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Her second thought was that no matter what misery the animal had caused her by getting loose right before she began to close up and leave, she was sending him to his death. His little legs were flailing as he flew through the air, right at the stranger’s chest.
She lunged in an effort to save the poor animal from meeting a horrible end, and realized the stranger was moving, too, right at her. In a heartbeat he had the rat in both hands, but she couldn’t stop her own momentum any more than he could stop his. She was as out of control as Charlie had been a split second ago, but she wasn’t being caught and rescued. Instead, she hit the stranger, tangling with him, feeling a stinging blow at her forehead, inhaling a jumble of scents, from gingerbread to aftershave, all layered with body heat.
The momentum kept up, the uncontrolled tumbling with the man until she hit the ground, felt the back of her head make contact with the floor, gasping as the man seemed to be everywhere. In the next heartbeat she twisted and the world stopped. All motion ceased. She’d gone from flying wildly into a stranger, to lying on top of the stranger on the floor with her eyes tightly closed.
She could literally feel his heart beating, and it took her a second to define the fact that her breasts were pressed to his chest, that his body was under hers, a hard, lean body, filled with heat and strength. A horrid thought—she hadn’t been this close to a man since Rob had died—was there before she could stop it. All she had to do was open her eyes and see the man, but she couldn’t. She wouldn’t.
She pushed back then opened her eyes and was thankful that the man was little more than a blur of darkness to her. His hand was on her arm, his fingers all but burning her skin, and she tried to jerk free. But he wasn’t imprisoning her, just holding her, and the motion of pulling hard sent her to her right, and she fell sideways onto the carpet.
She closed her eyes again, so tightly that colors exploded behind her eyes. She gasped for air, while her mind raced. Just explain that she was tired, that Charlie was important 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, he sank down to his haunches and Amy watched with fascination as he reached out strong, tanned hands, easing them cautiously toward the rat. He cupped his hands around and behind the rat, then closed them around the animal. Charlie squealed once, then Quint stood with the rat at his chest, just the head peeking out and the nose twitching in the air. “Okay, Amy, show me the cage.”
“I’ll get it,” she said and hurried around the tree and back to her office, trying to ignore the way the ruined skirt of her dress was riding up on her thighs with each step she took. She flipped on the overhead light and crossed to her cluttered desk where she’d left the metal cage. Grabbing the wire handle, she turned and ran right into Quint behind her. Heat, muscle, fine material, that aftershave, all mingled, and she gasped. “Good heavens,” she said as she moved back, her hips pressing against the edge of the desk to help her keep her balance. Amazingly, she didn’t drop the cage, but the handle began to bite into her hand as she saw that smile again, that slow, seductive curve to his lips. “That is a horrible habit you’ve got there,” she muttered, not daring to move because she didn’t want to touch him again.
“Well, catching rats isn’t my idea of a habit,” he drawled while Charlie cuddled in his hands against his chest. Even the rat liked the guy. Damn that amusement deepening in his eyes.
“No, you sneak up on people.” She turned from him, plunking the cage back on the desk, then she turned to take Charlie out of the man’s hands. “I’ll take him,” she said, and reached for Charlie, being very careful to make as little contact with Quint as possible.
She didn’t reckon on the man’s heat being in the rat’s fur as she cupped Charlie and eased him through the door of the cage. She set him down, then snapped the clip to secure the door. She stared at the rat instead of turning back to Quint as he spoke.
“I wasn’t sneaking anywhere the first time. I heard you talking to Charlie, and I thought…” The sudden chuckle was rich and deep and disturbing. “Lady, why don’t you just forget what I thought. Everything’s turned out just fine.”
Well, it wasn’t just fine. She was harried and tired, and feeling just a bit sick about being near a man who so disturbed her. She seldom noticed men. Even before Rob, she’d walked past most men in this life. Then Rob had shown up in her world. He’d been the other part of her soul, and she knew that the wait had been worth it.
This wasn’t happening to her. She wouldn’t let it. She didn’t want it. “Never mind. It’s late,” she said softly, then turned as he moved back half a step.
“Would you do me a favor?”
“I don’t know what favor I could do for you.” She edged around him as she spoke, making it past without touching, and headed for the door to go out into the main area. He was there, she felt him behind her, and she kept going toward the tree.
“Amy?” he said right behind her as she stopped by the tree.
She touched the painted bark with one hand, the hand with her wedding ring on it. The gold band glinted in the twinkle of lights, and it centered her. Grounded her. As she turned to Quint, she felt a control that she hadn’t felt since he’d walked in on her. “I’m sorry, what was that favor?”
“I missed a tour of this place earlier, and I thought since you’re here and I’m here, I wouldn’t mind looking around.”
She clasped her hands behind her back and relished the feel of her ring, smooth and warm and comforting. “Well, if you really want to. Where did you want to start?”
