Passionate Persuasion (Entangled Indulgence) Read Online Free Page B

Sophie smoothly took the glass and her own, and turned away from the bar. “Come along, sweetie, and stop flirting with the bartender.”
    She felt herself blush to the roots of her French twist. “I wasn’t…”
    “You can’t help it,” Sophie said over her shoulder. “You are a sexy girl with a friendly face. Why you should need Lydia Benwick’s help to get a date, I’ll never know.”
    Sophie walked off to find them a table, leaving no tip for the barman but a wiggle of her Sophia Loren hips. Kiara slid the young man an extra dollar along with her own, hoping he’d gone on to the next customer, but he was watching her, suppressing a smile.
    “It’s true,” the bartender said with a grin and a shrug. Then he gestured her in closer. “My cousin works for the Regis and he said that even Mr. Drake said he deserved it, and anyone who talked about it outside the pub would get fired.”
    The blush grew painfully hot and painfully… painful. “But your cousin told you .”
    He put two fingers to his lips, then held them up. “Bartender’s code of silence. Your secret is safe with us.” Then he nodded over her shoulder. “But be careful with your friend. I’m not so sure about her.”
    Kiara turned to see Sophie regaling someone with a story. She wasn’t sure it was the story, but she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t. Kiara groaned and slapped a ten dollar bill on the bar. “Give me a bourbon. Neat.”
    He poured out a generous dram, she downed it—not a very Audrey Hepburn thing to do—and went to rescue her reputation in Port Calypso.
    When she reached Sophie and the small crowd she’d gathered—as Sophie was wont to do—she was relieved to hear her own name, but not attached to anyone else’s.
    “Here’s your wine, sweetie,” she said as Kiara arrived. “I was just telling everyone that we met in school, here at PCU.”
    A lady arts patron—really, they all had a look that made them interchangeable sometimes—took up the conversational baton. “You two were sorority sisters?”
    Sophie linked elbows with Kiara. “That’s how I convinced her to take the job here! She’s just what we need to bring national attention to our little symphony.”
    “It’s not that little,” said a gentleman arts patron, gruffly enough to distinguish himself. She recognized him from one of her interviews with the symphony board and gave him a sympathetic smile.
    “No,” she agreed, “it’s not. I’m honored to play here.”
    Lady Patron sipped her wine and gave Kiara a coy glance. “Even with your old flame Alex Drake in the picture?”
    Kiara shot a not-at-all-coy glance at Sophie, who shot a glance at the ceiling as she downed her martini. Then she organized her face into a polite expression and turned back to the woman who’d asked the question.
    “Oh, that was ages ago. Bygones are bygones and all that.”
    “Oh really,” said the woman, more arch by the minute. “So there were no sparks flying at the Regis Pub last week?”
    Seriously? Did the Port Calypso Daily have a gossip column? Was someone going to Tweet this? She wasn’t exactly the Miley Cyrus of cello players.
    “No sparks,” drawled Kiara, since it seemed obvious The Disaster at the Regis Pub had made its way through the grapevine. “Just ice cubes.”
    Chuckles all around proved her right, so Kiara figured she might as well laugh, too. It felt good, like unbraiding her hair or peeling off her Spanx.
    “It’s all okay,” she said, feeling like she was manufacturing a sound bite. “We’ve exchanged emails, and I apologized, and we’re all good. I’m looking forward to my season with the PC Symphony, and I’m very grateful to Mr. Drake for his contributions.”
    Her press conference tone put a period on the end of that subject. The lady patron and her interchangeable friends looked disappointed, but the cluster of people broke up and reorganized, the way they do at parties. Sophie walked off with one of the less-generic