Read Not Another New Year’s for Free Online Page A

she was trying not to laugh. “Your secretary, I presume?”
    Hannah slowly sat up, clutching the sheet to her camisole-covered breasts. Her glance skittered toward Finn and then jumped back to the exotic-looking female standing at the end of the bed. She was tall and leggy, about the same height as Hannah and with hair the same shade and length. In a pair of painted-on canary jeans, a flowered tunic, and tall stilettos, though, her sartorial style was the antithesis of a schoolteacher’s.
    With the fingers of one hand, Hannah tried combing some order into her sleep-tangled hair. “I…um…I didn’t know,” she told Finn’s girlfriend. “You have to believe me.”
    The girlfriend blinked. She didn’t appear distraught, or devastated, or any of the dozen other degrading emotions Hannah had experienced when she’d learned what Duncan had done behind her back. But Hannah had tried to put a good public face on it too.
    She’d done all her cringing and crying in private.
    Her hand left the mess of her hair to wave in mute apology. “You see, it was midnight, and—and—” She glanced over at the man in the middle of all this. Why was he so quiet? He could try helping her out here. It wasn’t as if he was dead or anything.
    She heated her glance to a glare when he didn’t jump in with a word or an explanation of his own. He was pretty, and she remembered his gentle touch on her battered hands and knees, but now she figured him for a two-timing jerk. “Well?” she said, still staring at him.
    He was staring at her too. He started, as if coming back to the present. “Well, uh…what?”
    Maybe he had a subzero IQ as well. So much for her sense that he was someone worth her very first single-again sexual exploit. “Well, don’t you have anything to say?”
    “Good morning?”
    She squinted at him. “That’s it?”
    He crossed his arms over his (still impressive, despite his other lacks) chest. “Look, sorry. It’s pretty early.”
    “Maybe she means an introduction,” the other woman said.
    “Right.” He ran his hands through his hair. The golden mass settled into straighter lines. “Deborah, Dez. Dez, Deborah.”
    “Oh.” The word popped out of Hannah’s mouth. Deborah. She’d forgotten she’d given him a different name. Heat rose on her cheeks. She’d forgotten she’d given him that name.
    The other woman strode around the bed to hold out her hand. “Desirée,” she said. “Or Dezi or Dez. What ever. It’s nice to meet you.”
    Hannah found herself in the strange position of shaking hands with the woman whose almost-fiancé she’d just spent the night with. Looking into Desirée’s—so this was the famous Desirée—friendly face, she opened her mouth to get the situation back on a more honest footing. “It’s really Hannah,” she said.
    “What?” This from the man she’d shared sheets with. He was looking at her with alarm, his body suddenly tense. “What did you say?”
    Confession time. “I gave you the wrong name, Finn. I’m Hannah. Hannah Davis.”
    His horrified expression sent a chill down her spine. She scooted away from him, sliding half off the bed in one move. “I’ll be going now. No muss. No fuss. No regrets. Sounds good, right?”
    He pounced like a tiger. One moment he was on his side of the bed, the next he had his right hand wrapped around her wrist. “Don’t even think about going anywhere,” he commanded, pointing his left forefinger at her. “You park your pretty ass right where it is.”

6
    I f Tanner had thought his luck would change with the change in the calendar, he was already proved wrong. Of all the gin joints in all the world for her to walk into a night early, of all the women in all the world for him to break his eleven-month-long vow with, he’d selected the one woman he was charged with looking after.
    He’d taken to his sheets the one woman who held his career in the palm of her hand.
    Christ, and the bed hadn’t even been