A Real Page Turner by Rita Lawless Page A

public high schools.
    She was so stunned by this news, given that Misty had been so confident he was a lawyer that she’d stared at him with her mouth open. At least there wasn’t any food inside.
    “My mother always told me an open mouth attracted flies,” he said as he chomped on his own food. “Something wrong?”
    April put her slice down. “I just never pegged you for the teacher type.”
    “Well, I’m not teaching right now,” he said after he’d swallowed his food. “Right now I’m… taking some time off.”
    April stared at him. “Because?” she prompted.
    “Because I wanted to.” He started to eat again.
    “Because you’re rich and you don’t have to work?” April was pretty sure that people just didn’t take time off work, unless they had a huge amount of savings built up, or they’d won the lottery. There had to be some other reason.
    “Just because,” he said, the words muffled as he chewed. “Do you need to run a credit report before you sleep with me?”
    April crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. “Are you independently wealthy?”
    “Not that I know of,” he said after he swallowed.
    “Then you have to work for things like rent,” she cocked her head in his direction before she swept her hand toward the pizza, “and food.”
    Titan didn’t respond, so she pushed on. “Detective Threadway thinks I should be leery of you.”
    “Does he?” He seemed unconcerned.
    “Do you know him?”
    Titan picked up another slice of pizza. “Our paths have crossed, but we’re not golfing buddies, if you know what I mean.” He bit into his pizza.
    Frustration surged through April. Each answer he gave led her to question something else, and he wasn’t exactly being forthcoming with his answers.
    “Why do you think Threadway doesn’t like you?”
    Titan continued to eat. Finally, after he’d finished off that slice, he wiggled his eyebrows at her. “Maybe he wants to take you over his knee, and he’s pissed that I got there first.”
    “He wasn’t talking about sex,” she countered. “He was saying it as if—” She stopped mid-sentence, because Titan was right. Threadway had been talking about Titan taking a crop to her ass. Maybe the man sitting next to her was right.
    “Is there anything you want to tell me about yourself? Other than the fact that you’re unemployed?”
    He’d already picked up another slice of pizza. “Who said I was unemployed?”
    It was like they were going in a circle, and they weren’t getting anywhere. April decided to change her tactics. “How do you pay your bills, if you’re not teaching?”
    “I saved… a lot.” He polished off another slice. If April wasn’t careful, he was going to eat the whole pie without her. She dug into her food, realizing this was getting her nowhere. For some strange reason that didn’t bother her. He’d given her a plausible reason for Threadway not to like him. Two people that she trusted did.
    “How long have you lived in Denver?”
    “Seven years,” he said. “I taught at Coolidge the whole time.”
    He was fast with his answers, and that told her he wasn’t a liar. It was another ‘fact’ of Misty’s that was shot down. She decided to pose a really important question to him.
    “Do you read books?”
    “I do.”
    April narrowed her eyes. “Then how come you haven’t come into my store?”
    He looked amused. “Because it’s not close to where I live.”
    “You’ll have to come in more often.”
    She took a bite of her food, almost choking on it when he said, “Will I get to spank the owner in the stacks? It might be interesting to do it while the store is open, see if we can get away with it. Maybe toward the back, you with your panties down around you ankles, me with my belt off. You’d have to concentrate on listening for the door, and for customers while I laid the leather down on your sweet ass.”
    A thrill of delight ran through her. The shelves in the store were fairly