Double trouble Read Online Free

at the head table was welcoming. "Hello, beautiful lady," chirped the state party chairman. "Would you like to join us?"
    Matt rose to his feet as Kayla approached him. His heart was pounding, and he felt as eager and taut with anticipation as a boy picking up his dream date for the prom. Taking both her hands in his felt perfectly natural to him. "Hello again," he said softly.
    She smiled warmly, her heart in her eyes. "Hi." They gazed raptly at each other. Another round of singing broke out and Kayla chuckled. "You know, usually these political affairs are deadly dull but this is the most fun I've had in ages."
    "Hey, we Pennsylvanians know how to party," boasted the lieutenant governor and the rest of the people at the head table cheered their agreement.
    "I guess I'd better go back to my table now," Kayla told Matt. "Some of my friends didn't believe that you and I are going out for dessert tonight and asked me to prove it by

    coming over to your table and talking to you. A few wanted even more definitive proof."
    She giddily confided their dare. To sit on Matt Minteer's lap.
    Right then and there, Matt audaciously accepted the dare for her. He sat down on his chair and pulled Kayla onto his lap. There was an approving roar from Kayla's table that spread throughout the ballroom. Matt linked his arms loosely around her waist. ''Now everybody in the place knows that you're my girl," he said, his blue eyes darkening possessively.
    "Woman," she corrected automatically. "It's politically incorrect to refer to females over the age of eighteen as girls." A male politician could be excoriated for that lapse; it was a lesson she immediately taught her new clients and continually stressed to the ones who had used her consulting service for a longer period of time.
    "Whatever," Matt growled. At this moment, he was incapable of appreciating the benefits of her tutoring. He was too occupied with appreciating her, warm and soft and feminine on his lap.
    Unable to resist, he moved one hand slowly upward to rest on her rib cage, just below the underside of her breast. With subtle fingertips, he could feel the provocative feminine swell. If she were to shift just a little, the whole soft weight of her would be in his hand. The desire to close that small distance between them—to cup and caress her breast, to take her soft ripe mouth in a kiss that was as hard and hungry as his body—was almost overwhelming.
    Matt was vaguely aware that he was behaving in a manner most unlike himself. In public, he was impeccably proper in the presence of women. "You're too stiff—why won't you loosen up?" had been the constant disapproving refrain of his ex-almost-fiancee, Debra Wheeler.
    Debra had been committed to spontaneous public displays of affection while his own deep natural reserve, cou-

    pled with his reluctance to expose himself and his partner to the attention such behavior would elicit, kept him firmly reined in when an audience was present.
    It crossed Matt's bemused mind that if Debra could see him now, holding Kristina McClure on his lap at this all-star political fest, she would think that he'd been bewitched. Or that he was drunk. But he knew that was impossible. He'd had only one beer and one glass of wine, not enough to even give him a buzz. He certainly wasn't stupid enough to get drunk on a night Uke this.
    Not that he ever drank himself into a state of intoxication. His Great-Uncle Arch's prodigious capacity for drink was known to every member of the family along with old Uncle Arch's well-documented trips to the hospital emergency room for injuries acquired in falls from bar stools, fistfights and a host of accidents. With an example like that, there were no hard drinkers among the younger generation of Minteers.
    So if he wasn't drunk, did that mean he was bewitched? "I think you've cast some kind of a spell on me." Matt spoke his thoughts aloud as he gazed into Kay la's limpid hazel eyes.
    Turning slightly, she laid her hands