Read Online While You Were Writing: Watkin's Pond, Book 2 by Virginia Nelson - Free Book Online Page A

by leering at me, you’ve got another think coming, McQueen.”
    Instead of backing off, he moved closer. Not quite touching her, not even grazing her clothes with his, he bent his head to be too close. Her eyes fluttered closed, sure he was about to kiss her.
    He didn’t, and after a moment she opened them back up to see him looking unguarded. The expression on his face said everything she felt—need, hunger, sexual tension—and his lips parted as if he only barely resisted her. She became aware, between one heartbeat and the next, that if she simply moved those last few centimeters, he’d kiss her.
    The idea both terrified and thrilled her.
    The conflicting emotions kept her still, breath ragged, until she found her voice. “What caused your divorce, Radcliffe?”
    His nose barely touched hers, the briefest stroke of skin on skin and tenderness, and he backed off to brace his hands on the sink. “My mother. When forced to choose between my new wife and my mother, I chose the woman who needed me. I have work to do. If you’ll excuse me—”
    He spun to leave her and she caught his arm. He went still for a second and then she gasped as he swept her into his arms like she weighed nothing more than a doll. Her hips were against his, her face at eye level with his, and the hardness she felt against her screamed the attraction she fought wasn’t one-sided at all.
    “I warned you—don’t touch me. I won’t be responsible if you keep pushing me, Sheri. You’re waking a beast and he’s hungry.”
    He squeezed her once, close against his body, and she wanted to melt into him.
    Instead, he practically shoved her away from him. She stood, swaying at the need erupting in every nerve of her body. The slam and click of his lock told her he again shut himself in his office—his fortress of solitude—and she stumbled to a chair.
    “Okay,” she finally managed when her hands stopped shaking. “The mother. I need to find out more about the mother.”
    The silence in the kitchen didn’t answer her.

Chapter Eight
    The cursor blinked, taunting him. The rush of words he’d barely kept up with the day before dried up in the withering heat of sexual frustration.
    At least that was what he told himself as he blew up the bio picture of her off her website. The damned woman was under his skin, grating his nerves and distracting him with needs he’d long thought himself in control of. His body was a machine—he fed it, fulfilled its basic needs, and in return, it functioned as a vessel for his storytelling.
    Right now, the vessel was too full of her—the teasing scent of her, the mystery of her backstory, the way she never quite said what he expected her to—to have room for anything else. He toyed with the idea of finding her, seducing her, taking the edge off the gnawing hunger and constant arousal she seemed to create by being in his house.
    He discarded the idea. Part of him feared that one taste wouldn’t be enough. The craving for her could fast become an addiction, one he’d have to recover from when she inevitably found his life to be repulsive.
    Found him to be repulsive.
    The words were ones his wife had spat at him, quite probably fueled by angry disappointment. The knowledge that she’d gone into the marriage with dewy dreams of happily ever after and he’d cloistered her in a farmhouse far from the glitz and hubbub of the city didn’t remove the power from her declaration. Mama’s Boy, Pathetic Loser, Deadbeat, Impotent, Repulsive, Not Fit to Pretend to be a Man …all titles she’d thrown at him and he’d accepted and worn as armor against future entanglements.
    He’d found sexual release since the dissolution of their unhappy union, but always with women who understood it was sex and nothing more. Ones who’d wanted to sleep with the author, have the hero in their bed for a night, and not expected the man to live up to the promise of forever. Something inside him quaked at what Sheri offered—not