In Bed with Beauty Read Online Free PDF Page A

he thrust his tongue deep inside her mouth. He tasted of breath mints and something else. Something salty and masculine. Something she’d never tasted before but wanted to again.
    She slid her hands around his neck under his collar. His skin was hot to her touch, and his pulse beat a steady tattoo against his skin. Hers was beating just a strongly. It gave her a sense of power to think she affected him as deeply as he affected her.
    It was only passion, she warned herself. But passion like she’d never experienced before. A wildfire out of control, she thought.
    His hands slowly moved down her back, spanning her waist and pulling her more fully into his body. His chest was as hard as she’d suspected it would be. He pushed one of his thighs between her own. Her balance was no longer her own, but she didn’t feel vulnerable in his arms. She felt completely safe and supported.
    His mouth left hers as he dropped nibbling kisses down the length of her neck. “Tell me to stop now if you don’t want more.”
    Sarah tried to think. She didn’t know what she wanted. She couldn’t find words to make him stop or urge him to continue. She took his jaw in her hands and stared up at him.
    He ran one long finger down the side of her face. His touch stirring to life longings that she knew she shouldn’t be feeling for him. Everything about him had warned her this wasn’t a man who’d want more than her body. But her soul had been stirred from the first time they’d met.
    She wanted to be the one to awaken the emotions she sensed he kept locked away. But she wasn’t sure she was willing to pay the price.
    She stepped back, taking his large hands in her own.
    “I…oh, damn. This is more complicated than I thought it would be.”
    “Only if you make it complicated.”
    “What do you mean?” she asked.
    “Come back to my hotel with me.”
    She wanted to. More than anything else it was what she wanted but life wasn’t as simple as it had seemed just minutes earlier in his arms. And she’d never been able to sleep with a man and not let her emotions get involved.
    “I need more time.”
    “I’m only in town for five more weeks.”
    That’s it, she thought. Only five weeks. A keen disappointment filled her. “I’m sorry to hear that. But I can’t add another complication to my life right now.”
    “You’re a woman of honor. And there are damn few of those around.”
    “It’s not honor that’s driving me now,” she said. She wanted Harris. But she wanted him for more than one night in her life.
    “No?” he asked.
    “I need more from you than just a few nights.”
    “That’s all I have to offer,” he said. “I like you Sarah, but I’m not going to change who I am.”
    “I’d just like to know you, not change you.”
    “You say that but at the core we’re different people.”
    “Man and woman, I know.”
    “Not only that. You surround yourself with people you love—”
    “And this is a bad thing?” she interrupted. Some guys didn’t like women with family commitments. She knew that firsthand.
    “It can be.”
    “Why?” Her first serious relationship had ended with her parents’ death, because Paul hadn’t wanted to be saddled with the guardianship of the twins.
    “I don’t love, Sarah.”
    “I’m not asking you to.”
    “Not now. But you will.”
    The surety in his tone bothered her in ways she didn’t want to examine. She knew herself well enough to know she loved a challenge. But asking a man to love her, she knew better than to do that. “You are a little too sure of yourself for me.”
    He shrugged. “It’s not that I think I’m so irresistible.”
    “Then what is it?” she asked.
    “It’s you,” he said. Walking around her office he fiddled with the pictures on the wall showing various poses of her and the twins, her parents and the various members of the Taste of Home staff. Would he guess from the pictures that she treated her employees like family?
    He walked out the door