Beauty, that had been Hutch’s first impression.
The incredible beauty sleeping on the couch in the apartment upstairs.
When her brother Dag had rented the apartment for her, he’d told Hutch that his sister was quiet and the shiest of all the McKendricks. That she was meticulous and tidy so she would be a good tenant. Dag hadn’t said anything about the fact that Issa was a head turner.
Not that that was at all relevant to renting her a temporary place to live.
It was just that, to Hutch, Issa McKendrick was something to behold and he sort of wished he’d known that in advance so he hadn’t been so dumbstruck at first.
She was a vision that made him not quite believe his own eyes.
Flaxen hair and skin like porcelain—those had been the first two things to strike him.
And she had the most delicate features—a straight, unmarred forehead; a gently sloping nose; a slightly rounded chin; full, petal pink lips; rosy, high cheekbones; and when she’d smiled slightly in her sleep, there had been dimples. Deep, deep dimples in both cheeks.
And then she’d opened her eyes. And even from across the room he’d been able to see how blue they were. Dark, sapphire blue—they stood out strikingly amidst that light skin and hair. Sparkling dark sapphires…
She was breathtakingly beautiful but still with a wholesomeness to her.
But stunning or not, it didn’t make any difference.
Hutch was not in the market for a woman. Sure, a year and a half of widowerhood might mean that he could be. But he wasn’t. He had Ash to think of. To focus on. He had to concentrate on being a single father. A father to his own kid. This was no time to get into anything with any woman, let alone with someone who had issues of her own to deal with—issues like a baby on the way without a dad.
But Issa McKendrick wasn’t going to be hard to look at while they both lived here, he thought as he lifted his son down from the booster seat.
He just wasn’t interested in anything more than looking. The way he might look at a painting or a sculpture or a photograph—purely as an appreciation for a thing of beauty. A woman of beauty.
But there was no doubt about it, Issa McKendrick was definitely that.
“Itta hep. I’ma eat cookies.”
“I think I’ve been had,” Issa observed.
Hutch Kincaid laughed. “I think you have.”
In anticipation of Hutch and his son coming to install her new door handle and lock, Issa had run to the store and bought cookies for the little boy. She’d set some of them out on a plate on the coffee table.
Hutch had made a great show of Ash being his assistant, enlisting his son to hand him the screwdriver when he asked for it.
“Then when you’re finished,” Issa had said, “there are cookies…”
That had drawn Ash’s attention to the dish on the coffee table. But a mere glance in that direction was the tot’s only immediate response.
What he had done was lure Issa into helping Hutch, too, handing the screwdriver to her so that she could hand it to Hutch.
Issa had thought it was cute that the toddler wanted to include her. And in an attempt to be more outgoing and friendly, she’d complied.
But once Ash had her at the door with Hutch, holding the screwdriver, the little boy made the announcement that she could play assistant while he went to have a cookie.
“How can a two-and-a-half-year-old be that tricky?” she asked.
“Hey, when cookies are involved, it’s every man for himself,” Hutch said with a laugh before he called after his son, “One, Ash. You can have one cookie.”
Then turning back to Issa, Hutch whispered, “Now watch, he’s going to take a bite out of one, say he doesn’t like it, choose another, take a bite, and do the same thing until he’s had a taste of every kind you have out there.”
“I shouldn’t have bought the assortment?”
“You can’t put that much temptation in front of him.”
“I don’t know anything about raising kids,” Issa confessed.
But apparently Hutch Kincaid did because Ash had done exactly what his father had predicted and was on to his second cookie.
“One, Ash,” Hutch warned.
“I doan yice this kind,” the toddler announced for the second time, choosing a third cookie.
“Better take the plate away,” Hutch advised Issa.
“It’s okay. I put them out for him. And there are only four kinds. Technically, if he has one bite of each kind, it’ll add up to only one cookie.”
“Great, you want to split hairs, too. The problem with that logic is that there are more than four cookies on that plate and he’ll go on taking one bite out of every cookie unless he’s stopped. Can you hold this like this?”
That last question drew Issa’s gaze from son back to father.
Hutch had been working at lining up the inside doorknob with the outside doorknob and—the same way he had earlier in the day when he’d inspired inappropriate ideas in her—he had a hand on each of them.
“If you don’t keep them where I’ve got them I’ll have to line them up all over again,” he explained when she was slow in responding to his question.
“Oh, sure,” she said, stepping to his side to replace him before her imagination went any further than it already had.
And if, in the transfer, his hands brushed hers and set off tiny sparks? She wrote that off to static electricity, even though that wasn’t what it had been.
Maintaining the position of the door handles, she looked on as Hutch crossed to the coffee table and picked up the plate as well as the cookies his son had discarded.
“No!” Ash rebelled.
“You can have one,” Hutch reminded reasonably, firmly, without any anger or aggravation.
“I wanna diff’ent one.”
“Nope, the one in your hand will have to do,” Hutch informed him, setting the plate on the top shelf of the nearby bookcase and stacking the already-bitten cookies beside it.
Ash studied the situation intently.
Issa couldn’t be sure, but she had the impression that the toddler was working on a plan to climb up to that plate.
But Hutch again seemed to read his son’s mind. “Don’t even try it,” he warned as he headed for the door again. “Just eat your cookie.”
Ash scowled
