seeing him again?
She had a two-year-old daughter to care for and a house that seemed to be in constant need of one repair or another, and, if the additional money for the day care didn’t come through, the center might have to close due to a clause in the club’s amended bylaws assuring that no member’s child would be turned away, and she would be out of a job. And even if he didn’t know who she was, she certainly didn’t need the added stress of being reminded of the most embarrassing incident of her entire life.
* * *
As Josh walked down the hall toward the day care center, he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why he felt as though he knew Kiley Roberts. He didn’t think they had met before she walked into the meeting room earlier in the afternoon. If they had, he knew for certain he would have remembered her. A woman that attractive would be damned near impossible to forget.
Normally he preferred his women tall, willowy and with an air of mystery about them. But Kiley made petite and curvy look good—real good. With her chin-length, dark blond hair and the prettiest brown eyes he had ever seen, she looked soft, sexy and very approachable.
He frowned as he tried to remember if he’d even seen her before this afternoon. She might have been at Beau Hacket’s barbecue a few months back. It seemed that Hacket had invited the entire membership of the Texas Cattleman’s Club, as well as most of the residents of Royal. Or more likely he’d seen her somewhere around the clubhouse, maybe in the restaurant or the bar. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to it than that.
When he reached the door to the old billiard room—now renovated to house the day care center—he shrugged. It really didn’t matter. Once he gave her the news that she wouldn’t be getting any more money from the club, he would go straight to the top of her Grinch list and that would be the end of that.
Looking through the window in the door, he noticed that the room looked much nicer now than it had a couple of months ago when vandals broke in and tore up the place. They still hadn’t caught who was behind the destruction or their motive for doing it, but Josh felt sure the culprits would eventually be caught and dealt with accordingly. Royal, Texas, wasn’t that big of a town, and many of its residents were members of the TCC. It was just a matter of time before someone remembered seeing or hearing something that would lead the authorities to make an arrest.
He would hate to be in the vandals’ shoes when that happened, he thought as he opened the day care center’s door. Whether the place was wanted by all of the members or not, nobody came in and destroyed any part of their clubhouse without the entire membership taking great exception to it.
“I’ll be right with you, Mr. Gordon,” Kiley said from across the room.
“Take your time,” he said, looking around. Several children sat in pint-size chairs at tables that were just as small. He couldn’t imagine ever being little enough to fit into furniture that size.
As he watched, Russ and Winnie Bartlett’s youngest little girl got out of her chair and walked over to hold up a paper with crayon scribbles for Kiley’s inspection. She acted as if the kid had just drawn the Mona Lisa, causing the toddler to beam with pride.
Josh had never taken much to little kids. For one thing, he had never been around them and didn’t have a clue how to relate to them. But he found himself smiling as he watched Kiley talk to the child as she pinned the drawing to a bulletin board. Only a coldhearted bastard would ignore the fact that she had just made the little girl’s day.
“Carrie, could you take over for me for a few minutes?” she asked a young woman Josh assumed to be the day care worker Kiley had hired not long after the center opened. When the woman nodded, Kiley walked over to him and motioned toward a door on the far side of the room. “Why don’t we go into my office? Otherwise, I can’t guarantee we won’t be interrupted.”
As he followed her to her office, he found himself fascinated by the slight sway of her hips. He had to force himself to keep his eyes trained on her slender shoulders. But that only drew his attention to the exposed skin between the collar of her red sweater and the bottom of her short blond hair—a spot that looked extremely kissable.
His heart thumped hard against his rib cage and heat began to fill his lower belly. What the hell was wrong with him? Had it been that long since he and his last girlfriend parted ways?
“Please have a seat, Mr. Gordon,” Kiley said, walking behind the small desk to sit down in an old wooden chair.
He recognized both the desk and the chair as having been in the storage room for as long as he had been a member of the club and probably for decades before that. If circumstances had been different, he might have felt guilty about the funding committee insisting her office be furnished with the club’s castoffs. But considering none of the members on the panel, with maybe the exception of Nadine Capshaw, expected the center to remain open past spring, it had been decided that the used furniture would be good enough.
“Call me Josh,” he said, sitting in a metal folding chair across the desk from her.
“I assume you’ve come to tell me the funding committee’s decision on my request...Josh?” she asked, sounding as if she already knew the outcome of the vote.
There was something about the sound of her voice saying his name that caused him to frown. “Before we get into the committee’s decision, could I ask you something?”
“I...uh, suppose so.” He could tell by the hesitation in her voice and her wary expression that she didn’t trust him.
“Do we know each other?” he asked, realizing immediately from the slight widening of her expressive brown eyes that they did.
“No,” she said a little too quickly.
“Are you sure?” he pressed, determined to find out what she knew that he didn’t.
“Well, we...um, don’t know each other formally,” she said, suddenly taking great interest in her tightly clasped hands resting on top of the desk.
She was hiding something, and he intended to find out what it was. “So we have met?” he continued.
“In a way...I guess you could say that.” Her knuckles had turned white from her tight grip and he knew whatever she hid was extremely stressful for her. “It was quite by accident.”
Every hair follicle on his head felt as if it stood straight up, and he suddenly wasn’t so sure he wanted to know what she obviously didn’t want to tell him. “Where would that have been?” he heard himself ask in spite of his reservations.
Getting up, she closed her office door, then slowly lowered herself into the chair when she returned to the desk. “You used to date my sister.”
A cold, clammy feeling snaked its way up his spine. “I did?”
When she finally raised her head to meet his gaze head-on, a knot the size of his fist began to twist his gut. “I’m Lori Miller’s sister. Her only sister.”
Josh opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. For the first time in his adult life, he couldn’t think of a thing to say. But his unusual reaction to her suddenly started to make sense. From the moment she’d walked into the meeting room to plead her case to the funding committee, he had been fighting to keep his libido under control. Now he knew why. He might not have realized who she was, but apparently his body had. The chemistry between
