there’s no need for you to worry about the food.”
“But I love to cook,” she said, stepping back to allow Daniel to enter the kitchen. His sleeve brushed her hand as he passed by, and the cotton was cold and damp, raising goose bumps up the length of her forearm. She backed away further. “Maybe Roc would let me help him, at least.”
Daniel bent over the kitchen sink, splashing water on his face, then rubbed it with the nearest kitchen towel. “No,” he said again. “There’s no need for you to worry. Roc should have your room ready by now. Would you like to go upstairs, maybe have a shower and a nap? We usually have dinner about seven, if that suits you. Roc could call you then.”
“A nap?” She couldn’t believe her ears. “It’s only three o’clock in the afternoon, Mr. McKinley—I mean, Daniel.” She smiled, just a little, to soften the intensity of her instinctive outburst. “I haven’t had a nap in the afternoon since I was in kindergarten.”
He looked slightly displeased, and she suddenly wondered uncomfortably whether he’d been trying to get rid of her. Maybe she was being rude—maybe snowbound etiquette demanded that she withdraw obediently to her assigned quarters and at least pretend to sleep for the next four hours.
“There must be things you’d like to do.” His impersonal gaze roamed over her hair, her face, her hands, and she flushed, thinking what a mess she must look. He probably was accustomed to women who were far more concerned with their grooming than they were with cooking dinner. She lifted her chin, meeting his critical survey with just a touch of defiance. She wasn’t an ornamental, trophy female. She was a working woman, and she wasn’t a bit ashamed of it. Still, she tucked her short, unpolished nails behind her back.
“You’re not an employee here, you know,” he said curtly. “You’re a guest.”
Yes, she thought, but an unwanted guest. A guest who had been invited only by the storm. But she didn’t say it, knowing it would sound ungrateful. And she was grateful, of course. Though she would have preferred to be stranded almost anywhere else on earth, she knew how lucky she was not to be out there in that helicopter with that crazy pilot at the controls.
“Still,” she said, “there must be things to do during an emergency like this. I’d like to help.”
“For God’s sake, say yes, man, before the lady decides you’re some kind of chauvinist pig.” Roc appeared in the doorway, and Lindsay, though grateful for his arrival, wondered whether the caretaker knew a labyrinth of secret passages that accounted for these dramatic manifestations.
He ambled into the kitchen, his black garb strikingly dark against the gleaming white tile. “Daniel really isn’t a chauvinist, Miss Lindsay, though I know he’s been talking like a chowderhead. He hires plenty of women at the office, even has a couple of female vice presidents, believe it or not.”
Lindsay thought back and remembered that this was true, though she wasn’t sure why Roc was bringing it up now.
“It’s just that he’s not accustomed to having useful women right here in the house with him,” Roc went on. “Jocelyn, for instance—”
Daniel’s hand moved. “Roc—”
“Jocelyn, for instance,” Roc continued as if there had been no interruption, “could easily have spent four hours tending those talons of hers. Coloring them some DayGlo red that would make a blind man wince. And then she would have wanted Danny Boy here to spoon feed her while the paint dried.” Roc shuddered, as if the memory were too horrible to bear. “Disgusting.”
“That’s enough, Roc,” Daniel said, and though he still leaned up against the counter, apparently relaxed and at ease, his knuckles were pale around the dish towel he held, and every syllable was as sharp as glass. “I don’t think Lindsay’s interested in all that.”
Of course she was interested, though she tried to keep her face bland, noncommittal. What an incredible image Roc had conjured up! She looked at Daniel now, trying to imagine this scowling man sitting on the edge of his wife’s bed, laughingly placing bits of fruit between lovely red lips.
“Well, excuse me for trying to defend your sorry reputation,” Roc said huffily. He stomped over to the pantry and, grabbing the cupboard handle with his hook, flung it open. “If you want Miss Lindsay to believe that in your opinion women spend all day snoozing and scarfing bonbons, it’s no skin off my nose. But I for one would be glad of a little help around here. God knows you’re worthless.”
Lindsay instinctively held her breath, waiting for Daniel’s reaction. If she remembered correctly from her days as his employee, cold, quick annihilation awaited the disrespectful caretaker. But when she glanced over at Daniel, she saw that a grudging smile had begun to tilt the corners of his eyes. Roc wasn’t just an ordinary employee, then, was he? He obviously had a special status and was allowed liberties that no one else would have dared to take.
The smile disappeared as quickly as it came. Daniel tossed the towel onto the counter.
“All right, Lindsay,” he said, his voice betraying neither enthusiasm nor annoyance. “If you want to cook dinner for us tonight, Roc obviously will welcome you into his kitchen. I’m going out to check the furnace.”
“Right,” Roc said, his head still buried in the pantry. “Then you can go take a shower and a nap, Danny Boy. If anyone in this kitchen needs to tend to his grooming, it’s you. You smell like the woodpile, boss, and that’s a fact.”
Daniel deliberately postponed his shower for several hours, concentrating on first one chore and then another, as if to prove to Roc that he didn’t mind being grubby and disheveled around Lindsay Blaisdell. Then, when be finally did clean up, he consciously decided to dress down—fresh jeans and a thick blue sweater would be fine. Roc had better understand right now that Daniel wasn’t interested in impressing Lindsay Blaisdell.
He had been the victim of Roc’s matchmaking for three years now, and he knew all the signs. Ever since Jocelyn had died, the caretaker had been indefatigable in his hunt for some sweet young thing to bring home to Daniel.
The younger and sweeter, the better, at least in Roc’s estimation. Apparently he believed that Daniel needed the perfect sugarplum princess as an antidote to Jocelyn, who had been six years older than he, and had been possessed of a sophistication as sharp as the business end of a razor blade.
At first he’d been too numb to notice. But when he’d finally caught on to Roc’s machinations, Daniel had been rather sharp himself. He had no intention of ever falling in love again, he had assured his caretaker, and the few ultra-temporary, mutually satisfying relationships he was interested in couldn’t be honorably offered to these ingenues. These young women were dreaming of fourteen-carat, ring-finger, bells-and-preachers, capital-L-Love, and Daniel was permanently out of the stuff.
But for months Roc had been irrepressible, until finally, in an icy fury, Daniel had found the words to put a stop to the charade.
“Frankly, Roc, I don’t believe I require the services of a pimp,” he had said, narrow-eyed and steely. Roc had, for once, been speechless. In high dudgeon he had stormed off, but he had, to Daniel’s immense relief, finally ceased his maneuvers.
And now, after a blessedly quiet year, apparently Fate had dropped Lindsay Blaisdell like a bomb into the middle of Roc’s best intentions. She met all the criteria. Young—Daniel figured somewhere around twenty-two or -three. Pretty—well, even cold-hearted men who had no interest
