Sleeping Arrangements (Silhouette Desire) Read Online Free PDF Page B

invading my personal space, Reed. Back off.” She knew she looked ridiculous, and resented it.
    “I’m cleaning you up, Frosty. Relax.” He tugged off her knit cap and ran his bare fingers gently through her wet curls, combing out clumps of melting snow. She felt the trails left by his fingers on her scalp like the burning afterimage of the sun. Spencer brushed his thumbs gently across her eyebrows and then her cheekbones. When his fingers passed softly over her mouth, she inhaled shakily, and the sudden narrowing of his eyes told her that he’d heard it. “And it wouldn’t kill you to call me by my first name, Addy.”
    “You know, it just might,” she muttered, and nearly smiled at the grimness in her own voice. Her awareness of his hands on her skin shocked her with its intensity. In a sudden movement, she jerked her hands up to push his away, only to find her fingers entangled with his.
    If I’m so cold, why does it feel like he’s burning me? As the words flashed through her brain, she tried to pull her hands away.
    “That’s enough.”
    “Not nearly.”
    The clouds of their breaths lingered in the cold, still air between their faces, merging into one slowly disappearing fog. Addy felt the ridiculous urge to tuck her top lip over her bottom one and direct her next breath straight at her feet, and told herself she was being paranoid.
    She didn’t think she sounded very convincing.
    “Your hands are cold.”
    Her fingers were still interlocked with his, and Spencer was rubbing them gently. With inexorable slowness, he pulled her hands to his mouth and exhaled warmly on them. When she shivered, his smile showed in his eyes.
    Enough was enough.
    “I’m soaking wet because of your goofy dog, Reed. I’m cold all over,” she snapped.
    For the second time since her arrival, her irritation at his smugness saved her from further embarrassment. She yanked her hands away from his and shoved them deep into her coat pockets. “I suppose it would be too much to ask to go inside now, before I end up with a raging case of pneumonia?”
    Spencer’s grin told her she wasn’t fooling anyone. Then she shivered again, and this time it was because she actually was freezing.
    “I really am cold,” she said as her teeth started to chatter.
    “Of course. Come on.” With a casualness she didn’t fall for, he snagged one of her hands and tucked it in the crook of his arm. He led the way back to the sidewalk and steered her toward the front porch. After a moment of mental debate, Addy decided that the advantage of not having to look where she was going, allowing her to stare at the house looming over them, was worth the inconvenience of bumping into Spencer’s body with every step. Elwood pranced about their feet, kicking up snow with a dog’s sheer joy in play.
    But it was the house, the fairy-tale, castlelike vision of a house, that she couldn’t take her eyes off.
    With all of the lights on and a little more composure under her belt, Addy could see that although the house was large, it was the height of the building that made it seem soimposing. The house itself was three full stories tall, and its towers— there are towers, with round walls and cone-capped roofs, for God’s sake —stretched another story or two higher. There were windows everywhere, almost more windows than walls it seemed, and warm yellow light shone out of dozens of them.
    Closer to the house, she started to realize why the building gave off such a feeling of age. Her initial impression of stone walls had been given by the mottled, peeling gray paint on the clapboard siding. The wraparound porch that stretched across the front of the house and around one side lent an air of elegant welcome, until she noticed that the gutters were pulling away from the porch roof in several places.
    “Careful here. Watch your step.”
    “I see Great-Aunt Adeline didn’t exactly keep the place up,” she said as she gave a little leap over the first stair,