Seductive Secrecy (Shadows series) Read Online Free PDF

understand what he was doing with me. She was in her late-forties; like the painting, she was long and curvy; her breasts were full and most definitely fake. Her movements were thought out and sensual. And she didn’t just flirt with her eyes and mouth; she charmed with her whole body, including the smooth British accent that dripped off her tongue.
    The air he exhaled roughly through his nose warmed the skin on my neck. “You know you have nothing to worry about.”
    I believed him.
    He cares about you, Charlie. I know you feel it.
    I also believed Emma; her voice was just another layer added to everything I was already feeling. But no matter how much I felt that Cameron truly cared, I didn’t enjoy watching him go to her place, or knowing the piece he’d painted was of her, or how the sharp twinge in my heart didn’t dull at all when her name blew so casually through his lips.
    I squeezed my hands around his and leaned back into his chest briefly before I pulled away. It would have been hypocritical of me to start a fight about Lora, considering that Dallas, my ex-boyfriend, still had a huge presence in my life. It couldn’t have been any easier for Cameron to listen to Dallas’s name fall from my lips or for him to watch me go to his placewhich was exactly where I was headed now. But Cameron never gave me any shit about Dallas. He never told me not to go to his apartment, he never accused me of hooking up with him, and he never seemed bothered that we spoke almost every day.
    But I also didn’t create pictures of Dallas’s unclad body…though I very easily could have painted every bulging ripple of his muscles, every hair that dusted his limbs.
    I knew his body as well as Cameron knew Lora’s.
    “I’ll see you when you get home.” I kept my back to him, grabbing my bag before I reached the elevator. Once I was far enough away so that the emotions on my face wouldn’t be as obvious, I turned around.
    “I won’t be too late,” he shouted so I would hear him.
    I wasn’t sure how much it mattered by then.
    ***
    After exiting the train at North Station, I walked the remaining blocks to Dallas’s West End apartment. He buzzed me in when I called him from downstairs. He had signed a lease about three months ago, the same time I had moved my things into Cameron’s place. Once he opened the door, his bare arms wrapped around me. As they did almost every time we hugged, my eyes briefly scanned his fully-inked sleeves, the symbols and the words that I had memorized during all the hours I’d spent in their embrace.
    It had been several weeks since I’d seen him. He’d recently accepted a job with the Celtics as their new athletic trainer; he’d moved to this neighborhood because it was close to the TD Garden where they played and practiced. It had taken him years to qualify for this job, shadowing the trainer for the Patriots and Bruins until a position in one of the leagues had become available. Now, he flew in their private plane and attended every game, but his constant working and traveling hadn’t changed anything between us.
    Seeing him again, I realized how much I’d missed him.
    Our friendship didn’t have pretenses or expectations, even though we had a past—and a very messy one at that. Dallas had been there for me when Lilly died. He’d taken care of her while I worked nights at the mansion, and he was the only person I had ever allowed inside our old apartment. He witnessed our poverty, the puke stains on our carpet, the smell of Lilly decaying. He was also one of only two people I had told about my job. He didn’t like it, he didn’t support it, and he didn’t understand it at all. Still, I’d given him the chance to voice his opinions, and he did. And then we discussed it again after the mansion’s take-down, and the relief he felt when he learned I’d escaped the darkness that could have swallowed me and taken me from him forever.
    “Beer?” he asked as we broke our embrace.
    I