Four Temptations Read Online Free PDF

sleeps with. He likes to tell it how it is.
    Both of us really should have known that a relationship between us would never work out.
    But sometimes the truth isn’t so obvious when it’s right in front of your nose, is it?
    §
    You learn from your mistakes, though. You learn that even a mistake is not a bad thing if you’ve gained from the experience. Also, you learn when to call it a day.
    And you learn that – no matter how much your memories may have become rose-tinted – the past really should remain in the past.
    §
    Brandon always had a default charm about him. There was something about that lazy Texan drawl and the spark that could appear in his eyes at any time that would disarm anyone. He was tall and rake-thin, with salt and pepper hair and small, wire-rimmed glasses that gave an intellectual edge to his slightly weather-beaten good looks.
    I've never known anyone who manages to combine that innocent charm with a sharp glint of mischief in his look quite as well as Brandon does.
    And the bastard was doing it all over again.
    §
    The smiles, the little possessive touches, the unguarded comments. The flirting.
    Did he even know he was doing it, or had he finally learned to relax in my company again? By that logic, had he finally stopped caring, if he was able to relax with me again?
    We were at the annual Abel and Riley soiree, the kind of event where I was always going to run into Brandon, given that, in Jimmy Abel, we shared a literary agent and we were two of Abel and Riley's hottest properties.
    Drinks and canapés with a mix of writers, journos, editors, bookstore buyers, TV people, publicists and more; it was the kind of event that reminded me I really am a proper writer. I'd become accustomed to this kind of thing in the last couple of years, since Leaving Lulu had hit the bestseller lists and the movie rights had sold to Hollywood (although I must say I’d never seen Lulu as an Anne Hathaway type, but hey).
    Abel and Riley loved to wheel me out for these things, and generally I was happy to play along. It’s how the business works, and it had never harmed my career that I was easy company and even easier on the eye: tall and curvy in a way that I know from experience men love.
    I was there with a drink in my hand, laughing at something inane that the little guy from an American bookshop chain had said. Unusually for me, my heart really wasn’t in it this evening. On the back of the movie deal, my second novel had secured a massive print run, with all the attendant publicity that brings. There was even coverage in the broadsheet press and the BBC in the lead up to next week's publication of the book; trashy was the new high-brow, apparently, and my work was the exemplar. I took that as a grudging compliment.
    And, against this rather frenetic backdrop, I was trying to keep my head down and concentrate on the next book. Oh for a quiet life.
    The little bookseller had said something else and for a moment there was an awkward silence as he waited for some kind of response. I laughed – the safest option, given that he’d been trying to crack jokes for the past five minutes.
    “And then she said–”
    He was interrupted by a tall figure leaning into the too-small space between us, pulling an eyes-wide-open expression of surprise and saying, “Excuse me for interrupting, but may I just say... Wow! ”
    And with that, Brandon Tyne took me by the elbow and steered me smoothly away from the somewhat less than stimulating bookseller.
    “Thanks, Bran,” I said. “I was in danger of gnawing my own arm off to stave off the boredom.”
    “No really,” he said. “I meant every word of that ‘wow’. You sure haven’t lost it, Maggie.” Then he gave that rakish grin that would make a woman forgive anything, leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. The scent... the touch... So familiar and yet simultaneously like some distant memory of a dream.
    “It’s only been two years, Bran.”
    “An eternity without