In Bed With The Devil Read Online Free

grinned. “Okay, friends and some serious therapy.”
    “You were in therapy?” The reports hadn’t mentioned that.
    “For a couple of years. I worked through my issues. I’m too smart and weird to ever be completely normal, but these days I know how to pass.”
    “You’re not weird,” he said, knowing better than to challenge her brain. Meri had always been on the high side of brilliant.
    “A lot you know,” she said. “But I like who I am now. I accept the good points and the bad.”
    There were plenty of good points, he thought, doing his best not to look at her trim body. She had plenty of curves, all in the right places.
    They continued to jog next to each other. After another five minutes, Meri increased the speed again and went into a full-out run. Jack’s competitive side kicked in. He increased not only the speed but the incline.
    “You think you’re so tough,” she muttered, her breath coming fast and hard now.
    “You’ll never win this battle,” he told her. “I have long legs and more muscle mass.”
    “That just means more weight to haul around.”
    She ran a couple more minutes, then hit the stop button and straddled the tread. After wiping her face and gulping water, she went back onto the treadmill but at a much slower pace. He ran a few more minutes—because he could—then started his cooldown.
    “You’re in shape,” he told her as they walked over to the weight room.
    “I know.” She smiled. “I’m a wild woman with the free weights. This is where you really get to show off, what with having more upper-body strength. But pound for pound, I’m actually lifting nearly as much as you. Want me to make a graph?”
    He grinned. “No, thanks. I can see your excuses without visual aids.”
    “Reality is never an excuse,” she told him as she collected several weights, then walked over to a bench. She wiped her hands on the towel she’d brought.
    “I can’t be too sweaty,” she said. “If my hands are slick, it gets dangerous. About a year ago, I nearly dropped a weight on my face. Not a good thing.”
    “You should be more careful,” he said.
    “You think? I paid a lot of money for my new nose. You never said anything. Do you like it?”
    He’d known about the surgery. She’d had it when she was twenty. He supposed the smaller nose made her a little prettier, but it wasn’t that big a change.
    “It’s fine,” he said.
    She laughed. “Be careful. You’ll turn my head with all that praise. My nose was huge and now it’s just regular.”
    “You worry too much about being like everybody else. Average is not a goal.”
    She looked at him. “I haven’t had enough coffee for you to be philosophizing. Besides, you don’t know anything about normal. You were born rich and you’re still rich.”
    “You’re no different.”
    “True, but we’re not talking about me. As a guy, you have different standards to live up or down to. If you have money, then you can be a total loser and you’ll still get the girl. But for me it was different. Hence the surgeries.”
    “You had more than one?” he asked, frowning slightly. He knew only about her nose.
    She sat up and leaned toward him. “Breasts,” she said in a mock whisper. “I had breast implants.”
    His gaze involuntarily dropped to her chest. Then he jerked his head to the right and focused on the weight bench next to him.
    “Why?” he asked, determined not to think about her body and especially not her breasts, which were suddenly more interesting than he wanted them to be.
    “After I lost weight, I discovered I had the chest of a twelve-year-old-boy. I was totally flat. It was depressing. So I got implants. I went for a jumbo B—which seemed about right for my newly skinny self.”
    She stood and turned sideways in front of the mirror. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think I should have just gone for it and ordered the centerfold breasts. What do you think?”
    He told himself not to look, but it was like trying