Resisting Molly Read Online Free

my best to pretend that everything was going great.
     
October rolled in and Jonathan switched back to his regular work schedule. It hardly mattered, though, because I was too thoroughly swamped with homework to see him much more than before. Out of pity for me he took over the grocery shopping, insisting that my school work was more important and he was perfectly capable of handling it until I was ready to tackle it again, and more than once I dragged home late to find takeout or a pizza waiting for me on the kitchen stove. And every time he did something sweet or considerate like that my heart skipped a little and I slid a bit further down that slippery slope towards the abyss.
     
I didn’t want to love him. He was Brynn’s father, for one thing, which made him as old as my dad. Not that the word old ever crossed my mind when I looked at him, but I could just imagine the squawking and gossiping around our small town. Heck, I knew there was a tongue or two already wagging because I was living with him, despite the fact that I’d already been living at his house half the time since I was in middle school. The difference was that now I was living there alone with him. There were undoubtedly women in town ready to start sewing scarlet ‘A’s on my clothes.
     
To top that he was a doctor—he had money and a nice house and a Mercedes convertible and he was sophisticated and I was not my mother . While those things didn’t matter to me, if I went after Jonathan that was exactly what everyone in town would think and whisper behind my back. Just like her mother . There was no way to avoid that so even if I wanted something to happen between us it couldn’t work. It was simply impossible.
     
So of course when he asked me out I didn’t hesitate for so much as a second.
     
It had been a grueling week for us both. My professors had teamed me with a bunch of slackers for two group projects so that I ended up doing the lion’s share of the work in both classes, while the hospital had dragged Jonathan out of bed three times for late-night emergency surgeries after car wrecks. He came in Friday afternoon, took one look at me sprawled on the couch staring blankly at the ceiling, and shook his head.
     
“Go get dressed. I’m taking you out to dinner.”
     
My jaw dropped. I couldn’t have heard him right. “What?”
     
“You need to get out of here for a while. I don’t think you’ve been out for fun one single time since you moved in here, and you’ve hardly had time to come up for air in the last two weeks. So I’m taking you to dinner—somewhere nice .”
     
A swarm of butterflies flash mobbed my stomach and turned it into an impromptu mosh pit. Heck, my stomach was doing flip-flops that would have qualified it as an Olympic gymnast, and I sat up so fast I got lightheaded.
     
“We’re going out?” I squeaked.
     
“Yes,” Jonathan said patiently, but his eyes sparkled with amusement. “I’ll give you half an hour to get dressed, then I’m coming up after you to carry you off whether you’re ready or not.”
     
I leaped off the couch and flew up the stairs without touching more than one out of every three steps, but once I got into my room and closed the door I gave myself a good shake. I was crazy—this was so not a date. He was just taking his daughter’s friend out to a friendly dinner that was absolutely in no way, shape, or form any kind of date. Casual, that’s all it was.
     
But was that all I wanted it to be?
     
Startled by the thought I froze with my back against the door while my mind mulled that one over. The memory of the look on Jonathan’s face the night he had come home from College Station still haunted me, and a part of me wanted very much to have him look at me that way again. More, I wanted him to do something about it. I had secretly wanted him to do something for weeks, no matter how much I denied it to myself, and the more time I spent around him the worse it got.
     
How do