Working With Heat Read Online Free

about him. Chest. Abdomen. His cock, thickening against her lower belly.
    His hand cupped her jaw, his thumbs brushing her cheekbones, then he bent his head and kissed her, using lips and teeth and tongue to capture her mouth. Charlie had learned patience handling sand heated until it became liquid, pliable. He’d learned how to seduce a woman by working with heat. He didn’t rush. He drew it out, nipping at her lips, tilting his head to kiss the corner of her mouth, then her jaw, before returning to her mouth and using his lips to open it farther, his tongue advancing in slow stages, until she stepped closer, giving most of her weight to his body, weaving her thigh between his. She put her hands on his hips and tucked her index and middle fingers through his belt loops, pulling him closer, letting herself get absorbed in the texture of his beard against her lips and tongue. He turned, seeking out her ear, nipping at the lobe.
    She bent her head to rest on his shoulder, felt the heat of his skin through the fine cotton of his shirt, smelled the scent of him, so elemental. Soap, skin, the heat he absorbed all day. He’d been her friend for months, but now there was the possibility of something more. “Invite me up.”
    His fingers trailed through her hair to her jaw. He brushed his thumb across her lips and said, “Are you sure?”
    There were a dozen good reasons not to do this, not to sleep with her friend. Ruining the friendship. Making things awkward between all five of them. But the look in Charlie’s eyes was one really good reason to do this, and Milla had never been one to act out of fear. She’d take a chance on the chemistry, knowing she’d put their friendship at stake.
    “I’m sure,” she said, and kissed him again.

Chapter Two
    In the split second after Milla whispered, “Invite me up,” Charlie thought through all the reasons why this was a really bad idea. By the time he was Milla’s age, his ex-wife had burned him to a husk, both personally and professionally. He’d changed everything for her, moved out of the East End, polished up his accent, ignored the way glass called to him as an artist because he’d believed her dreams for them were better than his.
    Then she’d shattered those dreams in the most public, humiliating way.
    He’d crawled back to his roots, sown deep in the East End, to friends like Billy, to his family (who, for the most part, refrained from saying
I
told you that wouldn’t work
when he’d stumbled out of the divorce with not even his pride). He’d apprenticed himself to a master glass artist, learned his art, nurtured relationships with the overseas galleries immune to his ex-wife’s influence, giving him an outlet for the work he created once he could even think about art again.
    Milla was impossible to slot into a neat little compartment like East End boy or West End girl. American, but born in England and raised all over the world. Living her life through her mobile to the point where he wanted to wing the bloody thing in the Thames. Maybe that was worse, falling for someone whose roots were sown in the internet.
    For four long years he’d fought to rebuild his life and career. Risking it all on someone whose idea of privacy was so warped it included asking total strangers to pick her dates wasn’t just a really bad idea. It was madness. But his body, home to the animal instincts that had led him wrong with Chelsea, the desires he’d taught himself to ignore, was saying this was the best idea he’d ever had.
    Lightning round to break the tie. His body won, his brain taken down by the roundhouse punch of desire lighting him up like molten glass. Peering into her big brown eyes, feeling the lush softness of her body against his, lit him up like only the best kind of risk could. So very, very wrong, and yet so very, very right. Dangerous combination, that.
    But then she said she was sure and kissed him again, and he remembered what it was like to want, the power