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everything he’d known with Joey. She had been shot but it was he who’d fallen off the grid for five damn years.
    The single reason he’d come out of the shadows was to protect her. He’d wounded her, wrecked her in some sense, but it hadn’t been his plan. That plan belonged to another architect, and Zaf would let no one take her life.
    He’d been in Las Vegas some months now, lying low but learning the characteristics of the city and the hierarchy of its people. He surfaced at casinos on the occasions that he wanted to play his intellect against sophisticated dealers ruling high-risk table games.
    Mostly he tracked the bastard who’d made Joey his target. The threat to her had intensified to the point that Zaf could no longer effectively watch over her from a distance. He needed access, proximity, trust.
    Good friggin’ luck getting even one of the three.
    Not that he would blame Joey if she tried to run him through with her cane right now. He’d taken no sadistic pleasure in her pain, but welcomed her retaliation. He figured he deserved the wrath, and secretly he prayed it would assuage his agony.
    Zaf stood motionless. It was up to her to come to him now. He’d done all the heavy work to this point, hacking into Dating Done Smart’s system, creating a profile and neatly bridging it to hers without leaving a trace that security had been breached. This wasn’t a federal job—he’d find no governmental cooperation should the company be alerted and take up arms against him. But he didn’t care. He knew an attack was coming and this time he would keep her safe.
    Inside he shook with a craving to clear the damn room of everyone but his Jo. His Jo. She wasn’t anymore—when would that fact take root?
    A line of people nudged past him for a closer look at an exhibit, then he could see Joey’s tears again. No longer offering a mesmerizing shine to the bitter snap in her russet-brown eyes, they streaked down her cheeks. The woman next to her held out tissues but he wanted to block them with his body and erase the wet trails with his tongue.
    Whatever she said next had her friend reaching out as though to shield her, but Joey jerked loose and said something that sent the other woman out of the gallery. Identifying her was no challenge—he knew Charlotte Blue was a Las Vegas Slayers athletic trainer and Nate Franco’s fiancée.
    And he knew Nate Franco’s godfather, Gian DiGorgio, was a billionaire Joey had crossed. He should be in prison now, staring at the blood on his hands. But his brilliance, duplicity and mighty alliances afforded him the slickest loopholes to escape the consequences of his crimes, and gifted him the opportunity to put Joey under surveillance because he intended to lay his bloodstained hands on her.
    Joey navigated the gallery to him but didn’t speak.
    To take the coward’s way, he’d ignore the stick, pretend he didn’t feel a bone-deep stab of remorse with each halting step he watched her take. But to be a coward required him to fear something, and the capacity to do even that had been drained from him. “I did that. I did that to you.”
    â€œYou did. The bullet’s still embedded. Fragmented. But I’m sure somebody in the network told you that.” Those eyes were relentless—punishing, even. Her accent was spiced with the influence of her Spanish-speaking family and Texas upbringing, her timbre controlled and nonthreatening. Deceptively so. “ Qué pasa , Zaf? How does it feel, knowing you’re in me?”
    He was beyond redemption for tensing up in violent, dirty lust. Gazing down at her, he absorbed her every erotic detail. Maybe this was punishment, the need to pull those little combs out of her brandy hair and spear his fingers through it, to hurt with a thirst to taste her again, to have perfect vantage point of her breasts exposed by that deep-cut neckline—and