Holiday Heat Read Online Free Page A

his
throat. “Don’t.”
    Carrie frowned,
startled from her reverie and a little embarrassed by it. “Don’t what?”
    “Don’t feel
sorry for me.”
    “I wasn’t doing
any such thing.” She wanted to trace the line of the scar that ran from his
right shoulder toward his nipple with her fingers or her mouth, but she
resisted the silly impulse. “You’re far too smug to pity.”
    “Good.”
    “Do you—” She
broke off the question, confused by the sudden impulse to ask it.
    “Do I what?”
    “Do you think
it’s…unhealthy. What we’re doing, I mean. We both should be trying to heal
emotionally, and maybe having sex like this is really just a…”
    His brows drew
together. “A crutch?”
    “Yeah. Do you
think it is?”
     “Does it feel
like a crutch to you?”
    “I don’t know.”
She sighed and couldn’t quite meet his eyes. She had no idea why she was
blurting all of this out, but it had been on her mind more and more lately.
“I’m just sometimes afraid we’re with each other like this because it’s never
going to go anywhere, because we’re both too scared to get close to anyone. And
it’s keeping us from moving on, finding someone for real.”
    Something felt
strange about the way he was watching her, but she still couldn’t look him in
the eye. “Do you want to be with someone else? Someone you feel like you
could have a future with?”
    “No,” she
admitted. “I don’t want to be with anyone but you.”
    “So what’s the
problem?”
    “I don’t know.”
She felt better at his matter-of-fact question. “I guess there isn’t a
problem.”
    “Okay, good.
Now tell me this. Do you want to be with me just because you think I have a
hard edge?”
    The question
surprised her, as did the almost diffident look in his eyes when she glanced up
to check his expression. The truth was she’d gotten together with him at the
beginning only because of that edge—because he was new, dangerous, exciting,
completely different from Henry, completely different from anything her life
had ever been before.
    It wasn’t why
she was with him now, though, and the realization was so terrifying she
immediately pushed it out of her conscious mind.
    To force the
conversation back into their normal pattern, she stroked his chest again and
said in a lilting voice, “Oh, no. I like you for your other hard...qualities.”
    Her hand slid
farther down, over his flat belly, and lower toward his groin. Her eyes widened
as she saw he was partly erect again. “Damn, Matt, you’re insatiable. Have you
always been this horny?”
    “Honestly, no,”
he admitted.
    She was vaguely
comforted by the fact that he hadn’t been this way with every woman he’d ever
been with. All she said was, “Hmm. Maybe cheap motel rooms turn you on.”
    He stifled a
burst of laughter. “That must be it.”
    Feeling rather
soft at the sound of his laughter, Carrie smiled and reached out to take his
shaft in her hand. It was still only partly erect, and she rubbed the length of
it with her thumb. His flesh twitched in her grasp, but he didn’t harden any
further.
    She stared down
at her small hand, wrapped around him in such an intimate way. A feeling
swelled up inside her chest, and she recognized it as pride and possessiveness.
    Entirely
inappropriate feelings. And they disturbed her to such an extent that she
released him. With a groan, she rolled over and saw that it was after six in
the morning. “I better get up. I’ll have to get going soon.”
    She didn’t wait
for a response from Matt. Just walked barefoot into the bathroom to take a
shower. The cool water felt heavenly after the heat of the room and her
physical exertions. She took a longer shower than normal, using the time to
pull herself together.
    Matt couldn’t
allow himself to be emotionally intimate with a woman after what had happened
to him and his girlfriend, any more than she could after Henry. Isolation was
so much safer than risking another gaping wound