style="font-size:15px;"> He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Your mystery man won’t get to know the real you.”
She rolled her eyes. “He can get to know the real me later. First, I need to get him to notice me. So I think the makeover will work, and you did say you would help me. Don’t try wiggling out of it now.”
“I’m not.” He paused. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Hurt?” She glanced around as if to make sure none of her employees were within hearing range. “Are you saying you don’t think that a makeover will help me? That I’m so much of a reject that even a makeover wouldn’t do me any good?”
“No, that’s not what—”
“Well I’ve got news for you, Stern. I’ve seen even the ugliest of women and men become beautiful and handsome. So there’s no reason to believe a makeover can’t do wonders for me, too.”
“That’s not what I was insinuating, JoJo.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll show you,” she said, then walked off toward the first car she would be working on.
He rubbed his hand down his face in frustration. What was going on here? He and JoJo never fought or argued about anything, and now they seemed to be bickering back and forth about every damn thing.
All he’d said was that he didn’t want to see her hurt. Why would she think he’d meant that a makeover wouldn’t help her? In truth, he knew it would help her and that’s what he was worried about. Men would be coming on to her for all the wrong reasons.
He glanced over at her as she leaned over the car to look under the hood. He couldn’t help noticing how her work pants stretched tightly over her backside. Her perfectly shaped backside. Damn, why was he checking out JoJo?
He drew in a frustrated breath. “I’ll call you later.”
“Whatever,” she mumbled without even bothering to look up.
Stern left, feeling as if he’d made the situation between them worse instead of better.
Three
“Here’s the information you wanted on that Carmichael dude.”
JoJo looked up into the face of a petite blonde who didn’t look her age. A copy of Wanda’s birth certificate in her employment file indicated she was nearing sixty, but if you asked Wanda she would swear she wasn’t even fifty yet. And since she had the face and figure to back it up, no one had dared to call her on it.
JoJo picked up the card Wanda had tossed on her desk. “He lives in Cherry Hills Village.” The Village was one of the most affluent suburbs in Denver.
“You’re surprised? Look how he dresses. Look at the car he drives. Not to mention what he does for a living.”
JoJo nodded. “He’s thirty-one, the same age as Stern. And according to what you’ve found out, he’s not in an exclusive relationship.”
“Also like Stern.”
JoJo shifted her gaze from the card to Wanda, who was pretending to peruse JoJo’s bulletin board. She’d known Wanda long enough to recognize the smile the older woman was trying to hide. “Well, yes,” JoJo admitted. “Like Stern.”
Wanda tilted her head and met JoJo’s gaze. “Come to think of it, there’s a lot about this Carmichael man that would remind a person of Stern. Is there a reason for that?”
JoJo decided she didn’t want to hold Wanda’s gaze any longer. The woman was sharp. “What do you think?”
JoJo couldn’t resist watching Wanda out of the corners of her eyes. She saw Wanda look thoughtful for a moment before she said, “Do you really want me to tell you what I think, Jovonnie?”
JoJo tried to ignore the tension building at her temples. Whenever Wanda called her by her full name JoJo knew Wanda would go into “it’s time I tell it the way I see it” mode.
“Don’t you have a switchboard to cover? You are on payroll,” she reminded her.
“Don’t try pulling rank on me, young lady. This is my lunch break, and need I remind you I am entitled to one?”
“No you don’t have to remind me, but I’m working through mine, so if you don’t mind, I—”
“I do mind,” Wanda interrupted, resting her hip on the edge of JoJo’s desk. “And the reason I mind is because I think you’re making a big mistake.”
Seeing that she wouldn’t be getting any work done until Wanda had her say, JoJo tossed her pen on her desk and leaned back in her chair. “Evidently, you want to get something off your chest.”
“I do.”
JoJo nodded. “All right, you have the floor.” She placed the card down on her desk.
Taking JoJo at her word, Wanda stood and paced in front of JoJo’s desk. Wanda was a beautiful woman who had gone through two marriages. The first had ended in death and the other in divorce. Wanda would tell anyone that the second marriage had been a mistake because she’d tried to find a man who could replace a husband who was irreplaceable.
Wanda had fallen in love with a cop at the age of twenty-one, and he’d left her a widow with a newborn baby at twenty-eight. She had remarried at thirty-four and divorced at thirty-seven. She and her ex were both still single and remained friends. It wasn’t unusual for him to drop by the shop every so often to take Wanda to lunch or dinner.
Tension now throbbed at JoJo’s temples. She had a ton of paperwork to do, and like she’d told Stern, she needed to go home to unpack and do laundry. She’d become impatient with the pacing when Wanda finally stopped, snagged her gaze and said, “You’ve fallen in love with Stern.”
JoJo was glad her backside was firmly planted in the chair or she would have fallen out of it. She was totally positive she hadn’t given her feelings away so how had Wanda figured things out? JoJo didn’t want to believe what her father had always jokingly said about Wanda: that she had a sixth sense about stuff that wasn’t any of her business.
When JoJo didn’t say anything, but just sat there and stared, Wanda said, “Admit it.”
JoJo quickly snapped out of her moment of stunned silence. She reached across her desk and picked up the pen she’d tossed aside earlier and pretended to jot something down on one of the documents she picked up. “I won’t admit anything. Don’t be silly.”
“Not silly, just observant. And you should know by now that I don’t miss a thing.”
JoJo replaced her pen on the desk and tilted her head. “And just what do you think you haven’t been missing?”
Wanda smiled. “The way you’ve started looking at Stern when you think he won’t notice. The way you smile whenever you see him. How excited you were to go on that hunting trip with him. You acted like it was your first time when you do it two or three times a year.”
JoJo waved off her
