Uneasy Alliance Read Online Free PDF

him, he wondered. She'd been quite friendly in
    class.
    It had something to do with his need to be certain she was free. It was
    after he'd asked the crucial question that she'd really begun to withdraw.
    Perhaps it was because she wasn't altogether free.
    Had she spent that weekend on the coast alone two months ago? Maybe
    she had just terminated a relationship and that was the reason she was
    fearful of plunging directly into another affair.
    The questions spun around his head as he drove with automatic
    precision. The houses perched on the hillside on either side of the road
    appeared cozy and welcoming, their windows warm with lights. His own
    was going to be dark. Torr hadn't bothered to leave a light on to welcome
    himself home.
    One thing was for certain, he reassured himself. She couldn't know
    enough about his past to be really afraid of him. Not yet. Not ever, if he
    had his way. It was something else that was disturbing her. Had
    something he said reminded her of another man? The one she'd gone to
    the coast with two months before?
    His blunt fingers stretched and then gripped the wheel with a force that
    Torr didn't even notice. He would like very much to get his hands on the
    man who had made Abby so wary.

    I t was the mixed signals she was getting from him that were making it
    difficult to deal with Torr Latimer, Abby concluded the next evening as
    she dressed for their date. The impression of strength, for example, was at
    once reassuring and intimidating. She experienced an instinctive
    sensation of being protected by it on the one hand, while on the other, her
    past had taught her to be distrustful of physical strength.
    If he hadn't started making demands, asking about the other men in
    her life, wanting to know if she was free, she might have found herself
    letting the kiss go much further than it had. Abby faced the reality of that
    as she slipped the sleek, body-hugging knit dress over her head.
    The dress, a silvery blue, highlighted her honey-colored hair loosely
    arranged in a topknot and her blue eyes. Not cornflower blue or gentian
    blue, Abby decided with a flicker of humor as she remembered Torr's
    efforts to liken her to a flower the previous evening.
    It had been rather flattering, actually, especially since she didn't
    consider her features as a model of flowerlike beauty. The wide blue eyes,
    tip-tilted nose and expressive mouth went together in a reasonably
    attractive fashion, but Abby didn't kid herself that there was any riveting
    beauty underlying the whole.
    There was, however, a vivid animation marking her face of which Abby
    remained unaware. One seldom smiled, talked to or otherwise visited with
    oneself in a mirror. Mirrors were for studying an unnaturally quiet version
    of oneself. As a result the image in the mirror remained, for Abby, at least,
    merely reasonably attractive. The warmth and intelligent energy that were
    a fundamental part of her were usually left for others of a discerning
    nature to discover. There had been men in the past who had responded to
    the total effect Abby created, but not since Flynn Randolph had she
    allowed one to get close.
    The night before, her response to the grimly quiet man from the
    flower-arranging class had startled Abby. It was part of the disturbingly
    double messages she was trying to interpret. She frowned at herself, her
    brows knitting into a severe line as she applied a coral lipstick. Torr
    Latimer was not the sort of man she would have expected to respond to so
    swiftly. On the other hand, as she kept reminding herself, she had met him
    in a class on flower arrangement!
    That thought brought a reluctant smile to her face as she turned away
    from the mirror to answer the demanding clamor of her doorbell. Torr
    was right on time, showing a promptness that didn't surprise her in the
    least. She had had a hunch he was the precise, punctual type.
    He was also, she realized as she opened the door, every bit as unsettling
    and intimidating