McCloud's Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

awkward. He inhaled gardenias again and rejected the image.
The Patsy he remembered had smelled of Tootsie Pops and cheap mouthwash
and looked at him with adoration.
    Patsy had been sixteen the last time he’d seen her. She hadn’t smelled of Tootsie Pops then.
    “I’m really having fun with this charade, Tim, but I don’t
have time to play anymore. Do you really need me to tell you who I am?”
Impatience tinged her voice.
    With his eyes closed, he could hear his boyhood nemesis
clearly enough. The New York accent had blurred over the years, but her
clipped words defined it better than the sexy drawl she’d been using.
Maybe if he kept his eyes closed...
    He opened them to narrow slits and studied the stunning
woman propping her hands on her hips and glaring at him. The hair wasn’t
Patsy’s. Neither was the nose. He cocked his head thoughtfully. He was a
trained anthropologist, knew bone structure inside and out, and could
identify sex, race, and age of a skeleton with relative accuracy at a
glance. He just had some difficulty seeing bones through creamy skin and
tempting curves.
    Right height, right limb proportions. Patsy had been as
tall as her brother. She should have gone to a school with a woman’s
basketball team, but her parents were fixated on sending Brad to an
exclusive prep school that would prepare him for Harvard. They’d sent
Patsy to the expensive school only because Brad had refused to go
without her.
    Brad. Why did he have to be reminded of that tragic
failure in judgment at a time when he had to make a worse choice
involving another friend? TJ winced at the searing memory.
    “What the hell did you do to your hair?” With that gruff
acceptance of the improbable, he stalked toward his lab, grabbing his
white coat off a hook as he passed by. He’d never be able to concentrate
now. He would have to do the mundane stuff—like answer unanswered phone
calls.
    Mara breathed a sigh of mixed relief and trepidation at
TJ’s recognition. So much for hoping for fond reminiscences. The
arrogant jock still carried the burden of guilt.
    “Bleached it, like any sensible female,” she retorted,
following him in. “Will you stop ignoring me and sit down and talk a
minute?” she demanded when he reached for his box of slides and pulled
his glasses out of his lab coat pocket. “Couldn’t we at least have a cup
of coffee and get reacquainted?”
    “What do you want, Pats? I’m on a tight schedule and short an assistant, if you haven’t noticed.”
    Pats. It had been seventeen years since anyone had called
her that. Her first husband had called her lots of names, but none of
them as friendly as Pats. She’d dropped the whole ugly Patricia thing
when she’d taken the job at Bloomingdale’s.
    She didn’t do trips down memory lane. She wasn’t into hair
shirts either. “My schedule is not only tighter, but more expensive,”
she answered angrily. “I have half a dozen high-priced, high-strung
actors descending on this fair city in the next few weeks, and I need to
get my scenes set.”
    The look he shot her from beneath those sexy eyebrows
awakened every ounce of femininity in her. TJ McCloud had grown into a
hunk with smoldering dark eyes and shoulders a linebacker would envy.
Why in the name of heaven had she ever settled for a spineless worm like
Irving and an aging roué like Sid when there were men like TJ
available?
    Because men like TJ McCloud were never available to the
Patsy Simonettis of the world. In a huff of impatience at that thought,
Mara blew a straying curl off her forehead.
    “Then I advise you to go set scenes,” TJ answered, turning
his back on her again to sit on his lab stool and pull his microscope
from a cabinet.
    Mara thumped the back of his head with the rolled up
newspaper she’d picked up at his door. “If you don’t start behaving,
Timothy John, I’ll tell your mother on you!”
    He snorted something remarkably like laughter before