Three Fates Read Online Free PDF Page B

have to go back. Are you warm enough?”
    “Yes. I’m fine.” The minute she said it, she realized she should have complained of a chill and gotten away. The next problem was she’d been so flustered she’d paid no attention to the direction. Now she hadn’t a clue how to get back to the hotel. But surely it couldn’t be difficult.
    The streets were straight and neat, she noted as she worked to calm herself. And though it was moving toward ten at night, crowded with people. It was the light, of course. That lovely, luminous summer light that drenched the city in warm charm.
    She hadn’t even looked around until now, she admitted. Hadn’t taken a stroll, done any foolish shopping, had a coffee at one of the sidewalk tables.
    She’d done here what she did all too often in New York. Stayed in her nest until she had to fulfill an obligation.
    He thought she looked a bit like a sleepwalker coming out of a trance as she studied the surroundings. Her arm was still rigid in his, but he thought it less likely she’d bolt now. There were enough people around to make her feel safe with him, he assumed. Crowds and couples and tourists all taking advantage of the endless day.
    There was music coming from the square, and the crowd was thicker there. He skirted the bulk of it, nudging her closer to the harbor, where the breeze danced. It was there, by the edge of that deep blue water where boats, red and white, bobbed, that he saw her smile easily for the first time.
    “It’s beautiful.” She had to lift her voice over the music. “So streamlined and perfect. I wish I’d taken the ferry from Stockholm, but I was afraid I’d get seasick. Still, I’d have been sick on the Baltic Sea. That has to count for something.”
    When he laughed, she glanced up, flustered. She’d nearly forgotten she’d been talking to a stranger. “That sounds stupid.”
    “No, it sounds charming.” It surprised him that he meant it. “Let’s do what the Finns do at such a time.”
    “Take a sauna?”
    He laughed again, let his hand slide down her arm until it linked with hers. “Have some coffee.”
     
     
    IT SHOULDN’T HAVE been possible. She shouldn’t have been sitting at a crowded sidewalk cafe, under pearly sunlight at eleven at night in a city thousands of miles from home. Certainly she shouldn’t have been sitting across from a man so ridiculously handsome she had to fight the urge to glance around to be sure he wasn’t talking to someone else.
    His wonderful head of chestnut brown hair fluttered around his face in the steady breeze. It waved a bit, that hair, and caught glints of the sun. His face was smooth and narrow with just a hint of hollows in the cheeks. His mouth, mobile and firm, could light into a smile designed to make a woman’s pulse flutter.
    It certainly worked on hers.
    His eyes were framed by thick, dark lashes, arched over by expressive brows. But it was the eyes themselves that captivated her. They were the deep green of summer grass, with a halo of pale gold ringing the pupil. And they stayed fixed on hers when she spoke. Not in a probing, uncomfortable way. But an interested one.
    She’d had men look at her with interest before. She wasn’t a gorgon, after all, she reminded herself. But somehow she’d managed to reach the age of twenty-nine and never have a man look at her in quite the way Malachi Sullivan looked at her.
    She should have been nervous, but she wasn’t. Not really. She told herself it was because he was so obviously a gentleman, in both manner and dress. He spoke well, seemed so at ease with himself. The stone-gray business suit fit his tall, lanky form perfectly.
    Her father, whose fashion sense was laser keen, would have approved.
    She sipped her second cup of decaf coffee and wondered what generous gift of fate had put him in her path.
    They were talking of the Three Fates again, but she didn’t mind. It was easier to talk of the gods than of personal things.
    “I’ve never decided