Read Online A Crazy Kind of Love by Maureen Child - Free Book Online Page A

apparently futile attempt to keep her from “dropping by.” So what does he do instead? Pick her the hell up in town?
    Was there a conspiracy of some sort going on around here? Some twisted sense of fate that kept throwing this woman at him, like darts at a target?
    “Why? Robbing a bank?”
    “Nothing so interesting. I’m buying furniture. You’d be bored.”
    “Bored?” she repeated and gave him a grin that zapped something deep inside him. Something he was going to ignore completely. “How could I possibly be bored, shopping with someone else’s money?”
    He sighed, threw the gear shift into fourth, and stepped on the gas as they took the coast road. “What was I thinking?”
    The furniture salesmen followed Mike around the store like kids scrambling to be the first one into a carnival. They jockeyed for her attention, and when she smiled at one of them, they acted as though someone had handed them a fistful of cash.
    Lucas couldn’t blame them. Even he was impressed. She knew furniture. She knew fabrics. And damned if she didn’t have an opinion about everything in the place.
    Not that he cared. He knew what he wanted.
    “I’ll take this one,” he said, and was forced to grab the arm of the salesman closest to him because the man was so focused on Mike he was hardly breathing.
    “What? Yes. Oh sure.” The guy looked from Lucas to Mike and back again. “This one?”
    “Yeah.” Lucas looked at it again. Mission style, the big bed would go along with the Spanish-style house. Plus, it was huge. Simplicity itself, the head and footboard were made of wide, polished oak slats and at each corner stood sturdy oak posts. Perfect.
    “You’ve got to be kidding.”
    He looked at Mike. She stared at the bed for a long minute and then looked up at him again and shook her head. “That’s all wrong.”
    “How can a bed
I
want be the wrong bed for me?” He folded his arms across his chest and loomed over her. Not too difficult since the top of her head hit his chin. But the woman was nothing if not sure of herself.
    She glared right back at him. “Just because the house is Spanish style doesn’t mean everything inside it has to be. Expand your horizon a little.”
    The salesmen standing around her in a half-circle all nodded sagely as if she’d just stepped down from the Mount with two tablets in her arms.
    “My bed. My house.”
    “Your house,” she agreed. “Please, not that bed.”
    “What the hell difference can it possibly make to you?”
    “Oh please.” She waved one hand at her own face. “It would upset anyone with a sense of style. Couldthere be a more boring bed? It looks like a high-school wood-shop project.”
    One of the salesmen sniffed.
    Mike ignored him.
    “Why are you here again?” Lucas muttered.
    “To save you from yourself apparently.” Mike smiled, took his arm, then parted the sea of salesmen with the wave of one hand. Steering him across the showroom, she slipped behind a set of leather sofas and a plaid recliner that looked damn comfortable and came to a stop in front of the bed
she
preferred.
    “This is the one.”
    Lucas was determined not to like it. Damn it, she’d stuck her nose into everything in his life in the last two months and the only thing he’d stood his ground on was his damn balcony in his own damn bedroom. Well, Mike Marconi was in for another disappointment. No way was he going to like the damn bed. No way was he caving in. He wanted the big, plain, sturdy bed and that’s just the one he was going to . . .
    He looked at the one she’d chosen.
    Bigger than the Mission style, the sleigh bed was solid mahogany and richly beautiful. “One of a kind,” the salesman closest to him muttered and Lucas believed him. The dark wood was burled on the head- and footboard and deeply carved into the grain was a twining spiral of ivy. The mattress was high and thick and damned if it didn’t look inviting.
    “You like it.”
    Yeah, he did. But he hated like hell to