Ice Steam (Loving All Wrong #3) Read Online Free PDF Page B

peel my skin off.”
    Thomas gave Nick a chin-lift then opened the car door for me to get in. As he drove out of the hospital he asked, “Mind me asking how you’re doing, Alina? You don’t look like yourself.”
    “Like I said, I need coffee.”
    Knowing when to back off as always, Thomas killed his curiosity and silently drove me to my favorite Starbucks in Union Square, located on the fourth floor inside Macy’s, with its lovely view.
    With the sun losing its strength, the clouds were a beautiful reflection of pale yellow and orange, shifting against the fading blue expanse of sky.
    All the baristas at this particular Starbucks knew me well because of my link to Saskia and JK, so I never joined the long lines. Whenever I walked in all I had to do was find a seat and they’d come to me with my Frappuccino.
    That’s exactly what I was doing, sitting by the floor-to-ceiling windows, gazing out across at Saks Fifth Avenue and Tiffany & Co., when someone draped in a black hoodie with a ball cap underneath claimed the seat across from me.
    I hadn’t planned on acknowledging the person, because I got harried all the time by both men and women alike about my “features”. Usually I ignored them until they scooped up their dignity and left me alone.
    But this person, this particular person brought an energy-sucking heat with them. A defying heat. A heat that changed the direction of the winds, the temperature of the room, the beat of one’s heart. A heat that wiped all your thoughts and forced you to acknowledge.
    So, I looked. Not because I wanted to, but because my instincts, my stubborn will and nasty attitude was undermined and vetoed by the person’s heat.
    It took a second, but when I narrowed my gaze and recognized the steel-gray eyes staring back at me under that ball-cap and black hoodie, I emitted a tiny gasp.
    One long, calloused finger slowly pressed to those famous red lips as they protruded out to convey “shh”.
    I nodded my understanding. If anyone in the building recognized the face under the ball-cap and hoodie, it would be pandemonium in Union Square.
    Sitting across from me, sucking all the air from out of the room with an intense and undeniable magnetism, was Xavier Xander. Guitarist for the reigning number one rock band in the world, Ninety Miles.
    Before now, we’d never actually met face to face, and it was lost on me how he was even here.
    A couple months back when I was out grocery shopping with Saskia, paparazzi snapped a bunch of pictures of us and blasted them all over the internet, because, well, superstar Saskia Day was grocery shopping.
    Xavier happened to see those pictures and developed a rather futile and unhealthy interest in the “sexy raven beside Saskia Day”. Although he wasn’t supposed to, due to their band-mate’s beef with JK, he’d reached out to Saskia and begged her to hook us up.
    Of course, Saskia was afraid of JK flying off the handle, so she outright refused. Xavier, however, was like a dog with a bone. He threatened to show up on her doorstep with Tex and create a scene enough to attract paparazzi to splash all kind of rumors over the news.
    Saskia, frustrated and annoyed, gave him my digits so I could get rid of him myself.
    In our first text exchange, I told him I was a new mother, fresh out of labor, hence a very slack, cold vagina—hoping that would scare him off.
    All it did was make him even more interested. When he asked about the father, I told him he died fighting in the war in Iraq. This horrid lie was an even brighter green light for him. No matter how bizarre the stories I made up about myself, it didn’t deter him.
    Soon it became fun, a pastime, and I began texting him for the heck of it. Before I knew it, five months had passed and we were still “text dating”.
    Nonetheless, I couldn’t fathom how something as innocent as text dating could lead to him sitting across from me right now .
    “Nice to see you’re not dead,” he said, voice