Stirred by Nancy S Thompson Read Free Book Online

scanning the crowd for the woman who had so curiously piqued my interest. “Where’d you run off to, Ms. MacLaird?” I browsed every table as I walked through the bar and into the dining room, but I couldn’t find her anywhere.
    “Who ya lookin’ for?” asked my best friend, Trinitee Marsh.
    I plopped my ass down next to hers in the booth we were sharing and exhaled a disappointed breath. “Just some chick,” I answered, my attention still on the crowd.
    “Wow, you work fast,” she replied as she studied me. “You weren’t even gone that long.”
    “Yeah,” I acknowledged absently then pondered the card in my hand.
    “Did you do her out back or what?” Trinitee teased.
    I turned toward her, a flippant smirk on my face. “Why, you wish it was you?”
    She threw her head back in a silent laugh then said, “Been there, done that, dude.”
    “Liar,” I argued with a nudge to her arm.
    “Well, close enough anyway. Too close, in fact.”
    I snorted. “Gimme a break, Trin. You were so into it. Admit it. You would’ve gone all the way if I hadn’t stopped.”
    “I was just leading you on, dude. How could you not know that?”
    “Gimme a fucking break! You’re such a liar!”
    We locked eyes in silence for a single moment before we broke out laughing. To be honest, Trinitee was one of my few female friends I hadn’t screwed. Not that I hadn’t tried, but, at the time, it felt awkward, like I was kissing my sister or something, which was a damn shame, because, God knows, Trinitee was beautiful with her long, shiny, dark hair accented with a single purple streak, pale, porcelain skin, pouty, red lips, and those long-lashed, wide-set eyes that, depending on her mood, seemed to simmer somewhere between lavender and a hard, steel-gray. And, at five-foot-nine and a hundred and thirty pounds, it was an alluring combination that made her appear almost ethereal, above all us lowly, earth-dwelling schmucks who slithered around her feet like Lotharios waiting to be serviced.
    But, as tempting as Trinitee was, we enjoyed an extraordinary relationship that transcended sex. Truth was, I considered her my intellectual equal, someone engaged enough to discuss everything from the dumbing down of Americans too obsessed with selfies, to federal Internet censorship and the impact of new technologies on civil liberties. The girl was whip-smart. She’d graduated high school at sixteen, college at eighteen, and at twenty, she was nine short months away from earning her Juris Doctorate from the UW School of Law. And, much to my irritation, at number seven, Trinitee ranked three spots higher than I did in our third-year class of seven-hundred-and-fifty students.
    I envied not only her acumen, but her intuition, as well, an innate ability to read people on their most basic human level, the good and the bad, but especially the bad. She could tell if someone was lying just by their body language and facial expressions, a great skill for an attorney on either side of the law. Just hanging out with her was like having a sniffer dog as a companion. There was absolutely no hiding from her whatsoever, so I never even tried. Besides, after two-plus years in law school together, she knew me too damn well. When necessary, Trinitee Marsh was a master at manipulating people, including me, especially me, making everyone think whatever it was she was suggesting was all their idea in the first place. 
    “So, what happened?” she pestered with a look I’d seen a thousand times, one that told me she wasn’t about to let it drop, so I told her what went down, first in the bar, then the bathroom. “I knew it. I could tell by that stupid look on your face,” Trinitee chided with a roll of her eyes. “So, where is she? Point her out to me.”
    I moved my attention around the dining room and adjacent bar one more time. “I don’t know. I couldn’t fi—”
    I stopped mid-sentence, my gaze frozen on the stunning copper-haired beauty as she