Read Untouched for Free Online Page B

his rodeo days, he went for girls who went through a can of hair spray and a pallet of blush every week. Big hair, big lips, big boobs. Men like him took a Texas mentality to the women they went after. Everything bigger. Of course, they had those little waists that practically looked corseted, so not
everything
bigger.
    This woman didn’t have that look at all, but she was answering the door.
    And why should she care if the woman was Quinn’s girlfriend? It didn’t matter.
    “Hi,” Lark said. “I just need to speak to Quinn for a moment?”
    “He just sat down to eat.”
    “Oh, well . . . it’s urgent. I was working on the computers, and . . .”
    “Come in and eat.”
    She looked past the woman at the door and saw Quinn, along with about twenty other people, sitting at a long table with big wooden bowls set in a line across it. Pasta, salad and bread seemed to be what was on the menu, and Lark’s stomach growled, a reminder she hadn’t stopped for lunch.
    “I should go. Home. Which was . . . actually what I—”
    “Fifteen minutes to eat; it’ll round out the hour. Now come on in,” Quinn said.
    Lark stepped inside reluctantly, feeling like she was violating some kind of sacred blood covenant with Cade by breaking bread with his mortal enemy. But . . . the bread was already cut, so there would be no literal breaking of bread. Just chewing of it. And she was hungry.
    “Fine. For a minute.”
    She came in and smiled at everyone, realizing belatedly that she probably seemed like an ungrateful Bitchy McNasty since she was, in their eyes, turning down a free meal offered by their boss, who seemed to repel none of them.
    “I mean”—she smiled wider—“thank you so much, Mr. Parker, I would love to.”
    The quality of his smile changed, and she could tell he really enjoyed having her call him Mr. Parker. Having to be nice.
    She could just announce what a horrible person he was to everyone in the room, but something stopped her.
    I’m the only one who knows for sure . . .
    She hated that. Hated that his words had managed to take root somewhere inside of her. Hated that it all made her pause.
    So instead of saying anything, she sat down at the far end of the table from him and started to fill her plate up with food.
    Quinn made introductions around the table. The woman who’d answered the door was Sandy, a woman hired on to teach the boys. Everyone there was a teacher of some kind, specially trained to handle difficult children.
    “Coke?” he asked.
    She arched her brow. “Coke, huh?”
    “Not a drop of anything harder on the premises,” he said. “We have a lot of boys coming here who have a tendency to get in some serious trouble. I’m not bringing trouble to the grounds.” He picked up his glass and took a sip of what looked like water, then set it back on the table. “Plus, I’m an asshole when I’m drunk, so it’s good to keep it away from me too.”
    Her lips twitched. She was tempted to ask if he’d been drunk the day he’d screwed up her brother’s life, but again, she held back.
    “Yes, I’ll have a Coke. Diet if you have it.”
    “That we do have. Diet pairs nicely with pasta.”
    She laughed reluctantly, and everyone at the table chuckled. After that she kept quiet and listened to everyone else talk. About the plans for the ranch, the boys who would be coming soon, how the teachers were going to handle particular situations.
    She had to hand it to Quinn. He’d brought on a team of serious experts, and he himself was clearly pretty well-researched in ways to handle troubled youth. She hadn’t thought for a second about the implications of having beer on the premises, but everything Quinn was doing with the property was exceptionally cautious.
    Damn him. She couldn’t fault him on this. Or the project at all. It was shockingly decent for a man who’d supposedly deliberately sabotaged a competitor’s ride.
    Although, there had been no way of knowing the extent of