Read Cavanaugh’s Woman for Free Online Page B

I’m not here.”
    As if he could. Shaw looked at her, feeling as if he’d just been dared.
    “Okay.”
    He placed his secondary weapon beside his service revolver on the shelf just above her head. As he reached up, he was so close to her, their bodies all but touched. Then, stepping back, he pulled his towel free of the knot that held it precariously in place. He had the satisfaction of seeing the pupils of her eyes dilate as her mouth fell open.
    Shaw turned on his heel and started to walk back to the bathroom, his towel in his hand.
    The inside of her mouth had turned to sawdust at the same time that her pulse sped up. The man looked incredible, coming and going. She had to remind herself to breathe.
    “What—” Moira cleared her throat, trying to find the slightest evidence of saliva. There was none. The rest of her words dragged themselves along a bone-dry tongue. “What are you doing?” she finally managed to get out.
    He glanced over his shoulder before walking into the bathroom. His voice might have been innocent, but his expression wasn’t.
    “Doing what you told me. Pretending like you’re not here.”
    “Oh.”
    The moment she heard the bathroom door close, Moira spun on her heel and headed for his kitchen. She needed a glass of water.
    Badly.

Chapter Four
    A fter the performance he’d just given, Shaw was pretty confident that his uninvited guest would be gone by the time he finished showering and dressing.
    She wasn’t.
    The woman wasn’t anywhere in sight when he first opened his bathroom door, but there was a definite aroma in the air that hadn’t been there before.
    Eggs and coffee.
    The aroma became stronger the closer he got to the kitchen.
    So did the scent of her perfume. It was light and airy, yet very potent, which didn’t make any sense to him, but he could detect it separately from the tempting aroma of food.
    It surprised him that another, deeper hunger stirred, but then, he was only human, only male. And every so often, the fact that he wasn’t in anything that could even remotely be called a relationship did rise up to take a bite out of him.
    Talk about rotten timing.
    The last person in the world he would want to suddenly feel male around was a movie star. As far as he was concerned, they were, by definition, a shallow breed in need of adulation and constant reaffirmation. That wasn’t within his job description.
    He’d never been a joiner per se and signing up to be part of Moira McCormick’s fan club was as out of character, as foreign for him, as suddenly growing feathers and flying south for the winter.
    He came into the kitchen. Not only did she have something going on the stove, but she seemed to be doing something with his refrigerator that involved a sponge and the garbage pail he kept hidden in the cabinet beneath the sink.
    “What are you doing?”
    He’d startled her and she jumped, pulling back and swinging around. Moira came within an inch of colliding with him. Reflexes had him grabbing for her before she made contact.
    Holding her, Shaw realized that for all her bravado and the larger-than-life aura she cast, Moira McCormick was rather a delicate woman, at least in structure.
    He didn’t release her as quickly as he should have. Deep green eyes looked up at him, amusement winking in and out.
    “Cleaning out your refrigerator and making you breakfast with the only edible things I could find. Is there a lab paying you to house some of these things?”
    She nodded at the pail that now held the take-out containers whose origin in time he couldn’t begin to pinpoint. The pungent smell told him that their safety margin had long since expired.
    He chose to ignore her flippant question. “I didn’t know Hollywood types knew how to cook and clean.”
    Shaw couldn’t begin to adequately describe the smile that played along her lips, only that it managed to pull him in. “I wasn’t always a Hollywood type. Once I was a real person. Real people know how to do a