were returned. My secretary called you back,” he said.
“Ah, yes. Mrs. Stern. If I’d wanted to talk to your secretary, Mr. Burke, I would have dialed her direct. I need to speak to you.”
Dawson felt the muscles in his back beginning to tighten again despite Wanda’s competent ministrations. “Look, Miss Hawley, surely Carole Deming briefed you on what I’m looking for. This is gift shopping, not rocket science. If you can’t do the job—”
“Oh, I can do the job. I just believe in doing it well,” she replied in a voice that was stiff with pride. Another place, another time, he might have admired it. He had no patience for it at the moment. “I won’t take up much of your time,” she promised.
Dawson relented with a sigh, but he didn’t raise his head from the padded hole. He was being rude, insufferably so. But then that was the point. The woman already had strained his patience.
“Fine. Shoot.”
“You want to discuss this right now?” Her tone was incredulous.
“Right now is all the time I have. My schedule is very tight and will be for the next several days.”
“I see.” He thought she might object and leave. That had been his goal. But he heard a pair of heels click over the parquet floor. They stopped just outside his limited field of vision.
“I have some concerns,” she said, her tone that of a professional who apparently was not the least bit concerned about discussing business with a nearly naked man. Perhaps like the housekeeper, she, too, was old enough to be his mother.
“What are these concerns?”
“Well, in addition to business associates and acquaintances, your gift-giving list includes friends and several family members.”
“My parents, sister, her husband and their two children,” he said. “I’m well aware of who is on the list, Miss Hawley. After all, I’m the one who made it out.” Well, his secretary had done that, but he’d approved the final version.
“I do things a little differently when family members are involved.”
Heels clicked on the floor again and Dawson was forced to revise his opinion of her age when a pair of lethal-looking pumps came into view. They were red and made of faux alligator skin. But those weren’t the reasons that had Dawson subtracting a few decades from her age. Women of his mother’s generation generally didn’t have little butterflies tattooed on their ankles.
Curiosity got the better of him. He brought his elbows up and levered partway off the table so that he could see her. Then he sorely wished he hadn’t. The rest of Eve Hawley, from the curves that filled out her knit dress to the long dark hair that snaked over her shoulders, was every bit as sexy as her legs and those shoes. Suddenly, the fact that he was nearly naked didn’t give Dawson the advantage he’d sought. No. That had shifted squarely to the black-haired beauty who at the moment was eyeing him with her arms crossed, brows raised and unmistakable amusement glimmering in her eyes.
He sent a glance over his shoulder in the direction of his masseuse. “Wanda, that will be enough for now.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Burke. You still feel awfully tense to me,” she objected.
Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Eve’s full lips twitch.
“I’m fine.” To Eve he said, “Give me fifteen minutes and we’ll go over your concerns.”
“Sure.”
This time he was positive she was holding back a smile when she sauntered from the room.
Eve waited in a sitting room that was tucked just off the kitchen. The housekeeper had thoughtfully brought her a cup of hot tea. She sipped it now as she stared into the flames of the fire that was flickering cheerfully in the hearth and contemplated her client.
Dawson Burke was a surprise, and not because he’d been clothed in nothing more than a bedsheet at their introduction. He was not the paunchy, middle-aged workaholic who so often relied on her services. God bless those men since they had been helping to pay her bills for nearly a decade, but she hadn’t expected Dawson to be quite so young or handsome or—she sipped her tea—physically fit.
As an unattached woman of not quite thirty, there was no way details such as those were going to escape her attention.
Eve was relatively new to the Denver area, and the state of Colorado for that matter. The beauty of her job was that she could do it anywhere. She’d been looking for a fresh start after a particularly nasty breakup the previous spring, and after some Internet research she’d decided that anyplace with a view as pretty and panoramic as the one the Mile High City boasted just might provide it.
So she’d been settling in, building up a client list and sinking down roots. She’d caught a lucky break when she’d met Carole Deming while shopping in a boutique a couple of months back. The two women had hit it off right away. The fact that Carole was fifteen years older and they were technically competitors hadn’t stood in the way of their friendship. Indeed, Carole had been kind enough to toss some of her clients Eve’s way while she recuperated from surgery.
What was it she’d said about Dawson Burke? “I think you’ll find him a challenge.”
At the time, Eve had assumed Carole was referring to his gift needs, not his personality. Now she suspected she understood perfectly why the other woman had laughed while saying it. A challenge? Just getting past his pit bull of a secretary had taken an effort, which was why she’d decided to drop by his home unannounced.
Eve didn’t mind difficult clients. She’d worked for plenty of them in the past, picky people who gave her cart blanche to buy presents for others or clothing for themselves only to veto her every choice later. But this was different. She simply couldn’t do what Dawson wanted her to do without gathering more information, gaining more insight. It wasn’t right. As far as Eve was concerned, family members deserved more thought when it came to gifts. She had no qualms about buying for them, but she wouldn’t allow the purchases to be impersonal.
She set the tea aside and stood, walking closer to the fire when memories left her chilled. Her mother had died when Eve was eight years old. Suicide, or so it had been rumored. The alternative, an accidental drug overdose, had carried nearly as much stigma, especially since her mother’s family blamed her father. Growing up, she’d been shuttled from one relative’s house to another’s. Her dad had hit the road, ostensibly to try to turn his pipe dream of being a musician into a bona fide profession. More accurately, though, he’d been running from a reality he could not accept.
The last she’d heard, he had a gig at a pub in Myrtle Beach. At nearly sixty, Buck Hawley was no longer waiting for his big break. But he was still running.
He’d missed out on more than two decades of Eve’s life, though he always managed to send her a gift to mark another birthday and Christmas. She hated those gifts. They were always impersonal things that Eve knew upon opening he hadn’t picked out. For that matter, even the signatures on most of the cards hadn’t been his.
While growing up, that had pained her. All these years later it still hurt. She’d needed her father’s time, craved his attention as a child. At the very least, she’d wanted to know he thought about her while picking out gifts. So, when clients asked
