Momentous Kisses: Love in Sandy Beach Read Online Free PDF Page B

and Dex had been friends since med school, and had enjoyed lots of fun together. In fact, until last week, they’d both been content with their clinic. And while Dex was a nice guy, he didn’t get that Russell sought a deeper sense of purpose for his life. But how could he blame him? He barely understood it himself.
    His phone buzzed, alerting him that his last patient of the day had arrived, “Duty calls.” He stood up and walked with Dex down the hall.
    Dex glanced at him one last time and said, “Russ, you need to go out and have some fun. Take a day off and remind yourself of the benefits of being us.”
    Russell nodded his head; maybe his friend was right. While he wished there was a way he could do the job he loved and still earn money with it, he also had to be a realist. Then again, he’d earned enough money to retire this minute and never work again.
    His income, combined with the inheritance he’d gotten from his parents was more than he could spend in an entire lifetime. My parents…
    He flinched at the thought of his parents, and that dark tunnel he’d been avoiding for years on end opened up. He firmly closed it down, needing to focus on the patient waiting on him. Now wasn’t the right time for a nightmare walk down memory lane. In fact it never was. Russell had buried his pain somewhere deep down and did his best to keep the emotions confined – all of them.
    Laura, a new patient, already waited on him when he opened the door to the exam room. She wanted to have a smaller, more defined nose. Another nose job. God, how I hate it. Her nose is cute, nothing you have to work on.
    She was a flirty little thing, and by the end of the exam, she was openly hitting on him. Laura was a beautiful dark-haired woman with curves most males would do anything to get their hands on, and she was his for the taking. An easy outlet for his frustrations.
    All he had to do was say yes. Then he could take her home, sleep with her, and maybe then he’d be able to forget about Allison. “So, Laura, I think we can definitely help you out.”
    “Oh, goody.” She glanced at her nonexistent watch and batted her lashes at him. “It’s getting awfully late. Could we discuss this over dinner?”
    Russell sidled up to her and smiled with a nod. “I think that could definitely be arranged. I’ll meet you downstairs in the parking garage.”
    He quickly closed his computer down, not giving himself time to think. He called ahead and had dinner waiting for them in the carryout lane of his favorite Italian restaurant, and twenty minutes later he was escorting the lovely Laura into his apartment.
    Dinner was a hurried affair, and as he viewed the remains of their meal several hours later, he faced the fact that Laura had not been Allison. Bringing her to his place had been a mistake. Sleeping with her had been an even bigger mistake. While he was with Laura, he’d seen Allison’s smiling face, felt her soft strawberry blonde hair, and heard her enthusiastic laughter. He wanted Allison, and her alone.
    He offered to drive Laura home around midnight, and politely declined the offer of her phone number. Back in his own apartment he decided to pass her surgery off to Dex.
    How much longer will my one-night stand with Allison haunt me?
     

Chapter 7
    Allison was sick and tired of thinking about Russell all the time. He’d invaded her heart and her body, and despite her best efforts she hadn’t been able to ban his image from her mind.
    When Saturday rolled around, she couldn’t face another day of sitting around her apartment moping, so she hopped in her car and drove up to Ashton to visit her sister Reese. It was a twenty-minute drive, and as she entered the small exclusive resort town, she marveled that her sister had been able to make it here.
    Ashton was one of those places like Aspen – it catered to the rich and famous, and was a whole lot fancier than Sandy Beach. The villas were bigger and the cafés more elegant, and