Free Then Came You by Jill Shalvis Page A

curved. “Emily.”
    She lifted her gaze to his and winced at his knowing smirk. Busted. Had she thought he needed a hug?
    â€œBetter,” he said.
    â€œHey, maybe you have something on your mouth,” she said. “Like a crumb or something.”
    â€œDo I?”
    She bit her lower lip. Save face and lie? Or come clean and admit she was lusting after him.
Lie
, she decided. “Yes,” she said.
    â€œWhere?” He swiped his forearm over his mouth. “Better?”
    She couldn’t explain herself in a million years, but she shook her head and went up on tiptoes, touching his lips with her fingertips. “Here,” she whispered, and then, clearly in the throes of a psychotic break, she pressed her mouth to the spot.
    Wyatt’s hands went to her hips, tightening their grip when she pulled back.
    â€œYou get it?” he asked, voice low but tinged with amusement as well as heat.
    Not trusting her voice, she nodded, and telling herself that was absolutely the
last
time she touched—or kissed—him, they went inside the restaurant. They ordered bacon blue burgers and seasoned sweet potato fries, and some locally brewed beer.
    The food was fantastic.
    So was the company.
    In Emily’s world, there were pretty much three levels of existence; bad, okay, and good.
Bad
was having her mom slowly die over a five year period from complications of MS.
Okay
was attending vet school after earning her undergraduate degree, but nearly killing herself to do it, because she had to keep a job on the side to pay for such luxuries as eating and helping her dad with medical bills.
Good
was pretty much the same, but school was finally over and she was actually working at her dream job—albeit about a thousand miles away from where she’d planned. In one year though, she could have her dream job, in her dream location. Life might achieve great status.
    She didn’t see room for a distraction named Wyatt. She understood the attraction—she’d have to be dead and buried not to be attracted to him, but he was a damn big deviance from her Plan.
    Too big.
    One beer loosened her tongue, two beers separated it from her brain. So naturally she had two. “Your mom’s interesting.”
    â€œShe’s something,” he said.
    â€œWhat does she do?”
    â€œShe and my dad are foreign diplomats.”
    â€œWow. Impressive.” From what she’d heard, it sounded like he and his sisters had been on their own for a long time. And on top of that, his mom had seemed downright disinterested in his life.
    Her own mom had been the opposite. She’d been snoopy, nosy, bossy, and . . . amazingly wonderful.
    It had been several years since her death but Emily still got a lump in her throat just thinking about her. “You must’ve had a very interesting childhood,” she said.
    â€œSure,” he said. “If you call moving twenty something times between the ages of five and seventeen interesting.”
    â€œSo I guess you’re good on a plane,” she said.
    â€œPlanes. Trains. Mules . . .” He smiled at her laugh. “Ah. You’ve never been to Morocco.”
    â€œNo. I’m a shaky traveler,” she said. “I can’t even sleep through a flight, I have to be awake for the crash.”
    Now it was his turn to laugh.
    He had a great laugh. And did he know that when he laughed, his eyes laughed, too? Or that his hair curled over his ears in a really sexy way? She forced herself to stop noticing and blamed beer number two. She pushed it away from her.
    â€œTravel enough and it gets easier,” he said.
    â€œWe used to vote on our family vacations. Land or sea.” She smiled at the memory. “Land meant driving to the desert and camping out. Sea meant driving twenty minutes to the Los Angeles reservoir. We’d sit on the concrete shore in our drug store beach chairs and pretend we were on a