Breaking Read Online Free PDF

lapse, but he wasn’t going to risk hurting her feelings by
refusing her invitation so he got his stuff together and headed out to meet her
at a café near her conference hotel.
    He would rather
have just worked all day.
    When he was
working, he didn’t have to think about anything else. He could drown all
brooding thoughts with words on pages—words about a culture that was dead and
unchanging. When he was with Lori, however, his mind started to move in
directions that were simply too dangerous.
    He tried to
focus on the conversation at lunch—on her enthusiastic ramblings about her
morning at the writers’ conference she was attending. He met her eyes, nodded
at the right times, laughed at her amusing descriptions of eccentric fellow
writers and the argument she’d gotten into at one session.
    The first time
Ander had met Lori had been in a coffee shop, for an initial meeting to discuss
terms and prepare for her first client session with him. She’d been pretty and
young and nervous and surprisingly blunt.
    She’d asked him
about his unusual name, and for some reason he’d told her the truth.
    “Ander,” she
said, pulling his attention back.
    “Yeah.”
     “Do you think
that’s a good idea?”
    He took a bite
of his sandwich to give him time to figure out what she’d just said. Finally,
he had to admit, “I’m sorry. What?”
    “What about
May?” She spoke slowly and without any particular inflection, a clear sign she
was growing impatient with him. “That would be in between the end of the
semester and your next dig, and I don’t have anything big planned for the whole
month.”
    He blinked,
finally processing that she’d changed topics and was now talking about wedding
plans. “Okay.”
    She frowned.
“Is that not a good time for you? When would you prefer?”
    “Whatever you’d
like is fine.” He wanted to marry Lori—more than anything—but he honestly
didn’t care about the date, the location, or the kinds of flowers involved.
    “I’d just like
to set a date so we can make plans. It really doesn’t have to be May. Do you
want it earlier? We don’t have to—”
    “Lori, May is
fine. No reason to make it earlier.”
    “Oh.” She
looked down at her salad for a long time. “We can postpone it if you want.”
    He had no idea
why she was being so wishy-washy about this. He’d be happy to marry her
whenever she wanted. Next weekend, even. “Make the date whatever you want it to
be. I really don’t care.”
    “Well, it’s
your wedding too.”
    He sighed,
hoping the next eight months weren’t going to be like this. “I know.”
    He shouldn’t be
surprised she might get hung up on wedding details. They were important to a
lot of women, and Lori had a very strong romantic streak in her, no matter how
hard she tried to mask it with irony.
    She was a
romance writer, after all.
    She’d intrigued
him from the beginning. A romance writer still a virgin at twenty-six. It
wasn’t that he’d found her situation implausible. Women all had different
reasons for having or not having sex—he knew this better than most—and if
authors could write convincingly about committing murder or living in the
Middle Ages without actually doing it, then they could certainly write
convincingly about having sex without having done it. None of that would have
made him blink.
    But her coming
to him, trusting him with her first time—that had been beyond his experience.
Being with her in bed had felt different, even in their first session. The more
he’d been with her, the deeper he’d fallen, until he was hopelessly in love, with
no way of shifting their business relationship into something real.
    It didn’t take
much for him to relive those raw, helpless feelings even now.
    He’d stayed
awake night after night back then, thinking about her, fantasizing about
scenarios where she might fall in love with him, aching for another taste of
real intimacy with her, when he’d had absolutely none of it in