we hit it with a hammer now?” Nina asked, curiously. She bit into her muffin and smiled.
Kenzie didn’t reply. If she’d had a hammer she would.
“Call Reed,” Nina suggested. “Tell him to send someone here right away to save us. You can pull the granddaughter card.” She slid off the stool and headed to the door with a wave. “Got to go. Catch you later.”
“All right,” Kenzie said, reaching for the in-house phone.
* * *
Reed Watson knocked on the door to the suite. From the other side of the door he could hear the menacing sound of someone muttering and snarling. That didn’t sound good.
The door opened and Kenzie Russell stood there in all her beauty, wearing a red wrap dress that hugged her slender body like a glove. She was tall with curves in all the right places. Her brown hair was short and sort of spikey. His heart started racing and a bolt of heat hit him in the gut. And when she smiled at him her whole face lit up and he couldn’t stop staring at her. She was that beautiful.
“Hi,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m Kenzie, and you are...?”
“Reed Watson.”
“Oh, I’m so excited to meet you.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him into her suite.
He looked down at her elegant hand in his, liking the way her silky cinnamon-colored skin looked against his whiteness. Please don’t let my palm start sweating. He was reluctant to let her go. He took a deep breath to steady himself and inhaled the subtle scent of vanilla, spiced fig and orchid. She smelled delicious and exotic. He just wanted to bury his nose in her neck. A heated flush crept up his face and he forced himself to turn away and pretend to examine the decor.
The suite itself mirrored his with a living room, dining room and entry on one side and two bedrooms and a galley kitchen on the other, all opening to a balcony and a view of the mountains beyond. “I’m pleased to meet you, as well.”
“You’ve been so elusive I thought you were an urban legend.” She led him toward the dining table with paper scattered across the surface and her open laptop.
“My father has been ill and I needed to be with him.” Chemotherapy did that to a person, but the last test results had shown the cancer in remission and Reed was finally able to get to Reno.
“Miss E. said you had family issues. I’m glad you’re here now—I need your expertise.” She gestured at her laptop. “It just stopped working.”
He sat down at the table and tried to concentrate on the laptop with its blank screen. Anything to distract himself from her. “What’s the problem?”
“It’s broken.”
“Broken in what way?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re the expert.”
Okay, he thought. She was not a computer person. He glanced around and saw the disconnected power cord. He plugged it back into the computer, waited a few seconds and pressed the power button, and the laptop sprang back to life. It had just run out of battery power.
“How did you do that?” She stared at the flickering screen, one hand on her hip, the other pointing at the laptop.
“I have techno mojo.” Most computer problems were simple. “It helps to have the power supply hooked up. Your battery ran out of power.”
“That’s all,” she said.
He grinned. “That’s all.”
“So, you’re a computer wizard.” She leaned over his shoulder and slid her slender fingers over the mouse pad.
“I’m a god chained to Earth,” he ended with a chuckle. He pushed the power cord tightly into the laptop.
She laughed. “Well, then, can you use your godlike qualities to make my software work?”
He liked that she liked his humor. “You’re not a technophobe, are you?” he asked.
She frowned at him. “I know how to use my phone. I do everything on my phone.” She held up the newest, top-of-the line iPhone.
“Explain the problem.”
Leaning over his shoulder, she took the mouse and clicked on an icon. “I commissioned this program that will allow our boutique customers to try on clothes in a virtual environment, but the clothes won’t adjust to figures properly and my computer freezes every time I try to drag something over.”
For a moment he couldn’t force his thoughts away from the way her soft skin brushed against his hand. He gulped. No one had told him how beautiful and sexy Kenzie Russell was. The throaty quality of her voice started his heart hammering away. He fought to breathe. Never in his whole adult life had he reacted to a woman like this.
Beautiful women had been throwing themselves at him since he’d made his first ten million. They’d been more attracted to his money than they were to him. At first, he’d been flattered, but later he’d grown jaded. Kenzie didn’t seem to be looking at him in quite the same way. In fact, at the moment she wasn’t looking at him at all as she frowned at her laptop.
“What do you want your software to do?” he asked when he found his voice again.
“I wanted the software to take a photo of the customer. A salesperson would input measurements and search for appropriate styles depending on what the customer wants.” She waved a hand at the screen. “It seems so simple. Why can’t it be simple?” She frowned at the laptop again.
If software was simple, he might be living in his dad’s basement playing video games. “Who developed the software?”
“A friend of mine knew someone.” She pulled a chair over and sat down next to him.
“The concept sounds interesting.” He studied the laptop screen as she slid her fingers over the mouse pad and tried to show him. The laptop froze and she slapped her hand on the counter. He gently pushed her hand away and unfroze the screen.
“I know,” she said eagerly. “Can you make it work? Miss E. says you can write software in your sleep. She says you can do anything.”
“I don’t know about ‘anything.’” He laughed. “I like to work in my pajamas.”
“You do?” She cast a sidelong glance at him. “I like a man who can joke about wearing his pj’s to work. For me, half the fun of going to work is dressing up.”
“I know you’re all about fashion.” He opened the program again and began clicking through, trying to get a feel for it. From the way the program sputtered and lagged, he knew the code hadn’t been very well written.
“How did you get into computers?” she asked, her dark brown eyes studying him.
“My father took me to a computer show in LA when I was around ten and bought all the components he’d need to build his own, because he figured it would be easy. Except it wasn’t. After a couple hours of grunting and cursing, he started making dinner, and I put the computer
