Girl Gear 4: Striptease Read Online Free PDF

said anything she’d look back on and regret.
    “Loosen up, Melanie. If you analyze every detail, take everything so seriously, you’ll end up with an ulcer.”
    “Or get where I want to go,” she said. His gaze sharpened. She forced an indifferent shrug. “You said yourself we focus on different things, Faulkner. Different strokes for different folks, and all that. I prefer to steer rather than drift through life. What’s it to you?”
    His brow furrowed. “Hell, if you’re so busy fighting the current—” he took a step closer “—how do you expect to enjoy the ride?”
    Melanie swallowed hard, resisting the tug of a current, all right. The man’s magnetism was potent, his attention heady, his impression provocative. When he reached to cup a hand around the sculpture where it sat behind her on the bookshelf, her heart lurched.
    His gaze cut back and forth between the nude and her face. “So, I’m guessing to you this piece isn’t about the total concept. It’s more about analyzing the details. The woman’s posture. The way she has her hands spread and her fingers flexed to hold herself back.”
    Back from what? When he turned to look at her, his eyes seemed to answer the unspoken question, and Melanie’s heart kicked hard in her chest. It shouldn’t have. He was only telling her what he thought she might see. Nothing more. Nothing leading.
    Nothing sexual.
    “And to you?” she managed to ask.
    “To me this is all about interpretation. What the woman wants. What she’s looking for. Waiting for.”
    Melanie had to be imagining his suggestion that it was her and not the figurine who was the one looking, waiting. She hadn’t revealed any of those truths in the little bit of time they’d spent together.
    And she wouldn’t. Because they weren’t truths at all. “Okay, so, you take in the overall picture. I work my way up through the elements. In the end we both see the same thing, don’t you think?”
    “I’m not so sure.” He blinked, his lashes making a slow lazy sweep up and down. “We didn’t see the same thing looking at the view screen the day of the wedding.”
    Well, he had her there, didn’t he? Except she’d never told him what exactly it was she’d been seeing. And he certainly hadn’t bothered to share any details about what he’d been looking at when her image had appeared on his screen. Neither had he mentioned anything about where his focus had been while facing that bank of monitors in the van.
    She’d wondered about that. The wedding was two months past, and she still wondered if the position of the cameras had anything to do with what they’d been looking at that day. Or if that afternoon had been all about the tension, the same one thrumming between them now like a deep techno beat.
    She wanted more than anything to ask him to dance, to hold her close, to slip his hands underneath her sweater and strip her bare. She wanted his hands and his mouth on her body. She wanted to touch him, to smell him, to taste him in intimate ways. And she could barely breathe.
    She smoothed the hem of her sweater and took a step closer to him. A step that was so much longer than the distance she actually covered. Screw it. Shewanted this. Why was she holding herself back? “Listen, Jacob—”
    “Yo, Mel,” Chloe called from the hallway outside the office. “You’re still coming to the barbecue on Saturday, right? I really need your help. And Sydney wants to know—” Chloe stopped short just inside the doorway. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t know you were busy.”
    Thank you, thank you, thank you. Divine intervention when needed most. See? They weren’t even yet working together, and she’d already gone mad.
    Melanie shook her head. “I’m not busy at all. Jacob, this is Chloe Zuniga. She heads up the gUIDANCE gIRL mentoring program. Chloe, this is the Avatare Productions cameraman who’ll be working on the documentary. Jacob—”
    “Faulkner,” Chloe finished. “You’re