Tall, Dark and Lethal by Dana Marton Read Free Book Online Page B

Annoying at times, yes. But he was also the guy who had climbed the roof in the middle of a thunderstorm to rescue Mrs. Kuzimo’s kitten. The guy who mowed her lawn every single time, without having been asked. “No big deal, I’m out here with this noise box, anyway,” he’d say. The guy who cleared the leaves from her gutters before she noticed they were plugged. The guy who…“Okay. You’re one of the good guys.”
    “Let’s not go overboard.” But he was grinning.
    Which drew her attention to his lips again.
    “You kissed me.” The stunned thought that had been circling in the back of her head somehow slipped through her still-tingling lips.
    He shrugged. The grin stayed. “No big deal. We’re kissing neighbors.”
    If he could make light of it, so could she. “Is that like kissing cousins?”
    His grin widened into a breathtaking spectacle of delicious lips and white teeth. His voice dropped to a suggestive, husky tone when he said, “It’s much, much better.”
    Oh, my.
    Her life was now officially completely out of control—not just what went on outside her, but what went on inside her as well. Which was the real scary part. She’d lost her mind. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t be wishing that Cade would kiss her again.
    She needed to change the subject.
    “How long do you think we’ll be staying here?”
    “I don’t want to stay too long in one place. I need to make some calls and I need a computer with an Internet connection. Might have to contact some old friends.” The grin slid off his face. “Not that I want to drag anyone else into this.”
    They walked the upper edge of the beach, keeping their distance from the sun worshippers and everyone else.
    “Do they have Internet around here?” Those fishing huts hadn’t looked too high tech.
    “There’s bound to be an Internet café in town.”
    “Haven’t seen a town.”
    “It’s a few miles down the shore.”
    “I guess we’ll be walking a lot.” She wished they could have kept the car. She felt safer in a vehicle, less exposed.
    “Walking is good exercise.”
    He didn’t seem to be too put out by their situation, as if he played the hiding-out game all the time. He probably did, now that she thought about it.
    “Are you going to tell me any more about yourself?” She could have come up with a hundred questions or so without breaking a sweat.
    “No.”
    Through his shirt, she caught sight of the gun he’d tucked into his waistband. He was way out of her league. So far out, most likely, that she wasn’t even fully realizing yet how much trouble she was in.
    “Would you have to kill me if you did? When they say that in movies, is that for real? Because I can stop pushing.”
    He glanced at her sideways and grinned. He really was unfairly sexy. “Watch spy thrillers much?”
    “Now and again.”
    “I have no plans to hurt you.”
    Which, she noted, was not the same as saying he wasn’t going to hurt her. Then again, he had told her before that he didn’t like making promises he couldn’t keep.
    He must have read the doubt in her eyes. “I’m trying to protect you. I’m not sure if I’m one of the good guys exactly the way you mean it, but I do have some principles, such as they are.”
    And she had to accept that was as much reassurance as she was going to get from the man. “I’ll just think of you as a kind of good guy with a gun and principles.” She had to put her faith in the benevolence of the universe.
    He flashed another grin.
    “God, I need to get out and meet new people,” she groaned.
    They walked on in the sand, which went right in the toes of her sandals, so every few steps or so she had to hobble around to shake it out. But she knew that was the least of her problems.
    “I have to get in touch with my brother. He’s going through a bad divorce.” Trampled on and broken-hearted. She’d warned him about the mass hysteria that greeting card companies and Hollywood scriptwriters called love.