Hot Spot Read Online Free Page B

so she didn't have to feel as though she was trying to interpret a foreign language?
    "The cookie," he said. The flush on her cheeks was a real turn on. "It looks good."
    "Oh." Tamping down various possibilities racing through her brain—many having a sexual connotation—she thrust the cookie at him.
    He reached for it.
    She let go—a fraction of a second too early.
    And the cookie hit the deck and shattered.
    "Jeez, sorry." She blew out a breath.
    "Not a problem." Leaning over, he began to pick up the pieces. "The deck's clean enough to eat off anyway." Looking up from under his unbelievably long, dark lashes, he winked. "Buddy's into antiseptic. Not that that's all bad, I suppose."
    "You say it like you aren't."
    "Probably not." He set the cookie pieces on the chaise. "With the exception of my car maybe."
    "Your truck."
    "Yeah—truck. And someone comes in and cleans my place a couple times a month. That's about it. I'm pretty middle-of-the-road. No fetishes."
    She was really tempted to reply—the word
fetishes
conjuring up a wild array of pleasurable little vignettes when looking at a man like him. But then he popped a piece of cookie into his mouth, and those TV ads with all the crawly germs displaced more pleasant thoughts. "Are you sure that's wise—eating that cookie? There's a buffet to die for downstairs."
    "The cookie's good. Really, the deck's clean."
    "If you say so." But she wasn't going to eat any of that cookie. "How do you know Buddy?" she asked, steering the conversation onto safer ground than fetish speculation.
    "We met golfing in Florida. When I found out he was a comic collector—you know how that goes. Instant rapport. By the way,
Murky B
is a real winner. I read those new issues I bought." He'd also checked out her story about not dating customers with Buddy. It was for real. But then rules were made to be broken.
    "Thanks."
    "You're self-published?"
    "It's easy with the Internet. An international audience at your fingertips. What do you do?" If he was playing golf where Buddy Morton was playing, he must have a good job.
    "Not much."
    "You must do something."
    "I have a small farm on the other side of the river. It keeps me busy."
    Was he a drug dealer? A lottery winner? "What do you farm?" Maybe he raised Kobe beef or something really high priced.
    "Mostly pumpkins. I give them away to the school kids at Halloween."
    She wasn't getting much here, and short of asking to see his checkbook, she might as well drop the subject. If he didn't want to say, he didn't want to say. Then again, maybe he had a wife and kids on that farm in Wisconsin. Not that it mattered to her. She had no intention of dating him. "Are you married?" she heard herself ask, as though her self-restraint had taken the tourist train to Osceola.
    "What if I said I was?" he replied with a grin.
    "Then I'd figure you probably were pretty darned busy."
    "I'm
not
though, and I don't have a wife—never have. How's that for full disclosure?"
    "It really doesn't matter." More aptly, it shouldn't. But she wouldn't have had to write him into Marky B's adventures if she'd been able to simply dismiss him from her mind.
    "Speaking of full disclosure," he murmured.
    Here it came—the sordid truth. A man who looked like he did and knew people like Buddy—the Minnesota equivalent of jet-setters—probably had a scandal or two in his closet. Not that she cared; he was outside her dating pool anyway, for any number of reasons.
    "We haven't actually been introduced. I'm Danny Rees."
    "Stella Scott." Was it possible this man who appeared to do nothing was scandal free?
    "Buddy told me."
    "He didn't tell me about you."
    "There's not much to tell. I've lived across the river a couple years." He smiled. "And had I known about your shop, or more aptly, its owner, I would have been in earlier."
    "It's new—eleven months in business." She smiled. "I love it—not a single complaint."
    "I've one." His smile was sweet and boyish, without a hint of jet-set