Mr. Fix-It Read Online Free Page B

the shop talk. It’s surprisingly stimulating.”
    His thumb continued to ignite sparks of heat that traveled beyond Khela’s cheeks. He splayed his fingers, drawing his fingertips lightly over her bare shoulder blades until the warmth of his hand came to rest on her right shoulder, close to her neck. Khela turned her face slightly to the right, and his index finger whispered along her jaw. A pleasant shiver moved through her.
    “You’re a man,” Carmen Almeida said to Carter. Carmen wrote multicultural romances under the pen name of Carrie Fiore for Cameo’s Sizzler line. “I need a man’s opinion.” She cast a disdainful glance at Garland, who was using the flat surface of his knife as a mirror to tidily twist one end of his Snidely Whiplash moustache. “I’m working on a novel about a woman who isn’t sure which of two men fathered the child she’s carrying.”
    “Why darlin’, that hardly sounds romantic,” offered Kitty Kincaid, a sixty-something author from Georgia who cultivated the same Southern belle image she assigned to the heroines of her lengthy, Savannah-based historicals. She pressed the diamond-laden fingers of her left hand coquettishly to the base of her throat. “But I suppose anything goes in those hot-blooded contemporaries you churn out by the dozens, Carmen. I myself would never create a leading lady of such questionable morals.”
    Carmen’s long blue-black hair was arranged in fetching layers of curls atop her head. Elegant tendrils of her hairdo quivered with subdued anger, which sent color rushing to her terra cotta skin.
    Writers rarely criticized each other’s styles and genres, at least to their faces, but the tension had begun brewing between Carmen and Kitty at the start of the evening, from the moment Carmen’s A Hard Man Is Good to Find and Kitty’s The Cutlass and the Corset were listed as nominees for the much-coveted Romance Reader’s Choice award…the engraved crystal teardrop now sitting at Carmen’s right elbow.
    “Kitty,” Carmen began sweetly, “you stick to your thirty-year-old antebellum virgins and I’ll keep peddling realistic characters modern women can identify with.”
    Black-clad waiters glided in to replace their salad plates with the second course, and the table was spared Kitty’s response. Carmen, who had selected the grilled Maine lobster tails with orange chipotle vinaigrette, returned her attention to Carter.
    “If you were one of the men in the situation I described, what could the woman say or do to make you sympathetic to, rather than disgusted by, her predicament?”
    January Rose—her actual name—injected her thoughts on the subject. “I know your work, Carmen, and I know you.” She gave Carmen an approving wink, and the heavy laugh lines about her dark eyes deepened. “There’s no way you have your heroine knocking boots with two men.” With a sly look at Carmen, she added, “Unless they were identical twins.”
    Carmen’s brow lifted. “Very perceptive, Rose,” she grinned. “In my manuscript, my heroine—unbeknownst to her, of course—is drugged at a party, and has sex. She’s sure it was with the man she’s been dating, until she turns up knocked up, and the man’s twin claims that he was the one who was with her around the time the baby was conceived. Even worse, he claims that she was the one who seduced him at the party.”
    “Clever,” Garland said as he piled cucumber, dill and champagne compote atop a sizeable bite of the salmon he’d chosen for his entrée. “Clear-cut villain at work.”
    “Carter?” Carmen prompted. “How would you react to being told that your twin brother could possibly be the father of a baby you desperately want to be yours?”
    He finished chewing a bite of his grilled chicken and touched his napkin to his lips. “I suppose my gut reaction would be to distance myself from both my brother and the woman. But loving both, I’d have to find a way to forgive and accept the