Eye of the Storms (Eye of the Storms #1) Read Online Free

to shake his head, “It’s two hours or so from now. I’m just chillaxing. Trying to get in the mindset, you know?” I found myself nodding, as if I knew, and he held up the beer with yet another engaging grin. “Best cure for stage fright.”
    “Stage fright?” Dubiously, I doubted this claim, while my eyes were riveted to the way the bottle touched his lips, and the swallow that convulsed his Adam’s apple.
    My lips tingled, and I realized I was envisioning the feel of that sexy bump beneath them. Suddenly, I was unsettled at the effect he was having on me. The way my hormones were raging out of my control, the way I felt fourteen again. Taking a long sip, I forced a relaxed smile.
    “I guess you find that funny too.” A slight grin quirked the corner of his lips, and his gaze held mine in a challenge.
    “Who wouldn’t?” Defensiveness coated my words, and determination kept my gaze on his face. “A musician afraid to perform…”
    “It’s not uncommon.”
    Although he sounded slightly rebuffed, I still couldn’t seem to stop debating my position. “Well, if I were afraid of dogs,” Here, I pointedly glanced at Rusty, and the pup’s ears flattened against his head, “I wouldn’t be a veterinarian…”
    “No?” Dark brows arched mockingly, and the gleam in his eyes was amused, no longer offended. “Not even if you put a Band-Aid on a lost puppy, and some guy saw and decided you were great with Band-Aids? Then, the guy offered to you a quarter of a million dollars to take care of a whole litter of puppies?” Rusty’s ears perked when his master glanced his way.
    The comparison obviously alluded to performing and record contracts. Not lost was the pun of ‘band aids.” Eying him with a new respect, I wondered, “Is that how it happened with you?”
    Shaking his head, he paused for another sip of his beer, before teasing, “No, I would never put a Band-Aid on a puppy. Impractical with all that fur…”
    Normally, I was not an eye roller, but I felt the unconscious action, and saw the answering gleam in the depths of his dark eyes. How easily I had relaxed, as if he were a familiar friend, yet at the same time, every neuron transmitted awareness of this man.
    Jack was turning me on, simply by standing, more than I had been affected by Kel in the midst of so much more. An override was occurring. My words and actions were governed by libido and impulses, instead of logic and instinct. He remained silent, assessing my next sip as closely as I had been watching his.
    Relaxing into the sweet spell settling around us, I whispered, “So, the best cure for stage fright? Is this?” And I tilted the bottle for an extra sensuous sip.
    I hadn’t so brazenly flirted with anyone except Kel since college, but every womanly instinct inside me dialed up several notches.
    Dark eyes welded with mine, conveying instinctive and primal understanding, male to female.
    “Well, maybe not the best-best…” His voice deepened a few decibels, and the husky whisper was possibly the most sensual sound ever to reach my ears.
    “What’s the best?” My inquiry rode more on a breath, than a whisper.
    With my fiancé, I had made the first move hundreds of times, and with college hookups a few times when extremely inebriated. Now, despite this guy being a stranger and me being relatively sober, I trailed my fingers down bare skin, from the art just above the first row of pecs, to the still open fly.
    Struggling for a casualness I couldn’t feel, I tipped the bottle for another sip and wanted so much more than the swallow—not for a favor, or because he was famous. Simply because an intimate connection with him became something I needed. Even if it only came down to my knees on the cool marble floor.
    His bottle clinked as reaching behind me, he deposited it on the granite counter top. Next, he used one long tan finger to hook a strand of my hair, pulling it over my shoulder.
    Automatically, my body leaned into his as he