He shrugged, the action testing the fine material of his tux jacket. “Surprise me,” he said in a low voice that ran riot over her nerves.
She turned to avoid looking at him and to concentrate on the center, but as she turned, she realized that the fragrance of baking gingerbread coming from the new oven in the redone kitchen had become a pungent odor. And smoke was seeping out through the swinging door of the kitchen.
Chapter Two
Quint didn’t realize what was going on until Amy turned and sprinted barefoot across the room, then he saw the smoke. She burst through swinging doors and disappeared as smoke spilled out into the room. He ran after her, heading for the smoke, and suddenly a sound split the air—a smoke alarm.
He cursed himself for being so distracted by the woman and the rat that he hadn’t noticed anything else. Instead of paying attention, he’d been trying to figure out if Mike’s advice was worth taking. The damn building could be burning down around him, and he was trying to figure out if he should go for it and ask Amy out for a drink, stalling for time by asking her to give him a tour of the place. He shoved back the door and stepped into a room filled with smoke.
“Amy!” he called above the alarm, coughing when he took a breath.
Quint heard a scream, a crash, and he dove into the smoke as someone behind him called out, “What’s going on?”
Through coughing, Amy’s disembodied voice came from inside the room, “Gingerbread.”
There was movement behind him, then a motor started up and the smoke began to thin dramatically. Quint spotted Amy crouching on the far side of the room by an open oven surrounded by shattered glass from what looked to have once been a dish and a number of blackened, smoking lumps. He went to her, dropped to his haunches and made himself not touch her. That scream had shocked him, followed by his reaction that something had happened to her.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She stared at the mess in front of her, coughing again before she answered him. “Yes, I’m fine.”
Someone else was there, rushing around doing something to controls on the wall. But all he could focus on was Amy and the charred mess between them. “The gingerbread family, I take it?”
“Exactly.” Amy waved at the air in front of her as if she could disperse the last of the smoke. “I was baking them to show off the oven and to make this place smell nice. You know, the trick Realtors use to make houses more inviting? Bake cookies or something that smells great? Well, I had some dough left, so I put them in to take home with me when I went, and I forgot all about them.”
“The family’s toast,” he murmured.
She looked at him, grimacing. “That’s terrible.”
“Sorry.”
“So am I,” she muttered as she frowned at the broken glass all around them. “I’d hoped the smell of it baking would cover the paint and new carpet smells and people would think the place was homey and nice.” The alarm stopped as she added, “What a mess.”
He watched her in profile, and didn’t miss the slight unsteadiness in her chin. “For what it’s worth, it worked. That’s the first thing I smelled when I came in.”
She looked up at him. “Then the smoke, huh? I can’t believe I got so distracted.” She bit her lip, then finished. “Charlie has one more thing to answer for.”
She stood, then turned to the guard who was coming toward them through the haze of smoke lingering in the room. “Sorry, Walt, the gingerbread is a bit overdone. I hope this didn’t mess up things too badly for you.”
“No, I got to the sprinkler control before they came on and I got a couple of fans going. The smoke’s almost gone.” He went over to a central range with a huge hood over it and flipped a switch. Another fan roared to life. “I’ll leave them on for an hour or so, then check back here.” He turned to Amy and Quint. “Meanwhile, I’ll get maintenance in here to clean this up.”
“No, please don’t,” Amy said as she stood. “I did it. I’ll clean it up.”
“Whatever you say, ma’am,” Walt said. “You two okay?”
“We’re fine,” Quint said and then heard glass crunch under the man’s shoes as he turned and left. “Where are the brooms kept?” he asked Amy.
“I’ll get them,” she said, and she would have if he hadn’t stopped her by capturing her upper arm and stopping her before she could take a step.
“Don’t move,” he said, trying to block out the pleasure of her soft skin under his hand.
He drew back as she turned to him. “What are you doing?”
“Stopping you from getting cut.” He pointed to her bare feet. “There’s glass all over this place. I’ve got shoes on. You stay put and tell me where the supplies are.”
She glanced down, then back up at him, her lashes partially shadowing her deep-brown eyes. “I never thought…” She bit her lip. “The broom is in the closet to the right of the door over there.” She pointed behind her. “There’s a dustpan, too, and a bucket of some sort to put the pieces in.”
As Quint crossed to the cupboard, he heard glass crunch under his shoes, too. He got the broom, pan and bucket, then went back to where Amy stood very still. He handed her the pan. “Just hold this and don’t move your feet.”
“I never thought of that,” she said as she crouched down and he started to sweep the pieces into the dustpan. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” he said, sweeping the shards into the pan. By the time the floor was clear, the smoke was gone, but the odor still lingered. “You stay here,” Quint told her as he went to put back the equipment, and when he turned she was where he’d left her, her hair mussed, her feet bare, her dress torn and little or no makeup on her face. Not only was she beautiful at that moment, but she made his decision for him. Mike had been right after all. He needed this, a diversion, some time off to “go with the flow.”
