His One Desire Read Online Free PDF Page B

was sure that every man in the room must be staring at her,
but when he took a look around, he saw that masculine interest was focused on
the gorgeous redhead who starred in
Roommates
.
    She was stunning, no question. But as far as he was
concerned, she couldn’t hold a candle to Kali Jones.
    She didn’t radiate the prickly, restless intelligence that
Kali did. She didn’t have Kali’s elfin grace. And she didn’t have the eager,
contagious passion that Kali had when she was talking about something she cared
about—like right now, as she answered a network VP’s question about
Ghosts
.
    This dining room had been reserved for the network people,
and he and Kali had been seated at a back table by the far wall. Kali sat at
the end and Luke was on her right, with a perfect view of her as she spoke to
the man on her other side.
    She used her hands to illustrate points, as though words
weren’t enough. She was so charming, so compelling…he didn’t understand how any
man in the room could keep his eyes off her. The woman next to him was
chattering away about something—his last movie, he thought—but all he needed to
do to maintain the conversation was nod his head once in a while. That left him
free to watch Kali…and to remember the first time they met.
    It was the summer before freshman year, at a theater arts
camp in L.A. Kali was there as a member of the Hollywood elite—the daughter of
actress Meredith Michaels and her equally famous husband, director Henry Jones.
Luke was there on scholarship.
    He hung around with the cool kids, both rich and poor, while
Kali stayed by herself most of the time. At one of those
let’s-get-to-know-each-other campfire things, she revealed that she was
homeschooled, which he figured helped explain her total lack of social skills.
    He’d dismissed her in his mind as a solitary weirdo, and was
already waiting to hear from the next person in the circle—a gorgeous blond
girl—when she answered the question about her favorite movies and TV shows. “
Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, Chasing Amy, Edward Scissorhands,
and
Dazed and Confused
.”
    He stared at her. The girls so far had given completely
predictable answers—
Titanic
and
Braveheart
and
Dawson’s
Creek
. The girl next to her went with those, adding
Casablanca
to
the list to show off her classic movie chops. But Luke barely glanced at her.
He was staring at the pixie-faced girl with the long dark hair who had already
withdrawn back into her own private world, gazing off into space and talking to
herself like the solitary weirdo she was.
    The next morning, he got up early to go for a swim. Kali was
there before him, doing some strange kind of undulating stroke. When she caught
sight of him she swam immediately for the side of the pool and got out,
grabbing her towel without looking at him and drying herself off in a hurry.
    “What were you doing?” he asked, walking around the pool to
meet her. “What kind of stroke was that?”
    She pulled on her tee shirt and shorts over her bathing suit
before answering him. She had a pixie body to go with her pixie face—small
breasts, a tiny waist, and slender hips. Cute but not spectacular.
    “Oh, it’s just this stupid thing I do,” she said
dismissively, starting to walk past him without meeting his eyes.
    “What stupid thing? Tell me.”
    She stopped, shrugging her shoulders. “I pretend I’m a
mermaid,” she said, clutching at the damp towel around her neck.
    He laughed, but not in a mean way, and after a moment she
started to smile. “I know it’s dumb,” she said shyly.
    “No, it’s cute. I bet you used to do that horse thing, too,”
he said, noticing for the first time how big her eyes were.
    “What horse thing?”
    “You know. That thing girls do, where your lower body is the
galloping horse and your upper body is the rider.”
    Now they laughed together. “Yeah, I did,” she admitted.
“When I was, like, six.”
    “You wrote that play about