style="font-size:15px;"> She couldn’t resist needling him a tad. “Might have? You acted as if I was working black-ops catering with your teenager behind your back. I got the impression that my integrity was questionable in your opinion.”
“Now that you mention it…” His expression turned sheepish. “I made some phone calls. You’ll be glad to know your integrity checks out fine.”
“What a relief. I was worried.”
When he turned all the amps in his grin on her, Thea couldn’t breathe. She began to straighten the already neat stack of receipts on Connie’s desk, but the distraction didn’t do much to take the edge off her reaction to him. He was offering her a job. The fact that she was even hesitating to take it spoke volumes. When she was dealing with Kendra, there had been no question about her doing the party. Now that she would be dealing with Kendra’s father, everything was different. And it shouldn’t be.
Thea had catered events for both women and men. She’d done functions for corporate CEOs—male executives. This man was no different.
And that was when she recognized the lie.
She liked Scott and that made him different. It made her as nervous as a dieter in a doughnut shop, which was why she wanted to turn him down flat.
Then she looked head-on into the intensity of his gaze and her stomach did that whole stop, drop and roll thing. From another lifetime she vaguely remembered this feeling. It was another good reason to refuse the job. But what did that intensity in his expression mean? Did he find her attractive? It had been too long since she’d wondered or cared about such things and she couldn’t tell. Her feminine instincts, too long turned off, were now unreliable. He probably didn’t care about her one way or the other and she was being a ninny.
“Earth to Thea. It didn’t take this long to build the Suez Canal. So what do you say? Will you take the gig?”
“Do you have a date in mind?” she hedged. “I need to check my schedule.”
“She’s graduating the middle of June, assuming there are no unexpected surprises with her grades. But she’s always been an honors student, so I don’t expect that.” He thought for a moment. “I think a Saturday night would work best.” Moving closer to her, he glanced down at the large, desk-blotter calendar. “How about June nineteenth?” he said, pointing to the date.
She noticed the strength in his wide wrist and tanned forearm. She watched the muscles there bunch and ripple, making it difficult for her to take a deep breath.
“I’ll check my day planner.” She unzipped her briefcase and pulled out the leather-bound calendar. After opening it, she found the date and tried not to let him see her relief when she spotted a conflict. Loophole. She met his gaze. “I’m holding that date open for someone.”
“Holding it?” He frowned. “I’m going to take a shot in the dark here. Do you have a signed contract? A deposit?”
“Not yet, but I promised to try and keep that date free and I feel an obligation to the client.”
He pulled a checkbook from the back pocket of his jeans. “I’m willing to sign on the dotted line right now and put my money where my mouth is.”
Of course as soon as he mentioned it, her gaze went straight to his mouth. Some subconscious part of her wondered how his lips would feel against her own and the thought made her shiver. What was that about? Fear? Awareness? Weather-related? Darned if she knew. But the reaction told her she should refuse his deposit and tell him if the date opened up, she would let him know.
He met her gaze and assumed a puppy-dog expression to ratchet up his persuasion. “Kendra would be very disappointed.”
Drat. That was the only thing he could have said to win her over. Thea couldn’t let down a teenage girl whom she suspected had been let down one too many times already.
“All right, Scott. You win. I’ll do the party.”
He grinned again, showing his straight white teeth and very attractive smile. She thought of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf and couldn’t help feeling she’d just stepped alone into the woods on her way to Grandma’s house.
Scott looked at his daughter biting into her enchilada. “Thanks for throwing dinner together, sweetie. I planned to get home early, but there was a problem at one of the sites.”
“That’s okay. Do you like it?” she asked, about the meal.
“It’s great.” And that was no lie. “When did you get to be such a good cook?”
“Thea gave me the recipe when she catered my friend’s birthday party. She said it wasn’t hard to make and almost impossible to mess up. I guess she was right.”
Thea Bell. He’d had trouble getting her off his mind since leaving her office that morning. And that wasn’t at all like him. He’d dated here and there, but nothing serious. And it had been a long time, so he wasn’t used to thinking about a woman. Normally work was the only thing that took his mind off the ups and downs of his kids. But he’d found Thea was one smart cookie and pretty intuitive. She’d been right about the fact that he should listen to his daughter instead of lecturing.
But there was still the matter of that pregnancy test and it was too important to ignore. He so badly wanted to tell Kendra to do as he said, not as he’d done. He didn’t want her to learn the same lessons he had learned in the school of hard knocks. But how could he get through to her? How would Thea approach this potential minefield?
He started to say there was something he wanted to talk to her about, then checked himself. That would be his daughter’s signal to shut down.
He looked across the dinner table and decided to try a different tack. “This is nice. Having dinner together.”
“Yeah. Nice.” Warily, she met his gaze.
“I don’t stop to appreciate it enough. And I should,” he added.
“Why?”
“Lots of reasons. Because I enjoy spending time with you. And because when your sister was a baby, I hardly ever got to share a meal with the family.”
“It’s not that big a deal, Dad,” she said. Her expression and tone told him she was ready to shut him down in a nanosecond if necessary.
“Yeah, it is. In those days, I was going to college at night and working during the day.”
“But it’s Grandad’s company.”
“That didn’t mean I could slack off,” he explained. “If anything, he was harder on me because we were related.”
“I know the feeling,” she muttered.
He refused to be sidetracked by even a mumbled verbal projectile. “The point is that between work and school, I put in a lot of hours away from home. It cost me time with you guys.”
She pushed her plate away. “What are you really trying to say, Dad?”
So much for his different tack. He put his fork down. “Okay. Here’s the deal. I made some choices that
