“There’s nothing wrong with the place that a little spit and polish cleaning wouldn’t fix right up,” he insisted.
“Then why don’t you take care of it? It’s a crime to allow it to go to ruin. It’s probably riddled with termites and overrun with mice.”
He grinned at her unconscious shudder. “Then I’m surprised you’d want to buy it,”
“I would fix it up,” she said,
She made the declaration in that haughty little way that made him want to scoop her up and kiss her until she went weak in the knees. He settled for an indifferent shrug.
“Sorry, it’s not for sale.”
“I’ve been checking into real estate prices in the area and I’ve come up with a ballpark figure that I think is reasonable,” she went on as if she hadn’t heard him. She snatched a piece of paper off of his desk and scribbled a figure on it, then shoved it in front of him.
“Nice ballpark, if I were playing, which I’m not.”
Scowling at him, she scratched out the amount and wrote another. Kevin stared at the paper and managed to hide his admiration. She’d pretty much nailed down the current market value and tacked on an extra ten thousand. She’d been one very busy woman since hitting town. Most people undervalued the property around here because the town had been slow in grasping its own potential. This outsider had apparently seen it right off. Since she was playing fair with the money, he wondered if she’d be honest about a few other things.
“Tell me, Gracie MacDougal, why are you so hot to buy that particular house? Do you have a husband and half a dozen kids stashed away somewhere?”
“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”
“It would give me a clue about why you’re interested in such a huge old house. Doesn’t seem like the logical choice for a woman all alone.”
“Sometimes logic doesn’t have a thing to do with wanting a piece of property. Sometimes you just fall in love.”
He’d never met a woman less inclined toward indulging a whim. Hot as it was, she was dressed in a suit, hose, and high heels that would have knocked the socks off a New York businessman. For his own purely masculine reasons, he’d have preferred she come calling in a sundress. Be that as it may, Gracie struck him as an exceptionally practical, businesslike lady, which meant she had plans for that house. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what they might be.
“Or sometimes you decide you’d like to start a little bed-and-breakfast maybe,” he suggested quietly and watched the telltale color bloom in her cheeks.
He was glad he’d done a little checking when he’d first heard about Gracie MacDougal and her fascination with Aunt Delia’s house. He knew all about her career with Worldwide Hotels. It hadn’t required a huge leap to figure out what she had in mind for the old Victorian. Without saying a word, she’d just confirmed his guesswork.
“If you think I’ll raise my offer, you can think again,” she said.
“Wouldn’t matter if you did,” he said. “It’s not for sale.”
“Then I suppose I might as well be going,” she said, then met his gaze evenly. “For now.”
“Then you’ll be back?”
“Oh, you can count on it, Mr. Daniels.”
Kevin couldn’t explain the odd sense of relief that stirred in him. He’d intended to rid himself of her, once and for all. He’d been as adamant as he’d known how to be about Aunt Delia’s house. And still, some part of him had obviously relished the first skirmish in what now promised to be all-out warfare. He couldn’t help wondering what wiles Gracie MacDougal had up her sleeve.
Not that it mattered. His cousins were masters of every form of sneaky manipulation in the book. Not a one of them had put anything over on him yet. He doubted Gracie MacDougal would, either.
It would be downright entertaining, though, to have her try.
Gracie had negotiated for supplies and equipment for entire hotel chains with more success than she had in that first meeting with Kevin Patrick Daniels. The man obviously had no idea of the actual worth of that run-down property. Didn’t seem to care, either. Otherwise, he would have recognized her bid for the preemptive strike it was and snapped it up.
All in all, the meeting had been a frustrating waste of her time. She had left his house feeling disgruntled, off kilter, and thoroughly frustrated.
Of course, that might have had something to do with the fact that the man had been half nude, with his shirt undone and jeans so old they were practically threadbare in some very revealing places. She had tried not to look, she really had, but it had been impossible not to notice the curling, dark chest hair and the very impressive bulge beneath the zipper of his jeans. Unless she’d been very much mistaken, the man had been turned on by taunting her.
Whatever, she had left Greystone Manor more determined than ever to get her hands on that house…or around Mr. Daniels’s neck.
She had grown very tired of hearing him declare the property wasn’t for sale. Of course it was. Everything in the world was for sale for the right price. She just had to figure out what would be persuasive enough to get his attention.
No, check that. She’d had his attention, all right. There was hard evidence of that, so to speak. Plus, she had caught the speculative, masculine gleam in his eyes, once he’d bothered to open them all the way. She supposed there was a way to use that to her advantage if she were that sort of woman. But, alas, she wasn’t.
No, what she needed to do was to get him focused on business, caught up in the deal, challenged by the negotiations.
Unfortunately, she had a feeling one of those day-long motivational seminars couldn’t stir up Kevin Patrick Daniels. One thing she had to say for Mr. Daniels, he was no Max. Obviously, he had about as much ambition as a slug. Lying around in a hammock in the middle of a workday said a whole lot about the man, none of it good.
Of course, some would say that maybe she ought to take a few lessons in relaxation from him. She’d been on vacation less than a week and already she was caught up in a business deal when she should have been following his example and sipping lemonade and lolling around in a hammock. What was it about her that drove her to succeed? If she could figure that out, maybe she could bottle it and slip a little into Mr. Daniels’s lemonade.
A good shrink would probably tell her that she spent so much time on her career, because she was better at it than she was at relationships. In fact, she’d grown so leery of men in recent years that she’d worked very hard to attain the kind of independence that made a male protector unnecessary. She could count on her career in ways she’d never been able to count on another human being. At least she’d been able to until Max had come along and thrown a monkeywrench into that side of her life, too.
Maybe that was why she had seized on the notion of getting that Victorian and turning it into a bed-and-breakfast. It was just one more way to solidify her independence, to make sure that she alone was in control of her future.
Right now, though, Kevin Patrick Daniels stood between her and the control over her own life that she craved. That put him in a very dangerous position. A woman scorned in love was nothing compared to the ire of Gracie MacDougal when she’d been scorned in business.
Yes, indeed, win or lose, the next few months were going to be very interesting.
4
“Why on earth didn’t you sell it to her?” Aunt Delia demanded of Kevin, after Gracie MacDougal had stalked out of the house, her spine rigid and her cute little behind swaying provocatively despite her annoyance.
“You been listening at keyholes again?” Kevin asked, regarding his eighty-seven-year-old aunt with amusement. She was