What a Man's Gotta Do Read Free

and clefts and lashes no man should be allowed to have, dammit.
    Along with a subsidiary impression that those angles and clefts and long lashes were somehow familiar.
    â€œThanks,” she said, guiding the still whimpering Lucas toward the door.
    The man nodded, muttering “S’okay” in a soft, Southern accent.
    Ding! Ding! Ding!
    Mala whipped around so fast she nearly knocked Carrie over. Oblivious to her daughter’s affronted “Mama!” she stared at the man, hard, as her heart free-fell straight to her pelvis and her brain warped back twenty years to a time when she could still get into jeans that didn’t have elastic at the waist, a time when nobody knew that Spruce Lake High’s Senior Class President had a secret crush on a bad-ass kid whose ice-chip blue eyes regularly sent chills of forbidden promises down her spine, even though he never—not once—returned her smile.
    A boy with sinfully thick, caramel-brown hair and the sharply defined, beard-shadowed face of a man; a boy whose lean, muscled body had filled out his worn, fitted jeans andT-shirts like nobody’s business, whose direct, disquieting gaze spoke of innocence lost but not regretted. He showed up at school every day, yet never spoke to anyone, never carried around any books, neither got involved in any activities nor caused any trouble. Not that Mala knew of, at least. He had appeared out of nowhere, a month into their senior year, only to vanish six weeks before graduation. Mala hadn’t seen him since.
    Until today.
    She stood there, hugging herself against the cold, barely aware of Lucas’s entreaties to get inside as she let Eddie King once again ensnare her gaze in his.
    Then it dropped, unerringly and unapologetically, to her breasts, and she thought, Hold the phone—somebody noticed. Damn, she’d just about forgotten what it felt like to have a man look at her with a little Hmmm in his expression. God knew, Scott sure hadn’t. Not once she’d gotten pregnant with Lucas, at least. Yeah, yeah, so she was a feminist turncoat. Tough. Rushes of sexual awareness didn’t often happen to single mothers with two kids and too many pounds plastered to their butts. It was kinda nice, having her nipples tighten for some other reason than being cold.
    Even if it was just a passing thing.
    At seventeen, she’d been the quintessential good girl, while Eddie King had been the quintessential good girl’s fantasy. At thirty-seven, not a whole lot had changed on that score.
    But she had. At seventeen, she’d still believed in “one day…” At thirty-seven, that day had come and gone. But not before taking a healthy chunk out of her ample butt on its way out the door.
    Â 
    Eddie had no use for memories. The bad ones—and there were plenty of those—he’d ditched years ago. And the few good ones…well, that’d be like refusing to throw away a pair of shoes you’d outgrown, wouldn’t it? No matter how cool they were, if they didn’t fit, no sense hanging on to ’em.
    Mala Koleski had been a pair of shoes that’d been the wrongsize from the get-go. A pair of shoes he’d never even bothered trying on.
    Not that he hadn’t been tempted.
    In any case, he hadn’t thought about her in years. Yet all it took was one chance meeting, a split second’s worth of a connection that was startlingly and unmistakably sexual, to haul those memories of her front and center, boy, all shined up and ready for inspection.
    Whether he liked it or not.
    The kids annihilated the moment, as kids tended to do, and they’d all stumbled back inside, where he and Mala did this dumb so-wow-how-are-you-doing-fine-and-you? number until she’d shepherded her babies into Galen’s office and Eddie’d gone back to the stove.
    Where the sizzling sausage and peppers now taunted him. Galen had more or less left him to his own devices, and