Read Sleeping Arrangements (Silhouette Desire) for Free Online Page B

into love at her first sight of its jumbled oddities.
    “Here, curl up and get warm.” Spencer handed her tea to her and waved at a leather armchair with a muted plaid blanket draped over the arm.
    She was more than happy to follow that order, and wrapped herself in the soft chenille throw while he squatted down in front of the fireplace and began fiddling with the stacked logs. His preoccupation allowed her to indulge in a lengthier look at the room around her. She was debating whether or not she ought to get up out of her comfy seat to take a closer look at some of the volumes on the far wall when she realized that her gaze, for the last several minutes, had been focused on the way the fabric of Spencer’s clothes stretched tightly against his shoulders and his butt as he leaned forward with the long fireplace match and lit the kindling.
    Give yourself a break, girl, she thought, and raised the teacup to her lips to hide her smile. There’s no harm in looking, is there?
    Just how much harm there could be was made clear, however, when Spencer suddenly turned and walked away fromthe fire, catching her stare. His grin rose like a slow tide on his face and she flushed. She would have sworn the dratted man could actually read her mind.
    “Not too warm?” he asked, settling himself in the chair next to hers, tea in hand.
    “Not at all,” she said, denying the heated redness of her cheeks.
    “Good, then we can get started.” With these words, he leaned forward, bracing his forearms on his knees. “First of all, did you read any of the papers I sent you?”
    “You mean the papers that arrived at five this morning?” she retorted smartly. The blatant lie was her best option. “I was in nonstop meetings all day long. I didn’t have the time.”
    “I’m sure.” His drawl bordered on insulting and the way he sat meant his clasped hands rested only inches from her knees. She tucked her legs up beneath her in the chair. “What is it that you do? No poor-taste joke to follow,” he added.
    “I’m a civil engineer.” Gotcha, buddy, she thought, as her words made him sit up a little and cock his head a little to the side. And you can just ask me what that means if you don’t know.
    The silence held.
    That was unexpected, Spencer thought. A civil engineer. He leaned back again in his seat and picked up his cup of tea, using the gesture to fill time as he thought about the implications. If she’d said she was an animal trainer for the circus, or a performance artist who did weird things onstage while reciting poetry under a black light, he wouldn’t have been surprised. Adeline had told him stories about her niece, Addy’s mother, who’d gotten pregnant and run off with a jazz musician at eighteen years old. So he was prepared for a little oddity in the mother’s daughter. And she certainly had a mouth on her that defied polite-society conversation.
    A civil engineer. Although he wouldn’t want to be put on the spot to define what exactly that was—something to do with how a building affected the land and hooked up to various public-works systems, he thought—he was sure thatyou didn’t get to be one by having a few screws loose. She’d likely done postgraduate work in a scientific field and held licenses from several federal and state boards.
    This changed things. He wasn’t sure how, but he was sure that it did.
    First, a guess.
    “Were you in the field yesterday morning?”
    “How perceptive of you.”
    Tromping around on a construction site went a long way toward explaining her mud-bespattered appearance at his office. Still, even now she looked more like an unemployed college student, with her wildly curly black hair and what he felt sure were braless curves under his sweatshirt. She had silver rings—some braided, some set with stones, some plain—on almost every finger of both hands, including her thumbs.
    But, an engineer.
    “Please don’t be offended if I tell you that that was not what I