Burn for Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

friends-with-benefits thing, basically.” She shrugged and lifted the glass to her lips. “That’s easy enough. I don’t give up on my—”
    He closed the distance between them and slammed his hands down on the counter on either side of her. Friends . Yeah, so maybe he’d been the one to suggest this thing they had between them, but she had to realize how much things had changed. He couldn’t be the only one to see it. They’d slid past friends a long time ago.
    “We’re more than friends,” he growled.
    She stared at him over the rim of her glass, her soft green eyes distant as the stars.
    “No. We’re not. Friends is all you wanted. Friends is all you’ll ever give me.” The look in her eyes sent a spike straight through his heart.
    “I…” He closed his mouth, tried to figure out what to say to that. Something inside him twisted. Panic fluttered inside but he shoved it down. “Ali, we … we’re more than friends. You know you matter to me.”
    “I matter to you,” she echoed, her voice hollow. Then she turned away, staring out the window into the night. “You know something? Scott said that very same thing to me once. But neither the kids nor I mattered enough. Not to him.”
    Those simple words knocked the breath right out of him. Stunned, he backed up a step, leaned against the door as he stared at her. His voice came out in a gruff rasp. “Ali, what do you want from me?”
    “I guess I want to matter more .” She lowered her head, staring at the counter where her hands rested. She clenched them into fists. Tight, bloodless fists. “I’d … hell. I guess I’d like a man who actually wants to be with me. Not just for sex, but for real .”
    “I do want that.”
    She turned her head, stared at him. “Do you?”
    “Fuck, I just said I did,” he snapped, shoving away from the wall and closing the distance between them. “What the hell is going on? What are you getting at?”
    Slowly, she turned to face him, her face quiet, her eyes sad. He went to cup her cheek, but she pulled back, staring at the wall.
    “Is this because of…” He fumbled for the words, remembering how callous he’d been, how foolish and blind. “Is it because of the other night?”
    “Oh, Tate. This is about a lot more than just one night,” she said, slowly turning to look at him.
    It hit him, then. He got it, and it was like she’d taken a knife from the butcher block sitting a few inches from her hand. The pain was sharp, piercing, and unending. She was done. That’s what this was about. She was done.
    Staring into her pretty green eyes, while that pain tore into him again and again, only one thought managed to cut through it.
    Like hell.
    He closed his hands around her hips and boosted her up onto the kitchen counter. “No,” he said, his voice gruff and ragged as he pushed her thighs apart and moved closer. He slid one hand along until he could palm her butt and then he yanked her against him and he watched the heat bloom in her eyes, felt the slow, subtle tremor that went through her.
    Her skin went the color of a rose, low on her chest, bared by the skinny-strapped shirt she wore and he knew if he pulled it away, that faint rush of color would go all the way down to her breasts.
    “No,” he said again. “This is more than friendship.”
    The need to strip her clothes away, climb on top of her, feel her close around him was strong, grabbing him by the balls—she would feel it, he knew that. He could show her just how much more this was.
    “More than friendship.” Her lids drooped while that blush of color crept up her neck, then to her cheeks. Through her lashes, she watched him, all the while arching back so that the heat of her sex brushed against his cock. “This? This is just sex.”
    He opened his mouth, the word no trying to form.
    She slid a hand down his chest, toyed with the button of his jeans. “Sex.It’s good sex, it’s crazy sex, and it makes me forget who I am sometimes.”
    His