He went back to her, and she coughed softly. “Thank goodness everyone had pretty much left before that happened.” She looked up at him and said, “If anything had happened to this center, after everything everyone’s gone through…” She sighed heavily. “I don’t know what I would have done.”
Not willing to think back to that moment of sheer horror when she’d disappeared into the smoke, he tried to make a joke. “If anyone asks about it, do what you said you were going to do, blame it on the rat.”
She looked at him, and for the first time since he’d glimpsed her, she was smiling. Not hugely, but a soft lifting of her pale lips, and there was a sparkle deep in her dark eyes that accompanied that touch of humor in her. It made him wish he could see her smile fully realized. “Poor Charlie, how do you suppose I convince everyone that the rat burned the gingerbread family?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Well, lady, my theory is, if a mouse can own one of the biggest theme parks in the world, a rat could have done this.”
His wish came true and she smiled at him, really smiled, and the sight of it literally made his breath catch in his chest. Beautiful? Was that what he thought? This woman was beyond beautiful. “I guess that’s why they pay you the big bucks, huh?” she asked.
“What?” he asked, his thinking not exactly clear at that moment.
“Coming up with ideas to fix what’s going on in this place. I think they called you a ‘visionary,’ and I know that visionaries don’t come cheaply, at least not in this world. So, solutions equal big bucks.”
“I just do a job,” he said, noticing the faint touch of a dimple to the left of her mouth. Just the suggestion of a dimple. “That’s all.”
She exhaled, and the smile started to fade a bit, something he regretted greatly. “It’s time to leave, before I really burn this place down,” she said and looked down at the floor. “I hope all the glass is gone, because with my luck today, I’ll find the last piece, cut myself and really make a mess.”
“Amy, you’re brilliant. As a visionary, I can see you’re absolutely right. You’ll do that very thing.” She frowned slightly, as if trying to figure out where he was going with this. “And since I’m being paid big bucks to keep this company on the right path, I figure that keeping an employee from hurting herself is all part of the job description, and one of the reasons I make all those big bucks.”
He went closer to her as he spoke, so close he could see that there was a deep amber burst around the pupils of her eyes.
“Mr. Gallagher—” she started, but he stopped her.
“It’s Quint, and let me earn my money.” Before she could evade him, he picked her up. She was as light as a feather, but a feather wouldn’t have twisted the minute he held it, or gasped with shock as he caught it high in his arms.
“Put me down,” she was saying, but he was busy trying to absorb the way the fascination he’d had with her from the start was transforming into a basic need to keep this contact.
“Not in here,” he said.
She felt soft and warm and smelled like burnt gingerbread and flowers. Her hair tickled his face as she wiggled around, pressed one hand to his chest and looked him right in the eyes, her face inches from his own. “You do not have to do this.”
He did, but he couldn’t explain to her why he did. He couldn’t explain it to himself. “Oh yes I do,” he said, carrying her across the room to the door. “It’s for the good of LynTech.”
“Oh, come on,” she muttered, finally stilling in his arms.
“Oh, yes, if you cut your foot, you’ll go on disability and lose time, and the company will lose your work time, and you can see that we’ll all be headed down the road to ruin.”
She stared at him as they went out into the main room, then suddenly that smile came back. “You’re ridiculous, you know?”
“I’ve been called worse than that,” he said. There was carpet underfoot now, but he kept going with her, taking her over to the tree before he even considered letting her go. And when he let her down, he had to quite literally keep himself from reaching out to brush at the hair clinging to her cheeks as she stood to face him.
“You’ve earned your big bucks,” she said, her face slightly flushed, probably from all the excitement.
He was going to ask her out for drinks or coffee or something. Anything to prolong this evening. “We’ve got our stories straight, right?”
“What?”
“You’re pulling a Watergate. You need to blame someone else for all of this, and Charlie is an excellent scapegoat.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, Watergate? Sure, of course. Boy, that’s pretty ancient history, isn’t it?”
Ancient history? It had happened during his college years. He looked at her then, really looked at her, beyond that incredible sensuality that rocked him, beyond the voice and the eyes. She was young. It hadn’t even hit him before. He’d been too busy “going with the flow” and with everything else. “Very ancient,” he murmured, then found himself saying, “How old are you?”
He hadn’t meant to ask that bluntly, but it was out there and he waited. “How old are you?” she countered without batting an eye.
“Let’s put it this way, I was there when ancient history was made.” He tried to joke, but it seemed flat in his own ears.
She smiled again. “Well, if you were there for the Civil War, I want to know if Scarlett and Rhett ever got back together?”
Her smile was melting his reason—big-time. “I never met the lady, but rumor has it that she kept Tara and lost that Butler fellow.”
“Too bad. I heard he was pretty cool.”