Sea Kissed, A Crane Series Romance: Crane Series Read Online Free PDF

thinking that if the reply was hookers with whips she’d do her best to comply. She felt like her job, her whole future, was riding on this one.
    “Yeah, you can take off your jacket.”
    Her head snapped up as she glared at him. “I beg your pardon?”
    “I don’t know what it is.” He shrugged but she felt he was almost as tense as she was. “I’m not good with suits. Everyone in the room except for me is wearing a suit.”
    He gestured to his body in a sweeping motion and she nodded. He wasn’t wearing a suit. He wore jeans so well-worn they’d molded to his body, kick-ass boots, and a shirt advertising some rugby team she’d obviously never heard of. He looked elemental, dangerous, and good enough to eat. And he was worried he wasn’t wearing a suit?
    “Nobody cares what you wear, Steve. This is just a practice session. I thought you knew that?”
    “Yeah. I know. But look at this from my perspective. I’m up here in a T-shirt and everybody else looks like they came out of a fashion catalogue. Even you. It puts a bloke off.”
    She blinked. “You’re telling me you flubbed your lines because you didn’t like what the people in the room were wearing?”
    “Yeah.” Pause. “Well, and the lines are crap.”
    “Of course the lines are crap, Steve. This is advertising. For Beat poetry readings, head down to Union and Filmore.”
    Immediately she wanted to bite out her tongue. He wouldn’t know what she was talking about, and her sarcasm wouldn’t help anyone. To her immeasurable surprise, he laughed.
    “I’m not sure how many surfboards you’d sell reciting
Howl
, but it would certainly catch their attention when it came on the telly, eh?”
    “Right.” She agreed weakly. He must have read his San Francisco Now and come across something about Ginsberg. Still, he’d thrown her for a second.
    He threw her even more when he said, “I s’pose this is hard on you, too. All right. Let’s give it another go.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Great. I’ll call the others back.” She walked to the boardroom door and he blocked her exit, his body so big and rangy she felt absurdly small and feminine.
    “No. I only want you.”
    The words echoed around and around in her head and she wished so much they were true. This man, she realized, was going to sell a hell of a lot of surfboards if she could find the way in to get him pronouncing all his lines the way he’d just said, “I only want you.” His shirt was soft with many washings and smelled faintly of soap and sexy man and something foreign and exotic that she assumed was Australia. She had to look up to catch his gaze.
    “You’ll read the lines as written if I practice with you alone?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Including the wink?”
    He rubbed his jaw and she saw a hint of the humor she’d noticed the day before. “The wink’s negotiable.”
    She could yell at him and tell him his contract specified winking and he was damn well going to wink, but the twinkle in his eyes intrigued her and besides, she wanted to prolong standing here in his personal space where it was all sex and heat and possibility.
    “You want to negotiate the wink?” she asked, trying to keep her voice firm but reasonable.
    “Yes.”
    “I see. What are your terms?”
    “Take your jacket off.” She blinked. Even a simple Huh? seemed beyond her. “You looked more . . . I don’t know, approachable yesterday. I thought I knew who you were and I liked what I saw. Now, today, you’re all done up in this suit and your hair’s . . .” he pointed to the simple coil at the back of her head, “different. I liked you better before.”
    Well, she could tell him that she’d been in another woman’s clothes yesterday. And she could explain that her hair was in a bun because she’d been at the office until midnight last night making sure everything was ready for today’s read-through (which he’d blown), so she hadn’t had time to style her hair this morning and had