Free Taming Tess (The St. John Sibling Series) by Barbara Raffin Page B

he called as she traipsed off toward the front of the store. "Just the basics."
    She didn't answer. He hung one of the crop-top sets back on the rack, the gray one, and followed her. At least she was headed in the direction of the cash registers.
    But she ducked into the cosmetics department. Shoulders drooping, he followed as she piled herbal this and pomegranate that onto the clothes in his arms.
    "You don't need all this stuff," he said as he eyed the bottles and jars identified as deep cleansing lotions, skin softening creams, and pore tightening astringents.
    "Trying to save money, St. John?"
    "I could remind you that most people don't have trust funds to fall back on. I should point out that, in the real world, money doesn't grow on trees, and that I work hard for the dollars you are so cavalierly spending."
    " Cavalierly ?" She hitched one eyebrow onto her high, flawless brow.
    "Besides--" He put his face close to her scrubbed clean one with its sun -kissed cheeks and bare, burnished lips. "You don't need that gunk because you're beautiful without it."
    #
    He'd called her cosmetics gunk. She'd concede that the products the discount store sold weren't the best.
    But what had stayed with Tess long after she'd left Roman signing the credit card receipt at The Bargain Mart checkout wasn't the gunk part of his comment. Nor even his lecture about money. What she couldn't stop thinking about was that he'd called her beautiful …without make-up .
    Now, back at his house, Tess lie on the lumpy bed in the bedroom above Roman's, the warm glow of the Winnie the Pooh nightlight casting soft shadows across the slanted ceiling. In the city, a woman didn't step outside without her face made-up. Hell, women in her circle didn't leave their bedroom suites without their noses powdered and lips lined, which was a chore for a woman who liked to jog in the mornings. She had to either apply make-up before and after jogging or sneak out of the house to avoid her mother's, "A lady does not appear in public in disarray."
    Tess couldn't remember ever seeing her mother without the requisite helmet hair. She couldn't picture her father touching her mother's sprayed to brittle perfection hair, either.
    Roman St. John, on the other hand, was a man who'd run his fingers through a woman's hair. Oh yeah. He'd thread his long, thick fingers through a woman's hair all right. Tess dozed off thinking how Roman could cup a woman's head in his broad palm and caress her from head to toe without giving a single thought to whether or not he mussed her hair. He’d probably enjoy mussing it.
    If only she dared let the contractor with the bed big enough to share with a wife run his fingers through her hair.
    #
    It was the thump on the ceiling above his head that woke Roman.
    Not the low peel of distant thunder. Not the wind whistling under the eaves, or even the branch of the hundred-year old Norway pine scraping the north side of the house. He really should prune that thing back.
    He yawned and rolled over, too sleepy to give further thought to what had hit the floor in the bedroom above his. Even the flicker of lightning burning white between the slats of the window blinds elicited little more from him than a sleepy blink. But the yelp underscoring that flash sent him rolling for the light on his nightstand.
    Click. Click. The switch turned between his finger and thumb, but no light came on. The power was out.
    And, in the room above his head, his unwanted houseguest shrieked.
    Grabbing the flashlight from the nightstand drawer, he jumped out of bed, bolted up the steps, and charged Tess' bedroom door. But the door was already half open, his momentum sending it banging back against the inside wall, sending him tripping over something that cursed in a voice he knew too well. The next thing he knew, he was hitting the floor with an oomph and the flashlight was rolling under the bed.
    He groaned. "You really like to hurt me, don't you, Princess?"
    "You're the one