What Janie Wants Read Online Free PDF

mother.”
    Zade closed his eyes and centered his head again. “My mom’s a pretty rockin’ chick. I’ve seen her turn heads from twenty to sixty, and the ones she takes home are the ones who click with her, not the ones who fall into an appropriate age group.”
    “ Where’s your dad?”
    Zade fisted his hand to keep from rubbing his chest. “Dead. Died when I was a teenager. Cancer. But she didn’t die with him. She mourned, pulled herself up, and taught me to live life.”
    “ I’m sorry.”
    So sensitive. He liked that about her. How she seemed to tread carefully even around strangers. “Don’t be. I loved my dad and he loved us. It was just his time. We live while we’re here, then we move on.”
    Quiet stretched between them. Dahlia’s meditation chime sounded from the pier around the bend, and a seagull chirped overhead.
    “ My son is twenty-one,” she said.
    “ So you mentioned.”
    Zade paced his breaths and concentrated on the sun’s warmth along his skin.
    “ You can’t be much older than him,” she said.
    So, that was it. He sat upright and faced her, a grin he knew he should hide, but couldn’t quite manage to stop, whipping into place. “You’re not gonna let this age thing go, are you?”
    Janie frowned at the horizon for a few heartbeats, then slid her gaze to him. So much desire there, but pain too. Conflict. “When I look at you I can’t help but think about my son.”
    “ When I touched you, were you thinking about your son?”
    “ No.” Breathless. A husky tone he wanted to hear behind all kinds of other phrases. Preferably, “Yes.”
    “ That’s because I’m not,” he said. “I’m a man interested in a woman. Interested in getting to know you. Interested in finding all the best ways to touch you and make you sigh the way you did five minutes ago. And if I’m lucky, seeing the look on your face when you come.”
    Janie sputtered as if he’d tossed a bucket full of ice water square in her face. “You can’t be serious.”
    “ Why the hell not?”
    “ I’m forty ye—”
    “ Besides age.”
    She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it.
    “ It was your eyes that got me first,” he said. “Not the color, but the way you looked at me. The way you made contact and made me feel like I was the only man alive. You smiled, and all I could think about was seeing if your lips felt as good as they looked. And your hair. Christ, woman. It’s wild and natural and makes a man imagine what it would look like after a crazy night of sex.”
    Her gaze darted over his shoulder toward the pool and the shrill laughter of too many college kids with unlimited booze. “But don’t you want someone with a little less wear and tear? I can’t compete with girls your age.”
    Son of a bitch. She thought he was fucking shallow. A man who couldn’t see past vanity and strategically placed highlights. No different from those bastards who thought Photoshopping beautiful women was the answer to a solid bottom line. She may as well have punched him while she was at it. “Right.” If he were smart, he’d walk away. Focus on finding a way to fix his business and head home to execute it.
    She hugged her stomach, pulled her knees up tight, and curled her toes into the cushion. Something had hurt her. Shaken her confidence as much as his bad business move had shaken him.
    “ You realize your statement says more about what you think of yourself than it says about me,” he said. “I see a woman without pretense. A woman who’s real and sexy from the inside out. But if you want to compare yourself to barely legal girls who’ve never juggled more than how to coordinate the outfits in their closet, or talk about who’s dating who, then that’s on you.”
    The wind whipped her hair in front of her face, and she shoved it behind one ear. No clues at all to help him navigate beyond the tight line of her lips and the tension in her body. Either he’d struck a stronger nerve than intended, or