be a dollar and a half.”
“I’ll get it,” Matt said.
“Already got it,” Cord replied. Pulling a money clip from his front pocket, he peeled off a five-dollar bill and nodded to the logo on her driver’s-side door. Mama O’Malley’s Catering was stenciled in a shamrock-green arc.
“So, who’s ‘Mama’?” he asked.
She darted a smile past his arm as another worker took a muffin and handed over his money. “That would be me.”
One appraising eyebrow shot up. “You?’
“That’s right.”
Cord watched the tall brunette with the long, lanky body and the face of an angel hand over a cheese roll that the man behind him couldn’t reach. She wasn’t being especially rude or cool to him. Her tone even held the same hints of kindness he’d heard when she addressed everyone else. She just wasn’t giving him the same bright smile she’d seemed to manage for every single one of the other guys.
She didn’t seem interested in conversation with him, either.
He could always get a woman talking. Young. Old. In between. Especially in between.
Hating to think he was losing his touch, Cord skimmed a glance over her once more. “You don’t look anything like my idea of a Mama O’Malley,” he confessed, slowly shaking his head. She didn’t look like anyone’s mother. She had incredible eyes, skin so smooth it begged to be touched and a mouth that made his water just looking at her. And those legs. They went on forever. “Why do you call your business that?”
“Because O’Malley is my last name and I liked the alliteration. Hi, Bob.” There was the smile. All five hundred watts of it. It wasn’t for him, though. It was for the guy with the belly and a welder’s mask tipped back on his head. “What can I do for you?”
“Come on.” Matt nudged his arm. “Let’s get back to work.”
Cord stepped back. “Thanks,” he called to her, giving it one last shot.
“You’re welcome,” she replied, still polite, and turned her focus to the other men demanding her attention.
Cord felt his forehead pleat as he turned around himself, and started to walk away. Her eyes seemed to light up for everyone else when she smiled. Just not for him.
He glanced back, saw her look down as she made change from the pack around her slender waist. He wondered if they’d met before. If maybe he’d run into her at one of the local nightclubs and if he’d done something to offend her. He made it a point to never offend a woman if he could help it. He’d discovered the hard way that a woman scorned could not only be furious and hellish to deal with, but downright expensive.
The woman he’d heard the other men call Madison didn’t seem at all familiar, though. He would have remembered the name. He definitely would have remembered that smile. It lit her eyes, made her seem friendly, approachable, as if she glowed warmth from within. Without it, she was just another pretty face.
“Does she come here every day?”
“Who?” Matt glanced behind them. “The gal with the snack wagon?”
“Yeah.”
“We have a couple of trucks that come through here,” he said, looking as if he were trying to recall the specifics of this one’s owner. “I think she’s been around pretty much since we broke ground.” A quarter of a muffin disappeared, totally muffling his “Why?”
Cord shrugged. “Just wondered,” he said, and sank his teeth into a bit of heaven that tasted of sweet butter and lemon and had him closing his eyes in pure bliss.
Madison watched the two big men in the silver hard hats walk away, devouring her muffins as they headed past a huge pile of steel beams and a bright-orange crane that sat still and silent while its operator drank coffee and smoked a cigarette. The workers only had fifteen minutes for a break. They usually cleaned out a third of her stock in five. That gave her ten minutes to pull her restock from the storage compartment at the back of the truck, fill in the gaps in the three tiers of muffins, cookies and rolls, consolidate the fruit so it didn’t look picked over, and change the coffee grounds in the built-in urn so there would be two freshly brewed gallons by the time she reached her next stop on the dock twenty minutes away. She had another stop farther down the dock a half an hour after that. After a quick stop at a small tool-and-die operation, it would be back home to restock with the sandwiches and desserts she’d already made for the lunch run that started at 11:15 a.m.
Male laughter drifted toward her as she set her empty stock box in the back, flipped the switch to start the coffee and closed the stainless steel door. As she did, she consciously kept herself from looking around to see if Cord was still anywhere in sight. She hated the thought that he might catch her and think he had made any sort of impression. And he hadn’t. Not really. Not in any way that mattered.
She had never before met a man anywhere near his social or economic stratosphere, or one whose presence seemed quite so…large. She was around his basic type a lot, though. The attractive irresponsible type whose sole goal was to get into a woman’s pants and be gone before breakfast. She’d met plenty of them coming and going from her friend Mike’s pub, since she happened to live upstairs from it and routinely borrowed his kitchen to prepare her food. And men like them, even if they were rich and famous, weren’t worth the time it took to give them a second thought.
She didn’t think about him, either. Not until twenty-four hours later when she found herself in the same spot she’d been twenty-four hours before, doing pretty much the same thing she did at that same time every Monday through Friday.
Cord Kendrick had so slipped her mind that she hadn’t even remembered to call her grandma last night to tell her she’d met him and given the dear woman the opportunity to demand details.
The only reason she was thinking of him now was because Matt Callaway’s secretary had just called her on her cell phone to order a dozen muffins of the sort she’d given Cord yesterday, along with six large coffees. She wanted them delivered to the construction trailer, which Madison could see parked a city block away toward the middle of the work site.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Madison replied, going through the same motions she had a thousand times before as she closed the back of her truck and started to close the side. “I’m on a schedule, so I can’t make individual deliveries. If you can send someone,” she suggested, being as accommodating as she could, “I’ll have it ready when they get here. I won’t be leaving for another couple of minutes.”
The harried-sounding woman asked her to hold on, which Madison did while pulling six empty cups and lids from the dispenser and popping open a cardboard tray to set them in. A half a block ahead of her the huge orange crane started up with a rumble and a roar. Break time was over.
A rustling sound came over the phone.
“I understand you don’t make deliveries.”
The voice on the other end of the line was suddenly much deeper, much richer and carried a faint hint of challenge. She recognized that disturbing voice in an instant. That threw her, too. She didn’t want to think that anything about Cord had made an impression. She especially didn’t want anything about him messing with her heart rate.
Had
