Hot Touch Read Online Free Page B

figuring out his emotions. She was a bossy, conceited, quick-tempered hellion, and he didn’t need to prove that he could tame that kind of woman.
    He liked women; liked being friends with them, liked being nice to them and having them be nice in return. He was thirty-two years old and proud of the loving, long-term relationships he’d enjoyed thus far. There hadn’t been hundreds of women, or even dozens. In fact, he could count the number on his fingers and have fingers left over. Quality not quantity was his motto.
    Nothing in his life had prepared him for this she-devil.
    He’d given her the worst room in the house when he could have offered her something comfortable upstairs. He’d taken cruel delight in baiting her today.
    Then she had removed her glasses and turned her fierce, mesmerizing gaze on him. Her eyes were green around the edges with sharply etched, nearly black perimeters. Near the pupils they were gold. He’d seen such strangely colored eyes in animals, but never in a human before.
    And her hair,
Dieu!
Even disheveled and mashed from hours under the scarf, it was glorious. Straight and thick, it hung to her shoulders in a blunt cut. It drooped over her left brow in a provocative, sultry way. The color was like blush wine or rose-tinted gold.
    He found himself feeling sympathy for her as he had the first time he saw the scar. His insinuation about Frank had really hurt her; the pain was obvious in her eyes. She wasn’t very good at hiding it. Perhaps that was another reason she favored sunglasses.
    Now Paul uttered a few ugly descriptions of his ownvulnerability. It was foolish to feel softhearted toward such a silly, self-centered dame. She had marched out of her room tonight to eat dinner with Frank and some of the cast members, pointedly excluding him from an invitation. She had looked like some sort of desert queen in a sensual dress of pastel silks.
    She stopped by the kitchen table, stared rudely at his bowl of red beans and rice, then ordered him to have Wolf waiting for her first thing in the morning. She rolled her eyes when he told her that he’d turned Wolf loose in the forests for a day or two, as therapy. Wolf would come back sometime tomorrow, maybe. She called him irresponsible for letting Wolf roam.
    She left hurriedly when he threatened to dump her into a bayou.
    Paul shut his eyes and concentrated on his music until an odd thumping noise interrupted him. He paused to listen, tilting his head to one side. The old mansion was full of strange noises made by benign ghosts. But ghosts didn’t pound the ceiling downstairs.
    He placed the location of the thumping and smiled broadly. The she-devil’s sticky, hot bedroom. She was undoubtedly having trouble sleeping, and his music didn’t help. She was sending him another of her orders:
Be quiet
.
    Grinning, Paul played on, choosing a loud, raucous jig this time. Within a minute he heard footsteps on the long staircase to the second floor.
    “Oh, no. Against the rules,
chère
,” he muttered aloud.
    Carrying the accordion, he strode to his door, flung it open, and went down a wide hall. She crested the top of the stairs and stopped in the pool of light from a wall sconce. He stopped in the shadows.
    “Quit playing that thing, will you?” she asked. “It sounds like a dying moose.”
    Paul ignored her words and caught his breath at the smooth sensuality she radiated. Even in the dim lighthe could see her breasts moving swiftly against the thin material of her silky black pajamas. Her hair glistened with red and gold highlights. Her face was flushed with anger.
    “I told you that upstairs is off limits to you Hollywood people,” he reminded her. “Don’t ever come up here again.”
    “You have window air conditioners in
three rooms up here,
” she protested. “I walked around the house tonight and looked. “I want one of those rooms.”
    “No. Not upstairs. You’re lucky that I let you stay downstairs.” He squeezed the