Free [4 Seasons 01] Seducing Summer by Serenity Woods

plenty of stamina. I
can keep going for hours.”
    He raised his gaze to her face, but she was
concentrating on the map. Had she meant that to sound as suggestive as it had
sounded? Or was it just his sex-starved brain trying desperately to join the
dots?
    He looked back at the road, stifling a
sigh. He should have insisted to Phoebe that one of his operatives take his
place. The next few weeks were going to be torture, and not only because every
time he looked at Callie, he wanted to kiss her. There was something about her
that managed to cajole details out of him, like wheedling a whelk out of its
shell. Normally, he never revealed details about himself to a client, but it
seemed rude not to answer her questions. And she had an uncanny ability to
analyze everything that came out of his mouth. How he said things, and even
what he didn’t say, seemed to tell her as much about him as the actual words,
which was rather unnerving. But the main problem was definitely going to be the
fact that he found her attractive.
    Okay, so that was a massive understatement.
Callie Summer was like a cool glass of lager on a hot day, or a fillet steak
when a guy was really, really hungry. It was all he could do not to salivate
when he looked at her. From her shiny blonde hair that always looked
just-washed, to her generous breasts he was desperate to weigh in his palms, to
her wide blue eyes that gave him the shivers, to the plump lips he wanted to
kiss to see whether they were as soft as they looked… He’d not met a woman for
a long time that he hungered for so badly, and that he couldn’t have.
    It was the story of his life. He felt as if
everything he’d ever wanted had been placed on too high a shelf, just out of
reach.
    The therapist he’d seen when he first came
out of the Army had told him he set his sights too high, which was why he was
always disappointed. Am I asking for the moon? he’d snapped at her. What
did he want that was so incredibly ambitious? Some would say that a father’s
approval, a mother to love him, a supportive brother, a partner who loved him
the way he was, a career that didn’t end in near death, and friends who managed
to reach the age of forty wasn’t particularly ambitious.
    Or maybe it was. Many people weren’t lucky
enough to have all those things, he was sure. But he couldn’t stop wanting
them, even if he was shooting for the stars.
    He gripped hold of the steering wheel and
glared at the road. He wasn’t going to think about the past now, about all the
things he’d lost. And he wasn’t going to let a surge of hormones deter him from
his task. He was a grown man, not a teenage boy. Desire was all in the mind,
and God knew he’d learned to deal with not thinking about certain things for a
while now. He’d trained his brain to sidestep memories and triggers that evoked
emotions he no longer wished to feel. He could damned well add lust to the list
and put thoughts of Callie Summer to the attic of his mind in a dusty old chest
where they belonged.
    “Have you been to Dunedin before?” Callie’s
gentle voice stirred him from his dark thoughts.
    He glanced at her. She was watching him,
and something in her eyes told him she was perfectly aware of the gloomy path
he’d been heading toward, and she was attempting to distract him away from it.
    Half of him resented her for being so
astute—it was intrusive, and he didn’t like being so transparent. But the other
half felt a surprising lift of heart at the fact that she’d noticed but had
been nice enough not to ask him directly about what was bothering him, because
she knew he didn’t like to talk about himself.
    Forcing himself to loosen his grip on the
wheel, he took a deep breath and released it slowly before answering. “Yes, a
few years ago, though.” He’d done the training course to become a protection
officer there. “You?”
    “Once, although the same as you, many years
ago. I’m looking forward to it. I mean, I know we