Free Ready & Willing by Elizabeth Bevarly Page B

deaths, she had only retreated further into herself. Audrey had always liked her lone-wolf lifestyle, even if it had meant loneliness was a regular companion. She hadn’t minded the loneliness. Not really. Not for the most part.
    Until Sean Magill had big-shouldered his way into her life and swept her off her feet and shown her just how wonderful it could be with someone living it with her.
    No one would ever be able to take his place. She was as certain of that as she was her own name. Especially not someone like Nathaniel Summerfield, who couldn’t hold a candle to him. She didn’t care how good the guy looked or how many fires he started in her belly. It was her body responding to the man who came from around the desk now, and with nothing more than the sort of physical response that even the most primitive creatures felt. Not her mind. Not her spirit. Not her emotions. The human sex drive, she’d read, was second only to the human will to survive. Having been without sex for three years, it was understandable she would react this way to a sexy man. All it meant was that she was someplace in her monthly cycle where her body needed something that the rest of her absolutely did not. In a few days, she’d doubtless find Nathaniel Summerfield as attractive as a pile of laundry that needed to be put away.
    “Mrs. Magill,” he said by way of a greeting, his voice lacking anything akin to warmth.
    Which was ironic, because just hearing that velvety baritone again made the fire in Audrey’s midsection leap higher.
    She noted he remembered to refer to her as Mrs. this time, something he’d seemed incapable of doing the last time she was here, in spite of her insistence that he use the designation. And why had she been so insistent? she asked herself. Normally, she didn’t correct anyone who wanted to call her Ms., mostly because it didn’t bother her, especially when it came from someone with whom she would have only temporary contact. And she’d intended for her contact with Nathaniel to be very temporary indeed. For some reason, though, she’d wanted to make sure he understood from the get-go—and for good—that she was married. Even if she wasn’t, technically, married anymore.
    “Mr. Summerfield,” she replied, striving for a coolness she was nowhere close to feeling. In fact, just saying his name added fuel to the flames in her stomach, notching them higher still.
    “I see you once again arrive without an appointment,” he said somewhat caustically.
    “And yet you didn’t hesitate to see me again anyway,” she shot back.
    Instead of tossing out another retort, he extended his hand toward the chair on the other side of his desk. After only a small hesitation—enough to let him know she was no happier about this meeting than he was—Audrey sat down, leaning back, and crossing her legs to at least offer the appearance of not feeling cowed by the man. She hoped.
    Once he was seated, too—sitting in a way that made clear he was in no way cowed by her, the big jerk—she sorted through what she needed to tell him, not sure where to begin. She still didn’t know how she was supposed to convince him that his soul was currently residing in some nether realm, and that if he wanted to get it back, he was going to have to accept help from both her and a long dead relative. But he took the choice out of her hands by starting the conversation himself.
    “Would you care to enlighten me as to why you’ve darkened my door? Again? Without an appointment? Again?”
    Audrey allowed herself a moment of smugness at having riled him, then answered his question with one of her own. “Care to tell me why you agreed to see me? Again? Without an appointment? Again?”
    He frowned at that, then leaned forward to steeple his hands on the desk and look at her in a way that made her feel like, even if he wasn’t cowed by her, she did kind of scare him. So that was cool.
    “Because after you left the other day, Mrs. Magill, I