Gateway to Heaven Read Online Free PDF

handsome for his own good, wearing a pair of dark blue dress pants that fit his lean waist, hips, and the long length of his legs with too much precision to be anything but tailor made. His white cotton button-down shirt created a stark contrast with the dark pants, casual but perfectly fitted sport coat, and his sun darkened skin. Despite his tousled hair and well-trimmed goatee, he seemed as comfortable and natural in a sport coat and dress pants as he had yesterday in an untucked shirt, boots, and faded jeans.
    “ Christian.”
    It was all she could get out by way of greeting. Before she could guess what he planned, his hand had snaked out and his fingers sunk into her unbound hair. The other hand went to her shoulder and levered her up against the length of him. His fingers cradled her head while his mouth came down possessively. It was a closed mouth kiss, very brief, nowhere near as sexual as yesterday’s had been. Yet Megan felt the impact of it in places in her body that she hadn’t known were connected so intimately to her lips.
    He stepped away but his hand remained in her hair. His fingers flexed greedily into the waves. “I like your hair down,” was all he said.
    “ Christian kissed Aunt Meg!” Emily said in a singsong voice. Megan stared down dazedly at her niece. Christian handled the situation with his usual casual aplomb, picking up Emily and pecking her on her cheek.
    “ That’s right. All the pretty ladies get kisses this morning.”
    “ Sasha, too?” Emily asked hopefully as she held up her blonde doll, an attempted facsimile of Emily herself. She giggled irrepressibly when Christian bestowed a kiss to Sasha’s plastic cheek with an exaggerated smacking sound.
    Megan’s anxiety still lingered an hour later despite Christian’s bountiful charm and ease.
    “ The dolls have a hair salon ?” Christian muttered incredulously through the side of his mouth so that a starry-eyed Emily wouldn’t hear.
    Megan gave him an amused glance but uncertainty mingled with her suppressed humor.
    They stood in the doll hairdresser line at American Girl with dozens of little girls holding their dolls and their doting mothers and female relatives milling around them. Megan couldn’t help but feel the oddness of the entire situation.
    Why had he wanted to come?
    She wasn’t the only one who seemed aware of the novelty and intrigue of Christian’s presence. She had empathized with a few women when they looked at him with incredulity or humor in their eyes. She’d bristled at quite a few stares of downright lust. Megan tried to convince herself that she’d been wrong, but she would have sworn that two teenage girls who were accompanying little sisters had shrieked and grabbed each other in disbelief at the sight of Christian.
    Not that she could fault them. Christian easily topped six foot three inches and his masculine features and muscular, taut body stood in stark contrast to the frilly, feminine atmosphere of the American Girl Store.
    Yet he’d been nothing but solicitous and fun since they’d arrived. He seemed to share Emily’s enthusiasm, if not in the same way that another female might have, at least in the way of an adult who fully recalled the joy of childhood.
    “ I told you that you wouldn’t like it, Christian,” Megan whispered so that Emily couldn’t hear. For the hundredth time in the past hour, she asked herself why in the world he was doing this.
    They were standing necessarily close, her shoulder pressing into his upper arm as they waited in line. Megan felt a little dizzy as she inhaled the increasingly familiar, spicy, yet elusive aroma of his cologne. His scent was just like the man who wore it: complex, intoxicating, wild and paradoxically subtle at the same time.
    “ Who said I didn’t like it?” Christian asked, his mouth lowering toward hers.
     
    Because he couldn’t stop himself, and because he had always been much more of a sinner than a saint, Christian reached out and