Seduced in September (Spring River Valley Book 9) Read Online Free Page A

insistent pounding between his ears, but after a moment he realized there was nothing else to listen to. He didn’t hear the shower running; he didn’t hear the clink of dishes from the kitchen (the last woman he’d brought home had made him breakfast in bed). The distant whoosh of traffic reached him along with the chirping of birds, but no one was breathing in the bedroom except for him.
    Had she left? Or had he imagined her? His addled brain showed him a pair of stormy blue-gray eyes and a waterfall of rich blond curls. He knew from the tingling skin across his shoulders that she’d left him with some scratches and very possibly a bite on his inner thigh.
    Oh, man . Now was not the time to be thinking about that.
    He reined in a wave of unrequited lust and slowly pulled himself to a sitting position. The boom, boom, boom intensified, and his brain decided to exert some unwelcome pressure on the backs of his eyeballs. What the hell had he drunk last night?
    He remembered sparkling gold flakes and the burn of some kind of spice. It was good. The bad kind of good that leaves you regretting everything you did…at least the parts you could remember.
    Car! The thought sent a pulse of panic through his torso, and his head rebelled by stabbing him in the eye. He covered his face with his hands and cursed. No. No car. He’d obviously gotten a ride home from Tanner and probably gave his partner his keys. He certainly wasn’t dumb enough to drive in this condition.
    Peering over the edge of the bed, he found his pants in a bundle, lying next to his shirt which was splayed open like a kite. His underwear hung from the shelf above his bed.
    His grin returned despite the pain in his skull. It had been a very good night.
    Yet she was gone.
    Well, there was nothing to be done about it at the moment. His choices seemed pretty clear. He could go back to sleep—and likely wake up feeling a little more human at some point before he had to go back to work tomorrow, or he could drag his ass to the shower and try to reduce the swelling of his brain by drowning it in cold water.
    Sleep won out. Grateful that unconsciousness was an option, he rolled to the side, grabbed the other pillow and pulled it toward him. Something crackled in his year and, cringing, he rummaged under his head for the source.
    The small rectangle of cheap paper looked like a receipt. He squinted at the blurry letters and managed to make out the words Quick Mart and spearmint . He’d gone to Quick Mart last night? That was clear across town. And for what? Gum?
    A millisecond before his hand received the command from his brain to crumple the paper up and throw it at the wastebasket, it occurred to him that the receipt wasn’t his. He flipped it over and peered at the dainty set of numbers written on the back in blue ink. A local phone number. It had to be hers.
    Dulled by his hangover, he spent the next couple of minutes flipping the little paper back and forth, hoping to find a name to go with the numbers, but there was none. How was it he could recall the color of her eyes and the texture of her skin but not her name or anything else about her?
    The cantankerous trill of his cell phone nearly knocked him out of bed. Now he did whimper as he scrambled on the floor and retrieved the phone from the pocket of his jeans. The second ring nearly split his skull open and, blinded by the pain, he jabbed at random tiny buttons and yelled “Hello?” until he managed to match the speaker portion of the phone to his ear. Maybe it was her.
    “Good morning, Mr. Goldschlager. This is your wakeup call.”
    “Ugh. Sorry, I’ve got the wrong—I mean, you’ve got the wrong num—”
    “It’s me, dumbass.”
    “Tanner?”
    “Bing, bing, bing! Now for the sudden death round, the million-dollar question is, how hung over are you this morning?”
    “Ugh, God. On a scale of one to ten, ten being a coma, I’m a solid eight.”
    “Better than I expected. How did you get back to