Momentary Marriage Read Online Free PDF

hers. She felt engulfed, pulled toward him by a yearning for his touch.
    Jared met her gaze, his own seeming suddenly dark and brooding with the same awareness, the same need. Time stretched out, each second a pearl on an endless string. The damp air between them seemed to thicken. She felt herself leaning toward him ever so slightly, her face turned and raised to his.
    “So tell me,” he said, shifting away from her fractionally, “where shall I pick you up tomorrow evening?”
    Kelsey blinked. “Oh. My place, I guess.”
    She gave him the address, pushing aside her disappointment to say crisply, “I really appreciate your helping me out about the banquet.”
    “My pleasure.”
    Maybe she’d been wrong about the look in his eyes, she brooded as the cab pulled up to the restaurant. Sure, she’d promised herself to stay clear of the man, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t have liked him to at least try a pass. It would be interesting to kiss him, just once. No more.
    * **
    The phone rang.
    Amy turned blearily away from the coffee maker she’d been urging on with her fuzzy morning concentration and stared at the phone where it hung next to the refrigerator.
    It rang again.
    “Damn!” Someone was calling her at the ungodly hour of six o’clock in the morning. Amy grabbed for the receiver, stepping around the small kitchen table—
    “Crap!” She lifted her stubbed toes to one hand, reaching for the phone with the other. “Hello!”
    “Amy?”
    “Doug!” Lowering her bruised foot to the floor, she hobbled closer to the phone, not wanting the cord to pull loose from the receiver in her hand.
    “Are you okay?” he asked. “You sound kind of funny?
    It spoke volumes that she found his concern endearing, even at this hour of the morning, with her toes throbbing and her brain misty from a lack of life-giving caffeine. “Yes, I’m fine.”
    “Hey,” he said, sounding vaguely disconsolate. “I was just wondering if you’re going to the awards banquet tonight.”
    “The banquet?” she echoed, her still-sluggish neurons perking up a little. He was calling her about the banquet? That meant Kelsey had turned him down, bless her big sister. Only now Amy had to think what to do. Act desperate and immediately agree to go with him or lie like a woman with self-respect and say she had plans for the evening?
    “I guess I’m going,” she said, giving up on coherent thought and self-esteem all in one mumbled phrase.
    “Good,” he said, sounding relieved. “Shall I pick you up?”
    Amy stared blindly at the hideous Mickey Mouse magnet adorning the refrigerator door. This was going too far. Even for a woman as far gone on a man as she was on Doug.
    “Pick me up? Like we’re carpooling?” she asked with the hint of a snap.
    There was a pause from his end. “Well, no. I thought I could be your escort.”
    A sudden, stupid urge gripped Amy and she leaned back against the refrigerator, breaking Mickey’s eye contact in order to grapple with and subdue the impulse to ask him if her sister had already turned Doug down.
    She didn’t ask him for the simple reason that she didn’t want to know the answer.
    “My escort, huh?” It was a step, she told herself. Rome wasn’t built in a day or something like that.
    “Sure,” Doug said as if he were speaking to a slow child.
    “Like go on a date together?” The question tumbled out of her mouth as if she was fourteen and Amy wondered if this one clueless man would always have the same effect on her.
    “Yes,” he said with a hint of laughter in his voice. “I’m asking you out on a date.”
    She straightened from the refrigerator, a surge of silly happiness making her suddenly giddy. “Well, I don’t know, Doug. I hardly know you!”
    He chuckled. “Don’t say that, Amy. If you don’t know me, no one does.”
    “Remember that,” she responded softly.

CHAPTER THREE
    Kelsey tugged the short red dress down, slipping her arms through the sleeveless