Love Me Tonight - Four Erotic Romance Stories for Valentine's Day - Boxed Set Read Online Free

behind glass and roped off. A large crowd milled about, thickening around the curve of rope, taking sound-effect flash-free snapshots with their smart phones.
    She wondered how many people here were checking something off their bucket list, like she was. Not that she’d admit that. She could wax on about the genius of da Vinci if she wanted to (he really was a Renaissance genius who probably would have been diagnosed ADHD had he been born in this era) and the importance of art history and the museums established to contain and make that art accessible. She was part of the art education system, after all, as Director of Operations for San Francisco’s de Young Museum. It was her duty to visit museums while on holiday. Plus she would be able to write off her admission ticket.
    Not that this was a business trip. This was a heartache retreat, and a salt-in-the-wound one at that. Didn’t it make complete sense to go to Paris, city of love, over Valentine’s Day, just after you’d been dumped? She’d given herself a proverbial kick in the butt after she’d authorized the credit card transaction on the Last Minute Deals site. Who could resist a $750 airfare plus seven nights’ stay in a studio apartment in Paris? And one of Richard’s scoffing comments had haunted her ever since they'd first started dating two years earlier: “You work for a museum and you’ve never seen the Mona Lisa?”
    She’d never been to Florence either, and that had been a bone of derision as well, but there were no cheap tickets to Italy to be found, so Florence had been added to her bucket list. Next summer, she'd promised herself. She would work extra hours to save up enough to have a couple of weeks to linger there, and by then she hoped she wouldn’t be hearing Richard’s condescending voice in her head anymore.
    He had broken up with her before Christmas, the worst time for a break up—when gifts are already bought and visits to family already planned. She hated him for his bad timing, but it hadn’t stopped there. By New Year’s she had found out he was seeing someone else—surely someone he’d had his eye on before he broke up with her—and then last week, a friend of hers had leaked that Richard was planning to propose to his rebound on Valentine’s Day. All Laine wanted to do was escape. So she did. Nothing like a credit card and the internet to make fantasies come true.
    Laine checked her phone and saw that it was ten minutes less than the hour Colin had stipulated. Should she go to the pyramid? Would he even show up? Her feet were already sore and her head felt cottony from museum air and the heavy energy that surrounded old art. So many stories clung to each piece, and to Laine it often felt like walking through a thick physical fog of things she could sense but not reach out and touch, let alone comprehend. This mysterious effect had initially attracted her to the art world but was also a force she had to contend with and sometimes it won, especially in the big old European institutions. She would love to lie down on one of the benches and have a nap. She’d done that once at the de Young after hours and it had been the most delightful nap of her life. But if she tried that here as a visitor, one of the docents would rouse her and gently escort her to the exit. No napping was one of the rules.
    Some fresh air would rouse her energy, and she was curious to see if the handsome Englishman would show up. What did she have to lose? In fact, she might have something to gain. Not long after she and Richard had broken up she had, in a fit of sorts, added something to her bucket list: Have meaningless sex with a stranger. Even after her fit had passed, she hadn’t been inclined to remove this item. Nor had she had the chance to cross it off. In fact, she’d even tucked a single condom in her wallet as a lucky charm, but she’d yet to cash in on its luck.
    Laine’s bucket list was comprised of things she wanted to do and also