Read Online Hold Me Tight: Heartbreakers by Cait London - Free Book Online Page A

suite’s desk. She closed her eyes and thought of her husband’s last words. I want you to be happy, my dear. I blame myself for not spending enough time with Howard when he needed it. Promise me that you won’t ignore happiness when it finds you?
    Jessica rubbed the palm Alexi had kissed against her thigh. The stirring of her senses, his arousal against her, the frame of his strong body around hers as they rode to the Stepanovs’ this morning, disturbed Jessica. Alexi Stepanov was six-feet-three inches of pure trouble, not happiness.
    She looked out of the windows and thought of the Hawaiian chieftain who lay in his grave on Strawberry Hill, amid the low clouds and mist. He’d hated dying away from his homeland and had leveled a curse against the land he could not escape….
    Alexi Stepanov was definitely Jessica’s curse.
    But he was also a man that her instincts told her she could trust.
     

    The bell over the door tinkled merrily as Alexi entered Willow’s Soaps. He noted that there was no burglar alarm or video camera. Aware of his size in the tiny, cluttered shop, Alexi moved carefully through the displays, the brochures about businesses in Amoteh and the tables filled with soap still in their molds.
    In the off-season, the shop was quiet and scented. Alexi passed a stack of addressed shipping boxes. He noted a bowl of polished worry stones, probably from Ed and Bliss, who had settled in Amoteh. The parents of Leigh, Jarek Stepanov’s wife, were carefree souls fitting well into the Amoteh community. A variety of love beads seemed to shift and glitter as Alexi moved by them, reminding him of the gentle lecture Bliss had given him about listening to his inner self, to align his chakras and let his female side emerge. A neat stack of her tie-dyed T-shirts lay on the counter where Willow had evidently been wrapping bars of soap in waxed paper and raffia, carefully labeling them.
    Willow suddenly popped up from beneath the counter, her masses of waving black hair bobbing as she stared at him. Her little glasses were perched at the end of her nose, and she was wearing a battered sweat suit. Her eyes were rounded and filled with fear—“Oh, I thought you might be someone else—”
    Evidently flustered, she recovered quickly. “Hi, Alexi. I’m just wrapping soap. It’s a great ginseng and lemongrass blend. Smell—”
    She pushed a tiny bar at him and added quickly, “For a woman, not a man. I don’t stock the shop fully this time of year, but still, I do pretty good at Christmas. And your cousin, Mikhail, is just super, ordering my strawberry soaps for the resort, and I love the strawberry logo, and he gave me a good supply of them to label the soaps. Are you here to pick them up? I’m sorry, I don’t have them ready, but I can deliver them right away. I just have to put the labels on them. I’m glad the gift shop is letting me put my shop’s information on them, and I might start a catalog for people who want to order later, and did you want to buy something?”
    Willow seemed to be desperately trying to conceal her anxiety. Alexi dutifully smelled the soap and handed it back to her. At the dance she’d seemed relaxed and delightful; now she was obviously tense and distracted. “Is something wrong, Willow?”
    She shook her head and that hair, parted in the middle, quivered softly around her head. “Nope,” she seemed to squeak in a high-pitched voice. “Just busy. I’m working on genealogy, you know, just getting the families of Amoteh, and I worked late last night. I have an apartment in the back and I heard a noise, and I—oh, it was nothing of course, but still I had a difficult time going back to sleep. It really was nothing, Alexi.”
    Too earnest in her denial, Willow was evidently hiding something. “The dance at the resort last week was really nice,” she said quickly. “Thanks for dancing with me. I’m pretty clumsy. Um…did you come here for a special reason? I don’t want to take