Here to Stay (Silhouette Special Edition) Read Online Free Page A

there some connection between McLeod and Dr. Reiss? Whatever the cop’s reason for asking, Miles didn’t like him being in his face.
    “What if she did?”
    “Nice lady. I sure wouldn’t mind her coming to my rescue,” McLeod said, grinning smugly. Then he turned his back and walked out the door.
    Miles glared at the door as it closed slowly, shutting him in alone with his thoughts. And one of those thoughts was that Constable McLeod was too damn young for Sasha Reiss.
    Not that it was any of his business.
    * * *
    Sunday evening, when Miles answered Sasha’s knock, she noticed immediately that his voice was much stronger than the day before. She took a fortifying breath and pushed open the door. Miles was lying propped up in his bed, his battered face clean-shaven. The sheet and blanket bunched just above his waist, exposing a powerfully muscular chest so bruised that he looked as if he were wearing camouflage. The mat of hair covering the upper half of his chest was the same sable color as the hair spilling rakishly over the bandage on his forehead.
    Sasha swallowed hard, then summoned a smile to answer his. It wasn’t fair, she thought, for him to be so attractive. She didn’t know if he was married or involved, and the awful thing was, neither did he. She’d just have to pretend he was a horse. An old, swaybacked, flea-bitten, knock-kneed nag.
    Just the kind of horse she’d find herself adopting because no one else wanted him. No, better think of him as a man she didn’t know from Adam.
    “Hey, Doc. I thought you’d stood me up for some four-footed rival.” Miles’s golden eyes met hers. He sounded gruff, but she saw that he was trying to smile. His mouth looked so sore she could almost ignore the temptation to speculate about how mobile and expressive it must be. Good Lord, what was the matter with her?
    “I usually don’t work on Sundays unless I’m on a call, but I had a special job that ran late. A shipment of—” She broke off at the way he watched her speak. No, she couldn’t tell him.
    “A shipment of...?” he prompted. “Horses?”
    Inexplicably, heat rose to her cheeks. “No. It was nothing.”
    “C’mon, Doc. Your nothing is better than what’s been going on here. I’m too full of painkillers to focus on the paper, and the soap operas don’t do anything for me.”
    She studied the light fixture above Miles’s bed as if it were a piece of fine sculpture. “A shipment of stallion semen was delayed at the airport in Montreal. By the time the mare’s owner picked it up at the Buttonville airport, between here and Toronto, it was late afternoon.”
    “So you were playing Cupid by proxy?”
    She nodded, wondering why she was having so much trouble looking him in the eye when she’d given public lectures on artificial insemination to rooms full of strangers.
    “I don’t think I’d like being a stallion,” he said solemnly.
    Sasha glanced at him and he winked. She laughed, suddenly more comfortable with him. And yet, not comfortable at all. Instinctively she recognized that Miles Kent was not the kind of man who’d be a woman’s buddy. He’d be a lover, maybe a business associate, but not a chum. There was too much raw vitality, too much pure sexuality emanating from him to let any woman relax completely. It was the kind of reaction she’d longed to feel for that one “right man,” which Miles, a stranger just passing through her life, definitely wasn’t.
    “Some stallions are luckier than others,” she told him, firmly tamping down her awareness of him. “But distance makes some relationships difficult, if not impossible. Not everyone can afford to ship a mare and board her for a month or more at the stallion’s farm. A couple of hundred years ago stallion owners would travel with their horses. But that’s pretty tough on the stallion.”
    Miles raised his dark brows. “Puts a new spin on the concept of cruising, doesn’t it?”
    She smiled. “At least these studs