Great-Aunt Sophia's Lessons for Bombshells Read Online Free PDF Page B

or writing her ridiculous dissertation. I’d like you to take her out whenever you’re down here.”
    “ Date her?”
    “Do you want to date her?”
    “God no!”
    “Then just take the girl out, Declan. Show her around. Take her kayaking or rollerblading or whatever it is young people do these days.”
    “Rollerblading?”
    “Take her golfing. Anything. She doesn’t know anyone here, and she doesn’t strike me as the type of girl who’s going to zip into Carmel and find herself a pack of friends to go do things with.”
    “I don’t think she likes me. She may not want to spend any time with me, however innocent my intentions.”
    “She’ll go,” Sophia said.
    Declan helped Sophia up the stairs to the terrace, feeling the weight she put on his arm. A cold trickle went through his heart as he remembered that she was eighty-five. Her vibrance usuallymade age irrelevant, but in this moment at the edge of night, he realized there was no guarantee she would make it through her surgery.
    He felt a shot of hatred for Andrew Pritchard. Who was he to badger Sophia into a hip replacement? It could very well do more harm than good.
    He took Sophia into her library, a small room with a large flat-screen TV square in the middle of a wall of books. A laptop and a phone sat on a small desk beside a well-worn velvet couch with mismatched pillows. The fireplace was surmounted by a life-size portrait of Sophia in her prime. Red hair fell in waves to her bare shoulders, and a dark green strapless gown hinted at abundant cleavage, while the waist nipped in, accentuated by a black belt with a diamond buckle. She was posed half lying on a recamier with a leopard skin tossed over it, and the invitation in her eyes said that she would either purr for a man or devour him; it was his choice.
    Sophia eased down onto the sofa, then saw where he was looking. “A few pounds less and in the right clothes, it could have been Grace who sat for that.”
    “Her jaw’s different, and the expression in her eyes would give her away.”
    “I suppose you’re right. The posture, too.”
    “How much do you really know about your niece?” Declan asked, leaning against the mantel.
    “What a suspicious question to ask! You make it sound like she’s here to murder me and steal my riches. I don’t suppose it will make you feel any better to hear that I know next to nothing about her, will it? Of course I plan to write up a new will and leave every earthly possession to her, and then tell her about it right before I put her in charge of my medications.”
    Declan scowled. “Very funny.”
    “Don’t be an ass. She’s as innocent as she looks. Her mother is one of those ‘natural’ women with underarm hair and a unibrow. I don’t think much evil grows from composted ground.”
    “People are people, even the ones who act whole-wheatier than thou.” A thought hit him. “Grace would be a good match for Andrew! She’s got him half hooked already. Why not ask him to show her around instead of me?” The two would be a punishment for each other.
    Sophia tapped her bottom lip with her fingertip, thinking. “He wouldn’t be an easy fish to land. Almost as difficult as you, in his own way. He’s the type who will nibble at the bait but never bite.”
    “And what do I do?”
    “You steal the bait and swim away.”
    “You make me sound like a cheat.”
    “Perhaps no one’s had the right bait to make you forget the hook.”
    Declan looked again at the painting. Since he’d met Sophia, he’d compared every woman he dated against his imaginary vision of what she’d been as a young woman. From the age of eighteen, he’d been looking for someone with the beauty, intelligence, and raw sexuality of that imagined Sophia.
    He tried to imagine Grace in Sophia’s place in the portrait, sitting awkwardly upon the leopard skin, her brow wrinkled in worry as she pulled up her bodice to cover more skin. That puritan Dr. Andrew would probably like her