Not Another New Year’s by Christie Ridgway Read Free Book Online Page A

away. “Don’t you worry. I’ll—”
    “Hey, don’t anybody worry!” Dez suddenly declared. “I know exactly what we’ll do.”
    Tanner and Hannah looked at her. She was beaming.
    “I’ve got that big suite at the Hotel Del Coronado. Not to mention two closets full of clothes there. Hannah and I look near the same size. She can stay with me as long as she wants and borrow my wardrobe to boot.”
    “Oh, I couldn’t,” Hannah said, shaking her head.
    “Yes, you could. Because then I’d be doing Tanner a favor, and he’ll be the first to tell you I owe him. I owe him big.”
    “There’s that,” he agreed. And it would be a hell of a lot easier to accept Desiree’s temporary help than marry the poor little brat.
    Plus, it would get him out of clothes shopping.
    “Hannah?” He cocked an eyebrow her way.
    “It’ll be fun!” Dez declared. “Like an adventure.”
    It was that last word that seemed to sway Hannah. Though still sounding uncertain, she agreed. So he boogied off to the bathroom in the hallway, leaving her to get dressed in the master bath. When he came out, she was decent again, all buttoned up in her black jeans and her starched—though wrinkled—shirt.
    “Desirée’s waiting for me in the car,” she said, not looking him straight in the eye.
    He narrowed his gaze. “Are you going to be okay? Dez said she’d bring you over to Hart’s once you’resettled in and freshened up. She’s rich, but she’s not dangerous.”
    Hannah gave him a small smile, still hesitating.
    Moving forward, he put a finger under her chin and lifted her face to his.
    Big mistake.
    With their bodies aligned, it reminded him of being in bed with her again. He’d found her passed out beneath his sheets after his quick condom run. Staring down at her flushed cheeks and sleep-softened mouth, he couldn’t decide if he should wake her and take her home, or wake her and work to get her motor revving again.
    Option one was sensible, option two infinitely more desirable. Deciding his half-inebriated state rendered him too conflicted to make a decision, he’d fallen onto the mattress beside her to sleep off the dilemma.
    Instead, he’d stayed awake for hours, watching her.
    He’d stared at the perfect arch of her dark brows, at the feathery fullness of her eyelashes, at the creamy round of one shoulder peeking over the edge of the sheet. And then he’d stared at her mouth.
    Like he stared at it now, fascinated by the deep curve of her upper lip and the plump cushion of the bottom one. She made a little sound in the back of her throat, and he shifted his gaze to her eyes.
    She cast her damn spell again. Just like that, he was once more consumed by lust.
    But it wasn’t her, he told himself quickly. His damn vow was more likely to blame. Eleven months without a woman. Eleven months without kisses, without the sweet stab of a tight nipple against his palm, without that breathless moment of aching want and carnal discovery when he first opened the naked petals of a woman’s sex and touched her wet heat.
    Hannah had been turned on last night, and Christ, that was the ultimate turn-on for him. On the outside, she looked starched and prim, like someone who required coaxing for a response. But then he’d knelt at her feet, and the tremble of her limbs and the stuttered sound of her breath told him different.
    He was an idiot. If he’d remembered the need for condoms on their short walk from the bar to his house, or if he’d taken less time playing with her before recalling that there wasn’t a foil packet anywhere to be found on the premises, then now he’d know what it was like to feel the clasp of her body around his finger. He would know the way she liked her nipples sucked—soft and gentle, or strong and demanding. He would know the sounds she made when she came.
    He would have screwed Geoff Brooks’s beloved niece.
    Shit! It made him mad at her all over again. Deborah, she’d called herself. Fuck. Yeah,