Embraced by Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

mega-large heart was doing cartwheels, and his stomach was doing flips, and as his mouth met hers, his entire body came damn close to going into shock.
    Her lips were sweet and soft and everything he’d been dreaming about right from the first moment he’d spotted her out in the hallway in her office building. He ran his fingers through the soft curls of her hair, drawing her closer to him, kissing her mouth, her cheeks, her nose, breathing in her intoxicating perfume.
    He was out of control.
    He kissed her lips again, unable to keep himself from tasting them with his tongue, wanting desperately to really,
really
kiss her. He pulled her even closer, and at that contact, as her breasts brushed against his chest, she gasped, involuntarily allowing him passage into the sweetness of her mouth.
    Cooper didn’t hesitate. He took advantage and kissed her, deeply, thoroughly, endlessly. And, hot damn! She kissed him back.
    Heaven. It was absolute heaven.
    He might have backed her up against the Plexiglas display window and kept on kissing her, if he hadn’t suddenly realized that they were standing in the middle of a public place in the middle of the day, with an audience the average age of ten.
    So he pulled back. His hands were shaking as he released her, and he jammed them into the pockets of his jeans. He couldn’t read the expression on her face and he panicked. “Sorry,” he said quickly. “I’m sorry if I offended you—”
    But Josie laughed. “Where I come from, if a man kisses a woman like that, it means that he likes her,” she said. “Why on earth would
that
offend me?”
    Cooper had laughed, too. If he hadn’t known it before, he knew it for sure now—Josie Taylor was without a doubt the most perfect woman in the universe. And he was hopelessly, permanently, and eternally in love with her.
    He wanted to tell her, but he was still afraid of scaring her away, so he told her in Spanish.
“Te quiero,”
he said softly, knowing she didn’t understand.
“Te adoro, mi corazòn.”
    Sitting there on the floor, out in the hall outside his apartment door, Cooper rubbed his hands across his face, down his neck to his shoulders. Goddamn, he was tense.
    Of course he was tense—his entire world was coming to an end.
    True, it wasn’t the perfect world he’d imagined they’d share, back at the Museum of Natural History, back when he’d first kissed Josie. And Josie wasn’t perfect either—in fact, she was far from it. But she was human, and as he’d discovered each of her imperfections, it had only made him love her more.
    Suddenly the door opened, and Josie stood there, looking down at him. She was wearing the pair of green and blue plaid pajamas his mother had sent him last year for Christmas, and she’d had to cuff both the sleeves and the legs at least five or six times. They were her favorite cold weather pajamas. Seeing her in them was a reminder that summer was over. Cooper had a bad feeling this winter was going to be colder than ever. He slowly pulled himself to his feet.
    “I was worried about you,” she said quietly. She stepped back so he could come inside, but he didn’t move toward her.
    Josie didn’t say another word, she just waited. And finally he walked through the door. It wasn’t until she shut and locked the door behind him that she said, “You’re still angry.”
    But he shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, I’m not angry. Just hurt.”
    “Cooper, you’ve got to try to understand,” she said, pressing her fingers to her forehead as if she had a headache.
    He stood in the hallway, looking at her. “It goes both ways,” he said quietly. “And I don’t see you trying to understand how I feel.”
    Josie had never seen Cooper look so unhappy. She had never seen his eyes so lifeless, his handsome face so subdued. He was standing in front of her, ill at ease in his own home, holding his hat in his big hands. He bent his head, looking down at the floor, and his hair fell across