Road to Seduction (Kimani Romance) Read Online Free PDF Page A

rectangular baking pan. As though waking from a trance, she glanced down and looked mildly surprised to find a bowl and spatula in her hands.
    “Oh. Sorry.” She put the bowl down and reached for the cooking spray.
    Eric turned back to the shrimp and stirred. His turmoil grew as other, more provocative thoughts came, crowding his brain to overflowing:
    He was suddenly unattached. Isabella was suddenly unattached.
    Why did those two things seem monumentally significant? They’d both been unattached at the same time before—hadn’t they? Yeah, he was sure they had. Well…maybe not.
    Izzy had had a few long-term boyfriends, including some jerk named Al in college, and then she’d had long periods when he didn’t think she’d dated anyone, but he—well, to be honest, he generally had a flavor of the month, with next month’s flavor on the horizon. But right now he couldn’t think of another flavor he wanted to sample. Was that all there was? He really hoped not.
    Taking the shrimp off the heat, he turned off the burner and shot Izzy a covert glance. With the brownies safely transferred to the oven, she was now enthusiastically licking the batter-covered spatula and had a smudge of chocolate on the tip of her nose. Something tightened in Eric’s chest as he watched her.
    God, he didn’t want her to go. Not to Africa, not to be Joe’s wife.
    He wrestled with the Pandora’s Box he didn’t want to open but couldn’t leave alone. No possible good could come of what he wanted to say next, but he couldn’t not say it.
    “You’re pretty messed up about that Joe thing, aren’t you?”
    Izzy hesitated and then moved to the sink to rinse the brownie bowl. “I’ll be okay.”
    This threw him for a loop. Could you be okay after someone you cared about cheated on you? Having never been in love—or anything close to it—he didn’t know how these things worked, although his cousin Andrew (two years ago they’d discovered that Andrew wasn’t technically his cousin, but Eric still thought of him as such) and his wife, Viveca, had seemed to fall in love pretty quickly, if not instantaneously, and he sure didn’t think Andrew would be okay if Viveca cheated on him.
    “You’re better off without him. You know that, right?”
    “I know,” she murmured, scrubbing the bowl clean with a soapy brush.
    “And what’s this Africa business?”
    She whipped around to glare at him with narrowed eyes, splashing bubbly water all down the front of her clothes. “You listened? ”
    Eric thought of doing the whole, well, I might have accidentally heard a word or two while I was minding my own business in the bedroom thing, but why bother?
    “Yeah.”
    “Unbelievable.” Defiant and outraged, she flapped a hand toward one corner of the living room, where a stack of flattened cardboard boxes sat, presumably waiting to be packed with her belongings. “I want to teach at the girls’ school in Johannes—”
    “You already did that in college, Izzy—”
    The funniest little look shot across her face and disappeared so quickly he felt sure he’d imagined it. “That was just one semester, for an internship.”
    “—and people don’t just up and move to South Africa.”
    “ I do.”
    “Why?”
    “This is what I’m doing with my life.”
    “Why?”
    “Because those children are special and I can help them. I can make a difference in their lives.”
    “But you’re a teacher here. You belong here .”
    “I’m needed there . Kids here want a new DVD or the next computer game. Kids there want to learn . To have a chance. And many of them have lost their parents to AIDS. I can do the most good there .”
    Eric floundered, at a complete loss. For the first time in their relationship, he couldn’t understand Isabella. Her calm tone and determined expression told him he was getting nowhere, and his frustration level rose into the red zone. Maybe it was time to try a different tactic.
    “And what about your personal life?