Flirting With Disaster Read Online Free PDF

mail carrier never bothered her. She couldn’t get pizza delivered, so there were no wild pizza-boy scenarios acted out. And the only other neighbors were separated from her and Jill by the deep, shadowed forests of ponderosa pines and aspen.
    She liked it that way. She reveled in it. She felt almost safe. But things had changed last year. After dozens of trips to the library over the years to pick up interlibrary loans of rare, specialized anatomy books, one of the librarians had started a conversation. An interesting conversation. And Isabelle’s bubble of isolation had finally popped.
    Lauren Foster was a good friend now. And Sophie Heyer, another librarian. Those two women had pulled Isabelle further out of her comfort zone by insisting on girls’ nights out every other Sunday.
    But there hadn’t been much room for men. Not enough room. Her lies wouldn’t accommodate a long-term relationship, and neither would her heart. So she’d had a man for a week or a month at a time here and there, but never more than that.
    Maybe that explained why she found herself watching Tom as he spoke, wondering if those lips would taste as good as they looked. Or if those shoulders were as wide as they seemed.
    She shook her head. She needed more wine. Or less. Or she just needed to get laid. But definitely not by a US marshal.
    But it didn’t matter tonight. Tonight she was full of wonderful food and less afraid of why he’d shown up on her doorstep. There was more wine, dessert was waiting and nobody was asking anything about her father. She’d be able to paint tomorrow. She could feel it.
    As if the universe was offering a reward for her new good mood, Tom unbuttoned the left sleeve of his shirt and began to roll it up as he told Jill a story about a fugitive who’d fallen into an icy creek.
    “The thing was, he wouldn’t come out.” His wrist was exposed first. The same tan color as the back of his hand, dark against the white cotton of his shirt. “His lips were turning blue. He couldn’t stop shaking. He couldn’t even speak anymore. But he refused to come out.”
    Now the start of his forearm, slim but much harder than hers, muscles visible even at rest.
    “None of us wanted to go in after him. It was probably twenty-five degrees in the sun, and the creek was solid ice around the banks. We just stared at each other across the water, waiting for someone to break. I mean, this guy was going to die, and the office kind of frowns on that.”
    Now the thickest part of his forearm, the rolled cuff starting to tighten up around it. He was just as tan here, but the light from the wrought-iron chandelier skimmed his skin and caught on the hair of his arms, glinting golden and bright.
    “So what happened?” Jill asked.
    He grinned. “I broke. I had to do it. I was the senior officer. And holy shit, it was cold. So cold it felt like fire at first. The numbness set in pretty quickly, but that was only the skin. Deeper, in the muscles and joints, it
hurt
. And then when I hit a deeper pool of water...” He shook his head and turned the sleeve up one more roll. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
    Jill nodded solemnly. “Can you still have children?”
    “I doubt it. Then again, they do freeze sperm, right?”
    After she stopped laughing, Jill pointed at Tom. “A hero like you deserves dessert. I hope you like cherry pie. It’s Isabelle’s favorite.”
    Isabelle laughed. “You make me sound like a bad ’80s sex joke. But I do love cherry pie. Almost as much as Jill does.”
    A faint wash of pink appeared on Tom’s cheeks. Was he blushing? That was cute as hell. Maybe he wasn’t used to women joking about sex. But Isabelle had discovered that freedom was the best thing about getting older.
    She’d felt a touch of it when she’d turned thirty. She’d suddenly felt less like a big kid blindly feeling her way through the world and more like an adult. Then at thirty-five she’d realized she was at that age when so