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

he’d renamed himself Finn, but she’d started it, right?
    Dropping his hand from her chin, he stepped back. “Go on now,” he grated out. “Dez’s waiting.”
    Hannah bit her bottom lip. He closed his eyes, remembering doing that himself the night before, and the way her pupils had gone wide as she made a shocked sound of yearning.
    “Go on,” he said again, opening his eyes to make sure she obeyed.
    She did, half turning, but then spun back. “So…was it as explosive as you, uh, imagined?”
    Tanner stared at her. What? She couldn’t…She didn’t…
    Oh, but looking at her blushing face, he knew she could, she did. She didn’t remember passing out. She thought they’d done the nasty.
    Great. Did he look like a necrophiliac?
    His temper heated all over again. He could set her straight, of course, or he could serve up a sweet little bite of revenge.
    No contest.
    “You know as well as I do it was explosive, sweetheart,” he said, relishing the deception. “It was freakin’ Armageddon.”
    He watched her swallow. Nod. Turn around and scurry away.
    That would keep her up nights, he hoped. She’d be staring at the ceiling, trying to recall what they had done in his bed. It was only fair. He’d be awake too, tortured by everything they hadn’t.

FROM THE DESK OF HANNAH DAVIS
    Things I Hate about New year’s:
     
    Being forced to stay up past midnight.

7
    H er head doing a rerun of the woozy spins from the night before, Hannah ducked under the black top of the white convertible BMW parked outside Fi— Tanner’s bungalow. She shut the passenger door, then kept her grip on the handle, trying to find an anchor in her once-again reeling world.
    “Ready?” Desirée asked from behind the wheel.
    “For what?” Hannah muttered, her gaze trained on Tanner’s front door. Behind it was the man who’d uttered “explosive,” and with that one word had relit a fuse inside her she hadn’t known about before last night. Her skin tingled with an echo of shivery heat and she rubbed her palms against her arms to get rid of the goose bumps.
    “Ready for anything.” With a grin, Desirée shifted the car into gear and shot out into the street, gailywaving as another vehicle honked in protest at being cut off. They sped through quiet, New Year’s morning streets. To distract herself from the other woman’s nerve-wracking driving style, Hannah focused on the passing neighborhoods. Instead of noting the car’s speed, she studied the variety of suburban houses crowded so closely together, some of them small stucco bungalows like the one where she’d spent the night, others well-tended Craftsman cottages, and others Victorians with all the prerequisite fancy edgings and fanciful paint colors. Here and there a modern glass-and-angles home had been wedged into a narrow lot.
    The result might have been an odd mismatch if not for the lush landscaping that flowed between and around the houses, unifying them all. Tall and stubby palm trees, tropical-looking hedges, and flowering plants created a harmony between the diversely styled domiciles.
    “Shall we stop for coffee?” Desirée asked, and without waiting for an answer, took a two-wheeled right at the next intersection.
    Hannah braced her free hand on the dashboard and squeezed her eyes tight as the BMW just missed clipping a parked truck. What had she gotten herself into? she wondered as she prayed for her life. It wasn’t too late to get Dorothy back to Kansas.
    Then Desirée took a second turn and they left suburbia for another, wider street. As Hannah chanced a cautious peek, she saw something spectacular out the windshield. Sand. Ocean. A wide expanse of gray-blue dotted by pockets of gold and silver sunshine.
    A frothy wave crashed onto shore, and she stared at it, fascinated. Oz’d.
    Thanks to more of her companion’s aggressive driving tactics, they made it to a take-out place—Junie’s Java—and into a corner of a parking lot beside the sand in what