Wilde Heart (Wilde Women Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

and ran as fast as she could. Away from where Liam stood, his face plastered with the scowl she knew so well. Past the fire-breathing secretary who startled as she flew past.
    Slapping her hand on the elevator button, Rhiann counted the seconds before the door slid open, and she fell inside.
    Yeah. That had gone well. Not!

C ROSS-LEGGED ON THE SOFA, RHIANN sat unmoving in the deep silence of her tiny apartment. She needed the quiet to work some magic on her frazzled nerves following the unfortunate conclusion to her disastrous meeting with the boss man. The dude in charge. He-who-signs-the-paycheck. Liam.
    Sighing, she caught the faint tinny clicking of the metal wall clock hung in the kitchen. Soon, her left eye twitched in time—a clear signal that she was losing the battle of denial. Blocking the flashing memory of clinging to that man’s lips when she should have slapped his arrogant face and refused to play his game was a lost cause.
    As she sat motionless, Rhi became more aware of the slight pulsing in her lips that hadn’t gone away since he’d claimed her mouth with such effective thoroughness. Once the floodgates opened as a result of that kiss, it was inevitable that long-denied echoes in her mind would fire up.
    Feeling a bleakness in her soul for how quickly and easily Liam’s reappearance had shattered her world, Rhi couldn’t defend against the crush of memories from those days, when as a bright-eyed coed, she’d fallen for the serious, starchy grad student who eventually broke her foolish, naïve heart.
    It was hot that summer between her freshman and sophomore years at university when she’d been on the brink of turning twenty. She remembered that the heat had been relentless, forcing her gaggle of college gal pals to set up camp in the Baron-Wilde backyard where a pool and a large covered pergola offered sweet relief from the monotony of the brutal heat wave. That was where she’d first laid eyes on Liam Ashforth.

    “Cannonball!” hollered Shelby Sutton, Rhi’s dorm roommate, as she lunged across the deck and jumped awkwardly into the deep end, sending a huge wave of water exploding into the air. The girls shrieked their outrage as the resulting shower drenched them all.
    “Jeez-us, Shelby,” Rhi barked. “Warn a bitch next time!” After scrambling away from the torrent of splashes, she laughed at her roommate’s antics and ran for cover from the noonday sun.
    Across the patio, Nicole Bradley—Rhiann’s long-time neighbor—plugged her iPod into a dock and queued up a playlist of favorite tunes. As Justin Timberlake’s “ SexyBack” floated in the humid, motionless air, and Nicole did an exaggerated bump and grind along to the music, Freya Abbott came shuffling noisily from the patio slider with a two-liter of Diet Coke tucked into the crook of her arm. Hugging the bottle close to her body, she also juggled a stack of plastic cups and a big Ziploc bag of ice.
    Freya was their resident do-gooder and surrogate mom. In a lot of ways, the serious girl who Rhiann counted among her bestest of best friends was a substitute for her older sister, Brynn. Known for being a rule follower, Freya pretty much always volunteered to be the designated driver. She kept everyone on the straightedge, and like Brynn, never failed to cross the T’s and dot the I’s.
    “Beverages!” she called out with a wide grin before dropping everything onto a wood picnic table. Sticking out her tongue and grunting with comic emphasis, Freya rolled her eyes. “That’s my last waitress run inside, you guys! Next time you want something—get it yourself.”
    Shelby hoisted herself from the pool—landing on her butt with a hearty, wet thwack. “This weather!” she lamented on a groan. Ugh. “The pool is like bathwater it’s so damn hot.”
    “Oh shit! Speaking of hot—any of you get an eyeful of the Abbott House RA?” Nicole boomed over the thumping music. “Some random chick in my Speech and Language cohort