Last Night's Kiss Read Online Free Page B

glanced at Vida, who’d sidled up beside him.
    “I can feel the friction between you two, but you have to admit, you can’t keep your eyes off her.”
    “You shouldn’t spend so much time on that leg,” Adam said, distracting himself from Vida’s all too true comment.
    “I’ll take care of it,” she said. “Now answer my question.”
    Giving his full attention to Vida, he was surprised to find that he didn’t want to look away from Rosa. There was something fascinating about her. Something that commanded not only his attention, but every man’s in the room.
    “If I didn’t know better,” Adam told her, “I’d say you were into a little matchmaking.”
    “It wouldn’t hurt you to get serious about a woman.”
    “It wouldn’t help me, either.”
    Since Vida had returned to her childhood home, she and Mike Holmes had picked up their relationship just where they’d left it when the three of them were back in high school. Vida thought Adam had put his life on hold and that finding a mate would do him good. She was wrong.
    “Besides, she’s way too beautiful for me.”
    He lifted the drink he was holding and sipped the glass of champagne. They rarely had champagne at parties. Waymon Valley was more a beer and pretzel place. They had a couple of white-tablecloth restaurants, but their parties were mainly barbecues. Glancing at Rosa Clayton, he understood the reason for the drink. She moved through the room like a queen.
    “I don’t think so,” Vida said. “She’s more than a pretty face. She’s got a brain, too. Wait until you get to know her.”
    “I’m not going to get to know her. I don’t expect our paths to cross more than a few times the entire summer if she stays that long.” He clearly didn’t see it happening. “Come September she’ll be off to Paris or Rome or Australia and I’ll be tending horses and making sure my father takes his medicine.”
    They both looked toward Bailey Osborne. He was talking to Rosa. She laughed at something he said. Bailey was a charmer, Adam thought. Even at his age, women still vied for his company.
    “What’s she doing here?” Adam asked. He wasn’t one to skirt an issue. As a reporter, he needed the facts and baldly asked Vida.
    “Vacationing, visiting a friend, finding a place to unwind. Being a model is hard work and no one works harder than Rosa.”
    “Why here? And for three whole months. This sounds more like hiding out than just spending time with friends. You heard her. Staying with friends for longer than a few days…” He trailed off.
    Vida laughed. “You’ve been a reporter too long,” she accused. “This is not the naked city or the nation’s capital. Stop looking for conspiracy theories around every corner.”
    “The problem with that,” he told her, “is there usually is a conspiracy around every corner.”

Chapter 2
    It must have something to do with the curvature of the earth, Rosa thought as she look up at the sky from her new patio. She’d met Vida in Greece during a photo shoot, and naturally the two had talked about their origins, their families, and where they lived. When Vida told her how big the sky was in Montana, Rosa took it with a grain of salt, but today she understood. It was something you had to see. It couldn’t be filmed or photographed, at least not with justice to the splendor and vastness. She needed to be able to stand in the space and bathe in the limitless light.
    Rosa place a bowl of fruit on the table. She’d moved into her rented house three days ago, two weeks after she’d stepped off the plane. It was freshly painted and had two stories. Unlike Vida’s development house, this place was rustic with a loft bedroom on the top level. She’d divided the space into two areas, using a third of it as an office. She’d found an old fax machine downstairs. Bringing it up, she put it on a makeshift desk and left a place to sit the computer she’d ordered. She used to have video conferencing equipment