19 Headed for Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page B

312
was all it said. Short and sweet and all he needed to know.
    He ran for the elevator, pushed the button. It took too damn long, so he searched for and found the sign for the stairs. He took them up, three at a time.
    And there it was. Suite 312. He knocked, knowing that he was probably going to wake up her friends, but he didn’t give a good goddamn. He knocked again, even louder, and the door opened.
    Rosie stood there, and for several seconds, neither of them moved. And then they both did, both at once, and she was in his arms and Jesus Lord save him, he was finally kissing her.
    She was sweetness and fire, kissing him back so fiercely, that his heart damn near exploded in his chest.When he finally pulled away, breathless and dizzy, she was laughing and maybe even crying a little, too.
    “I’ve never done anything even remotely like this before,” Rosie told him. “I just … I don’t do this.”
    Frank didn’t either. Never before this. And probably, in all honesty, never again. “I have to go,” he told her. Words she’d hear from him again and again, unless she came to her senses in the next few hours, days, weeks,
months
. It was quite probably going to be
months
before he could arrange a trip to Hartford to see her again. And it would take him far longer, unless he broke into that savings account where he’d stashed his inheritance from his mother—all nine thousand dollars of it.
    Still, he kissed Rosie again, longer, slower, deeper this time, loving the way she melted into his arms.
    “My email address is on my business card,” she whispered. “Write me, okay?”
    “This is crazy,” he said, touching the softness of her cheek, trying to memorize her face, her eyes.
    She laughed up at him. “Good crazy,” she told him. “
Really
good crazy.”
    He kissed her again, both cursing and grateful for her roommates. If they’d been in her hotel room instead of out here in the hall, their clothes would already be off. And if there was one thing he was certain of, it was that she deserved better than a five-minute fuck, culminating with him running out the door to hail a cab, hauling up the zipper on his fly, shoes in his hands.
    But Lord help him, because what he wanted and what he
wanted
were not the same thing.
    And she was thinking along the same lines. “Do you want …?”
    He waited, sure this time that she was not going to offer him coffee.
    “I could …” She cleared her throat. “Come with you to your, um, hotel and … help you pack your suitcase?”
    She actually blushed because they both knew damn well that neither of them would pack any kind of suitcase if they went back to his room. Not that he even had a suitcase. He always traveled with his seabag, a duffel that he could just throw everything into—clean clothes and dirty laundry mixed together, because who the hell cared?
    But the thing in his chest was swelling even larger. It was way past his throat now. It pushed on the backs of his eyes, making him feel as if—sweet Jesus—as if he might actually start bawling like a baby. Because what she was telling him was …
    “You’re that sure about me?” he asked, his voice coming out no louder than a whisper. She nodded. She was.
    “Let me grab my sneakers,” she told him now, disappearing to do just that.
    Sneakers. With sneakers on her feet, they’d both be able to run much farther and faster. They could get to the Sheraton in enough time to spend
ten
minutes …
    “We should wait,” Frank heard himself saying. “I want to wait.”
    She was back in a sneaker-clad flash, looking at him as if he were from Mars, so he tried to explain.
    “I want to do this right,” he told her. “How about we meet for Christmas? Right back here, in New Orleans.” He could take her to dinner someplace elegant and romantic. Someplace with dancing and champagne. And only then would they go back to the hotel, where they’d make love—slowly, tenderly—all night long.
    “I’d