The Harder They Fall Read Online Free PDF Page A

All he wanted, all he cared about was her lips, soft and parted beneath his.
    His gut clenched tightly at his first taste of her. She tasted like a sexy combination of mint and woman. He cupped her neck, his thumbs skimming over her jaw. Tilting her head he slanted his lips over hers and coaxed them farther apart.
    Her hands clutched his suit, and Michael braced himself for her to shove him away. She didn’t. Instead, a little sigh sounded in her throat and her lips grew more relaxed and malleable beneath his.
    His body responded to the sound and feel of her surrender with a power that surprised him. He went hot and hard all over.
    Pressing deeper, he brushed his mouth over hers more insistently, more frantically. He was losing control. Worse, he didn’t care.
    “Darcy,” he whispered. He lifted his head slightly and watched her eyes flutter open. A wealth of emotions gleamed in their depths: passion, fear, pleasure and confusion.
    The beauty of her swollen lips twisted his heart in knots and tore his good sense to shreds. He covered her mouth with his again while he wrapped her hair around his hands.
    His senses flamed, his mind reeled. Tipping her head to the side, he pressed her lips farther apart and plunged into her mouth.
    Her body snapped stiff.
    Pain exploded in his mouth as her teeth bit into his tongue.
    Michael reared back, swearing. “Ouch! You bit me!” He shook his hands to free them of her tangling hair.
    “You stuck your tongue in my mouth!”
    He examined said tongue with his fingers. It felt as swollen as the Goodyear Blimp. “That’th called a Fwench kith, you twit!”
    “I know what it is,” she said, sticking her nose in the air. “I just wasn’t expecting it.”
    “A thimple ‘no, thank you,’ would have worked jutht fine.”
    “No, thank you,” she retorted, her eyes flashing.
    “Now she tellth me.”
    Her fists hit her hips again. “Why did you do that?”
    Michael dropped his hands, rolling his tongue over the roof of his mouth. “Because I like to French kiss.”
    She shook her head, her hair fanning over her breasts. “No, I mean, why did you kiss me at all?”
    He plowed both hands through his hair. “God knows. I must be nuts.”
    “You weren’t,” she said, her soft voice carrying a dangerous undercurrent, “perhaps trying to distract me from our conversation, were you?”
    His hands stilled on his head. “I don’t even know what we were talking about anymore.”
    “You letting it slip about who my father is?”
    “I told you—” Michael swallowed his retort. The crazy woman had just bitten his damn tongue. He wasn’t about to stand here and plead for her to believe him. “If you’ll excuse me, Ms. Welham, I believe I’ll go suck on some ice cubes.”

3
     
    Word spread faster than wildfire who Darcy really was. She had no doubts about the source of the news. As her co-workers discovered her identity, they withdrew from her as if she’d caught a case of the plague.
    It hurt. People had always given Darcy a wide berth, whether it had been her schoolmates or the ladies hired to care for her while her parents worked such long hours trying to establish their business.
    She’d learned to live with it. She understood why people considered her bad luck, even if she didn’t feel she’d entirely earned her reputation. But here, the other workers had for a while cheerfully accepted her into the fold. And then the rat had gone and ruined it for her.
    She sat all alone in the break room. As soon as she’d entered, the others had silently gotten up and left. More than ever in her life, she felt isolated and lonely.
    A tear slipped from her eye. And then another, and another. Her shoulders shook with the effort to stop the flow. She never cried. Never. Crying was for people who allowed themselves to feel the hurt. She’d spent a lifetime fighting that weakness.
    Darcy pulled a hanky from her apron and blew her nose. She couldn’t let Michael Davidson see her cowed.