LITMIR.BIZ

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noting that her wet clothes still clung. He shoved his hands in his pockets to disguise the effect her curves had on him and cleared his throat. “Why don’t you take a hot shower? Warm up.”

      So he could cool down. Think things through. Decide what to do with all the sexual dynamite in the room, especially when they were standing so close to the fire.

      Especially when the woman who had walked out of his fantasies was his brother’s bride-to-be.

      “Take a shower here?” She was already shaking her head. “No, no, no. I only came to talk and then—”

      “What?” Luke interrupted. “Go back out in that?” He gestured toward the windows and the full-on storm and wilderness-level darkness beyond them. “Now that would definitely be a Bad Idea, Lauren.”

      She made a face. “Oh, thanks for reminding me.”

      He allowed himself a little grin. “Fair warning, kid. Never show me your weakness. I’ll use it against you.”

      “Kid.” She made the face again, though he could see the appellation relaxed her. “I’m twenty-six years old.”

      “Be a grown-up then. Go upstairs and take a hot shower. Then we’ll put your clothes in the dryer, I’ll rustle us up some dinner and after that we’ll reassess.”

      Her eyes narrowed. “Reassess what?”

      She was a suspicious little thing, but God knows that was sensible of her. He shrugged. “We’ll reassess whatever occurs to us.” Like whether he should let her know who he really was. Like whether he could let her drive away from him tonight.

      After another swift glance at the scene outside the windows, she appeared to make up her mind. “All right.” She bent to retrieve the throw.

      As she handed it to him on her way toward the stairs, he used it to reel her closer.

      “What?” she said, startled. Round blue eyes. Quivering curls.

      “We haven’t had our hello kiss,” he murmured.

      Then, curious as to what it might be like, he placed his mouth on top of hers.

      At contact, his heart kicked hard inside his chest. Heat flashed across his flesh, burning from scalp to groin.

      Lauren had the softest, most pillowy lips he’d ever encountered in thirty-one years of living. Eighteen years of kissing. His biceps were tight as he lifted his hands to cradle her face.

      He took a breath in preparation, then touched the tip of his tongue to hers.

      Pow.

      They both leaped away from the sweet, hot explosion.

      She regained her breath first. “I’ll…I’ll just take that shower,” she said, her gaze glued to his face as if she were afraid to turn her back on him.

      “Sure, fine, go on up,” he managed to get out, when he should have said, “Run, Goldilocks. Run as far and as fast as you can.”

      As if he wouldn’t run right after her if she tried.

      Two

      Lauren Conover stared at her bedraggled reflection in the bathroom mirror, looking for any evidence of the backbone she’d thought she’d found this morning before driving to Lake Tahoe. Instead, all she saw was a wet woman with reddened lips and a confused expression in her eyes.

      “You were supposed to walk in and break it off with him immediately,” she whispered fiercely to that dazed-looking creature staring back at her. “Nowhere in the plan were you supposed to find him attractive.”

      But she had! That was the crazy, spine-melting trouble. When the door to the magnificent log house had opened, there stood Matthias Barton, looking as he always had on those few occasions they’d been together. Dark hair, dark eyes, a lean face that she couldn’t deny was handsome—and yet, never before had it drawn her.

      Then he’d invited her inside and when she’d been looking up at him with the fire at her back she’d felt fire at her front, too. A man-woman kind of fire that made her skin prickle and her heart beat fast.

      The kind of fire that a woman might be persuaded to marry for.

      And she’d come all this way to tell him it wasn’t going to happen.

      And it wasn’t!

      When her mother had plopped a stack of bridal magazines onto the breakfast table that morning, Lauren had looked at them and then at her thirteen-year-old sister’s face. Her tough-as-nails tomboy sister who had been giving Lauren grief since the engagement had been announced two weeks before.

      “You’d better do something quick,” Kaitlyn had said, backing away from the glossy magazines as if they were a tangle of hissing snakes. “Or the next thing you know, Mom will have me in some horrid junior bridesmaid’s dress that I’ll never, ever forgive you for.”

      Lauren had known Kaitlyn was right. Her mother’s steamroller qualities were exactly why she’d found herself engaged to a man she barely knew in the first place. That is, her mother’s steamroller qualities combined with her father’s heavy-handed hints about this marriage being good for the family business he always claimed was faltering. As well as Lauren’s own embarrassment over her three previous attempts to make it down the aisle.

      She’d picked those men herself and the engagements had each ended in disaster.

      So it had been hard to disagree with her mother and father that their choice couldn’t be any worse, despite Kaitlyn’s teenage disgust.

      But the sight of those pages and pages of bridal gowns had woken Lauren from the stupor that she’d been suffering since returning home from Paris six months before. Hanging a third now-never-to-be-worn wedding dress in the back of her family’s cedar-lined luggage closet had sent her to a colorless, emotionless place where she’d slept too much, watched TV too much and responded almost robot-like to her parents’ commands.

      Until glimpsing that tulled and tiara-ed bride on the front cover of Matrimonial, that is. The sight had hit her like a wake-up slap to the face. What was she thinking? She couldn’t marry Matthias Barton. She couldn’t marry a man for the same cold, cutthroat reasons her father picked a new business partner.

      So she’d grabbed her keys and gathered her self-confidence and driven straight to where Matthias had mentioned he’d be staying for the next month, determined to get him out of her life.

      Now she couldn’t get him out of her mind.

      Sighing, she turned away from the mirror and adjusted the spray in the shower. She’d found the master bedroom right off—my God, that luxurious bed had almost made her swoon!—but spun a quick about-face and entered a smaller guest bed and bath instead.

      The hot water felt heavenly and some of her uneasiness went down the drain with it. All she had to do was walk back out there and tell that gorgeous hunk of a man that she wasn’t marrying him. He’d probably be as relieved as she was. After that she’d drive home, face the certain-to-be-discordant music chez Conover and get on with the rest of her life.

      The rest of her life that wouldn’t include any more engagements to wrong men.

      A few minutes later, wrapped in an oversized terry robe she’d found hanging on the bathroom door and carrying her damp clothes in hand, Lauren made her way to the staircase. Some framed photos lined the walls but she didn’t give them but a cursory glance as she was more concerned with getting away from the house than anything. She could tell it was still raining and even from the second-floor landing the downstairs fire looked cozy and inviting, but she straightened her shoulders and mentally fused her vertebrae together.

      Break it off, Lauren, she ordered herself as she descended the steps. At once. Then get in your car and drive home. Who cared about not waiting to dry the wet clothes? The robe covered her up just fine.

      She could see Matthias standing

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