When Lightning Strikes Twice Read Online Free PDF Page A

not only leaping at the bait, you’ve already gulped it whole.”
    “Stop using overextended fishing metaphors! They’re clichéd and irrelevant.”
    “I should stick to those really original reptile metaphors, like snake?” Wade grinned. “Or is that a phallic one? Because from where I stand, Q.C.’s effect on you has nothingto do with either fishing or reptiles and everything to do with—”
    “Can’t you ever be serious?” To her consternation Rachel felt a hot flush sweep through her. Which stoked her anger even higher. She was
not
in the mood for Wade’s jokey innuendos. “And—And I did not personalize the Pedersen Case! True, I wasn’t happy about the outcome …”
    Rachel felt a peculiar stabbing sensation rip through her as she remembered the expression on Quinton Cormack’s face when the Pedersen verdict had been rendered. His victory, her loss. She could remember every detail of the little encounter that had followed.
    Quinton Cormack had turned to look at her, his smile cocky, his brown eyes shining with triumph. He’d arched his brows in that maddeningly mocking way of his when she had glared back at him. And then he’d approached her to stand right in front of her, so close …
too close!
    He’d laughed when she had refused to shake his hand, which he had proffered as the others in the courtroom began to file out. “Give it up, Counselor,” he’d leaned down to murmur against her ear.
    Even now, she could conjure up the sensory images of that moment. His warm breath rustling her hair, the scent of his aftershave, a tangy masculine aroma she couldn’t identify but couldn’t forget, his solid muscular frame that made her feel—small and helpless.
    Just thinking the words made her blush. Never had she expected to experience such a disconcerting sensation. She’d reached her five-foot-eight at the age of thirteen and learned to use her imposing height to intimidate her adolescent male peers, most of whom took years longer to achieve their full adult stature. By then, Rachel’s daunting body language skills were formidable enough to unnerve even gigantic athlete types because she had also developed verbal skills that could annihilate any male ego with just a few well-chosen words.
    The pattern seemed to be set in cement—men were attractedto her beauty but couldn’t cope with her outspoken, edgy personality. The men she dated seemed to expect what she considered an alarming degree of simpering and pandering from a woman and when she refused to accommodate, potential partners fled.
    At the age of twenty-eight, she’d had but one significant relationship, and disappointingly, it wasn’t all that significant. On her twenty-fifth birthday, she had decided she’d better experience sex at least once; after all, her younger sister Laurel—who was
five years younger!
—had recently given birth to a baby girl.
    Rachel had allowed Donald Allard, whom she’d been dating for months, to take her to bed—where she had experienced sex once and decided she hadn’t been missing a thing. Just as she’d always suspected, the whole thing was highly overrated. She’d stopped seeing Don and resumed dating others, who stopped seeing her when she didn’t simper or pander or sleep with them.
    Rachel told herself she didn’t care, she wouldn’t sacrifice who she was for any male. She dedicated herself to her career, patterning herself after her aunt Eve. After all, it was Eve Saxon who’d joined the family firm in Lakeview and continued its success while brothers Hobart—Wade’s father—and Whitman—Rachel’s dad—chose other careers in nearby Philadelphia.
    But somehow Quinton Cormack was oblivious to Rachel’s forbidding demeanor, or worse, he was fully aware of it and found it funny. Because the smile on his face had been devilish that day in the courtroom when he’d
taken
her hand—after she’d refused his taunting handshake!—into his.
    “Not going to offer me congratulations on a