made the trip in what she imagined was record time. She was surprised she had not gotten a speeding ticket.
Now, she stood outside that door where she had stood just a few weeks ago, when she was a totally different person. She took a deep breath, and she gripped the knocker firmly in her hand.
She could hear him coming.
The door swung open.
She stared at Jefferson.
Oh, beloved, she thought to herself. He had regressed. His shirt was rumpled, and his hair was uncombed. He didn’t look as though his face has seen a razor since she had left. He looked utterly exhausted.
She loved him more than she had ever loved him, more even, than that night of enchantment when he had been dressed so beautifully in a formal suit, and she in a gown suited to a princess.
“Nope,” he said.
It was hardly the declaration of undying love she had hoped for after her absence!
He started to close the door, but not as firmly as he would have if he really did not want to see her. Come to that, if he really didn’t want to see her, he wouldn’t have even come to the door.
She stuck her foot in it before he managed to get it closed all the way.
He reopened it and glared at her foot, before lifting his eyes to hers. There were walls up that a less determined person—a less courageous person—might not be able to scale.
“Are you burning the house down?” she asked. “Because it smells as if you are.”
“What’s it to you? You didn’t even leave a note.”
She saw the hurt in him before he quickly masked it with a scowl. “Yes, I did. I left it right on the kitchen counter where you would be sure to see it.”
“There was no note. What did you say in it? That you were going to single-handedly apprehend a very dangerous person?”
“How did you know that?” she asked.
He glared at her.
“It wasn’t single-handed,” she said. “I had an entire police team working with me. Jefferson, something is burning. Could we—”
He turned from her, and she followed him through the living room to the kitchen.
It was a shambles.
“No wonder you couldn’t find the note,” she said.
“It didn’t look like this, then.”
Black smoke was pouring out of his oven.
“Hell’s bells,” he snapped.
She was not sure how it was possible the room could be in worse shape than the day she had first seen it, The overhead lights were on, shining an unforgiving light on the disaster and illuminating the thin wisps of smoke that layered the air despite windows opened wide.
Gooey bowls were over on their sides. The countertops dripped mysterious substances onto the floors. A muffin tin—which looked suspiciously as if it was filled with partially cooked muffins—was upside down on the island.
And Jefferson Stone stood, with his back to her, cursing. His hair was silky and just a little too long, and it touched the collar of that same rumpled denim shirt. The shirt showed off the incredible breadth of his shoulders and how the wideness of his back tapered to narrowness at his waist. The untucked shirttails, thankfully, covered most of the enticing curve of his bottom but clung to strength of his legs, set wide. His feet were still sexily bare.
Angie felt an almost animal awareness of how beautifully he was made, how mouthwateringly masculine he was. It made the mess all around him fade.
He turned from the oven to her. She hoped it wasn’t the little gasp of pure weakness that rose in her throat and escaped past her lips, like a sigh of longing, that turned him.
He swung around to her, and her sense of being too aware of how beautifully he was made, intensified. The shadow of whiskers on his cheeks and chin had darkened even more. His features were honed and masculine and perfect.
She knew she had been traveling, and her appearance was probably disheveled. She had been so eager to see him she had not even stopped to run a comb through her hair or dab a bit of lipstick on her lips. She put a hand to her tangled hair. His eyes followed her hand, his gaze so dark and direct it sent a delighted shiver up and down her spine.
Stop it, she ordered herself. They had things to say to each other. Or at least, she had things to say to him. But the awareness that hissed in the air between them, like static, like the coming of a storm, was distracting.
A blackened, smoldering chunk of something was dangling from a fork in his hand.
“Is that on fire?” she asked, dragging her eyes away from the piercing gray-blue of his eyes to the welcome distraction of what he held in his hand.
He looked down at the chicken breast, turned quickly and tossed it into the sink before swiveling back to her. “Of course not.”
She sniffed the air and raised an eyebrow at him.
He frowned. “Smoldering.”
“Ah.”
“Prefire, at best.”
“Of course.”
“The smoke detectors didn’t even go off.”
“Maybe they aren’t working properly,” she said, and that earned her a scowl. “Have you tested them recently?”
He was silent.
“I’ll add it to my list of things to do,” she decided out loud.
“Your things to do?” he sputtered.
“How did the photo shoot go?”
“Swimmingly,” he bit out.
She hazarded a few steps in, stopped at the kitchen island and lifted the upside-down muffin tin with cautious fingers. Gluey strings tried to hold it to the counter top, but she succeeded at flipping it over. She stared down. The openings were filled with half-cooked batter that had evidently risen over the confines of the wells provided for them.
“What on earth were you trying to accomplish?” she finally managed to ask him, lifting her eyes to his.
“I had a sudden inexplicable need to lower my sodium intake,” he said, crossing his arms defensively over his chest and glaring at her as if this was all her fault.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I went away.”
He lifted a shoulder as if he didn’t care. “You can go away again,” he said, his voice hoarse, his posture so stiff it looked as though the tiniest nudge would break him in two. “Clearly, I don’t need you.”
“Clearly,”
