Free Nacho Figueras Presents by Jessica Whitman

chest, and then slipping his hands beneath the sweater, he cupped her breasts and gently rubbed her nipple with his thumb. A searing heat rocketed straight through her veins, making her arch and moan.
    This time it was Alejandro who broke the kiss, taking her chin in his hand and looking into her face. His sky blue eyes were stormy now, his pupils dilated with desire. “Georgia,” he breathed, “my God.”
    She wanted nothing so much as she wanted to kiss him again, to feel her body twined with his, to answer the raw need she saw in his face, but then she thought of the troubled way he had looked at the girl in the tent—his face so full of emotion—and she knew she didn’t want to be some sort of fly-by-night substitute. She knew she better seize the moment and break away, that she was seconds from giving herself over completely and getting caught up in something all wrong. After all, she’d been cheated on before—she knew how terrible it felt—and she hated the idea of being complicit in some stranger’s pain.
    “I—I think we should get back to the clinic,” she said shakily. “MacKenzie should be out of surgery.”
    He took a deep breath, took his hands off her, and sat back. His mouth tensed, and his eyes, which had been so alive with longing a moment before, slowly went cold, his professional mask descending again. “I’ll call a car,” he said politely and took out his phone.

Chapter Seventeen
    A s much as she enjoyed Billy’s folks, Georgia had been more than a little relieved when, after another hour with MacKenzie in the recovery room, she had finally arrived at their beach house and found that they were skiing in Aspen and she and Billy had the place to themselves. She could not have imagined standing there in her grass-stained clothes, knees still weak from Alejandro’s kisses, and having to make polite and intelligent adult conversation. It was sweet relief to have Billy take one look at her, arch a perfect eyebrow, hand her a cup of hot tea heavily laced with whiskey, and then tuck her into the soft and fluffy guest-room bed.
    She sat up for a minute, wanting to tell him about her strange night, but he gently pushed her back down.
    “Now, Peaches,” he said as he smoothed back her hair, “you know I want to hear every little dirty detail of what happened, but you’re so tired that I might as well be talking to your one-eyed donkey right now. So go ahead and sleep and you can tell me everything over mimosas in the morning.”
    She’d slept into the afternoon and awoke to Billy standing by her bed, holding a cup of scorching hot coffee in each hand. “Scooch over,” he said, and climbed into bed with her. “Now, start from the beginning, and don’t leave anything out.”
    They had lingered in bed, laughing and talking, until they finished a whole pot of coffee and Billy had wrung almost every last detail out of her. Not wanting Billy to tease her about her excessive morality, she left out the part about ending the kiss because she thought Alejandro might have a girlfriend. Instead, she just said vaguely that things had “felt wrong somehow.”
    Finally, Georgia declared she was starving, and Billy had shown her the huge, light-filled kitchen and told her to help herself while he took a shower.
    Georgia munched on a croissant and took herself on a tour of the premises. The beach house was predictably incredible in the late afternoon light, modern and open, with floor-to-ceiling glass and a beautiful gray slate pool too tempting for Georgia to ignore.
    She stuck her head back in the house and yelled, “Billy? I’m going to swim, okay?”
    “Go right ahead, darling,” came the faint reply from upstairs as Georgia went to her room to dig out her suit.
    *  *  *
    After spending most of the night on a hard plastic chair at the emergency clinic, Alejandro made it back to the hacienda early that morning and had gone straight to bed, exhausted. He awoke hours later to a slight hangover