Read A Maine Christmas...or Two for Free Online Page B

help herself…she answered.
    Grady,
    How do you plan to make me pay if I call you Mr. Sinclair?
    Emily
    His response was immediate this time.
    Emily,
    Try it and you’ll find out.
    G.
    Oh, Emily was so tempted. Grady was pushing and she wanted to push back. But sparring with him was dangerous to both her physical and mental well-being. He fascinated and unsettled her at the same time.
    Her fingers itched to type a reply, but she deleted the emails and closed the page, determined to ignore her attraction to him. She wasn’t used to a man doing anything for her, and she wasn’t quite comfortable with Grady’s gift. It was too thoughtful, too insightful. Just the fact that he’d noticed such a small thing about her glasses was perplexing. At the age of twenty-eight, she wasn’t a virgin. There had been one boyfriend in college and one after she graduated, but neither of them was anything like Grady Sinclair.
    Emily sighed, drew the glasses off her face and inserted the contact lenses. It was a relief to have clear vision again, and the prescription was perfect. Not that she expected anything less from Grady.
    Placing the glasses carefully in her purse, she tried to get back to paperwork, but her mind wandered the rest of the afternoon, daydreaming about what Grady might do to punish her. Chances are, she’d probably love it.

    “I want my truck back,” Emily told Grady irritably, stomping her foot in what looked to Grady like a female temper tantrum, but he wasn’t entirely sure. Most women he knew just took, and they didn’t argue.
    Emily had just arrived, toting her suitcase and boxes of red and green decorations along with her. She was wearing a Christmas sweatshirt that shouldn’t turn him on, but it did. Decked out in Christmas cheer from her tinkling bell earrings to the Christmas socks he could see quite clearly now that she had taken her sneakers off at the door, Grady decided there was one thing he liked about Christmas now—Emily. Even though she was glaring at him, she looked beautiful decked out for the holidays.
    In the last two weeks, Grady had felt like he was losing his mind, his only contact with Emily a brief phone discussion about when she’d arrive at his home, communication that had hardly satisfied his need to be close to her. He’d waited for this day for what seemed like forever, and now she was pissed. But he refused to back down, and honestly, he was finding her temper pretty damn adorable and sexy. “No. I already signed the truck over to you.” He was handing her the pink slip to his truck, but she was staring at it like it was a snake that was ready to bite her. “Your truck wasn’t safe. You’ve been driving this one for two weeks. If it isn’t what you like, I’ll get you something else.”
    “Of course I like it. It’s big; it’s completely loaded. God, it even has heated leather seats to keep my ass warm. But that isn’t the point. It doesn’t belong to me. The only reason I’ve been driving it is because I don’t have my truck. You told me we would trade when I got here for Christmas.”
    “I lied,” he answered, not feeling even a tiny bit of guilt. There was no way he was going to give her back an unsafe vehicle to drive. Her hands were propped on her shapely hips, her eyes staring at the paper he was holding out to her, but making absolutely no movement to take it. “Take it. It’s one of the things I want,” he said, waving the title in front of her face.
    “I want my truck. Where is it?” She ignored the paper being held in front of her, and shot him an obstinate look.
    Grady didn’t think now was probably a good time to tell her that her truck was probably in a scrap metal pile somewhere in another city. “It’s gone. It was unsafe to drive.”
    “It was perfectly safe. It just needed new tires. Give it back.”
    Grady smirked. “Or what? You’ll have me arrested for giving you a better truck?”
    “You stole my vehicle,” she accused, swatting