The Kissing Game Read Online Free PDF

legion of women whom Simon had loved and left. And she used the word
loved
only in the very loosest physical sense.
    At least she wouldn't make the mistake of believing that she could change Simon. At least she wouldn't be foolish enough to hope that he would treat her any differently from the hordes of foolish women who had come before her.
    She wouldn't do that—because she wasn't going to sleep with Simon. Not tonight. Not ever. Provided he didn't catch her at a particularly weak moment. Provided she didn't get pulled in by the molten lava of his gaze.
    “Just get back to work,” she told him, carefully keeping her eyes on the copy machine.

FOUR
    FIGURED I'D FIND you girl-watching,” Leila Hunt said, slipping into the seat across from Simon's at the resort restaurant. “Good grief, is that
Frankie?”
    Simon nodded.
    “What is she wearing? Is she wearing …. ?”
    “A dress.”
    “Who's she with? He's not bad. Really nice smile—”
    “He's a client.” Simon's words came out a little too tight, a little too clipped, and his sister looked at him in surprise.
    “Of yours?”
    Simon forced himself to relax, to smile, to hide the fact that he was sitting there with his insides tied in knots because Francine Paresky was sitting all the way across the room, actually wearing one of the dresses—the blue-flowered one— he'd found in her closet, and having dinner with Clayton Quinn.
    That could have been him sitting there. It should have been.
    “No, believe it or not, the client's hers,” he told Leila, and his voice actually sounded natural. He sounded lighthearted and even slightly disinterested. “She's working on a case for this guy, trying to locate the beneficiary to a will.”
    “That's great.” Leila took a bread stick from the basket in the center of the table, breaking off a piece and popping it into her mouth. “Just yesterday Frankie was telling me she was so broke, she was going to have to go back to chartering fishing trips here at the resort for Preston Seaholm.”
    “Oh, man, you're kidding.” Simon grimaced, pulling his gaze away from the animated conversation Frankie was having with Clay Quinn tolook at his sister. “I thought she swore she'd never do that again.”
    Leila's violet eyes were dead serious. “Taxes are coming due. She didn't have much of a choice.”
    Two years earlier Frankie had worked regularly at the resort, taking groups of vacationers on expeditions on Pres Seaholm's fishing boat. The groups were usually all men, and they usually drank quite a bit of beer as they fished. Sometimes the guests got rowdy and very rude. Once Frankie had felt sufficiently threatened to dump her life-vest-clad passengers into the ocean and haul them back to the harbor by ropes tossed off the stern.
    Simon never found out exactly what happened to set off that chain of events, but Leila had hinted that several of the guests decided that the money they were paying Frankie to captain the charter boat entitled them to certain sexual favors.
    Yes, Frankie had been able to take care of herself, but Simon shuddered to think what might have happened if those men had been a little more inebriated, or a little more determined to have their way.
    Frankie was tough, but she was barely five feet tall. A six-foot-tall man would be able to overpowerher rather easily. And she wouldn't stand a fighting chance against a group of men.
    Just the thought of her working that charter boat again made Simon's heart lodge in his throat. But she wasn't going to have to do that, he told himself. She had this investigation job for Clay Quinn. Thank God for Quinn.
    “I got a call from Mom today,” Leila told him. “She's going to stay with her friends on St. John for another month. She's actually thinking about buying a condo down there.”
    “Uh-huh,” Simon said absently, not really paying attention to his sister. He was staring across the restaurant again, watching as Frankie laughed at something Quinn said. Damn