Welcome to Temptation: A Romantic Comedy Read Online Free PDF Page A

chair frantically for the past hour, stopped and glanced up as the lights flickered once and went out. They were shrouded in near darkness.
    “The water is rising fast,” Gator said, going to the window he’d ordered Michelle away from only seconds before. Reba joined him..
    “It looks like the end of the world,” she said softly, holding a small calico kitten. She looked from Gator to her granddaughter and back, and she appeared to be on the verge of tears. “You were right. We shouldn’t have stayed. If anything happens to the two of you, it’ll be all my fault.”
    “Nothing’s going to happen,” Gator said, anchoring his hands on her frail shoulders reassuringly.
    Michelle would’ve had to be deaf not to catch the gravity of his voice. Once again, she stepped closer to the window. They were drawn to it like moths to a porch light. She tossed Gator an anxious look over her grandmother’s head and found him watching her, a thoughtful expression on his face. She wondered what he was thinking. Was he sorry now for staying? She suddenly remembered the kiss they’d shared and glanced away quickly. She returned her gaze to the window, where the bayou, usually without current, was now a pulsing, moving thing with ripples and whitecaps. It reminded her of the way her stomach pitched about each time Gator looked at her with those black eyes.
    Gator finally insisted they move to the center of the room, away from the windows. For the next couple of hours they waited and listened as reports filtered in on the radio although some of it was interrupted with bouts of static. They lunched on ham and cheese sandwiches and spice cake and made small talk as they listened and waited. Time crept by slowly while Reba rocked and quietly hummed church hymns. Gator tried to pull Michelle into conversation.
    “Remember the time we got caught in that storm at the swimming hole?” he asked.
    Michelle slid her gaze in his direction and felt her face grow warm at the memory. “No.”
    The smile he gave her told her he knew she was lying. “Think for a minute. It’ll come back to you. It started lightning, and we had to leave the water.”
    How could she forget, she wanted to rail at him. She had ended up in the front seat of his old pickup truck, alone with him, wearing only her bathing suit and smelling of suntan lotion. Something in her stomach fluttered as she remembered how he’d looked in his bathing trunks that day.
    Gator had matured much faster than the rest of the boys his age, and that day, with his naked chest glistening with oil and his wet trunks clinging to him, Michelle had been convinced of that maturity. That was the day Gator had kissed her for the first time, though heaven knew he’d tried a dozen times before. She couldn’t remember exactly how it had begun, but all at once she’d found him close, his mouth touching hers tentatively, as if he were half-afraid she’d scurry away like the squirrels had when the rain had begun. But she hadn’t. She had raised her lips to his eagerly. That one kiss awakened everything in her body, those gentle stirrings that he had aroused in her the first time she’d seen him. She had touched his chest, had drawn tiny playful circles in the light coating of oil that covered him, and had watched in wonder as his nipples had contracted. She had lain in bed that night for hours, thinking about it, wondering what it would have been like had she not put a halt to the kissing that in just a few minutes had grown hot and frantic. And then she’d buried her head under her pillow and squeezed her eyes tightly closed, trying to convince herself that no sixteen-year-old girl should ever feel the things Gator had made her feel.
    “Yes, I remember,” she finally said, meeting the look in his eyes. She wondered if he knew how powerful that look was. It was almost hypnotic. She felt as though she were being pulled toward him, like a small fish being reeled in on a line. “It seems so long