One Night in Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page B

she asked, peering out one of the windows, confused by how dark it was outside.
    “Don’t know if I’d say airport so much as landing strip.We’re on Mr. Amudee’s property. It backs the city, but there’s a lot of forest in between his land and civilization.”
    “Oh.”
    “There’s a car waiting for us, and your luggage, such as it was, is already loaded in it.”
    She stood and her breasts nearly brushed his chest. She’d misjudged the distance. Her breath caught in her throat and nearly choked her.
    Zack didn’t seem affected at all. He just smiled at her, one of his wicked smiles, all of the ghosts she’d glimpsed in his gray eyes before she’d gone to sleep were banished now, leaving behind nothing but the glint that was so familiar to her.
    “I didn’t have—” she had to take in another breath because being so close to him had kind of sucked the other one out of her “—that much time to pack. Otherwise I could have had just as many bags as your high-maintenance ladies.”
    “You aren’t like the women I date. You aren’t high maintenance. I like that about you.” He turned and headed out the bedroom and she followed him, her chest suddenly feeling tight.
    What he meant was, she wasn’t beautiful. Not like the women he dated. The women who were all high-fashion planes and angles. And cheekbones.
    Her mother was like that. Her sister, too. Tall and leggy with hip bones that were more prominent than their breasts. And that was the look that walked runways. The look that was fashionable, especially in southern California.
    And she just didn’t have the look. She had curves. An abundance of them. If any of the chi-chi boutiques had bras with her cup size, they were very often too small around, meant for women who’d gone under the knife to give them what nature had bestowed upon her so liberally. And her stomach was a little bit round, not concave or rippling. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen her ribs.
    Standing next to the women in her family just made herfeel … inadequate. And wide. And short. She’d tried to subsist on cabbage and water like her mother and sister, but frankly, she’d felt like garbage and had decided a long time ago that feeling healthy beat being fifteen pounds lighter.
    Of course, that decision didn’t erase a lifetime of insecurity. And that insecurity wasn’t all down to weight, either.
    “Great. Glad to be so … easy.”
    The door to the plane was standing open, and a staircase had been lowered to the tarmac. Zack stood and waited for her to go in front of him. She passed him without looking, trying not to show the knockout effect the slight scent of his cologne had on her as she moved by him.
    “I wouldn’t call you easy,” he said.
    She stopped, third stair from the top, and whipped around to look at him. “That’s not what I meant.”
    “Not what I meant, either,” he said, his expression overly innocent.
    “Yeah. Right. Are you determined to drive me absolutely insane for this whole trip?” She continued down the steps and hopped onto the tarmac, the night air balmy and thick with mist, blowing across her cheeks and leaving its moist handprint behind.
    “We are supposed to be a couple.”
    “Fair enough.”
    She was reluctant to get into the glossy black town car that was parked right by the plane. Because she’d only just gotten Zack-free air, and she didn’t really relish the thought of getting right back into a tight, enclosed space with him.
    She needed to be able to breathe. To think. And she couldn’t do it when he was around.
    That realization alone reinforced her crazy, spur-of-the-moment decision to move on with her life, and away from Roasted.
    The idea made her slightly sick and more than a little bit sad. Roasted had been her life since Zack had hired her on. Theday-to-day of it, the constant push to invent more and more goodies, to push the flavor profiles, to push her creativity … there would never be anything else like