Read Online Sinful Suspense Box Set by Tess Oliver - Free Book Online

break.
    I stepped inside. Hal wasn’t at his desk. Dozens of paper piles sat in a checked pattern on the cement floor. The file cabinets had been moved out of the corner and were sitting in the center of the room for easy access.
    A soft voice drifted out from behind the file cabinet. “W, W is next.” She stepped out into the checkerboard of files and looked up. They were the bluest damn eyes I’d ever seen and her perfect cherry lips parted in surprise when she saw me. She was wearing a bulky sweater that was so big, she had to roll up the sleeves.
    “Tashlyn, right?”
    “Uh, yes, hello. Jem?”
    “Yeah.” I glanced around at the papers on the floor. “You’re the new office helper?”
    She held back a smile as she surveyed the wall to wall file folders. “Yes. I guess I have my work cut out for me.”
    “Looks that way.”
    She blinked her incredibly long lashes at me reminding me of a nervous fawn standing in the center of a forest of office clutter. “Oh, you’re here for the orders.” The clunky sleeve of the sweater rolled over her hand, and she blew an irritated puff of breath up from a perfectly plump bottom lip as she stopped to roll up it again. “Mr. Stevens said someone would be coming in to pick them up.” Keeping up with the fawn image, she hopped gracefully, on long legs, over the mosaic of folders and slipped behind the desk. She pushed the papers around.
    “It’s the pink one,” I said.
    The sweater sleeve rolled down again, and she quickly pushed it back, exposing the smooth white wrist and forearm beneath. She tucked a long strand of hair behind her ear as she flipped through the stack of papers. Every move had my undivided attention.
    “Ah ha.” She pulled out the orders. “Pink.”
    “Guess it’s good they’re a different color.”
    She held up the paper and stared at me over the desk.
    I looked pointedly at my shoes. “If I walk across your handiwork here on the floor, I’m going to be turning all these files into Swiss cheese.”
    She hopped up on tiptoes and looked down at my feet. “Oh, right. Those do look sort of menacing. Definitely don’t want to wear sandals around you,” she said with a smile.
    Now it was my turn to stare back at her over the desk. It was the first time I’d seen her smile, and it went right along with the rest of her.
    “Holy shit,” I said on the breath I finally released.
    “Excuse me?”
    I shook my head. “Nothing, just still trying to figure out why the heck a girl like you is standing here in this mill.”
    “A girl like me? Are you some kind of a psychic that you can actually tell what kind of girl I am?”
    I squinted at her. “Let’s see. You like to play guitar.”
    “My, that’s amazing.”
    “You lost someone important out on that curve.”
    She rolled her eyes. “Honestly, I’ve got work to do.” As she swept her hands around the room, the sweater sleeve swallowed her hand again.
    “You like grape slushes.”
    Her eyes rounded with surprise.
    “Your lips were purple yesterday.”
    A dimple creased her smooth cheek. “Charlatan. You would have been a perfect snake oil salesman.”
    She skirted around the desk and walked carefully through the piles. There was only a slim space of open floor directly in front of me, and her small feet landed on it. She was just one step away, close enough to touch and, damn, did I want to touch her.
    She peered up at me with sapphire eyes and crinkled the order paper as she pushed at the massive sleeves again.
    I stared down at her. My nearness, or more likely the way I was looking at her, something I couldn’t seem to help, flustered her. “You’re looking for someone or something that was lost,” I continued. “If you had to pick between walking along a beach picking up broken pieces of shells or walking through a jewelry store picking out a diamond, you’d choose the beach. And you like to be kissed. No mushy shit. Just a long, hard kiss that doesn’t waste time and gets right