Holding The Cards Read Online Free PDF

spent a sweaty day working on one of the houses. His dark hair was fine and flowing as her own, falling carelessly over a high forehead and to his shoulders. His sensual lips, curved in that mysterious smile, made her imagine all the places they might have been, and his green eyes were full of secret thoughts.
    He was more than riveting, he was familiar. She was in the middle of the Caribbean for the first time in her life. No one should look familiar.
    "Could you use a hand? In the getting down department, that is?"
    "Yeah. Can you see if Lisette has some rope in her workroom?"
    "White knight, here to serve. Be right back."
    Josh nodded and looked down into Lauren's face. "Think you can climb down a rope if I get you started?"
    Lauren was trying to keep up with all the shifts and nodded dumbly to this latest suggestion. Josh touched her chin with a light fingertip, a trace of a shy smile flirting about his lips. "Er… he's the one that wouldn't get anything out of looking at your body."
    Lauren swallowed. "Lisette also told me… you weren't house-trained."
    He gave her a knowing look, but said only, "She had one out of two things right."
    Marcus emerged from Lisette's basement workroom and tossed up the end of a generous coil of rope.
    Josh tied it to the branch and then set his hands at Lauren's waist, his palms hot on her skin. The knot of her towel had tightened during her climb, so now the terry cloth rode low on her hips. His long fingers lay inside the circle of it, grazing her hip bones. She was sure he meant his touch to be a steadying thing, to help her take a firm grasp of the rope without having to worry about her balance. Unfortunately the effect of that warm, intimate touch had the exact opposite result.
    Jonathan's face flashed through her head, along with the memory of him sitting on the top stair to their second floor, dressed for work. It had been shortly before their breakup. She knelt between his knees, desperate for just a simple hug, the desire to be held. He had put his lips against her ear. "You are so fucked up, Lauren."
    He had said it soothingly, reinforcing what she had come to believe about herself. Rather than feeling insulted, she had felt vindicated. Like having a doctor diagnose her illness, she felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude at having it acknowledged.
    Lauren's skin crawled with the memory and her chin tightened. She knew how to climb down a damn rope. She was one of three women at the gym that could do it.
    She seized the rope and swung herself carefully into a descent position, blocking out for a moment that she was giving the man below, gay or not, a great view of her ass, and the one above quite a display of tits. Well, happiness and joy to them both.
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    "Focus," her personal trainer at the gym had told her. "That's the key to getting to the top, and back down again. Never think that getting down is easier. That's when most accidents happen in climbing, because it's harder to control your descent. Psychologically your mind thinks it's made it."
    Her current surroundings and situation were nothing like the gym, so perhaps it was understandable that the reminder of that lecture came after she lost her grip on the rope.
    Lauren had time for a short shriek before she was falling, flailing through the air and then landing against another warm body. Marcus was knocked off balance by the weight of her hurtling body hitting him.
    They thudded to the ground in a twisted tangle of limbs and muttered curses and rolled several yards down the steep incline before he managed to catch onto a protruding root and bring them to a halt.
    Lauren attempted to extricate her limbs from Marcus enough to turn and find out if he was all right. She found he was trying to do the same, but they managed it. Josh was coming down quickly, no hesitation, she noted sourly. She comforted herself with appreciation for the ripple