Read Online Wicked Pleasures by Tori Carrington - Free Book Online

asleep on you.”
    His chuckle touched her in places his hands had the night before. “Yes, but this time it was at my invitation.”
    “Ah. So then it’s okay.”
    “Yes.” He fingered her hair at the back. “How do you feel?”
    “Curiously like I got hit by a truck.”
    “That’s shock. Hopefully it’ll pass by morning.”
    She nodded. “Part of your Marine training?”
    “Something like that.”
    She sipped some more tea then placed the cup on the table. “I feel like I should go home. Be by her side. Studies prove comatose patients are still aware of their surroundings.”
    “Naturally comatose patients. Not medically induced.”
    She knew that. Still, it didn’t seem right somehow for her to be sitting here so far away while her mother was lying helpless in a hospital bed.
    “Maybe you can call and ask a nurse to put the phone next to her ear. Speak to her for a few moments so she can hear your voice.”
    She felt her smile down to her toes. “Thanks.”
    He raised a brow. “For what?”
    “For…well, for everything. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been there for me earlier.”
    “No thanks necessary. I’m just glad I could help.”
    She settled more comfortably into the sofa. Outside, the sun was dipping over the Rocky Mountains to the west. She hadn’t turned on a lamp yet and the apartment was awash in golden-yellows and purples.
    “Magic hour.”
    “Excuse me?”
    She gestured toward the window. “That’s what my mom always called this. You know…twilight.”
    She pulled her knees up to her chest, remembering Saturday afternoons spent, just the two of them, either hiking outdoors or browsing the library or baking. Her mother would tell her stories about her as a little girl and about her father.
    Her favorite had always been about magic hour. It had been during one that her mother had known her father was meant for her.
    They’d met when they were in their early twenties, doing what others their age did. Well, for the most part. Her mother was already working full-time at the supermarket. And her father was a Marine back on leave. They’d met while he was buying a box of condoms and she’d been the cashier to check him out. (Of course, Regina didn’t find out what he’d been buying until she, herself, was twenty—her mother had said she hadn’t remembered what he’d bought before that.) Her father had asked her mom out on a date, and she’d refused. Then refused the second time he asked. And the third.
    The fourth she accepted.
    They were supposed to go to a movie, but had lingered over hot dogs at a local drive-in place and then went for a long walk instead, talking about everything.
    Then came Magic Hour.
    It had been in that moment, as twilight fell, that she’d looked into Regina’s father’s eyes and known with everything she was that he was the one.
    Regina sighed now. It hadn’t been merely the story that had touched her, but the wistful expression on her mother’s face every time she told it.
    “It must have been hard on her when your father passed,” Linc said quietly.
    “Yes. She was devastated. She put up a good front for me, but…I always knew. When my dad died, a part of Mom died along with him.”
    She hadn’t been aware she’d moved while she told the story, but now found herself curved against Linc’s side, his arm around her, his breath soft against the top of her head. All she would have to do is look up and she’d be in perfect kissing position.
    She did. They were. And he kissed her…

10
     
    R EGINA’S LIPS WERE the softest thing his mouth had ever tasted…
    Linc tilted her chin up so he might kiss her more fully, amazed at the way his heartbeat sped up and his stomach tightened at the simple contact. Heat, sure and swift, rushed through him.
    His cell phone vibrated against his hip.
    Damn.
    She laughed quietly. “Did the world just move? Or is that your cell?”
    He cursed under his breath as he checked the display: