Have Yourself a Naughty Little Santa Read Online Free PDF Page B

focused. She shot him a hard glare. “I have nothing to hide. People go to Evergreen this time of year to vacation. I’m doing the same.”
    “At the risk of your life?”
    “I lost control, it happens.”
    “But 80 is closed and 82 has had only one pass with the plows—hardly ideal driving conditions. Why not wait until the roads were cleared?”
    Kim looked hard at him and laid it all out on the table. “Just because we had sex doesn’t give you the right to give me the fifth degree.”
    Ricco laughed out loud. “I’d call what we did more than just sex.” He seared her with a stare. Kim’s skin warmed hotter. She couldn’t help it. Dammit.
    “Okay, so I had a weak moment. I’d rather not talk about it.”
    He chuckled again, his voice warm and smooth, like one-hundred-year-old brandy. “If I remember correctly, you had six weak moments.”
    Her cheeks scalded and she turned to look out the window. It took her a moment to trust her voice, and when she spoke, she enunciated each word as she turned to look directly at him. “It. Was. A. Mistake. And if you have a shred of a gentleman in you, you’ll stop reminding me about it.”
    He stared hard at her, his eyes dark and intense. He nodded and looked back to the road. “If you can forget, I can forget.”
    Kim crossed her arms across her chest and nearly screamed as her hands brushed her hardened nipples. Jesus! Her head snapped back, and she glared at him. “I want my locket back.”
    “Your locket?”
    “Yes, my locket! The one that was on the chain around my neck that came off while we were…”
    He slowly shook his head. “I’m really sorry, but how can I have something that belongs to you when I just now met you?”
    Kim sat back in the hard seat and contemplated this man. She was used to dealing with men, and surely she had had her dealings with pretty boys like him. While that had once presented a problem for her, she had grown and matured dramatically since then. Gone was the needy, clingy girl looking for love from the first hotty who acknowledged her. In her place stood a woman who knew her weaknesses and steered diligently clear of them. Ricco was a weakness.
    He might be more disarming, and certainly more intriguing, than any man she had run across in a long time, including Nick, but he was like all of them before him—a man. Like her father. The good-looking charmer her mother followed around like a lost puppy, both of them ignoring their only child. She’d heard the fights, her mother’s accusations, then her father’s denials. Mother would threaten to walk out on him, taking him for everything he had. Father would sweep her into his arms and silence her with his smooth words and kisses. Until the next time. Kim laughed, the sound short and bitter. Never once during any of those heated arguments had Diana Marie Michaels threatened to take Ian Wycliff Michaels’s daughter from him. How ironic. And here she was, chasing men just like her father—a man who didn’t want her. And in the end, the ones she was chasing didn’t want her enough to fight for her either.
    So she’d finally seen the light. No way was she going down that miserable road again. She was Kimberly Ann Michaels, a woman who could and did indulge on occasion but did so clearly knowing that was all it was—an indulgence. Too much of anything made you fat and lazy.
    “I left you a message this morning,” she replied.
    “Bad reception up here.”
    Kim nodded and decided she would play this guy close to her chest. “Do you live in Evergreen?”
    “I did.”
    “What were you doing out with the snowplow guys?”
    “Plowing the roads.”
    “So if you don’t live in Evergreen, why were you on the snowplow?”
    “Does everyone have to live where they work?”
    “No. I suppose not. So you’re a road maintenance guy?”
    “Is there a problem with that?”
    “No, no problem at all.”
    He grinned. “In your fantasy, what did you think I did?”
    Her skin warmed