Starstruck Read Online Free PDF

Harrington was like, the man behind the movie star. What was he besides a talented actor and director and a clever playboy who was notoriously good in bed? I wish I knew, she thought and, closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. Sighing, she blew out every candle.
     
     
    J oe ducked his head under the shower letting the icy water drum mercilessly on his skull. He didn’t have much time. “Fifteen minutes,” Liv had said, “or we’ll be late.” But the shower was a necessity, as much to purify his mind as to cleanse his body of the grime of a long day’s travels.
    Five kids! How could she have five kids? Not even he, Joe Harrington, had ever put the make on a woman with five kids!
    Yet, a stubborn little inner voice mocked him. He tried to silence it but it persisted. You want her, it taunted him. No matter that she's up to her ears in children, thinks you crawled out from under a rock somewhere and obviously wishes you’d vanish back under one as quickly as possible, you still want her. He scrubbed himself viciously with a frayed orange washcloth, as though doing so might somehow eradicate this absurd desire. It didn’t work.
    “So much for fresh faces,” he muttered. She was hardly the sort to fancy being next in line after Linda Lucas! His mouth quirked in a reluctant grin. He could well imagine her throwing the casserole at him if he tried a pass like the first one again. A momentary recollection of her nose-to-nose with the zoning commissioner flickered in his mind. No doubt now who won that altercation, he thought. She was definitely a force to be reckoned with.
    She’d have to be, he acknowledged, to have managed to survive with those five kids. It would take a strong woman just to cope. He wondered what her ex-husband was like, other than being a fool for letting such a woman go. All he knew was that the man still lived nearby—“Dad’s bringing Stephen home,” Ben had told him when he asked where the other boy was. He would have liked to have asked about this “dad,” but Ben had gone on to tell his mother that his father had called and had said he would be bringing Stephen after dinner, not to wait for him, and Joe couldn’t see himself bring up the subject of her ex-husband with Liv. Approachable she wasn’t. Except when he had kissed her. Then there had been an electricity between them that had nearly knocked him off his feet, and he suspected that she felt it too. It wasn’t his run-of-the-mill reaction to a kiss, that was for sure, and he thanked heaven he had the option of giving her twenty-six more of them. He was going to use every one!
    “Joe, Mom says hurry up!” A voice hollered at him over the noise of the shower. Whose voice? Noel’s? Ben’s? Theo’s? He felt suddenly out of his depth. What did he know about kids, anyway? Eat your dinner, give your speech and run, fella, he told himself. That’s what you ought to do. Then he thought, run to what? Linda Lucas? Hardly. Theirs wasn’t a relationship so much as it had been a mutual-usefulness pact, however possessive she might want to act at times. She was seen at all the right parties on the arm of the famous Joe Harrington, and in return she granted him certain favors he didn’t want to think about right now. It was as simple and meaningless as that.
    And there was no doubt that Olivia James knew it. What had she called him? “God’s gift to women?” That and probably a few other things behind his back. Well, she was honest about what she thought, at any rate. And not far from wrong, he reflected. At least up to this point. The question was, what now?
    He shut off the shower and pulled back the shower curtain, dripping his way across the bathroom floor as he tried unsuccessfully to discover a towel. It was a far cry from the Sheraton, he thought in amusement—half a dozen toothbrushes in a rack on the wall, a pair of moldy sneakers peering out from beneath the sink, a racquet ball in the soap dish, and not a towel to be