a genie in a bottle. The petite young blonde standing before him would have constituted his first wish—and quite possibly just about every wish that he’d ever had.
“Yes. Yes, I am,” he replied, the inside of his mouth unaccountably turning bone-dry. So much so that it felt as if any second now, he would start exhaling dust. “How did you know?” he heard himself asking.
She smiled up at him, causing his heart to momentarily stop before it suddenly started beating double time, all within the scope of approximately fifteen seconds. Her sky-blue eyes teasingly captured his as she pointed to the rectangular piece of cardboard he’d forgotten he was holding in his hands.
“That kind of gave me a clue,” she told him. “You’re holding up my name,” she explained when he made no effort to acknowledge what she’d just said
Mike blinked, slowly coming to. “I am? Oh, yeah, I am.”
The next moment, as his own words—as well as Samantha Monroe’s—sank in, he suddenly felt like a contestant for—and most likely the winner of—the crown of Jackass of the Decade.
Possibly of the century.
A massive wave of embarrassment washed over him.
He had no idea what had just come over him. It wasn’t as if he’d never seen a beautiful woman before. His own sister, Alma, though he wouldn’t have readily admitted it to her, was an extremely attractive young woman, as were the women that his brothers, Eli, Gabe and Rafe, had married.
But something about this woman, about the laughter in her eyes, her straight golden hair and her sexy figure sent an earthquake rippling through him. The sum total of those assets could have made a dead man sit up and beg.
“Well, since I found you, I think you can put the sign down now,” Sam gently prompted.
“Yeah,” Mike agreed, still stumbling over his tongue. That part of his anatomy seemed to have inexplicably grown in weight and girth.
“Funny,” Sam went on to observe, “I pictured someone a bit older when I spoke to you on the phone the other day.” There was amusement in her eyes as she told him, “You certainly don’t look like the patriarch of such a large family.”
“No, I d— Wait, what?” he asked, confusion running rampant through the fog that encircled his brain.
“I said I pictured someone older when I spoke to you the other day,” Sam repeated.
She was fairly certain that there had to be some sort of a mistake. No matter which way you sliced it, the tall, handsome cowboy standing before her was not well into his fifth decade. She doubted if he was finished with his second one. Or, at the very most, had just gotten a toehold of his third.
But she was not about to shower this man with questions. She was giving him leeway to surrender any sort of an explanation. She had no intentions of crowding him or rushing him to clarify. To be honest, she found his verbal stumbling rather sweet and definitely flattering.
It had been a long time since anyone had looked at her as if she was an attractive female. Just because she earned a living as a ghostwriter did not mean that she was supposed to be invisible to the naked eye. Her last three clients had been women and while she could capture their perspective even better than she could that of a male client, she did like the almost involuntary appreciative look in this man’s eyes.
For the most part, the women she’d worked with had acted as if she didn’t really exist, but she supposed it was because they would have preferred that people think they had written their own autobiographies rather than that they’d had help in wording them. She amounted to their dirty little secret and as such had to be as close to nonexistent as possible.
“You didn’t talk to me.”
“I spoke to Miguel Rodriguez,” Sam pointed out, her cadence deliberately slow and easy, giving the man every opportunity to interrupt and set the record straight whenever he wanted. “And you did say that that was your name.”
“It is,” Mike agreed. “That’s the name written on my birth certificate.” But then he hastened to clarify the point. “But I’m Junior to my father’s Senior.”
She smiled. It wasn’t as if she’d never encountered that before. “Is that what you’d like me to call you?” she asked. “Junior?”
He didn’t look like a Junior anything. Tall, with wide shoulders, rather appealing small waist and hips, with wavy, thick black hair that made her fingers unexpectedly itchy, he was definitely in a class all his own.
“Mike,” he told her, his voice striking a note of command. “Call me Mike.”
“Mike,” she repeated, her smile once again mesmerizing him and all but freezing his brain, making it impossible for him to form a coherent thought. “I like that.”
“Yeah, me, too.” The words fell flat and were incredibly lame.
What was going on with him? Mike silently demanded of himself. He’d never sounded like a blithering idiot before, not even in the presence of a drop-dead knockout like that starlet that Ray was so crazy about.
Why was this particular woman numbing his brain and completely negating his ability to think in near complete sentences?
“And what do I call you?” he asked, wanting to say at least one semi-intelligent thing in her presence. “Ms. Monroe, or—”
“Sam,” she told him, cutting off any further speculation on the cowboy’s part. “Everyone just calls me Sam.”
“Sam” was way too masculine-sounding a name for someone who was the absolute antithesis of masculinity, he couldn’t help thinking. But she obviously seemed to like the name and for no other reason than to go along with whatever the woman wanted, Mike nodded and repeated the name.
“Sam.”
Then, remembering that he was supposed to be a walking, talking, functioning adult, Mike forced himself to follow up the single word, and say something more.
“Let’s get your baggage.”
It came out more like a gruff order, but Mike preferred that to sounding like some mesmerized half-wit incapable of stringing four words together into a discernible whole.
“This is it,” Sam informed him, indicating the two pieces of luggage she had with her. The larger piece was most obviously a suitcase on wheels, the kind that easily fit into overhead compartments on planes; the other case was much smaller and in all likelihood contained her laptop inside. A wide, fringed dark brown hobo purse hung off her shoulder.
“You don’t have anything else coming down the chute onto the carousel?” he asked, surprised.
Sam shook her head, her straight chin-length golden hair swaying to and fro as if to reinforce her denial. “No, I travel light.”
Mike took that to mean that the rest of her things were being shipped out—which only bore out what he’d complained about to his father: that the woman was going to be moving in indefinitely.
And while Sam was admittedly a great deal prettier than Ray, the brother who was still living
