Read Rescued in a Wedding Dress for Free Online

from how bad things were as he had begun to slug his way through the old gal’s abysmal record and bookkeeping systems. Miss Viv—and his mother, Second Chances’s largest patron—trusted him to fix this. He would. Neither of them needed to know the extent he had to go to. But Molly Michaels did, since the mantle of it all could quite possibly fall on her slender shoulders.
    “Yes, it’s bad.” He closed the fuchsia cover on oneof the project reports, the mauve one on another and put those files on the desk between them. “The Easter Egg hunt is gone. The poetry competition is out. And I’m looking at the prom dress thing, and—”
    “Prom Dreams?” she gasped. “You can’t! You don’t know what it means to those girls.”
    “Have you ever known real hardship?” he asked her, his voice deliberately cold. This job was not going to be easy no matter how he did it. Hard choices had to be made. And he had to see if she was willing to make them. There was no way she was going to be suited to taking over the top job at Second Chances if she was always going to be blinded by the stars in her eyes.
    But cad that he was, his gaze went to the lip that she was nibbling with distraction. He was shocked that out of the blue he wondered if one of his hard choices was not going to be whether or not to taste those luscious lips before he made his escape!
    She met his eyes. Stopped nibbling. Things that should be simple, cut-and-dried, suddenly seemed complicated. He wished she wasn’t looking at him as if she was remembering, too, that unguarded moment when two strangers had touched and the potential for something wild and unpredictable had arced in the air between them.
    “My parents divorced when I was young,” she offered, softly. “I considered that a terrible hardship. The only one I’ve known, but life altering.”
    Thank God she didn’t mention the cad! He could see the pain in her eyes. Houston reminded himself, sternly, that he likely had a genetic predisposition toward allowing women to make him crazy. Because he had no business thinking of trying to change the light in hereyes. But he was thinking of it, of how soft her lips would be beneath his own.
    Why would that genetic predisposition toward crazy be surfacing now, for God’s sake? He’d been around many, many beautiful women. He’d always taken his ability to keep his emotional distance for granted, one of the few gifts from his chaotic childhood.
    Don’t form attachments. Don’t care too deeply.
    Except for his business and boxing. Both had rigid guidelines and rules that if followed, produced a predictable result. That made them safe things to care about. An occasional bruised knuckle or fat lip, a skirmish in the business world, those hazards were nothing compared to the minefields of becoming attached to people, where the results were rarely predictable.
    No, he knew exactly where he was going to channel his substantial passion and energy.
    He was being drawn backward, feeling shadows from his past falling over him, entirely against his will. He blamed the letter from his father and the unfortunate fact it coincided with the past weeks of going over files of people who were as desperate and as needy as his family had once been.
    It was his annoyance at himself for allowing those thoughts into his business world that made his tone even sharper than it had to be, even if he was testing her ability to run a million dollar corporation.
    “Have you ever been hungry?” But even as he asked it, he knew that question, too, stemmed not so much from professional interest as from a dark past he thought he had left behind.
    “No,” she said, “but I think I can imagine the desperation of it.”
    “Can you?” he said cynically.
    Without warning a memory popped over the barrier of the thick, high wall he had constructed around the compartment of his childhood.
    So hungry. Not a crumb of food in the house. Going into Sam’s, the bakery at the corner of