What a Girl Wants by Lindsey Kelk Read Free Book Online

cold water over a dubious-looking flannel. ‘Not at all.’
    Why would I be thinking about him? I had just woken up in the arms of a wonderful man who was over six feet tall, had all his own teeth and had bought me pizza. In an online dating world, Charlie was the catch of the century.
    ‘So I’m not thinking about Nick.’ I slapped myself around the chops with the icy flannel. ‘I am wishing I had never met him, but I am not thinking about him.’
    There was nothing to think about anyway. So what if he was so attractive he made Matthew McConaughey look like he’d fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down? So what if he was intelligent and passionate and fascinating? So what if the sex was intense and so all-consuming that I still have pale yellow traces of his fingerprints on my arms and shoulders and hips and even thinking about our time together made me forget to breathe.
    Nick was a
fling
. I had a fling and now that fling was over. And not just because he sent a heart-stoppingly brief ‘call me’ email a week ago and then failed to pick up his phone or answer anything subsequently, but because I had decided it was over. Hawaii was a fantasy; this was real life. And it wasn’t a bad trade by any stretch of the imagination.
    ‘Totally over the Nick situation.’ I was resolute underneath the flannel. ‘The fling has been flung.’
    Not that I wasn’t a bit pissed off. Yes, he had good reason to be annoyed at me, but when a man sent you an email that said ‘call me’ and then didn’t actually answer your calls, that was enough to slot him firmly into the ‘douchebag’ category.
    ‘Why tell me to call if he didn’t want to speak to me?’ I asked the flannel.
    It didn’t answer. It just smelled damp and sad.
    ‘Everything all right in there?’ Charlie knocked on the door. ‘You setting up shop or something?’
    ‘I’m was just, you know,’ I stood up and flushed for the want of a better response, ‘doing stuff.’
    ‘Oh,’ he replied. ‘Oh. Right, uh, I’ll let you get on with that then.’
    ‘I’m not doing that,’ I shrieked, realizing he had added two and two and got something very unladylike. ‘I was just washing my face.’
    I threw the door open and waved the damp flannel around to prove my innocence.
    ‘You didn’t use that, did you?’ Charlie asked, taking it from me with his thumb and forefinger and sniffing gingerly.
    I pressed my fingers to my face. The skin was still all there. ‘Why?’
    ‘No reason.’ He threw it over my shoulder into the bath and wiped his hand on the back of his boxer shorts. ‘Come here.’
    Before I could protest, Charlie wrapped his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head. I clasped my hands behind his back and made myself smile, trying to relax into him. I’d always found Charlie hugs reassuring. He was so tall, he even dwarfed me when I wore heels and I was five ten. In bare feet, it was like being cuddled by a considerably cuter Bigfoot. I felt his chin on the top of my head and heard a purr-like noise emanate from his entire being.
    ‘Let’s go back to bed …’ His hands slid down my back and up underneath my borrowed T-shirt. ‘This is the first time I’ve been happy to not have a job since we got fired.’
    ‘I can’t,’ I said, writhing out of his reach and grabbing hold of both of his hands before I got carried away. Again. ‘I’ve got a meeting.’
    Even though I was congratulating myself for listening to my brain instead of my vagina, it was still hard not to fall right into Charlie’s arms and let him carry me back to bed. This was what happened when you didn’t have sex forever and then had all of the sex at once – you lost control of every single sensible impulse in your body.
    ‘A meeting?’ Charlie casually pushed his erection down like a bad dog. ‘Who have you got a meeting with? At this time in the morning?’
    ‘It’s an agent,’ I replied, my eyes squarely locked on