Read Welcome to Paradise for Free Online

the bathtub, her skin wet and warm and satin-smooth. Her face flushed under his scrutiny. Maybe she remembered the moment, too, when he stumbled in to see if she'd succumbed to the therapeutic waters.
    “Now I see it,” Zeb acknowledged, snapping out of his reverie. “It's the grizzled grin. And the bowed legs.”
    Wilma cast a quick glance in the direction of Chloe's shapely legs. “Don't pay any attention to him...Miz....”
    “Hudson,” she said. “Chloe Hudson.”
    “Pleased to meet you.”
    “Why don't you throw in an inflatable air mattress,” Zeb suggested. Then he bit his tongue. What was wrong with him, making helpful suggestions? He wanted her to be so stiff and sore from sleeping on the ground, she'd be gone by tomorrow.
    Chloe nodded and Wilma went to the back room to look.
    “She doesn't seem the least bit suspicious,” Chloe whispered.
    “That's because you're with me,” Zeb explained, examining the hand-tooled belts hanging from a rack. “The last tourist who came to town was tarred and feathered.” He raised two fingers in the air. “Scout's honor.”
    “I didn't know you were a Boy Scout,” Chloe said as she plopped down in the wide woven hammock stretched between two poles in the middle of the store.
    He walked over and gave the hammock a push. Chloe closed her eyes as she swung back and forth. He stared down at her, mesmerized by her copper-colored curls against the dark green fabric, noting her fair skin, dark lashes, freckled nose. Wondering how far the freckles extended, trying to remember.
    “Sure am,” he said absently. “Kind, courteous, brave, thrifty.” He left out trustworthy. Didn't mention honest. On purpose. Good God, she was beautiful, lying there in that hammock that was big enough for two. What if he lay down next to her... What if the hammock formed a V, the way hammocks do, the contours of the fabric shoving them into each other's arms, the way hammocks do? Their hips would be thrust together, her breasts pushed against his chest. Their lips would meet, they'd exchange long, hot kisses, the kind he'd sampled that morning.
    He'd rip her clothes off, she'd tear at his. Then, swinging back and forth in the middle of the dry-goods store, they'd make mad, passionate love all day long as customers came and went. He wiped a bead of perspiration off his forehead with his handkerchief. He took a deep breath, reached out and grabbed the edge of the hammock and brought it to an abrupt halt. Her eyes flew open.
    “I almost fell asleep,” she said, sighing so seductively his heart rate doubled.
    If Wilma hadn't come back with an inflatable mattress in her arms he might have jumped right into that hammock and damn the consequences. That's how far gone he was. Gone crazy over some woman he didn't know and didn't want to know. He had to get away from her. Or better yet, she had to get away from him. Far, far away.
    Chloe got up out of the hammock as if nothing had happened, bought the mattress and the hammock and, with his help, loaded everything into the back of his truck.
    “I don't suppose...do they have a coffee shop around here or anything?” she asked.
    “No,” he said brusquely. “Just a bar.”
    “You don't think they have coffee in the bar, do you?” she asked wistfully.
    “Absolutely not.” He opened the passenger door to the truck and waited impatiently for her to get in.
    “Why don't I just have a look,” she said with a certain stubborn look in her brown eyes he was beginning to recognize. And while he watched, she sashayed down the street and disappeared behind the swinging doors of the vintage Western bar, as if he didn't exist. As if he hadn't just told her they didn't serve coffee.
    Now she'd find out they did. In fact she was probably already sitting at the bar, surrounded by randy cowpunchers, ordering a double latte, or whatever the hell they drank in San Francisco. And drinking in the damaging information about Paradise Springs along with it.
    He