Straight From The Heart by Janelle Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

was just short of self-adulation. He was teasing her, but she didn’t want to be teased. She didn’t know what she wanted, and he made her feel off-balance and testy.
    “Not even a smidgeon,” she lied.
    His grin grew to Cheshire cat size. He saw right through her. Kim turned away. She had to get out of here soon, or she would lose her sanity. As much as she denied it, she felt the same lifting of that weight that he did.
    “How was the shower? Still warm?” she asked hopefully.
    “Bearable.”
    “Ice cold, huh?”
    “You’d be better off to heat more water on the fire and add it to the tub.”
    “Maybe I’ll do that later,” she murmured, her mind already skipping ahead. She needed something to do. If she had to sit around here with nothing to think about but him, she really would go crazy.
    When he got up from the love seat and went into the kitchen, she silently eyed his progress. She heard water running, then he returned with a huge tub which he arranged on the burning logs.
    “Oh, don’t worry about it,” Kim sputtered. “Really. I’m okay.”
    “Might as well heat it up,” he answered.
    His ability to just take over bugged her. Everything bugged her. Striving for neutrality, she said, “My son thinks yours is about as cool as it gets.”
    That brought a half-smile to his too sexy lips. “Jason’s a pretty good kid.”
    “Pretty good? Bobby would be offended that that’s all you could say about him. Jason is ‘The Best’ and ‘The Coolest.’ Everything is a superlative when it comes to your son.”
    “He just got his driver’s license, and he thinks he’s ‘The Best’ and ‘The Coolest,’” Stephen said with affection. “All he wants to do these days is run to the grocery store, so that I don’t have to.”
    Kim smiled. “How thoughtful of him.”
    “Yeah, isn’t it, though? It couldn’t have anything to do with the car.” His expression grew sober. “Pauleen wants him to come live with her. She wants to send him to a private school.”
    “Oh.” Kim tried to read his thoughts. “So, that’s what you’re going to do?”
    “Over my dead body.”
    She could feel the roil of emotions just below the surface of this conversation. She understood the tension. “Your divorce wasn’t so amicable, was it?”
    He hesitated, his gaze narrowing on her face as if he were considering whether to trust her or not. Kim, who’d managed for months to make him out as some kind of monster who’d tried to steal her child from her, had picked up on the vibes of his own shredded marriage. Her lips parted; she wanted to say something, an apology perhaps? But Stephen’s gaze dropped to her lips and stayed there, searing in its intensity and driving whatever she’d planned to utter right out of her head.
    “I don’t want to talk about my ex-wife,” he said flatly. “We stayed together for too long, for all the wrong reasons.”
    “I understand. I don’t know why I stayed with Alan. I was just too afraid, I guess, you know, to make a change even though there was nothing there. Nothing left.” Kim heard herself babbling, but couldn’t stop. Stephen was watching her in that intense way that seemed to reach down inside and yank on her emotions. “I had to get out, and I finally did, and then I was alone and it was okay. Except for Bobby. Just the two of us, you know.”
    “But then Alan sued for custody,” Stephen put in when Kim suddenly stopped.
    That stopped her cold. She blinked several times, unable to speak. Stephen set down his coffee cup and came to stand over her chair. He squatted down, so close she was enveloped by the clean spicy scent of his soap and the heat of his skin. “I didn’t know he hit you,” he said softly. “Betsy told me after Robert took Alan’s case.”
    “He didn’t really hit me. He pushed me,” she said quickly, still too mortified over the event to talk about it openly.
    “Same difference. I  . . . met with Robert about Alan  . . . ”