Ugly Ducklings Finish First Read Online Free Page A

smiled to mask the dangerous sexual awareness closing around him like a fist. What Payton was making him feel—the breathless excitement that made his skin too tight for comfort—was coming at him like a sucker punch, and he didn’t have a clue how to handle it. This wasn’t some random woman he could amuse himself with for the night, only to send her on her merry way with a kiss and a vague promise to call. This was Payton , for God’s sake. Best to think of her as the Baby Brain he’d once known, rather than a hot-as-hell seductress who could make him hard from all the way across the gym.
    No, damn it. He wouldn’t think of that. And he wouldn’t let himself feel it, either. Payton was out of his reach, and that was all there was to it.
    He just had to keep remembering that.
    * * *
    The beat of a bluesy tune twined around the couples crowding the dance floor, but Payton never noticed. She was so wrapped up in the man who held her, they might as well have been locked in an isolation chamber. On a desert island. In the exact geographic middle of nowhere.
    Wiley Sharpe.
    The hysterical urge to laugh bubbled up, and Payton had to work at wrestling it back down. Back in the day Wiley had been her nemesis, her secret fantasy and her only acquaintance in Bitterthorn High. She refused point-blank to call him a friend . Even now that label was far too anemic for what he’d eventually come to represent in her life. And with that realization came another—she had told Wiley she’d come back for herself, and while that was true, it wasn’t the whole truth. As Wiley’s thighs brushed against hers in an illusion of seduction, she could secretly cop to another reason.
    She’d come back for him.
    “So.” She backed away on the excuse of looking up at him, when her real goal was to avoid that brain-melting friction of thigh against thigh. “Now that I’ve impressed you with my life’s resume, let’s talk about you.”
    He grimaced, and it was as charming as his smile. “Boring subject.”
    “Not to me.”
    He looked around the room as if he would find the answers there. “I doubt you’ll believe me.”
    “Why? Are you going to lie?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Then I’ll believe you.”
    “Fine. I’m a lawyer. Really,” he added defensively and stared hard at her, as if daring her to laugh.
    “Oh, my. Wiley, that’s wonderful .” She threw her arms around his neck and pressed a smacking kiss to his clean-shaven cheek before she could stop herself. “I always knew you had it in you.”
    “Yeah?” Smiling in apparent bemusement, he raised an absent hand to his cheek. “You’re not surprised?”
    “Should I be?”
    “Everyone else is.”
    The resentment threading through his words made her smile. “They don’t know you as well as they thought they did.”
    “But you do?”
    Her heart executed a Baryshnikov-level pirouette when his tone lowered to a purring intimacy, and she hated herself for it. Intimacy with the Coyote was the last thing a smart woman needed, and if she was one thing, she was smart. “I guess I did know you, a decade ago. But remember, I haven’t seen you since I left for college.”
    “Not true.” Another couple bumped into them, oblivious to everyone but each other. Wiley’s arms curled around her back to shield her, bringing them together in one long line of heat. “I saw you the day of your father’s funeral.”
    “Oh.” Payton’s brain stumbled to a halt the moment his body pressed flush against hers. Alarm bells went off while a crazy quilt of surprise, desperation and a pulsating, primitive awareness smothered her thought processes until only one thing was left to echo through the sudden stillness of her mind.
    Oh man , what a body.
    Scrabbling for composure and trying not to drool, she struggled not to notice how the beat of his heart thudded against her breasts. “I don’t remember seeing you that day.”
    “I’m not surprised. We barely had time to speak, but I