The Billionaire’s Handler by Jennifer Greene Read Free Book Online Page B

dizziness or illness or anything like that. She was just stepping toward him, trying to make an instinctive calming gesture, when she seemed to trip over…nothing. Air. Her own feet. A speck of dust.
    You’d have thought she’d started a fire. Maguire shouted something to Henry, grabbed her, swept her into his arms and started chugging with her up the stairs.
    â€œMaguire—” Whether she could hear him or not, she was pretty sure there was nothing wrong with his hearing. Right then, though, he wasn’t listening to her or anyone else. He was too busy having a fit and a half.
    He charged with her into the bedroom, laid her on the bed as if she were breakable china, put a hand on her forehead while he was scooping covers over her at the same time. At the rate he was going, she was going to be smothered, either from excess heat or the weight of covers. It was pretty darn obvious he thought she was weak and sick and traumatized.
    Hell’s bells, maybe she was all three of those things, but the hysterical-deafness thing was getting beyond exasperating. At that precise moment, all Carolina wanted to do was communicate—that she was okay, that she wasn’t in some new state of trauma, she’d just clumsily tripped over her own feet.
    She didn’t set out to kiss him. It was just…a kiss seemed a way to halt him in his tracks.
    It worked beautifully.
    Sort of.
    All she did was frame his face in her hands, lift up and press her lips against his for a couple of seconds. That was all it took for Maguire to go from manic-energy machine to statue-still.
    There was an unexpected repercussion. Her heart suffered immediate cardiac arrest. With that firstcontact, her lips seemed to instantly recognize that Maguire was nothing like any man she’d ever known. Her whole body knew it a millisecond later.
    She’d felt so trapped these last two months, caged so tightly she couldn’t seem to free herself. Maguire had inserted himself in the role of her white knight—alias her kidnapper—but that wasn’t the man she found herself kissing.
    It wasn’t a hero who kissed her back.
    It was a man who wasn’t used to having his cage doors rattled. A man who didn’t expect himself to…respond. A man who was used to initiating action, to controlling it, but not to ever, ever be on the receiving, unprepared end of it.
    Carolina perceived all that on a swoop of sensation. Then other instincts completely took over.
    The taste of him was dangerously exotic. Unfamiliar. Her heart bucked as if she’d been caught petting a tiger. She saw the flash in his eyes—a flash of alarm, awareness—just as she was closing hers. She’d never experienced it before. That spice of danger. She’d always been impulsive, enthused about taking the unknown road, exploring something different. With special children, she tried anything she could possibly think up, no matter how unconventional, to reach them. But that was about life in general.
    It wasn’t about men.
    Yet when she felt the gruff whiskers on Maguire’scheek and neck. Felt the pulse in his throat throb under her touch. Felt the satin-smooth texture of his mouth. Smelled him. His soap, the wood smoke he carried from their fire outside, nothing that yelled of a specific scent…except that he was male. Five-hundred-percent male.
    She didn’t know any other five-hundred-percent males. Maybe there weren’t any. Maybe this was the only male in her particular universe who pushed certain triggers that had never been pushed before, who aroused a cacophony of sensations that she hadn’t realized existed before. She didn’t think those things. She just sort of felt…awash. In him. His presence, his textures, his scent.
    He broke free from the kiss connection, reared up his head, looked at her with a frown—a frown darker than a thundercloud. He started to speak, then seemed to remember she