Read Online Touch Me by Christie Ridgway - Free Book Online Page B

her walking home from the Canyon Country Store. There were no sidewalks on that stretch of Laurel Canyon Boulevard, but she’d had a short distance to go. Still, he’d pulled over and insisted she get into his vehicle. Riding shotgun in his low-slung sport scar—its lines incredibly sexy even to her untrained eye, despite being painted in nothing more than a matte-silver undercoat—she’d wished for the darkest of dark sunglasses and bee-stung lips and that she’d grow five inches in the blink of an eye to have supermodel legs that would draw Payne Colson’s bright, heaven-blue gaze.
    Finally, one day after school a boy her age was teasing her in the way boys of that maturity level were wont to do. He’d gotten hold of her backpack and was tossing it over her head to one of his buddies who would then lob it back. The keep-away game had started playful but began to feel mean. Frustrated tears were heating the back of her eyes when Payne arrived on the scene and snatched the pack out of mid-air. Without a word to her tormentors, he’d slung his arm around her shoulder and led her to his car. Riding shotgun again on the way to the ice cream place where he bought her favorite sundae once again, she’d lost her heart. There and then, she’d vowed to be everything to him.
    That she’d give him anything he’d take from her.
    As he’d braked in front of her house, she’d clung to her adoration and the cardboard cup of ice cream, thinking how to communicate all that was running through her head.
    Maybe he’d let her wash his car.
    Copy over his Calculus homework in her neat hand.
    Mend his favorite shirt.
    Maybe it would have been a purely mental adoration. But when she’d invited him in, he’d muttered something about Lily still being mad at him and then he’d cupped one side of her face in his big hand, the look in his eyes warm.
    Brotherly.
    “Get going, kid,” he’d said, then briefly pressed the pad of his thumb against the fattest part of her bottom lip.
    With that one touch, she’d awakened. Her scalp went hot and the warmth rolled over her head toward her feet. Tingles spread from her middle outward.
    For the first time in her life she’d gone wet between her thighs.
    The Rose who’d climbed into the car a girl climbed out a sexually conscious being, her devotion to Payne no longer cerebral.
    She shivered now, remembering the overwhelming but bewildering excitement that had run through her then.
    “Where’d you go, Rose?”
    Starting at the sound of Lily’s voice, she looked up. Her sister was patting the baby’s back, a line between her arched brows.
    Rose waved a hand. “To the past.”
    Lily looked even more fierce, her mouth turning down in a frown. “If this is about that bastard Blake—”
    “Maybe it wasn’t all his fault,” she said quickly, thinking that topic was safer than the man on her mind. “I’m sure it didn’t help that I added up columns of numbers when we were together in bed.”
    “I take it you mean not when it came time to count sheep.”
    “Nuh-uh.” She ran a fingertip along a vein in the granite. “Sometimes I practiced my times tables. The sixteens.”
    “Rose.” Lily looked on her with pity. “That’s just…”
    “Yeah, yeah,” she said.
    “You should have known he wasn’t the right guy before you moved in together,” her sister said.
    “Oh, it was the same with my first, too. Jerry Dyrtle.”
    Lily tried burying her snort of laughter in the blanket swaddling Marcus. “Jerry Dyrtle?”
    “He couldn’t help his name. It was spring semester freshman year. I met him in Intro to Accounting.”
    “You did times tables with him too?”
    “Ran through financial glossary terms,” Rose admitted on a sigh.
    “I’m so sorry.”
    “I had this one very hot guy for one night junior year. But…”
    Lily was biting back her smile. “Do tell.”
    “I was a little drunk. I believe I spent most of those hours cursing whoever thought it was a good idea to