to Taylor and the other kids at the center, and that she was ready to leave. That was all true. Very true. Weariness ate at her, weariness that sleep didn’t dispel, when she could sleep.
“Whoa, lady,” the man uttered in a deep, rough voice touched by a faint Texas twang.
She kept her eyes closed for a long moment, then scrambled to her feet, her chest tightening as she finally opened her eyes to look at the man. He was flat on his back on the floor, and his image was painfully clear to her, from the thick dark hair streaked with gray brushed back from a face with sharp features, a full, graying mustache and a strong jaw. But it was the eyes that caught her attention and held it. They were dark eyes, partially shadowed, narrowed as they looked up at her, yet capable of making her heart lurch in her chest. It didn’t help that they were crinkled at the corners from humor, the same humor that made the mustache twitch above a mouth with a decidedly sensuous bottom lip.
She looked away quickly, not prepared to be so instantly uneasy with a man, especially with a man who was smiling at her. No, it wasn’t exactly uneasiness she felt. As her eyes ran down his lean frame, over the perfectly cut tuxedo, she knew that she was disturbed. Very disturbed, and she was embarrassed by it while he lay on the floor laughing. She was also embarrassed by her own clumsy stupidity. She felt heat rising to her face.
“I am so sorry, I mean, really sorry,” she said in a rush, crouching down by him as she held out her hand to help him up. “You scared me and I didn’t think. Poor Charlie, I sure didn’t mean to throw him at you like that.”
“Poor Charlie is right,” he murmured in a low rumble.
“Poor Charlie is—” Horror shot through her. “Charlie!” Instead of taking his hand, she grabbed at the shoulder of his tuxedo, tugging with all her strength to move him quickly. But it was like trying to move the Rock of Gibraltar. “Oh, God,” she gasped. “Charlie—you’re killing him. Move, get off of him!”
He moved then, scrambling away from her and the rip of material was jumbled with frantic movement, then her own sigh of relief when she saw the carpet under where the stranger had lain. The only thing there was the vague imprint of his body on the new carpeting.
Relief almost left her giddy, and she exhaled in a rush as she sank back to sit on her heels. “Oh, thank goodness,” she said on a relieved sigh. “You didn’t kill him.”
“Kill him?” he asked from right beside her. “You’re the one who threw him at me.”
“I know, I know, but I thought you were lying on him. Crushing him.” She shuddered. “I was sure he was a goner.”
“All of this concern seems odd coming from someone who was threatening him with murder a few minutes ago.”
“Well, sure, but I didn’t want him dead.”
That brought unexpected laughter from the man as he crouched right in front of her. She looked into those eyes and saw they were a rich hazel filled with flashing humor. “I’ll take your word for that, but either way, neither one of us committed raticide.”
“Raticide?”
“The murder of a rat? I thought that was going to happen when you threw the thing at me, right before you attacked me.”
“Attacked you?” She scrambled backward, grabbing at the tree trunk to get to her feet. But as she stood, he was on his feet, too, right in front of her. “No way. You’re the one who scared the bewaddle out of me by sneaking up on me like that.”
A grin came with her words, a grin that stunned her when she realized how seductive an expression it was. She was more tired than she’d ever dreamed. “Bewaddle?” he asked. “Lady, you’re definitely going to have to define bewaddle for me.”
She brushed at her hair as it tangled around her face, regretting taking it out of the clips when she’d thought she was leaving. “Bewaddle is…well,” she began with a shrug. “It means you really scared me so badly that I…I wasn’t responsible for what I did, and I wasn’t attacking you, I was trying to save poor Charlie.”
“So, bewaddle made you throw a rat at me?” he asked with mock seriousness. “And saving him meant you attacked me?”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, I never—” She remembered what she was doing to begin with, before this man ripped into her world and turned it and her on their collective ears. “If you weren’t lying on Charlie, then where is he?” She turned from the grin and scanned the center.
“If he’s not dead, he’s loose,” the man said.
She glanced back at him, at that smile that seemed a permanent fixture, and immediately regretted her next words. “And it’s all your fault.”
She turned from him, embarrassed to be so petty at the moment, and she wasn’t prepared for him to touch her. His fingers pressed heat to her arm, and she jerked back and around to face him again. “Lady, we should all be thankful you aren’t sitting on any jury trying me,” he drawled. “Hell, you’d give me the death penalty for jaywalking.”
She barely knew him, but she knew for sure that she’d never vote to stop whatever time he had left on earth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This has just been the most awful evening. There was so much work and so many people crawling out of the woodwork asking the dumbest questions. I tried, I even made a gingerbread family thing, and that drove Charlie crazy. He loves gingerbread. And my dress…” She brushed the tear in the skirt. “It’s not even mine, I mean, my—” She bit her lip, not about to explain anything else to this man. A stranger. She didn’t even know his name. “Listen Mr….?”
“Gallagher, Quint Gallagher.”
She stared at him. Quint Gallagher? Oh, no! Gallagher, the planner, the man brought in from New York by Matt Terrel to map LynTech’s future. The man who, so she’d heard, had refused to go on one of the tours of the center they’d arranged for this reception. And she’d thrown a rat at him, knocked him over and accused him of killing that same rat. “Oh, Mr. Gallagher, I didn’t know.”
“Stop. Let’s just start all over again.” He held out his hand. “I’m Quint Gallagher.”
She would gladly start all over again, but when she slipped her hand into his, she knew that whatever was spooking her tonight was just getting worse. She had to try twice to say her own name. “Blake…Amy.”
“What goes first?” he asked, his gaze flicking over her as he kept his hold on her hand.
She drew back on the pretext of smoothing the dress she’d borrowed from her sister-in-law. “Amy…that’s first.”
“Amy Blake. And you’re here because…?”
“I was giving tours of the center to the people invited for the reception.”
He eyed her again. “A professional tour guide?”
“No, I work here in the center, and right now, I need to find the rat.”
“No, he found you,” Quint said and pointed down at her feet. Sitting on the carpet, right between the two of them, was Charlie methodically licking his paws then cleaning first one ear and then the other. “And if you don’t move, I think your worries are over,” he murmured in a half whisper.
Slowly,
