Master of Fire Read Online Free Page B

she was still that fat little girl who was too smart for her own good.
    He wondered what quirk of his personality found that so appealing.
     
     
    “Wait a minute,” Logan told Giada as they pulled up in front of the six-story cream building that was the Daniel Morgan Inn. “If you try to hop out of the truck right now, you’ll fall on your head.”
    He swung out of the bomb truck cab and jumped down, then strode around to open Giada’s door. There was no way she could manage the metal steps down from the truck’s high seat, not with all the tequila she had on board.
    Giada blinked owlishly at him, then placed her hands on his shoulders and allowed him to swing her down.
    She swayed against him on her long legs, and he braced her there. Her breasts felt delightfully full and soft against his chest. The scent of her hair seemed to arrow straight to his groin. Logan swallowed, looking down into her wide gray eyes. Her lips parted, full and naked of lipstick. The temptation to kiss her rolled over him like a wave.
    “You feel really good,” she murmured.
    He swallowed with an effort and managed, “And you are really drunk.” Somehow he found the self-control to take a step back from that lovely, delightfully female body.
    “How am I going to get to work?” A worried frown line formed between her delicate blond brows. “My car is back at the sheriff’s office. Isn’t it?”
    He sighed. “I’ll give you a ride in the morning. What floor are you on?”
    “Third. 304.” She fumbled the long strap of her purse onto her shoulder, then moved off across the parking lot for the front door of the hotel, swaying dangerously on her short heels. Logan caught up to her and took her arm, steadying her. Breathing deep of her seductive scent.
    Do not seduce the coworker.
     
     
    Logan walked Giada to her hotel door with careful courtesy, but did not ask to come in, pointedly, like a man holding tight to his self-control. After telling her he’d pick her up in the morning, he strode off down the hall as she watched with drunken admiration.
    He really did have the most incredible butt. Might even be worth catching a fly or two.
    “Ribbit.” Giada closed the door and turned with a sigh to let her back fall against it. The room promptly did a slow revolution. Pointedly ignoring the effect, she made for the bed and fell facedown atop it.
    A cat leaped silently up onto the bed. Technically speaking, the Daniel Morgan Inn was not a pet-friendly hotel, but nobody saw Smoke if he didn’t care to be seen.
    He strolled up to her body, black as India ink at midnight, except for smoke gray stripes across his forelegs and rear haunches. She turned her head to stare woozily into the unearthly crystalline blue of his eyes.
    “Hi there, Smoke,” she murmured as he made his way onto her backside.
    He paused to knead her ass with sheathed claws, then strolled up to her shoulder and settled down, a warm, furry weight.
    “They almost got us today.” Giada swallowed tequila-flavored bile at the thought of just how close she and Logan had come. “But it wasn’t a sniper like the others. It was a bomb.”
    The cat growled deep in his throat, a rumbling sound she could feel in her shoulder blade.
    “I managed to disarm it with my magic, but Logan got suspicious.”
    “Well,” the cat observed in a basso masculine voice, far outsized for his seven-pound body, “the boy has never been stupid.”
    “No, he’s definitely not stupid.” Handsome, seductive, and suspicious, but not stupid. “I think I convinced him I’m just a mortal, but I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all. Lying to him—now, that’s stupid. He needs to know what’s going on. If I hadn’t had a vision of what was about to happen, he’d have triggered that booby trap.”
    The cat eyed her in feline disapproval. “You know your orders.”
    “Yeah, well, the orders need to change. I’m going to go talk to them.”
    “Better brush your teeth first.”