Protecting His Assets by Cari Quinn Read Free Book Online Page A

chopped the vegetables more finely. The movement sent a wave of tingling numbness through his hand, and he had to grip the knife twice as hard not to drop it. He’d be paying for her martial arts practice moves for hours, if not days. “The song,” he grated out. “What’s it called?”
    “Oh. It’s ‘Deep’.”
    “The song is called ‘It’s Deep’?”
    “No. Just ‘Deep’.” She cleared her throat and went to work with her spatula in the pan, looking more like she was stir-frying the yolks than scrambling them. Using her other hand, she threw liberal dashes of salt and pepper into the mix.
    His arteries winced in silent agony.
    “Who wrote it?”
    “Me.” Almost to prove it to him, she started to sing in her sultry voice. She vocally caressed the words, coating them in smoke and honey while she swayed to the music she made.
    The lyrics were crazy sexual, a sort of melodic aural fucking. She sang them with sly bravado, an experienced seductress who needed no other weapon other than what was between her lips.
    And he was mesmerized.
    “That was the first thing I ever wrote,” she said when she was finished, evidently unaware that he’d stopped chopping in favor of staring open-mouthed at her back. Drool optional. “Back in high school. You were probably still next door,” she added, laughing.
    “You didn’t learn that in church.”
    Another laugh, softer this time. Then she glanced at the clock and gasped. “Shit.” She gasped again, probably at her swear word slip. Back in school, she and Cass had been militant about telling him and Jax to mind their language, though Cass wasn’t quite as careful anymore. At least around him. “Church. We have to hurry.”
    He nearly dropped the knife again but not because his elbow was acting up. “Excuse me?”
    “I’m not home and it’s Sunday morning. We need to find a service.” When he continued to gape at her, she shrugged. “Fine. I do. You can do whatever you want. By the way, I need my veggies. My eggs are drying up.”
    Shaking his head, he walked over to her and unceremoniously dumped the pile of peppers and mushrooms into her remarkably fluffy eggs. Dry, my ass . “You go to church every Sunday?”
    “Yeah. I do.” She folded the vegetables into the eggs, then made his heart constrict in advance of his looming cardiac event as she liberally soaked the concoction in more salt. Which she then licked off her fingers with a sound that might have been “Mmm.”
    “Are you on cholesterol-reducing meds?”
    She blinked up at him, all blue-eyed, church-anticipating innocence. “No. Why?”
    “Because I think you’ll need to be soon.” Chase snatched the salt and pepper shakers and set them aside before returning to their original conversation. Whether it was about sex music or visiting the house of the Lord, he wasn’t certain. “I can drive you home and you can go to your own church.”
    “Yardley is two and a half hours from here. It’s past seven already. We still need to eat breakfast, and I have to take a shower. Washing my hair takes—”
    “Got it.” He cut her off to avoid clamping his hands over his ears like a petulant child who didn’t want to go where she insisted on taking him. Repeatedly, with vivid word pictures. She might as well invite him to play chess with the strategically placed bubbles over her erogenous zones. “I’ll take you to one here.”
    “You don’t have a home church?”
    He resisted busting out laughing. Not that he was against church or organized religion as a whole. He just hadn’t had a lot of time to fit it in during the last decade or so, what with his pretty rigorous schedule of training, games, drinking and indiscriminate screwing.
    Time was one thing he had way too much of now.
    “I’m not Catholic, Summer.”
    She blinked, probably at his use of her actual name. “No? Cass is.”
    “Not a practicing Catholic,” he amended. “I always figured it was a little hypocritical to take my