and all in all it seemed comfortable.
“I don’t expect you to feed me the whole time I’m here but the apartment will do just fine. In fact, it’s cozy. I like it,” Kit assured him, meaning it.
He lifted her suitcase over the brass footboard that matched the bed’s brass headboard and set it on the mattress as Kit put the shopping bag on the tiny kitchen table.
They turned to face each other at about the same time and that was when Kit was treated to the sight of his eyes.
The man had amazing, vibrant, bright aquamarine-colored eyes.
And for a moment she got lost in them.
Until his deep voice brought her out of it.
“So, do you want some time up here alone or shall we just go down and get you fed?”
Since she’d already used the rest room at the bus station, she said, “To tell you the truth I didn’t have time to eat all day and I’m starved. I think I’ll just take you up on dinner.”
He smiled as if that was what he’d been hoping to hear, putting those intriguing creases down the sides of his handsome face. “Great. Let’s go.”
They hadn’t closed the door and this time Ad stepped outside ahead of her, as if giving the place over to her as her own.
Kit followed him out, flipping off the wall switch beside the door to turn off the overhead lights he’d turned on before. Then she checked to make sure the door was locked and closed it after herself.
“I recommend the fish-and-chips. They’re especially good tonight,” Ad said as they retraced their path down the stairs. “But you can have whatever you want.”
“Fish-and-chips it is. And iced tea if you have it.”
They went back in through the kitchen and Ad told the cook they needed an order of fish-and-chips sent out. Then he took her into the restaurant once more.
He poured two glasses of iced tea from a pitcher behind the bar before nodding to a small corner table that was free.
“Let’s sit over there,” he suggested.
“Don’t feel as if you have to keep me company if there’s something else you need—or want—to do,” Kit felt obliged to say.
“There isn’t anything else I need—or want—to do,” he answered, making her wonder if there had been special emphasis on the or want part, or if she’d just been imagining it.
Then, as if it had just occurred to him that she might not want his company, he said, “Unless you’d rather be alone—”
“No,” Kit answered much too quickly. “I just don’t want to be a bother.”
“It’s no bother. I’ve been kind of enjoying myself,” he said.
That pleased her more than it should have but Kit tried to ignore it and made her way to the table.
They settled in across from each other and as Kit took a sip of her tea she worked to come up with something to talk about with this man she’d just met…and couldn’t seem to keep her eyes off of.
But then she doubted it would be easy for any normal, red-blooded woman not to look at that handsome face and the muscular body that went with it.
It was that robustly healthy physique that suddenly spurred the memory of the newspaper article that had been her first exposure to Ad Walker and she seized that to make conversation with.
“I heard about you and Cutty saving that family from their burning house and about you both getting hurt. How are you after getting beamed?”
Ad smiled. “Shouldn’t that be beaned?”
“As I recall you didn’t get hit with a bean, you got hit with a beam,” she said, smiling to let him know her play on words had been just that.
“I’m as good as new.” He tapped on his head as if knocking on a door. “Hard head.”
“Not hard enough to keep you out of the hospital for a couple of days—or so I heard.”
“I’m okay now, though. But thanks for asking.”
“Kira said Cutty got the cast off his ankle last week and he’s doing all right, too,” Kit said, trying to keep things going.
“He did. And the burned house has been repaired, and the family we dragged out of it has moved back in, and even the dog’s singed tail looks normal again. It’s as if it all never happened.”
“Except that as a result of it I no longer have my best friend living across the hall from me,” Kit pointed out as a waitress served her meal.
When she’d thanked the woman, Kit shot another sly smile in Ad’s direction and added, “Of course I blame you for that.”
Ad laughed. “Me? What did I do?”
“You talked to Kira about Cutty and that was instrumental in her decision to pursue her relationship with him.”
“Ah.” Ad’s engaging grin said that he realized she was only teasing him. But rather than commenting on the subject of the part he’d played in his friend’s romance, he nodded at her plate with his chin. “How’s your food?” he asked.
Kit had tasted both the beer-battered, deep-fried cod and the French fries and could honestly say, “It’s the best fish-and-chips I’ve ever had. But don’t think it makes up for costing me my best friend.”
“Doesn’t it make up for it a little?”
Was he flirting with her?
Had she been flirting with him?
Kit wasn’t sure on either count. But she was enjoying the exchange just the same.
“It makes up for it very little,” she countered.
“Hmm. Well, as I understand it, you did some encouraging of your own when it came to the fork in the road for Kira and Cutty. Kira told me you opened her eyes to some things that got her to thinking and ultimately coming back here to Cutty.”
“It was already too late by the time I got in on this. I just had to roll with things,” Kit claimed. “So I still blame you.”
Okay, maybe that had sounded slightly flirtatious.
Stop it! she told herself.
“I guess I’ll have to think of a way to make it up to you,” Ad conceded with an innuendo-laden tone of his own.
Kit played along with skepticism. “That’s a tall order.”
“I love a challenge,” he said.
His aquamarine eyes glinted with mischief and held hers in a spell that left Kit completely unaware of anything or anyone else around them.
So
