Doing It Right Read Online Free Page A

and stroked her hair where it curved along her skull, realizing with happy dismay that he was falling in love with a woman he knew nothing about, not even her last name.
    It was his last happy thought for a while. She came awake like a cat in the dark—one minute dead to the world, the next utterly alert. Her hand came up, seized his wrist in a grip slightly less breakable than handcuffs, and pulled. Hard. He rocketed toward her and somehow—he didn’t think this was possible to do from a prone position—she flipped him over the end of the couch. She didn’t let go of his wrist and a split second later he was on his butt in the dust and she was looking down at him from the back of the couch, still holding his wrist, which started to throb from the pressure.
    “For heaven’s sake,” she complained, letting go. “Don’t scare me like that.”
    He could feel his eyes bulge. “Don’t
scare
you?” he croaked, climbing slowly to his feet. “You’re the one who broke in, dammit! Jesus Christ, I come into my apartment—
my
apartment—and here you are, dead to the world, a—a breaker and enterer—”
    “I didn’t break,” she said reasonably. “Just entered.”
    “—and then you wake up and kick my ass all over my own living room. Who scared who?” He finished standing and was pleasantly surprised to find his legs were supporting him. His heart rate felt quite high—like about six hundred. “Some bodyguard!”
    She snorted, then the snort turned into a laugh. She choked off the sound almost at once and looked at him, stone-faced. “I apologize for startling you. Something woke me up—”
    He coughed, knowing his pawing her hair had been what awakened her and unwilling to impart that information at the moment.
    “—and then I saw a large man—”
    “A large, incredibly handsome, virile man,” he interrupted.
    “—leaning over me and I acted instinctively. How’s the wrist? Good thing I didn’t break it on the way down,” she added thoughtfully.
    “Yes, that
is
a good thing. I retract my whining. Instead I’ll count my blessings. You could have broken my arm, caved in my skull, reached into my chest, and pulled out my still beating heart and showed it to me.”
    She looked away. “I’m not quite that bad. You have—” she eyed him as he hustled toward the kitchen, remembering he hadn’t eaten in seven hours—”admirable equilibrium.”
    “That’s what all my bodyguards say,” he repliedaffably over his shoulder. “How about some breakfast?”
    “That would be lovely,” she admitted, carefully folding the blanket she had been using. She placed it gently at the end of the couch and followed him into the kitchen. “I hope you don’t mind my coming here. I didn’t hurt your lock—”
    “I don’t mind,” he assured her. “You can come over anytime. Do you want a key?”
    “It’s not necessary,” she said with a straight face.
    “I
know
that. But maybe it’ll be a little faster than picking my lock every … No?” She shook her head. “Ho, boy. That’s some childhood you must have had.”
    She changed the subject—but later, when he thought about the conversation, he realized she hadn’t changed it at all. “How is the little boy?”
    He looked up from removing ingredients from the refrigerator. “Little boy?”
    She perched on a stool beside the counter. “He came in the ER with multiple stab wounds. Red hair, about seven years old?”
    “Ah. He was stable when I left. Amazingly, the bastard who did the cutting managed to miss virtually every major organ and blood vessel. His mother’s boyfriend,” Jared added, whipping eggs in a stainless steel bowl. “Carved the kid up when Mama left him. In Cleopatra’s time, they used strangulation as the death penalty. Kind of makes you long for the good old days, huh?”
    She nodded seriously, though he had—hethought he had—been joking. Dark humor, the kind he took refuge in when terrible things happened to little kids.