‘UNLESS,’ Luke queried, blue eyes narrowing, ‘you have someone else to help you?’
Holly shook her head. ‘Nope. Just me. All on my own.’
‘Well, then. Show me what needs doing.’
She looked into his eyes, confused by this sudden softening of his attitude towards her. One minute he was Mr Mean, the next he was laying on the charm with a trowel, and—surprise, surprise—he was very good at that! ‘What’s the catch?’
‘No catch.’
‘Well, that’s very sweet of you—’ she began, but he shook his head firmly.
‘No, not sweet,’ he corrected. ‘I am never sweet, Holly.’
‘What, then?’ She wrinkled her nose at him. ‘Let’s go on what we know about you already. Kind? Polite? Gentlemanly?’
He laughed, and even that felt like a brief betrayal, until he told himself that he was being stupid. Men could be friends with women, couldn’t they? Or, if not actually friends, then friendly. Just because you had a laugh and a joke with a woman, it didn’t mean that the two of you automatically wanted to start tearing each other’s clothes off.
‘Let’s just say that it wouldn’t rest very easily on my conscience if I walked away knowing that I had left you to deal with that outrageous amount of luggage. I’m kind of old-fashioned like that.’
Holly regarded him steadily, but her heart was beating fast. She wasn’t used to men coming out with ruggedly masculine statements like that last one. ‘You mean that I’m too much of a delicate female to be able to manoeuvre a couple of suitcases off the roof-rack?’
‘Delicate?’ Luke looked her over very thoroughly, telling himself that she had asked the question, and therefore he needed to give it careful consideration.
She was getting on for six feet—tall for a woman—with correspondingly long limbs. She had legs like a thoroughbred, he thought, then wished he hadn‘t—long and supple legs that seemed to go all the way up to her armpits. She was slim and narrow-hipped, but not skinny in the way that tall women very often could be. And her breasts were almost shocking in their fullness—they looked curiously and beautifully at odds with her boyish figure. ‘No,’ he growled. ‘I wouldn’t call you delicate.’
She wondered if he had noticed that she was blushing. Maybe not. He hadn’t exactly been concentrating on her face, now, had he? There had been something almost anatomical in the way he had looked at her. If any other man had stared at her body quite so blatantly, she suspected that she would have asked them to leave. But she didn’t feel a bit like asking Luke to leave. With Luke she just wanted him to carry on looking at her like that all day long.
‘So do you want my help, or not?’
Holly swallowed, wishing that everything he said didn’t sound like a loaded and very sexy question. And the decision was really very simple—if she wanted to be totally independent and self-sufficient then she should decline his offer and do it all herself.
But a sensible person wouldn’t do that, would they? After all, she knew no one here, not a soul. Was she, the great risk-taker, really tying herself up in knots over a simple offer of assistance just because it happened to come from a man she found overwhelmingly attractive? Wasn’t that a form of sexism in itself?
‘Thanks very much! You can start bringing the stuff in from the car, if you like,’ she told him, trying to sound brisk and workmanlike, ‘while I go and see how habitable it is upstairs. I just hope it’s more promising than down here.’ But her voice didn’t hold out much hope. ‘Unless you happen to have been up there lately?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve never set foot inside the place before.’
Holly frowned. ‘But I thought you said you were the landlord?’
‘I did. And I am—but an extremely new landlord. It’s a long story.’ He shrugged, in answer to the questioning look in her eyes. In the dim winter light shining through the shop window he became acutely conscious of how pale her skin looked, how bright her green eyes. With the deep copper ringlets tumbling unfettered around her shoulders, she could have stepped straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting, jeans or no jeans, and he suddenly felt icy with a foreboding of unknown source.
‘And you didn’t ask to see any credentials,’ he accused suddenly. ‘Basic rule of safety, number one.’ His eyes glittered. ‘And you broke it.’
‘Do you have any on you?’
‘Well, no,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘But the lesson is surely that I could be absolutely anyone—’
‘The impostor landlord?’ She hammed it up. ‘About to hurl me to the floor and have your wicked way with me?’
The air crackled with tension. ‘That isn’t funny,’ he said heavily.
‘No,’ she agreed, and her throat seemed to constrict as their gazes clashed. ‘It isn’t.’
‘In fact, it’s a pretty dumb thing to do—to put yourself in such a vulnerable situation,’ he growled.
Independent and self-sufficient—huh! She had fallen headlong at the first hurdle. ‘Okay. Okay. Lesson received and understood.’
He was still frowning. ‘You’d better give me the keys,’ he instructed tersely. ‘And I’ll move your car when I’ve unloaded all the stuff.’
Holly hesitated. ‘Er—you might find she’s a little temperamental in cold weather—like all cars of that age.’
‘I should have guessed!’ His voice was tinged with both irritation and concern—though he didn’t stop to ask himself why. How was she hoping to get a business up and running if she was this disorganised? ‘Why the hell don’t you buy yourself a decent car?’ he drawled. ‘Didn’t it occur to you that you might need something more reliable?’
His sentiments were no different from her own, but it was one thing deciding that she needed a newer car for herself—quite another for a complete stranger to bossily interrogate her on why she hadn’t bought one!
‘Of course it occurred to me,’ she agreed. ‘But reliable usually means boring. And expensive. To get an interesting car that you can count on costs a lot more money than I’m prepared or able to spend at the moment.’ She gave him a reassuring smile. ‘But don’t worry if she won’t start first time. A little coaxing usually works wonders.’
That smile was so cute. He threw her a lazy look in response. ‘And I’m a dab hand at coaxing the temperamental.’
‘Just cars?’ she quizzed, before she could stop herself. ‘Or women?’
He held her gaze in mocking query. ‘Do you always make assumptions about people?’
‘Everyone does. You did about me. And was my assumption so wrong?’
‘In this case, it was.
