everyone, she guessed. Women. It was a small town. He was probably its most eligible bachelor. And damned unhappy about it, too. She could just imagine them clucking over him at the supermarket.
She made a note to herself. No clucking. No fussing. He was right. She was not his mother.
“There’s only one solution,” he said.
She held her breath. Either he was going to throw out the list or reconsider her employment.
But as it turned out, there was a third option, which she had not even considered.
“You’ll have to come and do the shopping yourself.” He held out the list, and she snatched it from him, trying not to show her delight at this unexpected turn of events. “I’ll send you off to the market while I run my other errands.”
“It won’t put you out in the least to have me along,” she said. It sounded like a promise.
“Yeah, whatever.” He didn’t have the grace to appear even slightly grateful she was going to get some decent supplies for him. He glanced at his watch. “I can’t go until later this afternoon. Can you be ready around four-thirty?”
She sighed. “That means frozen bean burritos for lunch, I’m afraid.”
“You say that as if it’s a bad thing,” he said drily.
It was when she left his office that she remembered he said he went to Anslow by boat. And she had said she thought that was romantic, even though she shouldn’t have done. Anyway, she scolded herself, if that was her idea of romance, it was no wonder that her fiancé had left her for someone who wanted to live on a beach in Thailand!
Well, if she was not Jefferson’s mother, she was even less likely a romantic prospect. Luckily for her—and for tired-of-women-fussing-over-him Jefferson—she was completely disillusioned in that department. Harry, and then Winston, had seen to that.
What a relief. Because feeling romantic about her boss in any context, including a boat ride, could lead to dreadful complications, even in two short weeks.
But for some horrible reason, even as she vowed off romance, Angie thought of his lips brushing her cheek the night before. And she blushed even more deeply than she had over the mispronunciation of a word.
She squeezed as much activity as she could into the day. By the time four-thirty rolled around, the dishes and laundry were completely caught up and the kitchen was gleaming. It was hot, though. A thermometer on the outside of the kitchen window told her it was a hundred and two degrees outside when she slipped up to her room and showered the day’s grime off.
Angie had hauled her meager suitcase up the stairs to her room. She had not, in her panicked flight from Calgary, packed one thing that might impress Jefferson Stone. It was too hot to impress, anyway. She slipped on a clean white T-shirt and a very simple wraparound skirt she had designed and made herself. Then she ran a brush through hair that was springing up all over the place.
“Ready?” he asked as she came down the stairs.
“Is it always so hot here?” She regarded Jefferson. He didn’t look hot at all in a summer sports shirt and light khaki shorts. He looked cool and confident and composed—a man who did not invite fussing at the supermarket.
“This is a pretty average summer day. You could have turned on the air-conditioning.”
“I was hoping to freshen up the house by leaving all the windows open. I think I’ve succeeded only at letting the heat in. How are we going to keep the groceries from wilting?”
We. As if they were a partnership. She contemplated how easily the “we” had slipped from her lips.
He grabbed a large cooler from the storage cabinet by the back door and then led her out the back door and across the deck. She noticed he did not bother locking the door they came out. He paused before taking the stairs down, scanning the nearby mountains.
“What?”
“Just looking at the clouds,” he said.
She followed his gaze. The clouds were huge, pure white and fluffy as cotton balls, obliterating the tops of the mountains. “They’re beautiful,” she said. “Can you see anything in them?”
He cast her a glance, shook his head and snorted.
“Well, I can,” she said stubbornly. “It looks like a horse kicking up clouds of snow behind it.”
He looked back at the clouds, squinted, then shook it off.
“It’s not unusual to get a thunderstorm late in the day when it’s hot like this,” he said. “Hopefully, it will hold off.”
“I don’t know. I feel as if I’d love to stand out in the rain right now.” The heat was absolutely withering.
He looked as if he was going to say something but, with one more glance at the clouds and at her, changed his mind.
They went down a steep staircase, carved into stone, that led to a crescent of private white-sand beach and to a boat dock. It seemed with every step closer to the water, the air cooled.
“Oh,” Angie said, looking at the sleek boat bobbing at its moorings. “It looks like something out of James Bond.” Come to think of it, he looked like something out of James Bond!
He stepped from the dock to the boat with absolute ease despite the cooler in his hands and the bobbing of the boat.
“Wait,” he snapped when she tried to follow. He stored the cooler and came back. He reached out his hand to her, and she took it and leaned forward for the long and rather scary step down. He sensed her hesitation and let go of her hand. Then he put his hands around her waist, lifted her easily into the boat and set her back on her feet.
For a moment they stood there, looking at each other, his hands still cupping her waist. She glimpsed the man he had been last night. Angie had a sense of time stopping, of being highly aware of the way the hot afternoon sunshine felt on her skin and of how it looked in the crisp darkness of his hair. She was aware of the shape of his lips and the moody gray of his eyes, the strength in those hands that practically encircled her waist. She was aware of the birds calling all around them, the annoyed chatter of a squirrel, the gentle lap of water against the hull of the boat.
She was aware of feeling exquisitely alive.
Then Jefferson abruptly released her. He tossed a cover over a seat beside the wheel, and she took it, aware of the scorching heat coming up through the cover. It was the kind of gorgeous white leather she thought was reserved for higher end cars.
He was back out on the dock releasing the boat from its moorings. He tossed the lines in the boat then gave it a shove with his foot before leaping with mountain goat agility over the swiftly widening gap of water between the dock and the boat.
He took the seat beside her, put a key in the ignition and powerful engines thrummed to life.
He motioned to a sliding panel located between their seats, slid it open briefly to show her a staircase leading into the hull of the boat. “Life jackets are in here, if we should need them. And facilities.”
