Betting Hearts Read Online Free PDF Page B

wasn’t attractive, wasn’t sexy on her best day and had no interest in making anyone feel better about his hard day when she had one of her own. No one other than Burke, anyway. Which worked out. Odds were, he’d be the only man not blood-related to her staying with her till the day she died. She turned to him. “What do you think makes a woman feminine?”
    He leaned back into the couch and pulled her feet onto his lap by her ankles. “I don’t know. Looks aren’t it though. All that’s just training. You might not know all the girly magazine stuff, but you’re a woman where it counts.”
    She wiggled her toes so he’d rub. “Yeah, where’s that?”
    “I don’t know, CB.” His palm took hold of her foot firmly, the heel of it pushing small circles against her arch. “Femininity is mystery, not an organ. You know it when you see it. You’ve got it in there. Somewhere.”
    Way to sound reassuring, Burke. “Sure I do.” Right where he was rubbing if the tingles and urge to groan were any indication.
    “You do,” he insisted, ceasing the pressure from his hand.
    She opened her eyes, ready to insist he get back to his work, and met his glare.
    “I see it all the time.”
    She gaped. No one else in twenty-eight years had seen it, including her. Burke bowed his head, picking up the other foot to massage, signaling the topic closed.
    She frowned. He couldn’t say something like that and pretend there was nothing else to discuss. When did he see it? Why didn’t he mention it? She wanted to see it. She hated looking in the mirror and seeing what Luke did. Couldn’t he—
    “No, Cassie.” He didn’t pick up his head, but she could feel the pressure on her instep change.
    “You don’t know what I was going to ask.”
    “I don’t have to know. You’re upset. You’re hurt. Anything you think up right now is going to get you in a world of trouble. It always does.”
    Cass folded her arms and set her foot bouncing in time with her irritation.
    He followed it with his hands for a moment before dropping them from her entirely. “Fine, but it’s gonna be a bad idea.”
    “Think you could help me bring it out?”
    He laughed, absently returning to his task, relief evident. “It’s not a dinner tray.”
    “No, but…” An idea formed—an odd, fanciful, fascinating idea. Something Burke was guaranteed not to approve but sounded like exactly the right thing to do. “You said it’s all in the training, right?”
    Uh-oh. She could see him rethinking his laxity. His hands on her foot tightened, his back straightening with the scent of danger. She rushed to explain herself before he wigged out completely.
    “You could teach me!” Oh, oh it’d be perfect. Wouldn’t Luke’s jaw fall off if she came into the church dressed to the nines and so sexy that every man in Rancho Del Cielo was overcome with desire?
    “No, I couldn’t!” He bumped her feet off his lap as if she’d caught fire.
    Maybe she had. The idea had merit.
    “Sure you could. You said you see my femininity all the time. You said—”
    “I was trying to make you feel better.”
    “Were you lying?” The very real possibility brought her pause.
    His discomfort started to resemble a blush. She never knew Burke’s face was capable of reddening. “Uh…no, but CB—”
    “Then you can do it!”
    “No.”
    “Yes!”
    “No! I’m not doing anything with your femininity and that’s final!” He got off the couch and stomped to his bedroom.
    Cass lay back into the leather cushions, smiling only when he slammed the door to make his point. So he walked away. He’d done it before. He always came back. It didn’t matter if he wasn’t there to help her at the moment. She already had a plan, a progressive way to prove to Luke—to everyone—that she wasn’t someone to be pitied or dismissed.
    Cassandra Bishop was going to become a girl.
     
     
    “This isn’t your night, Sel,” Alice Panyon crowed to her husband a few hours later. She