Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4) Read Online Free PDF

business was theft and robbery and extortion. “That’s no place for a schoolteacher.”
    “Evidently your bartender agreed. He wouldn’t serve me.”
    She eyed the beer in his hand.
    He remembered the day she had come to his house and drunk whiskey in his parlor. He’d liked that about her.
    “I can repair the deficiency, if you’d like to come in.”
    She hesitated on the doorstep. “Dozens of people know where I am,” she said. “I texted friends this address.”
    “Really? What house number did you give them?”
    She fixed him with a baleful stare. “There is no house number. I gave them the GPS coordinates.”
    Ah, the modern age. “Then I suppose you’re perfectly safe,” he said, standing aside to let her pass. He hoped she was nothing of the sort, at least when it came to his bed.

Chapter 3

    A nn hesitated on the doorstep, remembering her last visit to Finn’s house. The day they had met, she and Finn had been talking in the second-floor parlor of his far grander residence across the square. He’d been trying—she was pretty sure—to charm her, or at least seduce and distract her. Then there had been a deafening noise and somehow they had been outside , across the street, on the grassy slope below the Bunker Hill Monument. Ann still couldn’t sort out exactly what had happened. She’d heard later that it had been a gas explosion, but something about it didn’t add up.
    Common sense told her to turn around now and go home, but the thought of Davin’s ravaged arms strengthened her resolve and carried across the threshold. That, and she was parched for a beer and tired of walking the length and breadth of Charlestown in search of this intriguing, infuriating man.
    She followed the crime lord inside. The interior wasn’t at all what she had been expecting. His brownstone had been grand, full of overstuffed furniture and swathed in velvet and silk draperies, like something out of a decorating magazine. It had felt more like a showplace than a home.
    This house was different. It was immediately welcoming and comfortable. The wide pine floors were sanded to silk beneath her feet and dotted with colorful braided rugs. The paneling on the walls was painted in a soft palette of gray and blue. She glimpsed a comfortable-looking sectional covered in pewter twill through one door, a dining room with a maple table and Windsor chairs through another.
    The home was like its owner: quietly seductive. Ann wished she wasn’t intrigued. Criminals were not supposed to be sexy. Bad boys were bad news. She had come to tell Finn that she was going to report Davin’s father to Child Services—and dare him to do his worst, now that all of Charlestown had seen her march up to his front door—but already something was off the rails; things weren’t going to plan.
    Because she found something about him bewitching, his charm so difficult to resist.
    It was more than his physical appeal, although that was impossible to ignore. She’d never encountered a man like him in the flesh. His body was the stuff of billboards and movie posters: broad shoulders and defined muscles and a neat, narrow waist over lean hips. His clothing moved with his body, a soft flannel shirt in forest green and rich indigo jeans that fit as though made for him. The piercing gray eyes and thick wavy hair didn’t hurt, either.
    She had never felt this way about a man before. She had found her previous boyfriends cute, like puppies or kittens, but not the stuff of her deepest fantasies. And even then, while dating men she found only passably attractive, she’d been hungry for them to touch her. With Finn she felt more than hungry. She felt ravenous—and it frightened her.
    “Hungry?” he asked her.
    “Yes, actually.” For more than food, but she could hardly say that. She worried that it was obvious enough without putting it into words. And it was hardly a position of strength from which to bargain over the well-being of a child. Remember