eyes were ice-blue, his mouth a tight line. Kelsey didn’t dare ask if his mother was still alive; he looked like he’d take her head off if she as much as opened her mouth. She brushed past him, her brain whirling. Earlier, she’d cast him as the villain, but she’d been wrong. He’d been totally ignorant of his grandmother’s existence.
Wouldn’t Alice at the post office love to hear that juicy little morsel?
Too bad. She wasn’t going to hear it from Kelsey.
Tomorrow she’d bring sandwiches, Kelsey decided, and work through lunch. And tonight she’d take a couple of boxes home with her and go through them there. The sooner this job was done the better. Luke Griffin didn’t just spell H for handsome or S for sex. He spelled D for danger.
CHAPTER TWO
THE FOLLOWING DAY, as dusk fell, Luke and Kelsey carried a couple of boxes out to her car. Luke drew a deep breath of the chill, damp air. January at its worst, he thought, crunching through a patch of unmelted snow, catching a glimpse of a pale moon through wind-torn clouds. Carefully balancing the box on the rear bumper, he opened the trunk, waited for Kelsey to dump her box in, then added his own. He slammed the trunk shut and opened her car door.
“Thank you,” she said stiffly, and climbed in.
As she banged snow from her shoes, her skirt inadvertently rode up her legs. Admirable legs, he thought with sudden sharp interest, watching as she hastily hitched the thick tweed back in place. Her wrist, under the cuff of her jacket, was slender, the skin smooth. And it wasn’t the first time he’d seen a flush mount her cheekbones, which were also admirable.
He toyed with the very strong temptation to yank the glasses off her nose. Keeping his hands firmly at his sides, he said, “See you tomorrow.”
She mumbled something under her breath, thrust the key in the lock, clashed the gears and drove away. It was time he headed back to the city if he was having sexual fantasies about the frumpy Ms North, Luke thought caustically
Maybe he should ship the boxes to his penthouse and go through them at his leisure. If he was in Manhattan he could be having dinner at Cisco’s, with someone like Clarisse or Lindsay.
Neither of them had a temper. Unlike Kelsey. No, Clarisse and Lindsay wouldn’t risk ruffling his billion-dollar feathers.
He walked slowly up the front steps. A headache was banding his forehead. So far, Kelsey had found Rosemary Griffin’s birth certificate, and he’d found the bill from the exclusive clinic where his mother had been born. And that was it.
He’d learned one other thing. Kelsey might top America’s Worst-Dressed List, but she sure knew how to work. Thorough, uncomplaining and dedicated: if he’d been writing a reference for her, he’d have used all three words.
He could have added unforthcoming. The only fact he knew about her was that she’d lived all her life in Hadley. He’d found that out by asking.
He himself was in no mood for idle conversation. Why, then, did it irritate the hell out of him that she’d discouraged anything resembling personal chitchat?
Luke walked slowly up the front steps and forced himself to go through one more box. The wind was moaning in the gutters and rattling a loose shingle; suddenly he couldn’t stand being alone for one more minute in his grandmother’s house, a house as withholding of its secrets as its dead owner.
He ran upstairs, changed into a clean sweater and jeans, and picked up his car keys.
THREE-QUARTERS OF an hour later, Luke got out of his car, carrying a thick brown paper bag. Kelsey’s little house was set in a grove of old lilac bushes and tall yews; lights blazed in nearly every room. He climbed her front steps and rang the bell.
Janis Joplin was emoting at the top of her lungs. Luke rang the bell again, then turned the handle and found the door unlocked. The song came to an end as he pushed on the door and walked in. The hinges squealed like an animal in pain.
A woman came running down the stairs. When she saw him, she stopped dead on the fourth step down. Her hair was a tumbled mass of chestnut curls, framing eyes of a rich, velvety brown. She was slender-waisted, slim-hipped, with legs that seemed to go on forever.
Her low-necked orange shirt clung to her breasts; her jeans were skintight. Her toenails, he noticed blankly, were painted purple.
Her mouth…He gaped at it. Her lips, too, were orange, a glossy lipstick smoothed over their soft, voluptuous curves.
Lust coursed through his veins. He said awkwardly, “Oh…I was looking for Kelsey North. But I must have got the wrong address. Sorry to have bothered you…”
“Very funny,” the woman said, in a husky contralto voice.
“Kelsey?”
“Who did you think it was?”
“I—er, you’ve changed your clothes,” he said. With a distant part of his brain he wondered what had happened to the Luke Griffin who’d dated famous beauties from Manhattan to Milan, and who was unfailingly suave.
Descending the last of the stairs and putting her hands on her hips, she said coldly, “I don’t want any more boxes, and if you’ve lost your way I can direct you wherever you want to go.”
She smelled delicious. The other Kelsey, the brown tweed Kelsey, smelled of worthy soap. Swallowing hard, Luke said, “Have you eaten dinner?”
“No. I’ve been going through the boxes I brought home.”
“Good.” He indicated the bag in his hands. “I brought it with me. From the bistro ten miles down the road.” The bistro on the rich side of the peninsula, he thought, the same side as Griffin’s Keep. Hadley, seven miles away, might as well be on another planet.
“You brought dinner with you? To eat here?”
“Yes.” He gave her a winning smile. “I couldn’t stand one more evening alone in that house.”
Kelsey said carefully, “Am I missing something? I may only be from Hadley, but I thought it was customary to ask a woman if she wanted to have dinner with you.”
“If I’d phoned, would you have said yes?”
“No, of course I wouldn’t.”
Why of course? “I don’t like rejection,” Luke said, and smiled again. “So I just arrived.”
“I bet you haven’t been rejected in years.”
With an edge that surprised him, he replied, “Not since I earned my first million.”
“Poor little rich guy.”
“That’s me. What were you going to have for supper?”
“Scrambled eggs.”
“I can offer borscht, capons stuffed with wild rice, and blackberry mousse. Along with a reasonable Merlot.”
Her mouth was watering. For the food, she thought hastily. Not for the man who was
