
the
man,” Alaina whispered, leaning over Jayne’s prone form. “The Hunk from Down Under, himself.”
    “Pat Reilly?” Jayne barely managed to whisper the name. A dozen different emotions all rushed to her throat to choke her. There was dread and traces of a guilt she thought she had rationalized away a long time ago. And underlying that mix of negative feelings was something else altogether. It was like excitement or anticipation or something more primal that she didn’t care to give a name to.
    Reilly had returned.
    “Hello, luv.”
    The voice was unmistakable. The husky baritone strains reached out like fingers and caressed her skin. Shivers ran up and down the length of her like ribbons rippling in the breeze. Jayne sucked in a horrified breath. This was exactly the way she had reacted to the timbre of his voice the first time she’d met him, when she’d been a very happily married woman. It was a frighteningly automatic response, one she seemed to have no control over whatsoever. It had made her feel wicked at the time. She wasn’t the kind of Hollywood wife who bed hopped. She’d been so content with Mac, she had rarely looked at other men to appreciate their male beauty, let alone to contemplate their more hidden charms. So when her husband had brought home the great friend he’d met while on a photographic shoot in Australia, Jayne had been shocked by her reaction, dismayed and disappointed in herself.
    She’d loved Joseph MacGregor with her whole being—or so she’d thought. Though Mac had been nearly twenty years her senior, he’d been her soul mate, her anchor and her mentor. She had worshiped and adored him. But on meeting Pat Reilly she’d learned a quick and disheartening lesson: there was a level of attraction she’d never experiencedbefore. To find that out with a man other than Mac had been a crushing blow. It had somehow tainted the love she had for Mac and rippled the surface of the peace she’d found with him.
    Now Faith and Alaina leaned away from her, parting like double doors to admit Reilly’s countenance to her field of vision, and she was given a refresher course in that lesson. It didn’t matter that half his hair was black and half was blond. It didn’t matter that his rugged features were slightly irregular—his bold, hooked nose was a tad crooked, his cheekbones were a little too high. It didn’t matter