you.
Kind regards, Daisy Connolly.
Kind regards? Daisy Connolly?
As if he would need her last name to distinguish her from all the other Daisys in his life.
Blast her, anyway! Alex smacked a hand on the desk next to his computer screen. So all it had needed was for him to turn up on her doorstep and make an idiot of himself and Daisy was suddenly inspired to finish editing the photos, send them along and get him out of her life.
Swell.
He’d lain awake half the night—staring at the damned skylight and cursing his own misplaced desire—and wishing Amalie would come up with a viable “option.”
In the morning he called her and demanded a better selection. “The last one was a charlatan,” he said. “If she was an architecture student, I play center field for the New York Yankees.”
“I’m talking to another young woman today,” she promised. “You’re very discerning. It takes time.”
It didn’t take time, damn it. That was the trouble. If Daisy wanted what he wanted there wouldn’t be any problem at all.
But she didn’t. That was perfectly clear. She probably hadn’t been stalling. She’d probably actually been busy, too busy to get right to his photos. But once he’d turned up on her doorstep, making demands, she’d outdone herself getting the photos finished so she didn’t need to have anything more to do with him.
They were amazing photos, though.
He stood in his office, staring at them now. He’d spread them out on his drafting table, studying them, seeing himself through her eyes.
They were every bit as sharp and insightful as the ones he’d seen on her wall last night. She’d taken most of the shots in black and white which, on first glance, surprised him.
But the more he studied them, the more he saw what she was doing: she had used the monochrome scheme to pare him down to his essence, exactly the way an architectural drawing or a blueprint did.
She caught him clearly—a man who had little patience with subtlety, who knew what he wanted.
He wanted her.
She had to know that. Didn’t she know that?
He sighed and scraped the photos into a pile and put them back into the envelope. Of course she knew it.
She didn’t want him—not on his terms.
So he’d seen the last of her.
End of story.
Daisy was still taking deep breaths and letting them out slowly a week later. But it was her own fault. She knew she should have got the photos edited and sent off right away. She hadn’t.
And so Alex had turned up on her doorstep. An intense, edgy, irritated Alex. An Alex who had looked at her with fire in his normally cool green gaze. An Alex who had shot into her office so quickly, she hadn’t even thought about how to stop him. And once he was there, it had felt like being trapped in a cage with a full-grown, very hungry panther.
A panther who had complained about the meals he was being offered at the same time he was looking at her like he intended to make her the next one.
She’d skittered away, crossed the room, needing to put space between them, because the mere sight of him had set her heart to pounding. All her senses went on alert with Alex. Her body wanted him no matter what her brain—and her mother’s-heart—told her was wise.
She had been determined to resist—not just Alex, but her own desire.
Then abruptly he had turned and walked out!
And Daisy had been left staring after him as he strode off into the cold dark windy night. Then she’d shut the door and leaned against it, her heart still slamming against the wall of her chest, her pulse racing.
The adrenaline had kept her working half the night.
It took a week to wear off, more for her to be able to say with confidence to Cal that life was back to normal, and still more until she believed it herself.
So it was a blow on the first Saturday evening in November to hear a knock on the door, expect to get the Thai takeaway she’d ordered, and find Alex standing on her doorstep again.
She stared at him, dumbstruck.
“Good evening to you, too,” he said cheerfully. His tone was mild, friendly, completely at odds with the Alex who had shown up last time.
“Good evening,” she replied cautiously, trying not to look at his smooth-shaven face, his quirking smile, that groove in his cheek she always itched to touch. Deliberately she curled her fingers into the palm of her hand.
He hesitated a split second, then said, “I just wanted to say that I may have found the one.”
Daisy blinked. “The one? The one what?”
His smile widened. “Woman.” There was a pause. Then, “Wife,” he clarified.
Daisy’s stomach did an odd sort of somersault. She swallowed, then mustered her best polite smile. “Really. How nice.”
She shut her eyes for an instant, and opened them to discover that he’d done it again—slipped past her and was suddenly standing in her office. How did he do that?
“She’s a vice president in marketing for an international cosmetics firm,” he reported, his handsome face looking very pleased. “She runs campaigns in half a dozen places all over the world. Always on the move. She has two phones. A red one for emergencies.” He grinned, as if this were a good thing.
“Does she?” Daisy said drily. “Sounds perfect for you.”
“You think so, too?” He was still grinning, so she didn’t know if he heard her sarcasm as it had been intended or not. “That’s what I thought. I read Amalie the riot act after the first bunch, said if that was as good as she could do, I was finished. And then she came up with Caroline.”
Caroline. Even her name was right. Sophisticated, but approachable. She did sound perfect.
“And,” Alex went on with considerable enthusiasm, “there are other things, too—she’s beautiful, bright, funny, articulate, well-read.”
Daisy shut the door but stayed by it, keeping an eye out for the Thai deliveryman and thanking God that Charlie was at Cal’s this weekend. “So have you asked her to marry you yet?” she asked Alex flippantly.
“Considering it.”
Her jaw dropped. “On the basis of a couple of dates?”
“Three,” Alex corrected. He was moving around her office in panther mode, but looking better fed. He picked up an alabaster cat on the bookcase, and examined it while he talked. “Well, two and a half.” His mouth twisted wryly. “The red phone rang tonight. She had to leave in the middle of dinner. She’s on her
