Read Sun-Kissed for Free Online Page A

satisfaction.
    “Oh, come on ,” he begged. “Go for it. Now you’re just taunting me.”
    “Mack,” she said between her teeth. “If you think I’m wasting my energy on a slap, you don’t know me very well. I’m going to knee you right in the groin.”
    His teeth showed sharp. “Yeah? You going to take it into the physical? Go for it, Anne.”
    He looked so damn hungry. Nerve endings were shooting alive everywhere , and they made her almost frantic with the need to do something. Anything. Knee him in the groin.
    “Mack Corey, you have lost your mind due to some empty-nest syndrome, and I’m going to restrain myself in consideration. Also, because think of the pictures in the paper tomorrow when I knock you out in your own home. I’d probably get arrested again.”
    “Why? I wouldn’t press charges. It would be pretty fucking funny, if you ask me. Especially if you managed to get cake smashed all over yourself in the process. If you want to start a brawl with me, trust me, I’m game.”
    Her teeth snapped together on the nearly overwhelming urge to smash her head against his to knock some kind of sense into him. “Go dump your head in a bucket of water. Come back when you’re using your brain again.”
    “Already dumped something much more sensitive with a glass of ice water,” he said matter-of-factly.
    She gaped at him.
    “Might have to do it again,” he added, with the tiniest flick of his blue gaze down over her body. Hers flicked down his own body involuntarily to—was he aroused again ?
    “Mack.” She drew her stomach muscles in tight and pressed her thighs together, against this squirmy something that needed to behave.
    “I don’t know if I’ve told you this in the past twenty years, but since you’re already at the point you’re ready to knee me in the groin, I might as well go for it. You’re hot, Anne.”
    She stared at him, her jaw dropped. And nothing got her to drop her jaw. Not even an announcement of “Guilty” and “six months in prison”.
    “I really like that new cut on you.” Without dropping the cage of his arms, he nodded to the short, short haircut she had adopted in a moment of temper during her prison sentence.
    One of the other women there had plans to open her own hair salon once she got out and kept eyeing Anne’s classic bob avariciously, and at a certain point, Anne had just said, Go for it . It was a minimum security prison, but they’d still had to get permission to set up the hair salon under strict guards, because of the scissors. Anne was occasionally tempted to disillusion people of their Club Fed illusions about life in a minimum security prison, but she wouldn’t give anyone in the media the satisfaction of telling them how horrible it had been.
    “Makes you look like some elf queen, all frost and timeless power.” Mack gave one of his tight, aggressive grins. “I especially liked the way you told the journalists it was because of prison lice, all while looking like the graceful elf queen. That was pretty damn hilarious.”
    “I kind of lost patience with idiots, in prison,” she admitted. Not that she had ever had too much, but she never used to say things like that. Some shift had occurred, some perversity, some desire to provoke when once she would have held it all in, under calm, cool control.
    Telling the journalists she’d had lice had kind of been another way of saying fuck you.
    “And you’re being an idiot right now,” she warned him.
    He held her eyes with those vivid blue ones of his. The man had never been able to back down from anything or anyone but his own children. Neither had she. “Well, go ahead then, Anne. Lose your patience with me. I dare you.”
    “I’m mentally counting the glasses of champagne you must have had. To encourage myself to stay tolerant.”
    “It’s sexy as hell,” he mentioned. And lifted one hand from the wall to run his finger down the nape of her neck . A frisson ran through her. “That