I Saw Her Standing There Read Online Free

big house starts to feel awfully small when all the Abbotts are in residence.”
    “That must be crazy.”
    “You can’t even imagine.”
    “Isn’t this your parents’ room?”
    “When they’re here, yeah. But they don’t care if the rest of us use it.” He went ahead of her and flipped on the lights in the bathroom.
    “Oh, wow. Is that a hot tub?”
    “Sure is. The window above it opens. It’s pretty cool. You want to check it out?”
    “Only if you do, too.”
    “You’re on.” Colton turned on the water and opened the window to let in the soft evening breeze off the lake. “Go ahead and get changed. I’ll be right back.”
    He left her with a kiss and closed the door behind him as he left the room.

CHAPTER 3

    After two days of below-20 temps and a nice rest for the crew, tapping resumed today. They tap only when the temp is above 20, to prevent splitting the tree in the brittle cold, and because tubing repair goes along so nicely without stiff hands and tubing. Another day or two and the sugarbush will be tapped out.
    —Colton Abbott’s sugaring journal, February 19
    A fter the door clicked shut, Lucy stood in the middle of the huge bathroom and took a moment to calm her frazzled nerves. Sometimes she still wanted to pinch herself because she’d captured the attention of a sweet, funny man who also happened to be so hot he made her blood boil.
    When they were together, she tried not to think about the overwhelming issues that hung over their relationship. When they were apart, the issues were all she thought about, especially after last weekend when things had taken a decidedly erotic turn.
    All week, those memories had run through her mind when she was trying to concentrate at work, when she was with her friends and family, when she was trying to sleep at night while wishing he was sleeping with her.
    From the beginning, she’d told him she had no interest in getting serious with someone who lived in another state. And yet here she was with him for yet another weekend—the sixth she’d spent alone with him. As she looked for the bikini he’d told her to bring for swimming in the lake, she realized her palms were sweaty and her heart was beating fast at the thought of what might transpire between them this weekend.
    So much for not getting serious.
    “Ugh,” she said as she quickly got changed, folded her clothes and stashed them in her bag.
    More than anything, Lucy wished she could call her best friend and hash it all out with Cameron, but at the beginning, she and Colton had agreed to keep their “friendship” private for the time being. As the weeks went by, the big “secret” seemed to grow and take on a life of its own until telling Cameron would also mean confessing to having kept something rather huge from her friend for all this time.
    She and Cam didn’t keep things from each other, especially not potentially life-changing things such as what was beginning to look an awful lot like a legitimate relationship with the brother of her best friend’s boyfriend. Lucy sighed, pained by how complicated something supposedly uncomplicated was getting.
    “More sighs,” Colton said when he came into the bathroom wearing a pair of board shorts that left his incredibly muscular chest, shoulders, arms and belly bare to her hungry gaze. He’d told her before the muscles had resulted from the endless need for split wood to run the sugaring facility. Images of him wielding an axe had fueled many a fantasy since he’d mentioned that.
    “You weren’t supposed to hear that sigh.” She glanced up at his ruggedly handsome face to discover a gaze as hungry as hers taking in the sight of her in a bikini, which naturally made her flush from head to toe. She hated her fair complexion and how it gave away her every thought and emotion.
    Thankfully, he chose not to ask about the sigh he’d overheard, preferring to take her hand and lead her into the hot tub.
    As she eased into the warm water that