in the hall and in the rooms they peeked into. Papers littered the floors, cobwebs were growing in corners and windows were covered with grime on the outside. Inside, dust coated everything. They entered another room filled with shelves and books and found the same situation. A desk was covered with notebooks. Along one wall were locked cabinets with wooden doors. Jake looked at the three key rings he’d been given.
“I think there should be a key here for each of these cabinets.” He ran his hand over a dusty cabinet door. “From the looks of these, I’d guess they hold guns.”
“Guns? Maybe.” She leaned closer to look, glancing again at the lock. “You have maybe forty keys on those rings.”
“There are numbers on them. This is ring number one,” he said, holding a ring with keys of various sizes and shapes. “We can try these next week after they get the dirt and cobwebs out of here.”
“You can just walk away and not try to get in and see what’s inside?” she asked.
He turned to focus on her. “Yes, I can.” He looked amused. “You can’t? Be my guest, then,” he said, holding out the three key rings.
“You really don’t care?”
“No, I don’t. You’re hired to help me clear this stuff out, remember?”
“You go look at more rooms and I’ll try the keys. I’m too curious to wait. What’s in here? A hidden bar? Rare books? Family albums? Whatever it is, there’s a lot of it,” she said, looking at the cabinets covering one wall.
“Here,” he said, taking her hand in his and placing the key rings in it. The moment he took her hand, everything changed. She forgot the keys, cabinets, even the house. That fiery awareness flared again and she knew he felt it, too, because his chest expanded as he inhaled while he flicked a questioning look at her and continued holding her hand.
“Does that happen to you with every guy you meet?” he asked quietly and her heart thudded.
She didn’t need to ask what he was talking about. She shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “Not ever. I figured it’s something you always have happen, though. You do have a reputation for attracting the ladies.” Her heart drummed and she had a prickling awareness of him, of his hand still holding hers as he ran his thumb so lightly back and forth over her knuckles.
“It happens sometimes, but not quite like this,” he replied. “And never with someone I work with. Not ever. You’re unique in my life, Emily,” he said and she shook her head.
“I think I’ll forget looking in the cabinets this afternoon,” she said, giving him back the keys and yanking her hand away from his, eager to put some distance between them. “Let’s make a quick tour of this floor. I’ll take the other side of the hall and you do this side and we’ll meet at the other end of the house.” She didn’t want to have a reaction to him and she couldn’t allow the moment to get personal. She had to work with him for a few weeks at least. When they got the place cleaned up, they would stay here, some nights just the two of them. She didn’t want to have a breathtaking, instant, heart-racing reaction to him every time their hands brushed.
She felt ridiculous and wished she could have passed off her response as nothing, but she couldn’t. She had never had reactions like that to a man she didn’t know. And she didn’t want to start with Jake. He was a Ralston. The last person she wanted to have a fiery attraction to.
She hurried away, crossing the hall to a great room that held a huge marble fireplace. Here again, the furniture was covered with sheets. From what he’d told her, she had expected to find a wreck of a house. Instead, it looked solid and soundly built.
She entered a ballroom-sized dining room with a huge table covered by canvas that draped over the chairs. She lifted a corner and looked at an elaborately carved table and chairs with faded antique satin striped upholstery. She wasn’t particularly happy to see some fine furniture because it meant working with him longer. If it had all been ruined and ready to dispose of, the job would have been over quickly.
She left the dining room and moved to a large kitchen. The kitchen was the room that needed to be replaced. Everything was old, with out-of-date appliances and a chipped, rusted sink, but the room itself was big and could be updated easily. The real question might turn out to be how important the house was to Jake. What did he ultimately want since this was now his ranch?
A sunroom stretched across the back of the house. There she found what she had expected throughout the house—worn, broken chairs, overturned tables, nothing worth saving. The whole room needed to be gutted and the furniture dumped.
When Emily met Jake in the hall, he shook his head. “This is going to take some work. I don’t think we need to look upstairs. There’s enough here to know we have a job ahead of us. I went through the library, the study that’s under years of dust and had more locked cabinets. I went through an office with locked files, a locked desk, a locked closet. One good thing—there are three big downstairs bedrooms, each with its own bath. Can you get started right away on getting new furniture for two of those bedrooms and something for the windows? It can all be temporary, just so we have a clean place to stay.”
“Yes, I will.”
“I want an office I can work in with a desk, a file cabinet, a long table and a place for three computers and screens. You’ll need an office, too, so you’ll have to furnish it however you like. Get a sofa and a couple of chairs and about four big-screen televisions, so we have one in each room we’ll be living in.”
She took out her tablet and jotted notes while he talked.
“We’ll have meals sent up from the cook and maybe work out some kind of delivery from that little café in Flat Hill, so we’ll need a table where we can eat. Or maybe we can use the big table in the dining room. I peeked into that kitchen. It’s got to go. It’s the biggest disaster in the house so far.”
“I agree.” As she finished jotting notes, she was only half thinking about her writing. She was aware of Jake standing inches away.
“I’ll give you a credit card for the furniture. Just have the pieces sent out here. I’ll tell Rum.”
“Sure. I’ll be glad to. Give me a limit you want to spend.”
“No limit. Use your judgment. Just get something several notches above nice. I want to be comfortable and frankly, I’m not worried about the cost. I want comfort and a place I don’t mind living in.”
She nodded. “I’ll get everything with the agreement they have to take it back if it doesn’t suit you. I can send you pictures—”
“No,” he interrupted, shaking his head and looking amused. “I don’t want to make furniture decisions. I don’t care. You do it and put it on my bill.”
“It really might help if we could go by your Dallas home and I can see what style of furniture you like. Would that be possible?” she asked, aware of inviting herself to his Dallas home.
“Sure, we can. I have a condo. I think we might as well go back to Dallas now. I don’t want to work in this dirt and dust. You get that cleaning crew out here and some furniture bought and delivered, and we’ll come back. We can make plans on the plane.”
“Before we go, I need to get the measurements of where I’m putting furniture so I’ll have an idea about how
