Summer on the Cape Read Online Free PDF

saying good-bye, he turned and strode back to the truck. In a moment, he had climbed in and was gone.
    She looked after the green truck as it disappeared down the road. “My God,” she said aloud. “He acts as though I’d come here just to do him some personal harm.” She closed the door and felt a disturbing shiver of Zach’s sensual impact run through her body. She stood there for a moment with her hand on the door handle. “But he sure is one hell of a man.”
    * * *
    Zach got as far as the highway before he pulled the truck over to the side of the road and stopped. The full impact of Allie Randall was hitting him like a bomb with a delayed-action detonator, and he needed to catch his breath before he became a menace on the road.
    He’d known he’d been sledgehammered the moment she stepped off that plane. In that instant, the sunlight on the field had blazed as though some cosmic electrician had turned up the intensity, just long enough to catch his attention, and the breeze that had lifted her hair seemed to have made her raise her arm just so he could see that lovely young form that had just made a graceful and totally unexpected entry into his life.
    Zach was unprepared for the feelings that had exploded so unexpectedly in him. For all these years, his life had been lived in an emotional limbo, safe from intrusions, and now, with no warning, he’d been blindsided, slammed hard against the ground.
    He dropped his head forward, resting his forehead on his hands where they grasped the top of the steering wheel. So many years. Eight years. Eight awful years. Practically to the day. He would not have believed any woman could reach him like this.
    Maybe, if he hadn’t been thinking about Adam before she got off the plane, maybe if he hadn’t been making ugly assumptions about her even before she arrived, maybe then he’d have felt the full force of her effect on him right at the beginning instead of its going off later, like this, like a time bomb. As it was, she seemed to have disabled his powers of rational thought. He didn’t know the woman at all, he thought, angry at his stupidity, and he’d managed to be incredibly rude to her before he’d even gotten her to the house.
    Before she arrived, he’d been prepared to be hostile to Allie Randall. But he’d been completely thrown by the look of her, that slim, lithe figure, so graceful, so casually graceful. And the scent of her hair—he’d caught the barest breath of it as he helped her into the truck—that marvelous hair, and those fine, sensitive eyes, so beautiful, with lovely dark rims around the glowing irises, turning greenish when she got mad. And no wonder she’d gotten mad. He’d acted like a jerk! He’d deserved more than a tongue-lashing and the lightning that had flashed from those extraordinary eyes.
    But the thought of any connection between her and Adam Talmadge must have made his mind slip a gear. He’d acted like a jealous adolescent, assuming the worst about her, insulting her. Pretty damned stupid! She’d put him in his place, and he’d deserved it.
    But what was her connection to Adam? Maybe she really was one of Adam’s clients. And if she was, she must be good. Adam Talmadge represented only the best. And she was obviously here to work. The house had a first-rate studio in it, and that load of painting supplies and easels was not just window dressing. Maybe she didn’t even know what Adam was up to. It was possible.
    And after all, what Adam was trying to do wasn’t illegal. Far from it, it was entirely legal and it was in the best tradition of good old American “progress.”
    But Zach had his reasons, very personal reasons, why he wasn’t going to allow Adam to go ahead with his project. Zach’s fists gripped the steering wheel and he pressed his forehead hard against his hands, the muscles of his jaw clenched tightly.
    With a bright, graceful force of its own, the image of Allie appeared in his mind, and suddenly, like