in embarrassment, she recalled the uneasiness filling his blue eyes. The man hadn’t seen her in two years, and while to her he seemed as elegant and cool as always—his brown hair with its dark gold streaks shorter than before, but his body’s lean strength and latent sense of power just the same—to him she’d likely appeared at least dotty if not downright crazed.
What must he think of her?
Probably nothing, a little voice inside her answered reasonably. In the past, he’d never noticed her, let alone thought about her. Now, outside of thinking he was obligated to do a favor for the daughter of a family retainer, he probably didn’t think anything about her either.
“Right,” Annie said aloud, flipping the sheet back down and then kicking the covers entirely away. “Griffin’s likely already put me and anything I did out of his mind.”
Just as she was going to put the robbery out of her mind.
And Griffin.
Determined to get on with her day, she strode into her small bathroom. Its faint anti-bacterial smell testified to her housekeeping mania the day before, and it wasn’t until she’d soaped, shampooed and toweled off that she comprehended just how far that mania had taken her.
She had cleaned out her underwear drawer yesterday, too. Working with the zeal of the newly converted, she’d ferreted out each ragged or ill-fitting bra, each pair of panties with sagging elastic or in a color so unappealing that they had overflowed the sale bins at the local discount store.
Which meant that Annie had thrown away all of it. Yes. Every stitch of undergarment she owned was now lying in her garbage can, in a ragged tangle of ugly colors and stretched-out straps.
And it wasn’t as if she could rescue a piece of it for even a short shopping exhibition, Annie thought in dismay, wrapped in a towel and staring at the contents of her garbage. Because after the underwear drawer she’d moved on to cleaning out her freezer. That ragged tangle was now drenched with two cartons of melted neapolitan two-percent ice milk.
With nothing left to do but get something on and get to the mall ASAP, Annie hurriedly dressed in a knee-length denim skirt and a dark blue T-shirt. There was no reason to imagine she couldn’t make it to the store and back without detection or embarrassment, she told herself firmly. Hey, and the good news was she wouldn’t have panty lines!
Still, she was slightly disconcerted by the weird sensation of air passing over her bare…uh…well, there, as she slung her purse over her shoulder and made a beeline for the door. She pulled it open, stepped out and—
Bumped into Griffin’s chest.
“Good morning.” His voice rumbled against the tip of her nose.
Annie leaped back, causing air to whirl up her skirt which in turn made her acutely conscious of all she wasn’t wearing. “Uh, hi.” She tried forgetting that delicious breath of his understated, expensive scent in her lungs as she pasted the insides of her knees together and threw a casual arm across her chest. “Um, I was just on my way out.”
Oh, great, Annie, she thought, groaning inwardly. Yesterday weird, today rude.
He looked down at her, that same expression she’d labeled before as uneasiness again in his eyes. “So I didn’t imagine it, did I? You really did grow up.”
“H-huh?” Annie swallowed and pressed her forearm closer against her unbound breasts. “I mean, um, well, yes. I suppose I did.”
She had been grown-up two years ago as well, but Griffin had looked right through her or over her or around her since the day she’d arrived at the Chase estate. Not in a superior, I’m-too-good-for-you way, but in a you’re-a-little-girl-and-I-smell-a-potential-pest way.
She hadn’t blamed him, though it hadn’t stopped her from following him around, either.
He just hadn’t noticed.
And while she remembered wanting him to notice her with an almost-humiliating intensity since she was four years old, today, in her underwearless state, she wished she could simply disappear before his eyes.
But he was noticing something, darn it, as he slowly shook his head. “When did you stop wearing…”
How could he tell? Annie’s heart froze and she squeezed her knees even more tightly together as she watched his forefingers make puzzling circles beside his ears.
“…pigtails you call them, right?” He smiled.
Oh my. She’d forgotten Griffin’s smile. It tilted up one corner of his mouth and both corners of his blue, blue eyes. Over the years she’d seen him smile that smile a hundred times—at her mother when finagling more cookies, at one of the groundsmen for washing and waxing his car, at every girl he’d ever brought home.
He’d just never smiled that smile at her. Not the housekeeper’s daughter.
“Annie?”
“Wow,” Annie murmured, then caught herself, blinking away her smile-induced stupor. “Oh. Yes. What?”
“Annie?” he said again, probably wondering if there was a padded room nearby. “Are you all right?”
She desperately cast back to the conversation. Pigtails. “Pigtails. You’re exactly right. That’s what they’re called.” She lifted both hands to imitate those funny ear circles he’d made.
And then remembered her bralessness and immediately clapped both arms across her chest, as if she was hugging herself.
Griffin’s expression switched from doubt to concern. “Are you cold? Why don’t we go inside?”
We? We? But even with that warning, Annie did nothing as he stepped closer except step back, until they were both inside the small front room of her cottage and he’d shut the door behind him.
Now what was she supposed to do with him? It didn’t seem quite fitting for the wealthy man-about-town to be standing in her modest cottage.
“Well, um, would you like to sit down?” she felt forced to ask.
“Sure.” He dropped onto the flowered cushions of her white wicker love seat, settling against its back and extending his long legs.
Oh, terrific. Not only did his position not make him seem any less out-of-place, it made it clear that he planned to stay awhile. She bit her bottom lip. “And some coffee? Would you like some coffee?” If he was going to stick around even for a few minutes she needed some alone time in her comforting kitchen to catch her breath and find her composure.
“Sure,” he said again.
Though trying to keep her legs together made her walk a sort of awkward scurry, Annie hurried off, wondering if she could stitch temporary undergarments from paper towels and the cook’s twine she used for her famous parmesan chicken rollups. She was biting her lip and contemplating the paper towels when Griffin suddenly appeared in the kitchen.
“Can I help?” he asked.
The largest room of the cottage suddenly shrank and Annie spun toward her coffeemaker. “Oh, no. This will just take a minute.”
He
