Read His for the Taking for Free Online

too obvious.
    ‘I’m not a joiner. My mother forced me to go to one Brownie meeting with my older sister Jade and I deliberately poured milk down the jumper of the head Brownie person.’
    Nick laughed and his laugh was just as appealing as his chest, warm and deep. Zoe curled herself into a corner of the couch, wrapping her arms around her legs to keep herself in control. ‘So what else do you have in that backpack? A tent? Cooking stove?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Nick, and she risked a glance to his face to see if he was serious. He was.
    ‘What were you going to do? Camp out in Central Park?’
    ‘It occurred to me.’
    Zoe snorted. ‘Well, that’s fine, then. You don’t need to stay here. You can go camp out in the park and I’ll just open the window and call you if your dad shows up.’
    ‘Nope,’ Nick said serenely. ‘Staying here. Why are you so hot to get rid of me, anyway?’
    ‘I don’t know you from Adam and as far as I can tell that backpack is full of knives so you can cut me into little pieces and then steal all my great-aunt’s valuables.’
    Good thing she was such a good liar, because there was no way she was going to tell him the real reason she didn’t want him to stay—that she was afraid if she spent much more time with him she’d get to like him.
    Then again, that could be a pretty good way of getting him to leave. He’d think she was the biggest freak in the universe, which, come to think of it, could be true.
    ‘Well, I tried to point out earlier that I might be dangerous, and you told me to shut up.’ He opened a different compartment of his backpack and began to rummage inside it.
    ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘I have other places to be.’
    ‘Oh.’ He looked up from his backpack. ‘Do you have a date or something?’
    The appropriate response to that was to fall on the floor laughing. Zoe Drake, with a date on a Sunday night? She managed to control herself. ‘I work a lot of evenings.’
    ‘Do you need to work tonight?’
    ‘No,’ she admitted.
    ‘That’s good. I could do with the company. Besides your friend Ralph and some toll booth workers on I-95 on my way down here, I haven’t spoken to another human being face to face for a week and a half.’ He smiled at her and his teeth were straight and white and she felt like melting.
    ‘And this fact is supposed to make me feel more reassured that you’re not a psycho?’
    ‘I’m not a psycho.’ Nick held out something wrapped in a silver foil pouch. ‘Do you want something to eat?’
    As soon as he asked the question Zoe felt her stomach grumble. She was absolutely starving. She’d worked a nine-hour shift from six this morning on not much more than a ham sandwich, and then she’d gone for a run to clear her head and then gone to the funeral parlour.
    ‘What is it?’ she asked.
    ‘A protein bar.’
    She made a face. ‘I’m hungry, but not hungry enough to eat that.’
    He shrugged and peeled back the wrapper. ‘You’re welcome to anything else I’ve got.’ He took a bite of the bar and, although it smelled unappetising even at this distance, her stomach rumbled again.
    ‘What else have you got?’
    ‘Dehydrated soup, some vacuum-packed stew and pasta, trail mix, a whole bunch of nuts.’
    ‘How’d you grow so big on a diet like that?’
    He laughed. ‘I left in a hurry and took what I had left over from my two weeks on Cranberry Island. I’m actually a pretty good cook on a camp stove, when I can get the right ingredients. Do you think there’s anything in your great-aunt’s kitchen?’
    ‘No. Xenia never cooked. I’ll tell you what there is, though.’ Zoe jumped up from the couch and went to a side table, where she picked up the cordless phone and a sheaf of take-out menus. ‘We have a whole world of food at our fingertips. We only have to pick a country and a style. Chinese, Italian, Turkish, Indian, Japanese, American?’
    Nick crumpled up the wrapper of his gross protein bar. ‘I haven’t had a