Crazy Kisses Read Online Free

else, but he wasn’t going to spend the effort to figure out what. He was too damn tired to sort through anything tonight. All he wanted to do was sleep, and one bed or another didn’t really make much difference.
    He turned to leave, when a small torn white T-shirt hanging off the doorknob caught his eye, a plain white T-shirt with a paint smear on it—electric blue paint.
    Everything inside him froze, except his heart, which plummeted into the pit of his stomach.
    Impossible.
It was absolutely impossible—but he knew that T-shirt, knew that paint smear.
    His gaze slid to the clothes draped over the chair, and he saw something else he knew: a purple silk robe with a letter “N” painted in pink on the pocket.
Geezus
. He looked around the room, at all the stuff. But it wasn’t just stuff, and it wasn’t just any girl grenade that had gone off in here. It was a Nikki McKinney grenade.
    He picked up the robe, brought the silky material to his face—and her scent flooded his senses. Hot sex, warm love, all the memories were there, so close to the surface.
    Too close.
    Nikki was here, and suddenly, he was in over his head. Way over.
    Why in the world would Nikki be in Panama City?
    And had she brought the freakin’ fiber artist with her?
    Geezus
. He couldn’t take that. No way in hell.
    He looked up from the robe and checked the room. No, this was a one-person disaster, from the Panama hat and pink-and-green-striped sunglasses on his dresser to the pile of underwear on the bed. This was all Nikki, every square inch of it.
    Underwear. Bed. Nikki.
    And suddenly, he was wide awake, every cell in his body.
    He dropped the robe back on the chair and headed out the door. In the courtyard, he turned toward the loudest music. Nikki would be at ground zero, which meant the Sandovals’ walled garden next door.
    Rico and Luis Sandoval were a couple of trust-fund twins whose daddy ran the biggest chain of car dealerships in Panama. They were great guys for a good time, a cold beer, and a Friday night poker game, strip poker if they could talk a girl into playing.
    Kid always opted out of any Sandoval brothers scheme that included drunk naked women, but Rico and Luis wouldn’t have had to use liquor or talk very fast to get Nikki in the game. There wasn’t anything she liked better than naked men. Twins would be an irresistible bonus in her book.
    Cripes
. Nikki and a couple of Panamanian beach-boy hustlers with a marked deck. The thought had Kid limping at double time. It would serve Rico and Luis right if he just let her have them. They’d never get the drop on her, no matter how much they cheated, and once she pulled her “Gee, can I paint you naked” line on them, they wouldn’t have a chance. She’d have them stripped out of their
machismo
faster than they could drop their skivvies. The trust-fund boys would still be looking for their balls come Christmas.
    But he didn’t want any other guys dropping their shorts for Nikki tonight, or any other night—Panamanian beach boys or fiber artist fiancés.
    A fiancé—how in the hell had he let things get so out of hand? How had he gone seven months without calling her? Without writing her?
    He stopped by the gate in the wall—stopped and made himself take a reality check. The truth was, he knew why he hadn’t contacted her. He knew exactly why he hadn’t gone home at Christmas. And nothing had changed.
    He wasn’t the man she’d fallen in love with, not anymore, not even close, and there was no coming back from the places he’d been.
    But she was here, and he had to see her. He wasn’t going to fool himself into thinking she’d come to see him. He was the last person she would have expected to show up in Panama City, despite his owning the house. If she’d wanted to come to Panama, for whatever reason, Skeeter would have loaned her the key and given her the official situation report: He was in Colombia, working out of Bogotá.
    And if he hadn’t reached the end