Surrender Read Online Free PDF Page B

you?”
    “Yes.”
    He leaned against the edge of the desk facing her. “I can wait until you’re through.”
    Netherland frowned. “It may be a while.”
    “I have nothing else to do. Go ahead and finish what you’re doing and pretend I’m not here.”
    Fat chance! Netherland thought as she tried to refocus on the documents in front of her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him move away from her desk to settle in the love seat on the other side of the room. As hard as she tried, she could not gather her train of thought to complete the task she’d been working on before he had arrived. Considering that he had been on her mind constantly all day, she had hoped that staying in her office and catching up onsome paperwork would be the perfect solution to not having to see him tonight. It appeared that he had no intentions of letting her avoid him.
    After wasting a good ten minutes trying to unscramble her brain and feeling his presence too close for comfort, she finally had enough. “That’s it,” she said, standing up. “I’m through with what I was doing. We may as well go back and join the others.”
    Ashton didn’t stand. Instead he leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs and looked up at her. “Are you afraid to be alone with me, Netherland?”
    Netherland looked at him, astonished. He didn’t know how close to home he’d hit. Yes, she was afraid to be alone with him, but not for fear of what he might do to her. She was afraid of what she might let him do. Her attraction to him was too strong. There was no way she could deny that. If she stayed around him too much longer she would forget about the very reason they could not become involved. “I’m not afraid of being alone with you, Ashton.”
    “Then let’s share a drink together. One drink is all I ask. Is that too much to ask?”
    You don’t know the half of it, Netherland thought. But if sharing one drink with him would get them out of her office that much quicker, then she would go along with it. “Okay, I’ll share one drink with you. Just one and not much.”
    He stood and walked over to her desk and retrieved the wine bottle and glasses. He came back to her and handed her a wineglass. “Most people wouldenvy you, Netherland,” he said, pouring her a small amount of wine.
    She lifted a brow. “In what way?”
    “The one thing you hated about the military most people would find rewarding.”
    Netherland took a sip of her wine before asking, “What could be rewarding about being uprooted every two to three years?”
    Ashton took a sip of his own wine before replying. “In your travels you’ve probably seen places that most people only dream about seeing.”
    “I would gladly have let them trade places with me. Although I do admit it was nice seeing most of those places, I’d rather have had stability. You don’t know how devastating it was for me whenever my father received new orders. That meant leaving the house behind that I had just started to consider home, and leaving friends behind that I had just gotten to know. There was never anything constant in my life.”
    Ashton nodded. “Didn’t your parents try to make the moves easier for you?”
    “They did what they could but it’s not easy being the only girl with two older brothers and two younger brothers. Things might have been different if I’d had a sister who could have been my best friend, but that wasn’t the case. As close as I was to my brothers while growing up, I couldn’t always get them to do girly stuff with me. They were boys, who were their father’s sons with aspirations of a life in the military.”
    Ashton nodded as he leaned against the edge of her desk. “Did all four of them go into the military?”
    “Yes.” She then told him about her brothers and what branch of service each belonged to. “So as you can see I’ve been surrounded by military men practically all my life. That’s another reason I don’t want to become involved