Free After Midnight by Katherine Garbera Page A

wasn’t going to be able to get what she wanted from him if she let her doubts and fears plague her. And unlike standing on all that freshly packed snow earlier, this fear was a lot easier to conquer.
    She heard the sound of the television next door coming on. The walls in this place weren’t exactly thick. “Sorry about that.”
    “I have lived in apartments before, so I know what it’s like. Why’d you choose this place?” he asked, coming into the room and taking off his coat. He sat on the ottoman to remove his boots.
    He was getting comfortable and acting normal. It made her realize how out of sync she felt. She took off her coat and picked his up, hanging them both on hooks by her front door. Her father had put them up when her parents had visited over the holidays.
    She kicked her boots off and set them under her coat. Carter came over and did the same with his.
    “So why do you live here?” he asked again.
    “It’s close to the lodge. When I was cleared to ski again, I came back here thinking I’d go straight into training. My coach—do you know Peter Martin?”
    “I do. Not sure he likes me very much,” Carter said with a huge grin.
    “Why does that not surprise me?” she replied. “You do tend to annoy a lot of people.”
    “I know. I like it.”
    She knew he did. That had been obvious from the first. “Anyway, I got to the top and couldn’t ski down, and he suggested that maybe I stay here and teach classes so I’d be on skis every day as a way of getting used to it again. But so far it hasn’t worked.”
    “Yet it did today. You went down a slope—”
    “A tiny one. That hardly counts.”
    He gave her a chiding look. “But you did it. And we crashed—”
    “You did that on purpose,” she said.
    “You’re right,” he admitted, taking her hand in his and lifting it to his mouth. He kissed her palm and then placed her hand on his chest. “Guilty as charged. But I had enough of waiting to hold you in my arms. I don’t think you can appreciate how much I want you.”
    She thought that maybe she could. She wanted him, as well. With each aching breath she took she wanted to feel his naked body pressed to hers again. She wanted to see if in the cold light of day he’d been as sexy as he’d been the night before.
    Had it been the night and the champagne that had made it seem magical? Surely it had. No man could make her feel so alive. A mountain, maybe. Taking a run down a dangerous slope, definitely. But Carter Shaw—surely she was remembering it wrong.
    She felt her pulse beating a little more quickly, and her lips felt dry thinking about his mouth pressed to hers. A slow burning heat brushed over her from head to toe, and her clothes felt too restrictive and she wanted...just wanted things that she’d never thought she would.
    He watched her with that uncanny gaze of his and she felt as though he could see all the way through her fears and her doubts. Straight to the heart of her, where she questioned everything she’d experienced with him the night before.
    “Gorgeous, what am I going to do with you?” he asked.
    A tingle of anticipation swept through her, and she guessed that this was her chance to try out all the risqué things she’d always sort of wanted to try but had never had the right guy to do it with. But this was Carter. The live-for-the-moment poster boy and her chance to do all the things she’d always deemed too dangerous.
    “Kiss me?”
    He smiled and then lifted one of his hands, pulling the ponytail holder from her hair very carefully so he didn’t snag even one strand. He ran his fingers through her hair, fanning it out and pulling it forward over her shoulders. Then he tunneled his fingers through it, tipping her head back, and very slowly lowered his head toward hers.
    She kept her eyes open this time. This kiss, she wanted to see his emotions, ascertain what he felt and try to figure out if she was doing this right. Because if she’d learned anything