Taming Tess (The St. John Sibling Series)

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

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Authors: Barbara Raffin
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his underwear.
    She paused by the dresser and opened a drawer. Sure enough. His shorts were folded into tight little squares. She shook her head. "You're going to make some neat-nick woman very happy, St. John."
    Of course, it wouldn't be her. She wasn't neat.
    She wasn't husband hunting either. She was just a woman snooping through a man's underwear drawer, a very virile man's underwear drawer.
    Neat or not, St. John was a man's man.
    And not just because he wore plaid shirts, a hard hat, and a tool belt. He had a physique sculpted by physical labor and an ass made for his carpenter jeans.
    Closing the drawer, Tess mewed in contentment. The marriage bed loomed before her and her mew turned to a resigned sigh. There could never be anything between her and Roman in the bedroom save for smoldering sex. Too bad because he really wasn't such a bad guy, judging by their phone conversations that had often wandered away from the job at hand into areas of general architecture. He was compassionate and generous, traits she'd witness one afternoon after he'd sent his crew home and he stayed to build new porch steps for the very elderly Mrs. Antonetti across the alley. Then there was the way he always managed to make Kitt's infant daughter smile by making silly faces or cooing at her.
    She sighed. He was a natural with kids, not that paternal talents were even on her radar screen when vetting men. Still, he was a nice guy--a good guy. The fire at her house an accident and no reason to leave his kitchen a mess. Just as it wasn't his fault all she and Roman could share was a fondness for similar architecture, steamy sex, and that they both liked to read in bed.
    S he fingered the reading material piled high on his nightstand. There were magazines dedicated to renovating older homes and a fat volume on building codes. And then there was that thin little book he'd been reading last night when she'd come to him for a nightlight, the one with the faded title he'd said was about a woman like her. She picked up the book and turned it over in her hand.
    "Shakespeare. I'm impressed, St. John," she murmured as she squinted to read the faded title. But impressed wasn't the word that came to mind once she made out the words. The Taming of the Shrew .
    He'd compared her to a shrew ! How dare he? And after all the hassle and headache he'd caused her!
    "Arrogant oaf." She slammed the book down on the nightstand.
    "Pompous, patronizing neat freak!" she growled at the dresser with its drawer of precisely folded underwear.
    "Condescending Cro-Magnon," she howled, hammering wrinkles into Roman's bedspread. "You think I'm a shrew? You haven't begun to see how shrewish I can be and to start with, you can clean your own kitchen!"
    She stormed out of the bedroom in search of something to write on. "Let it never be said of Theresa Louise Abbot that she didn't give a man exactly what he deserved."
    She snatched up the stick y note pad, but quickly discarded it. The yellow square was far too small for all she had to say to her contractor. Remembering he had an office, she raced up the stairs and into the room across the hall from the guest bedroom. She headed straight to the desk wedged in under the eaves, snatched a pen from a racquetball can next to the computer, a sheet of paper from the storage shelf beneath the inkjet printer and started to write.
    Dear Mr. St. John:
    No. Too polite.
    Roman St. John didn't deserve polite. She crumpled up the sheet of typing paper, tossed it over her shoulder, and snagged another.
    Look here, St. John!
    The paper tore beneath the ferocity of her exclamation point. She balled up the paper and sent it after the first, snatched up another, and set pen to page. This time, the pen left nothing but scratchy little lines and faint dashes where letters should be.
    Scowling, Tess dug in the racquetball tin for another pen. But all she came up with were pencils. No pencil lead would stand up to her writing. Not today.
    She opened the

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