Passionate Persuasion (Entangled Indulgence) Read Online Free

hell happened to you?” Greg asked from behind his scrupulously tidy desk.
    “Don’t ask,” warned Alex, going to the closet where he kept a change of clothes. Running a restaurant and bar meant long hours.
    “You know when you say that,” said Greg, swinging his chair around, “it only makes me more curious.”
    Alex peeled off his shirt on his way to the office’s small washroom. “I’m sure you can get the story from the staff later.”
    He and Greg had been best friends since college. They might as well be brothers, with all the good and bad that entailed. Like how, by the time Alex had cleaned the sticky drink out of his hair and buttoned up a new shirt, he could already hear maniacal laughter coming through the open door.
    “Holy crap!” said Greg through his laughter. Alex found him peering at the computer screen, and the cc TV footage from the bar where Kiara was throwing the drink in his face on a soundless five second loop. “I should post this on Facebook.”
    “You do and you’re dead.” Not for his sake. That was not the first drink he’d had thrown in his face—though to his credit, or at least he thought so, it had been years since he’d deserved it and maybe never as much as he deserved it tonight.
    But he felt a hot rush of protectiveness toward Kiara. He shouldn’t have laughed at her for cursing—God knew he really had fucked up—but she’d taken him by surprise, in her adorable, spitting-kitten fury. And yes, he’d found the drink-flinging thing funny, too, until he saw how embarrassed she was.
    It had been a long time since his last pub-brawl, too. But anyone who gave her grief about this would answer to him. Including his best friend.
    He let Greg off the hook, however, because his glee was entirely at Alex’s expense, which was as it should be, and how it usually was. Alex calmly walked to his own desk and sat like he had pressing work to do.
    “That girl looks familiar,” said Greg, pausing the video and peering closer.
    “I dated her in college.” He watched him out of the side of his eye, to see if he would let it drop.
    Greg enlarged the image. “No shit! That’s Miss Iowa State Fair!”
    “Kansas,” corrected Alex, aloud, and crap , to no one but himself.
    “You dated her for a while.”
    “A couple of months.”
    “I remember now. You broke up with her right before the winter formal.” Greg left a significant pause. Or maybe Alex’s memory gave it extra weight. “I always thought that was kind of a dickish thing to do.”
    “Well, you would know,” said Alex calmly, not liking the pot/kettle thing going on. Not liking the reminder that he’d been a dick.
    Finally he gave in to temptation and opened a browser window, typing her name into the search field—something he’d resisted doing since he’d first gotten her email address and realized who she was, who Mrs. Benwick considered his perfect match. He hadn’t wanted his decision to be based on how she looked now.
    There were several pages of Google hits. Kiara Fredericks didn’t just play the cello. She played the cello. There were actual articles about her, using words like “rising star” and “virtuoso.” In the images section, there were thumbnails from performances and events, but Alexander clicked on one with the glossy look of official publicity photo. The image filled his screen—Kiara wearing a scarlet dress, her dark hair pinned up with sparkly clips, her neck and shoulder arched gracefully as she pulled the bow across the strings of the cello she held almost sensually in front of her.
    No, not almost. Definitely sensually.
    Kiara 2.0 was beautiful, sexy, and talented. She was cosmopolitan and polished, and exactly the type of woman he went for every time. Every time except once, for two months in the fall of his senior year in college, when he’d met a freckled farm girl with a laugh and a temper and bank of twenty-dollar words and a talent for getting under his skin. It made him a