Passionate Persuasion (Entangled Indulgence) Read Online Free PDF

in a few weeks. I’m playing at that.”
    His eyes crinkled at the corners, like he at least suspected her line of thought. “I hear you’re pretty decent.”
    “Eh. I’m okay.”
    The crinkles deepened to a real, knowing smile. “You know what else I hear?” he asked.
    “What?” she breathed.
    He sipped his drink, watching her over the rim. “I hear that there is no spark between us.”
    She cleared her throat. She searched her overheated brain for something to say. She found nothing.
    “Um.”
    Alex leaned close, so close she smelled the starch in his collar, the spice of his soap. So close that she felt the heat of his neck on her lips, and the tickle of his words in her ear. “That is a bald-faced lie , Kansas. Which makes us even.”
    He brushed her jaw with the lightest of kisses, something that would pass for social from a distance. A far distance, too far to hear his inhale near her hair or see her hectic blush and the beat of her pulse in her throat.
    Then he stepped back with a smile that nearly blew out her fuses. “See you around, Miss Fredericks. You’ve got my number.”
    “Oh, I’ve got your number all right,” she called after him, when she could breathe again. Which was several long seconds after he moved out of reach.
    That big ol’ flirt just laughed.
    The gauntlet had been thrown.
    Kiara looked down at her empty hands and realized her drink had disappeared. The bartender wordlessly slid it toward her. Then, with a sympathetic look, he touched two fingers to his lips and held them up—bartender’s honor.
    She hadn’t even noticed when Alex had rescued the glass from her nerveless fingers. She could safely say this round had gone to him.

Chapter Four
    “Just call her up and ask her on a date like a normal person.”
    Alex looked up from his paperwork with a guilty start. Or rather, he looked up from pretending he was concentrating on that month’s liquor order. He knew better than to actually work on the thing while he was thinking about the night before. Not when distraction meant the difference between ordering enough rum to float the Battleship Potemkin on a mojito, or leaving the Regis high and dry during the Memorial Day festivities on the waterfront.
    “How could you tell I was thinking about her?” he asked Greg, not even pretending that he hadn’t been.
    “Dude, the way your eyes are glazed over, it’s either that or you’ve got the flu.” Greg pointed at the wall, where someone—not him—had posted the flyer for the symphony’s new season. It featured Kiara rather prominently. “The hole you’re staring in that thing is a clue, too. It’s not like you don’t know where to find her.”
    Well, that was true. He’d gone to the cocktail reception last night because he’d known she’d be there. That had worked out better than he could have imagined.
    No, that wasn’t true. In his wildest dreams, he could have imagined her throwing herself at him and the two of them making hurried, hasty excuses and goodbyes and then going out to the car and back to his place. Or her place. But as long as it was his complete and utter fantasy, he might as well be on his home turf.
    Or maybe they wouldn’t have made it as far as his condo. They had a history with the back seat of his beat up college subcompact. His sport sedan was a lot nicer, and there would be that enticement of history repeating itself, the comparison of that versus this, then versus now. He knew he’d been the first one to get his hands under her shirt, to fill his palms with her pale breasts and feel her gasp of shock and pleasure against his kiss. Then less shock and more pleasure, and frantic, fevered fumbling—for both of them.
    There was something about her that always made him lose his cool, to want to get as much of his hands on as much of her skin as quickly as possible. He’d had a fair amount of experience before he met her. Not legions . Not even as much as Kiara seemed to assume. But those hectic