Ulterior Motives Read Online Free

time to pull away—as if she could possibly want to.
    “Just this.” He breathed against her lips an instant before his mouth touched hers in a soft kiss. It was a feather-light caress, warm and tender, lasting scarcely a second. They stayed with their faces close together, enjoying each other’s nearness for a long, silent moment as they savored the promise in that brief kiss.
    Shelley was amazed that a mere kiss could make her quiver, could fill her mind with erotic thoughts, could make her long to melt against him and find out what else he did so well.
    “I could stay like this all day,” he murmured. “But I only put a quarter in the parking meter.”
    Shelley smiled. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    “Until tomorrow,” he said, and then he left.
    Shelley looked at the door after he’d gone, allowing herself one last moment of pleasure over him. Then she sighed and headed toward her office. Francesca stood in her doorway and peered at her curiously.
    “You were back there a long time,” Francesca observed.
    “Oh?”  
    “He is a real man,” Francesca said enthusiastically.
    “I suppose so,” Shelley agreed, remaining nonchalant.
    “You have found a good lover,” Francesca said with certainty.
    “He’s not my lover. He just gave me a lift,” Shelley said.
    “Ah, no, cara, he looks at you the way a real man looks at a woman he wants,” Francesca declared with relish.
    “Have you nothing else to do today except chiacchierare?” Shelley prodded, feeling a little embarrassed.
    “Ahhh,” Francesca said wisely. She went back to her desk.
    Shelley was picking up the phone, hoping to secure a French teacher for that evening’s class, when Wayne Thompson came bounding through the front entrance and charged into her office. He flung his lanky frame into a chair before her desk and shook his blond hair.
    “Whatever you’re doing, put it aside, put down the phone—” He snatched the receiver out of her hand. “—and listen to me. ”
    “Yes, Wayne, has something happened?” Shelley asked dryly.
    “You were right, I was wrong—”
    “Heavens to Betsy.”
    “Mr. Charles Winston-Clarke has good cause to be uptight today.”
    “If this is about Chuck,” Shelley said, “it can wait till later.”
    “No, it can’t. Wait until you get a load of this!” Wayne was just pushy enough to extract information from people that they really hadn’t intended to give him, and Shelley was curious to know what had prompted his whirlwind entrance.
    “Well?” she prodded.
    “Well, since you came to Cincinnati over a year ago, we’ve given Elite very serious competition for new business. I might add that my own contribution to our success and their lack of it has not been negligible—”
    “Get to the point.”
    “Patience, I am. It seems that while Cincinnati was a quiet little city with two quiet little unsuccessful language schools downtown, the folks at Elite’s headquarters in Paris didn’t pay any attention to either of us. But now the city is growing by leaps and bounds, and Keene International is just one of a number of big companies offering considerable opportunities to a reputable language center. The great minds at Elite are feeling somewhat perturbed that, while they’ve been concentrating their energies elsewhere, we’ve elbowed them out of all new business here this year.”
    “Well, that’s their tough luck for not looking ahead,” Shelley said.
    “Their thoughts exactly.”
    Shelley looked at him speculatively. “Are they thinking about replacing Chuck?”
    “It’s a little more interesting than that. They’re sending a fix-it man.”
    “A what?”
    “They’ve evidently got some guy whose whole job is to go around reorganizing schools that are losing money. He’s directly responsible to Henri Montpazier, the president of the whole company, and to no one else.”
    “Is he some kind of marketing expert?” Shelley asked.
    “I don’t know what his actual background is.