LITMIR.BIZ

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her waist as reaction shuddered through him. And his long fingers fisted in the thin cotton of her T-shirt. Fierce joy blossomed inside her as his tongue tangled with hers—dominant and demanding. The vicious heat throbbed, making the sweet spot swell.

      But before she could grab hold of the euphoria, before she could bask in the hot glow, he reared back and ripped his mouth away.

      “Damn it, Katherine. Stop it.” Grasping her wrists in an iron grip, he thrust her hands down and shoved her back.

      His crystal-blue eyes were like chips of ice in that lean, masculine face. “What kind of a game do you think you’re playing?” The harsh words slashed through the euphoria like a machete.

      “I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “I thought...”

      “What? That I wanted you to kiss me?” The sharp tone sliced to the bone. “I don’t.”

      She hunched her shoulders. Dragging her wrists free of his grip, she clasped her arms around her waist, trying to hold the agony of his rejection inside. Why did everyone always reject her in the end? Why had she always been so unworthy of love?

      She wanted to disappear. To fold herself up so small no one could ever see her again. Especially when the one question she’d never been able to ask before burst out of her mouth.

      “Why not?”

      He thrust his fingers through his hair, looking tense, and more agitated than she had ever seen him. “Because you’re just a kid,” he said, but his voice had softened. “And I don’t kiss kids.”

      She forced her face up, her humiliation beyond bearing.

      He looked shocked and angry and a strangled laugh burst out of her mouth—the hysteria going some way to mask the hurt.

      She had wanted to get a reaction out of Jared Caine, and now she had. Unfortunately, it was the wrong one.

      His eyebrow shot up his forehead. “You think this is funny?” he snapped.

      It wasn’t—in fact it was easily one of the least funny moments of her entire life—but she could never let him know that.

      “I think it’s hilarious,” she lied as she shoved her chin out and stiffened her spine, adopting the pose she had used so often before when sassing Lloyd Whittaker to disguise the pain of his rejections.

      “You spoiled brat.” Caine’s face hardened. “You try a stunt like that again and I’ll put you over my knee and spank you myself. I don’t care whose damn sister you are.”

      “Don’t worry, I won’t,” she shot back. “You’re not even any good at it.”

      It wasn’t true, of course. For that brief moment of bliss his lips had felt so firm, so sure, so perfect.

      Swinging round, she raced out of the room and slammed the door.

      But, as fast as she ran, she couldn’t escape the misery spreading through her like a virus.

      Hitting her bed, she shoved her head under her pillow to muffle the wrenching sobs that poured out.

      She didn’t want him to hear her crying.

      But as the anguish slammed into her full force, it brought with it the cruel punch of memory. And the sounds of her father’s ranting—the words he’d shouted at Megan while he’d beat her sister with a belt.

      “You’re just like her, both of you. No loyalty, no respect. Both little whores.”

      Katie curled in on herself, trying to hold back the images which had tormented her for two long weeks.

      But they played in her mind like a horror movie: Megan’s broken body curled on the floor, her arms flung over her head, the vivid welts on her shoulder blades accompanied by their father’s taunts and the sickening thud of leather hitting bone.

      Katie gulped in breaths, the sobs so violent they wracked her whole body.

      But the sweet spot between her legs still ached to be touched, her lips still felt tender and her cheeks still stung from the rasp of Caine’s jaw.

      And the hideous truth kept repeating inside her head, over and over and over again.

      Lloyd Whittaker had been wrong about Megan, punishing her for something their mother had done, but he had always been right about her.

      And now Jared Caine knew it too.

       CHAPTER ONE

      Five years later, the Amalfi Coast, Italy

      PLEASE DON’T DIE...please don’t die.

      Katie prayed for all she was worth, but the god of smartphone batteries wasn’t listening because the phone screen cut to black.

      She whimpered and stopped walking—or rather hobbling—along the narrow farm road as it dawned on her that having had most of her worldly possessions snatched by a couple of teenage sneak thieves wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to her today.

      The sun had sunk another inch toward the horizon, lengthening the shadows over the landscape of lemon and orange groves perched on the hillside.

      She had been blown away by the wonder of the view at dawn that morning when she’d ventured down the deserted track on her second-hand Vespa to find a secluded cove to paint. But anxiety rose like a wave to add to her exhaustion now. In an hour, two at the most, it would be pitch-dark. And she would be stranded miles from the nearest town with no transport, no money, no means of communication, no luggage—she peered down at her bare legs and feet, covered in a layer of dirt that reached her knees—and no shoes.

      Resisting the urge to hurl the offending phone—which hadn’t had a signal for hours—onto the rocks below, she shoved it into the pocket of her shorts.

      How ironic that three months ago when she’d first arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport from New York with nothing but a backpack, the beautiful mahogany box of art supplies Megan had given her and her passport, the whole point had been to travel light. To support herself and spend some time on her own. To prove to herself and everyone else that she could be more than a serial screw-up or microcelebrity click bait.

      On her first night in Paris, in a little hostel near the Bastille, she’d been terrified, but over the weeks and months since, she’d started to find something in Europe she’d never had in the US. Anonymity and hard work had finally given her the time and space she needed to grow up.

      She’d made new friends—waiting tables in a brasserie in the Marais, making beds in a hotel near St Mark’s Square and hiking thirty miles on the Camino Real—but in the last month she had started to really appreciate her own company. She’d even managed to start earning real cash doing watercolor landscapes she posted each week to a gallery in Florence.

      She hefted the box under her arm, which had begun to feel as if it weighed several tons about a mile and ten thousand blisters ago. At least she still had her paints.

      But she’d discovered today she had a lot to learn about personal safety and not being an easy mark. If only she’d been less absorbed in her watercolor of the cove and more alert when Pinky and Perky had appeared from nowhere, maybe they wouldn’t have managed to hot-wire her scooter, wrestle her pack off her and then disappear in a cloud of dust and victorious whoops in the space of approximately twenty-five seconds.

      How come I always have to learn everything the hard way?

      She forced herself to keep going, even though her feet hurt from tiptoeing over the rocky path and her head was pounding as if someone had sideswiped her with her own pack. Probably because they had.

      She tested the knot forming on her forehead with her fingertips.

      If she ever caught up with Pinky and Perky, she was going to stab them both through the heart with a well-sharpened artist’s pencil. And

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