should have told me you were living here.”
Except how could he, when Nick hadn’t given him a chance? When he’d grown so frustrated by the man’s smoothly evasive replies that he threw his hands in the air and walked out, jumped in his car and drove straight here?
He scrubbed a hand over his face and wondered what had happened to his logic, which seemed to have gone missing…probably to the same place as his usual even temper. He adopted a more reasonable tone before he continued. “If I’d known you were living here, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see your light.”
“So that’s why you came down here.” Her smile was edged with relief, as if she’d needed an explanation…or because the conversation had taken a safer turn. “Something woke me, but I wasn’t sure what, so I turned the light out again. When I heard you outside, it scared about a year off my life.”
“Sorry about that. I guess we both had the wrong handle on each other.”
Whatever the reason for her smile, it sliced a swathe through Nick’s irritability, made it possible for him to smile right back at her. And he found something in her expression, in the slow color that highlighted her cheekbones, that reminded him what sort of a handle they’d had on each other in the close darkness of the breezeway. Her hands sliding over his shirt, touching his jeans. His hand on her belly, her breast. Heat licked through him like wildfire, doing more than sear his blood vessels. It surprised the hell out of him.
Jet lag, he reminded himself as he shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and cleared his throat. “You want to pack a few things—what you need for tonight?”
She stiffened visibly. “I beg your pardon?”
“You’re not staying here.”
“I’m perfectly comfortable here.”
Her mutt, which had fallen asleep on the foot of her bed, chose that moment to whimper and twitch. Nick snorted. “Your dog isn’t even comfortable here.”
“Must we discuss this now?”
“No. We can discuss it later…after we’ve moved you.”
When he started toward her, she held up a hand. “Look, it’s the middle of the night. I don’t want to fight with you, and I don’t want to have to make up another bed. Okay?”
Nick dragged a hand through his hair. Unfortunately he could see her point. “Fine,” he conceded. “But tomorrow you’re moving out of here.”
“Shouldn’t sorting out this ridiculous bequest be our first priority?”
Nick frowned at her choice of adjective. Unexpected, yes. Unusual, maybe. Overly generous, definitely. “You think it’s ridiculous?”
“It makes no sense.”
“You can’t think of any reason why Joe would leave you a million-dollar bequest?”
All the color leached from her face as she stared back at him. In his world, a million dollars didn’t turn a hair; to Tamara Cole, the figure was obviously staggering. Buying her out would be as simple as writing a check, Nick realized. So where was the satisfaction that always accompanied knowledge of a sure thing, a deal all but closed? As she continued to stare at him, wide-eyed and unblinking, he noticed she looked more than stunned. She looked as dead beat as he felt.
“Sleep on it, green eyes,” he advised as he headed to the door. “We’ll talk later.”
“Nick.”
He stilled, one hand on the doorknob. Now why should the sound of his name on her tongue cause his pulse to pound? All his responses seemed shot to bits tonight.
“I’m sorry about before, about mistaking you for a burglar.”
Nick turned, caught her looking at him with that same expression as before, the one that made him think about hands in the dark and the sweet little body hidden beneath unflattering flannel. He stared back, a slow grin on his lips and a fast burn in his gut.
“I’m not.”
After the door clicked shut, T.C. rested her overheated face against the cool windowpane and one hand against her overstimulated heart. No man’s smile should be allowed to have such an effect, and especially not a man so out of her league.
It wasn’t fair, but it wasn’t unexpected.
From his photos, she knew the man was gorgeous, from Joe’s stories she’d learned of his charm, but nothing could have prepared her for Nick Corelli in the flesh. Nothing could have prepared her for that blue gaze sliding over her like a silk blanket, warming her, sensitizing every cell in her skin, as he murmured “I’m not.” As if he had enjoyed their tussle in the dark, as if the surge of attraction she had felt so intensely was mutual. As if a man who could take his pick of the glamorous, the beautiful and the smart, would be interested in her.
As if!
With a snort of derision, she turned her face against the windowpane and looked outside in time to see the house windows light up one by one, marking his progress through the entry hall into the living area, and then on to the bedrooms. A tug of alarm pulled her hard up against the glass. Which would he choose?
“Please. Not my room, not my bed,” she breathed. “It’s enough knowing you’re in my home.”
Whoa! When, precisely, had she started calling Joe’s house her home? Sure, she had lived in it the past five years, but only because Joe insisted, only because he was the kind of man who brooked no argument.
“You think a house like this deserves to be empty? You think I want to come here to an empty house after a whole week spent with too many idioti for any one man’s patience?”
The backs of her eyes pricked at the memory of Joe’s words, and she pressed her lids tightly closed. She hadn’t cried once in those god-awful months since she’d finally learned of her boss’s terminal illness, and she wasn’t going to start shedding tears now.
If you don’t want to be treated like a girl, don’t cry like one. That came straight from her father’s concise book of lessons, right after There’s only one thing a man like that could want from a girl like you.
She had been young and reckless when she learned the harsh truth of her father’s words. She had given that one thing to a rich, smooth-talking, heartbreaker named Miles Newman, and after he laughed at her words of love and moved on to the new stable girl, she’d dried the last of her girl-tears and thrown away the handkerchief.
Never again would she trade her self-respect for something she mistook for love. Never again would she mistake the flashfire of physical attraction for something more. Oh, she wanted there to be somebody—a special person to share her life, to love and to cherish—but she didn’t need the palpitations and the heartache and the tears. She needed strength and stability. She needed respect and understanding and companionship. Until she found a man with those qualities, she would make do with her own company.
Except at this moment her own company was making her edgy and unsettled. She swung away from the window and started to pace her room, but that activity did nothing to ease her restlessness. The quarters she
