A Will and a Way Read Online Free PDF

that made her heart beat faster.
    “I think you might underestimate what I can imagine.”
    He lowered his hand to her thigh, and she almost sprang straight off the stool. “I would never underestimate a woman like you.”
    “You don’t know the first thing about me.”
    His hand crept a little higher, the tip of his middle finger tracing her inseam. “Tell me everything.”
    “I don’t usually drink this much wine.”
    He eyed the glass she’d barely touched. “I don’t usually have the chance to pass an evening at The Pump talking to pretty ladies, but sometimes you have to break out of your comfort zone.”
    “You said you’ve been coming here for years. I’d have thought this was your comfort zone,” she said, a note of accusation creeping into her voice.
    “The bar, yes. The company is what’s out of the ordinary.”
    She shot him a sidelong glance. “I wouldn’t think you do too badly in that department, either”
    “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, blinded as you are by my movie star good looks, but I’m not twenty anymore.”
    She tried for wide-eyed mockery, but her voice came out wispy and girlish. “You’re not?”
    “No. Thank God.” He laughed that tease of a laugh then leaned in to speak directly into the ear he’d loved and left just minutes before. “If I were, I’d have you pressed up against a wall by now.”
    She should have been outraged. Any well-bred southern woman worth her salt would have been. But training and polish aside, she’d been born with nothing more than a daddy who’d struck it rich and married one those proper ladies in hopes of smoothing off his rougher edges. Maybe that was why this man made her blood rush rather than cool. His forward manner and frank words marked him as the worst kind of dog. Just the sort of man a woman with more than her fair share of mongrel blood avoided all her life.
    A sip of wine gave her time to rein in the surge of need his brazen assumptions unleashed. “I imagine you know some of the people in here.”
    She sensed his gaze on her.
    “Most of them.”
    “So this is a regular hangout bar. Like on Cheers ,” she said, adding a flash of a smile to show she approved. Though she couldn’t imagine why she did. She’d just moved seven hundred miles to get away from the scrutiny Will probably felt every time he walked through the door here. “Do you like that?” And there she went with the questions again. “I mean, this is a big city. Anonymous. Do you like having a place where…” She trailed off, feeling like the country mouse cliché as a smile lit his face.
    “Where everybody knows my name?”
    “Where you feel comfortable,” she corrected with a sniff.
    “Do you want anonymity? Is that why you moved here from….”
    He circled his hand encouragingly, and good manners forced her to comply. “Percy, Mississippi.”
    “Percy, Mississippi?” He moved the wine glass she’d been fiddling with an inch or so, and Betty automatically clasped her hands in her lap. “Did you come to the frozen tundra so you could blend into the landscape? Because, I have to tell you, it’s not working.”
    A laugh boiled out of her like steam from a kettle. She turned to face this too-handsome man with the perfectly imperfect face and cruelly charming smile, and summoned her inner Scarlett O’Hara. “Are you saying I don’t belong here?”
    “I didn’t say that at all. I was paying you a compliment.”
    He leaned in closer, and she caught a whiff of aftershave. Her skin tingled. It had been a while since she’d had a man this close. Even longer since she wanted one. A thrum of anticipation beat low in her belly. She bit her lip to keep from blurting something embarrassing and tore her gaze from those dark, mesmerizing eyes.
    “You strolled in this dreary old bar on a Tuesday night wearing your shiny pink parka expecting that no one would notice? Sweetheart, you’d have gotten less attention if a magician had pulled you out of his