Free Crush on You by Christie Ridgway

though there was no reason to know the details. “Make me understand why people around here treat you like this. They’re afraid to meet your eyes. They’re afraid to glance at your tits.”
    She gasped in offense.
    “Well, hell, Alessandra. They’re damn good tits and you’re the one laying them out there.”
    Her glance fell to her cleavage once again and then she jerked her shoulder from him as she buttoned up a second time.
    Penn shook his head. “This just doesn’t make sense. Something’s not right here.”
    Her gaze jumped to him and there was fire in her eyes. “I hate the expression on your face,” she said, and he could tell her mad mood matched his. “It’s like you’re trying to punch holes in my story. Do you want me to track down Tommy’s obituary that ran in the paper? I have it somewhere.”
    Yeah, she probably did, along with a pressed flower from her wedding bouquet and the rings they’d never exchanged. For some reason that thought only spiked his ire. Beautiful Alessandra Baci, languishing after what couldn’t be. Yearning for a touch from ghostly hands.
    “Well?” She slammed her arms across her chest, popping the top buttons yet again. “Why are you so suspicious of me?”
    He didn’t have every answer to that himself. Shaking his head again, he slid his hands in his pockets, determined to keep them to himself from now on. “Maybe it’s my job. The first season of the show we had to revamp the participant application six times to get it right. Now it’s fourteen pages developed by a unit of lawyers. A regiment of PIs then go about verifying every fact. The schemers we’ve seen—”
    “I’m not a schemer!”
    “You’re something,” he muttered. “What that is, I just don’t know. Except it’s weird as hell how they treat you like you’re made of glass.”
    “That’s because—” She broke off. “You wouldn’t understand.”
    He thought he did, remembering the old guys in the hardware store. His fingers tightened into fists. “You’re still Tommy’s girl, is that it?”
    “Look, I don’t owe you any explan—”
    “Give me one anyway.”
    She rolled those big brown eyes, but then her gaze met his. “It’s just that . . . that we were always a couple. We were high school sweethearts when Tommy was diagnosed his senior year. We danced at his prom with him in a wheelchair and me on his lap. Then four years passed and everyone believed he’d beaten it—he had beaten it—but the drugs that helped him had damaged his heart. It gave out on the way to our wedding. So just as he’ll always be the one who died too young, then, yeah, I’ll always be Tommy’s girl.”
    “Christ,” he ground out, not the least bit satisfied by her answer. “You’re a woman—”
    “Widow,” she corrected, then frowned. “Well, almost a widow.”
    Worse than a widow, Penn decided. A baby almost-bride who might as well be buried beside the hometown boy who’d died too young to make good. People looked at her and saw tragedy instead of a living, breathing person. Hence the acquiescence to her every request, the tremors at her every tear.
    She took a step closer to him, bringing her scent that much nearer. He sucked it in, and his head spun. But his vision was clear enough to make out the thrumming beat of the pulse in her throat, and he knew his nearness affected her, too.
    He saw her face flush and her pupils dilate, but she challenged him all the same, silly woman. “Satisfied now?” she asked.
    Silly, silly woman. “Not even close,” he answered, knowing as he did that he was no longer going to keep his hands to himself. He couldn’t, not with that scent in his head and this clamoring need to show baby bride that she wasn’t as cold as that corpse in her past.
    As he bent his head closer to her lips, he slid his palm inside that half-opened shirt that had made him crazy all the long, damn day.

5

    Alessandra saw the kiss coming. She had all the time in the world to