About Last Night Read Online Free PDF

openhearted grin normally reserved for close friends or lovers—and he’d lost the thread for a moment or two. Looking down into her huge brown eyes, he’d thought she might be the loveliest woman he’d ever seen.
    She’d also been completely pissed and badly in need of an escort. On the train, she’d slung one arm across his chest and snuggled sleepily against him as she prattled on about Patsy Cline and train schedules and possibly something about a straitjacket, and he’d wondered what sort of woman treated a total stranger this way. He found it both disarming and oddly comfortable at the same time.
    He tossed the larger shards of glass into the bin along with the wet rag. The sight of her bare feet in his peripheral vision sent him to the spare room for the broom and dustpan. “Don’t move,” he said over his shoulder, risking a look at her on his way out of the room.
    She’d covered her thighs, but she still appeared shell-shocked, a bit dazed from what they’d just done. He couldn’t blame her. He was rather dazed himself.
    He hadn’t intended to kiss her the first time, though heaven knows he’d wanted to from the second she walked into the room. Bad enough to know she was naked in his bath. At least then he’d been spared the torment of the sun shining straight through the thin cotton shirt, revealing the dark shapes of her bra and panties.
    Shapes he was altogether too familiar with. Under that shirt, she wore purple satin trimmed with black lace over creamy white skin, and she wore it well. He’d had no intention of seeing her nearly naked last night, but it had happened, and the experience had kept him awake for hours. He wanted her. Badly. The hunger of it surprised and disconcerted him.
    Whoever she was, she seemed to have a knack for surprising and disconcerting him.
    When he’d kissed her, he’d meant it to be a little thing. An experiment. A way to wipe that uncertainty from her eyes and make her feel better, as she was obviously unhappy about the state he’d found her in last night.
    Though, if he were being honest, his primary reason for kissing her hadn’t been charitable. Nev had wanted her to notice him, to shake her up the way she did him.
    He hadn’t stopped to think whether she’d kiss him back, nor had he had the faintest notion how quickly things would heat up between them. They’d practically set the table alight.
    Another surprise.
    She was so small, just a wisp of a woman, and so … brash. Not at all the sort he usually went for. But he’d fallen asleep thinking of the shape of her body, the softness of her skin under his palms when he’d lifted her from the floor. Those tattoos. At the center of her lower back, a songbird with its wings spread wide. Swirling lines surrounded it—some thin and curling, others thicker and more angular. He hadn’t gotten a good look at it, but there had seemed to be other figures embedded in the pattern, which curved around onto her stomach. He’d wanted to trace the lines of the ink with his fingers and his tongue.
    He hadn’t, of course. He wasn’t a complete cad. But the impulse remained.
    He came to himself standing in his office, staring blankly at the cupboard. For heaven’s sake. What had this woman done to him?
    Shaking his head in an attempt to clear it, Nev grabbed the broom from the cupboard and returned to the studio. He kept his attention on the floor as he swept up any tiny pieces of glass that remained. Safer not to look at her.
    Safer, because he’d been a hairbreadth from taking her on the table in his studio without so much as knowing her name, and he absolutely would’ve done it if the jar hadn’t fallen and broken. Even now, he wasn’t sure how long he could remain in the flat with her without dragging her off to bed.
    It wasn’t the sort of thing “City” would do, he expected.
    The thought made him want to do it all the more.
    He dumped the contents of the dustpan into the bin and looked up at last. She