Stevie Lee Read Online Free PDF Page B

understood his words better than she’d let on. Why else would she have threatened to drop him in the snow if he didn’t stop talking?
    Foolishness, her common sense warned, pure foolishness. She had enough problems without allowing a mere physical attraction to mess up her life. He might look like a Nordic god, but he was trouble with a capital T, and worse, he was a traveling man. She had decided a long time ago that the next time somebody wandered off into the world, it was going to be Stevie Lee Brown, not some man with her heart in the palm of his hand.
    “Well, that settles that,” she whispered to herself quite convincingly and forced her attention back to her books.
    Tired of looking at net losses, she searched through her papers for her balance sheet full of liabilities. She picked the form out of the sloppy pile, and a red pen rolled off and leaked on her blue-and-white checkered tablecloth. Typical , she thought. She was floating in red ink.
    Last week, she’d offered Jake, the hottest bartender in town, double his wage at The Emporium, and he’d turned her down. Maybe a stock option was in order. Sure, she thought, that was what Jake wanted—stock in a broken-down bar. She took another sip of coffee and rearranged the numbers on her balance sheet, reversing the debits and credits just for kicks.
    If she didn’t have a bartender, a darn good bartender, by the next weekend, she might as well close her doors. She and her brother Doug would never be able to pump enough business through the Trail, not without killing themselves. And death, she was sure, was not on the top of Doug’s priority list for the summer.
    Young and in love, she knew he planned on having his nights free and two days off a week. Her mother had offered to help out, but sweet as the offer was, Stevie doubted if her scatterbrained mom could take the pressure. No, what she needed was someone to charm the crowds away from Jake Stone at The Emporium. She needed a good-looking, fast-talking—
    A knock on the door interrupted her thoughts.
    “Come in,” she hollered, reaching across the table and flipping off the lock. The door opened but no one came in, and Stevie glanced up.
    If she’d had a cat, it could have dragged him in.
    “Good morning.” She deliberately added a bright sparkle to her voice, and watched him carefully, gauging his hangover by the depth of his wince. There was a slight crinkle to the eyes, his mouth was holding firm—he wasn’t in too bad of shape, she decided.
    “Nice try, Stevie. What did you do? Mickey Finn me?” Sarcasm, pure and simple, and thicker than molasses, rolled off his lips and right off her back. She wasn’t going to let him get around her defenses again.
    “If I had, you wouldn’t know it yet.” One sable brow arched above her clear gray eyes. “You should have told me you couldn’t hold your liquor. I do keep a full stock of soft drinks.”
    Two very bloodshot, indigo-blue eyes narrowed at her from beneath a Dodgers cap. The white-blond hair sticking out on either side of his hat reminded her of fairy wings, but she doubted if he wanted to hear about it. She also doubted if he wanted to know that he’d forgotten to zip his pants.
    “Funny how I never had that problem before.” His voice, rough and gravelly the night before, was positively jagged this morning.
    “The altitude does crazy things to a person sometimes,” she said, leaning back in her chair and rocking it on two legs. “Makes them dizzy, lowers their tolerance for alcohol, maybe freezes them to death in their sleep”—she not so subtly hinted at all the work she’d done last night—“I’m glad to see you didn’t have that problem.”
    “Guess your luck finally ran out.” Try as he might, he was having a hard time holding onto his anger.
    “It’s not the first time,” she confessed with an unperturbed smile. “Probably won’t be the last.”
    Well, he thought, she sure hadn’t lost any of her chutzpah, and she