Bachelor Number Four by Megan Hart Read Free Book Online

Mary Poppins , and then the lights went out, her children slept, and she went downstairs to grab a few minutes of work time before going to sleep herself.
    Before a few weeks ago, she hadn’t logged in to Connex in over a year and yet here she was, once again opening her browser window and staring at status updates from a bunch of people she didn’t really care about. She even had a bunch of unanswered connection requests and some invitations to events long over…but though it had been two weeks since her last correspondence with Shane, there were no new messages. She’d been half expecting him to message her, even though she hadn’t replied to his last one. Now her fingers itched to type a reply, but she resisted.
    “No game playing,” she told herself. Of course she’d told herself that about him many times in the past and had let herself get swept up with the sort of mindfuck he’d favored…but that was a long time ago. Things had changed.
    She had changed.
    Her computer chirped. At the bottom right corner of the Connex page, a small button blinked.
    User erectorset1241 has sent you an instant message. Do you wish to accept it?
    Arden hardly ever used her instant messaging program and hadn’t even known anyone could ping her through Connex. But it was him, Shane Donner, the man she didn’t want to remember and had never been able to forget. Her fingers moved the mouse to hover over the Deny button, to delete the message. Ignore it. With a twist of her wrist, she changed her answer to Accept.
     
    erectorset1241: I hear the Come Inn has great midday rates.
     
    She stared at the screen, pulse quickening. The words twisted her stomach, and not totally in dismay. He’d remembered, but why shouldn’t he? They’d been his words, way back when.
    “We’ll end up sneaking around in hotel rooms when we’re in our thirties,” he’d told her when she said she was going to marry Jason.
    “I hope not,” had been her reply. “Because that means everything I’m hoping to have in my life will have been a lie.”
    She’d just turned thirty-four. He’d have turned the same age this past July. She wasn’t angry that he was trying to see if she remembered the last words they’d shared. She was furious he’d assume she’d be willing to cheat on her husband.
    He didn’t know about Jason, of course. Couldn’t. Shane was being his typical self, cocky and arrogant, teasing her into a conversation she knew she shouldn’t have. If he thought she was married, he’d be testing her to see how far he could get her to go.
    A full minute had passed while she processed his words and thought about deleting them. And yet, when she moved the mouse to the small red “x” at the top of the message window, she couldn’t quite do it.
    The pure and dirty fact was that she wasn’t married any longer. And even now, years later, with a good marriage and a hundred thousand wonderful memories filling her brain, she still had room to remember the brief time she’d spent with Shane. Good sex—really, really good sex—was hard to forget. Almost as hard to forget as first love. She wouldn’t have said she loved him, knew he hadn’t loved her, but they’d been tied together for that time and forged a tenuous but powerful link that had never quite broken.
    It hadn’t been love, but it had been something strong enough to make her wonder…what if?
    There was no reason for her not to flirt with him now. No reason to pretend she wasn’t curious about him. Her time with Shane had been a roller-coaster ride, all high peaks and deep valleys, screaming with the wind whipping her hair. The question she needed to ask herself was clear: was she ready to get back on the roller coaster?
    Arden paused, trying to think of what to type, how to respond. What to give him…and what to keep for herself.
     
    shesewsbuttons: Shane?
    erectorset1241: I’m flattered you didn’t forget me.
    shesewsbuttons: Don’t fish for