Yours for the Night Read Online Free Page B

watched Tiffany read the back of the card, as if convincing herself it was real. Garrett knew what it said by heart: Elaine Elizabeth Berringer. Born May 20, 1978. Died November 15, 2006. Remember two kisses, the first and the last.
    Tiffany stared at the picture for several long minutes, flipping it over in her hands, and when she looked back up at him, her eyes had welled.
    Damn, now he’d made her cry.
    “Don’t cry, please,” he said, almost desperately, taking the picture back and slipping it into his wallet. “I just wanted you to know I wasn’t lying. Completely understandable how you would misinterpret what I said earlier,” he added, and put his hands firmly on her shoulders, making her look at him.
    Obviously he didn’t quite have the way with women that he used to. “I’m sorry for making you cry, too,” he added for good measure.
    “No. I’m the one who’s sorry. I always do this, leap to conclusions, leap into relationships, leap into trouble… I just tend to… leap . And what I said was horrible, considering. I am so sorry,” she repeated. “She was lovely.”
    Garrett’s heart softened even more. “Yes, she was. But it was a long time ago,” he added, experiencing a little kick of surprise at how easily the words fell from his lips, accompanied by a tiny sting of guilt. He’d never before tried to push Lainey’s memory away.
    “How long were you married?” she asked.
    “Six years,” he said. “I put this in my pocket at the funeral. It took me two years to clear a lot of her things out of the house, three years to take my ring off… I guess I thought I should keep something of her with me.”
    Tiffany smiled a little. “That’s sweet, and sad.”
    Garrett frowned. First Tiffany thought he was a player trying to have an out-of-town fling behind his wife’s back, then he’d called her a liar and made her cry. Now she thought he was clinging to the memory of his long-dead wife.
    When he’d lost Lainey, it was as if Garrett had died, too. He would wake up, move, breathe, eat because of the demands of his body and because he knew his family worried about him. They grieved, too, and he didn’t want to cause them any more pain.
    Gradually, it got easier, better. The business had saved him. His brothers, his family, had saved him. His heart had scarred over sufficiently that he could go on. But he hadn’t really moved on.
    Meeting Tiffany made his blood move again, coursing through him with new vigor. He was excited for the first time in a long time, his heart doing more now than just keeping him alive.
    And he was alive. He’d never known that fact more keenly than when he looked down into Tiffany’s face, her beautiful green eyes still a little blurry with tears.
    Garrett pulled her closer, experimenting, operating on instinct and sheer male desire. It coursed through his blood like a river that had been held back for too long. He could only think of one way to convince Tiffany that he was very much living in the present, not the past.
    He kissed her.
    It was as simple as that.
    Or so he thought, until her arms crept around his neck and that lovely, lush, curvy body pressed into his and she was kissing him back.
    “Yeah, just like that,” he breathed against her mouth, and dove back in, plundering the inside of her mouth with his tongue. Suddenly starving, he couldn’t taste or touch enough of her.
    Walking her back, he pressed her up against the car, loving how she kissed him as hungrily and desperately as he did her. He moved his hands over full breasts that strained the tantalizingly thin material of her dress. Her hands stroked his back, and then went down to his butt, her fingers gripping him and pulling his hardness closer into the soft cushion of her hip.
    She sighed into his mouth. It was such a pure, uninhibited sound of pleasure that he wanted to lift up her dress and take her right there. Garrett—known amongst his family and friends for his level-headedness, his