Page 35 of Romancing the Rumrunner
“Hmm. Well. How was it?”
“How was what?”
“The kiss. Or whatever else you did,” she said with a wink. “Was it nice? Did you like it?”
“Oh.” Jessie bit her lip to keep from smiling. “It was…you know…”
“Oh, yes, Idoknow.” Maude sighed and slumped farther down on the pillows.
Jessie just flipped over and buried her face in her pillow.
“That good, huh?” Maude laughed, her low, husky laugh that made men drool at her feet. “I bet it was.”
“Oh, Maude,” Jessie said, slapping her friend’s arm. “What do I do now?”
“If it were me, I’d march right back into that man’s office and kiss him until he couldn’t even look at another woman but me.”
Jessie frowned. She’d love to do that. In fact, every cell in her body fairly screamed to do it. But it was never going to happen.
“But you aren’t me,” Maude said with a sigh. “What do you want to do?”
“I really don’t know. I know I can’t trust him. I know he only wants to seduce me to get information out of me. And I don’t know what his connection to Jameson is yet. They obviously aren’t friends, but they know each other and that is concerning. So to get involved with him would be foolish. Especially since he’s also my competition.”
“So. You have a lot of reasons to stay away from him.”
“Yes.”
“But?”
Jessie shrugged. “There is nobut. It’s foolish. It doesn’t matter what I might want—”
“So youdowant to be with him! I knew it.”
The ridiculous butterflies that had erupted in her belly at the memory of the kiss faded away with the cold light of reality. “I don’t know what I want.”
“I think you do,” Maude said gently, reaching over to brush Jessie’s hair out of her face. “Now you just need to find out how to go about getting it.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“You are making this too complicated.”
“No, I’m not. It’s plenty complicated without any help from me.”
Maude shook her head. “You are both over thinking this. You want him. He wants you. Nothing else should matter.”
Jessie leaned against her friend’s shoulder, wishing it really was that simple. Unfortunately, other things did matter. Far too much.
…
Tony sat across from Jameson at the diner, his coffee growing cold in front of him, trying his hardest to hold his patience. The man had been quizzing him for more than an hour now while he shoved his breakfast down his throat, and Tony had no more information to pass along than he had when they’d started. Finally, he held up a hand.
Jameson stopped eating and frowned at him. “What?”
“Agent Jameson, I can appreciate your situation. I know you want the Phoenix. I am doing my best to get you the information you need. But I won’t be able to do that from this diner and me being seen with you won’t do anything but blow my cover.”
Jameson waved him off. “The bootleggers would be more suspicious if we weren’t harassing you and pulling you in for questioning every other day. They’d wonder why we were leaving you alone.”
“Be that as it may, I can’t do the job you hired me for in here.”
