Give yourself a break, girl, she thought, and raised the teacup to her lips to hide her smile. There’s no harm in looking, is there?
Just how much harm there could be was made clear, however, when Spencer suddenly turned and walked away from the fire, catching her stare. His grin rose like a slow tide on his face and she flushed. She would have sworn the dratted man could actually read her mind.
“Not too warm?” he asked, settling himself in the chair next to hers, tea in hand.
“Not at all,” she said, denying the heated redness of her cheeks.
“Good, then we can get started.” With these words, he leaned forward, bracing his forearms on his knees. “First of all, did you read any of the papers I sent you?”
“You mean the papers that arrived at five this morning?” she retorted smartly. The blatant lie was her best option. “I was in nonstop meetings all day long. I didn’t have the time.”
“I’m sure.” His drawl bordered on insulting and the way he sat meant his clasped hands rested only inches from her knees. She tucked her legs up beneath her in the chair. “What is it that you do? No poor-taste joke to follow,” he added.
“I’m a civil engineer.” Gotcha, buddy, she thought, as her words made him sit up a little and cock his head a little to the side. And you can just ask me what that means if you don’t know.
The silence held.
That was unexpected, Spencer thought. A civil engineer. He leaned back again in his seat and picked up his cup of tea, using the gesture to fill time as he thought about the implications. If she’d said she was an animal trainer for the circus, or a performance artist who did weird things onstage while reciting poetry under a black light, he wouldn’t have been surprised. Adeline had told him stories about her niece, Addy’s mother, who’d gotten pregnant and run off with a jazz musician at eighteen years old. So he was prepared for a little oddity in the mother’s daughter. And she certainly had a mouth on her that defied polite-society conversation.
A civil engineer. Although he wouldn’t want to be put on the spot to define what exactly that was—something to do with how a building affected the land and hooked up to various public-works systems, he thought—he was sure that you didn’t get to be one by having a few screws loose. She’d likely done postgraduate work in a scientific field and held licenses from several federal and state boards.
This changed things. He wasn’t sure how, but he was sure that it did.
First, a guess.
“Were you in the field yesterday morning?”
“How perceptive of you.”
Tromping around on a construction site went a long way toward explaining her mud-bespattered appearance at his office. Still, even now she looked more like an unemployed college student, with her wildly curly black hair and what he felt sure were braless curves under his sweatshirt. She had silver rings—some braided, some set with stones, some plain—on almost every finger of both hands, including her thumbs.
But, an engineer.
“Please don’t be offended if I tell you that that was not what I expected.” He decided that honesty would be best, and waited to see if she would spring out of her chair and attack him for it.
“You mean like I didn’t expect to find you living in my great-aunt’s house?” she asked with a real smile. She was warm. She was cozy. There wasn’t enough energy left in her body right now to get into a fight. Elwood strolled in the library door and flopped down in front of the fire. That’s how she felt, too.
“Yes, something like that.” He smiled at her, crinkling the corners of his ocean-blue eyes, and for the first time, she just smiled right back at him. The firelight was doing interesting things to his hair, dancing bronze and gold sparks off the ends. As their gazes held, she felt those same sparks take up dancing in her stomach.
“You’re going to explain that, right?” she asked at last, cutting through the building tension with her voice.
He laughed. “Don’t worry. It’s only temporary while my condo is being renovated. I knew Adeline my whole life. My family have been her family’s lawyers for almost a century, and when she heard I was going to move into a hotel, she invited me to stay here.”
“Really?”
“Cross my heart. You can ask my mother.” The thought of meeting the society matron who’d raised him did not excite her. “I hate hotels.”
“Me, too,” she murmured and curled up a little more in her blanket. The warmth of the fire was so soothing on her face, the low crackling of the flames hypnotizing. “So tell me what’s in all those papers.”
“Certainly. You should know, first of all, that this last version of your great-aunt’s will was drawn up just last year. Since there are no other living relatives outside of your family, there should be no contesters as to the validity of the will. Assuming you fulfill the conditions of the bequest, there will be no…”
Spencer’s measured baritone was very calming. His tone of voice asserted that there were no problems in this world that reflection and clear thinking could not solve. She was so reassured, in fact, that she thought she’d just rest her eyes for a moment while he spoke. She could listen to his very reasonable description of the terms of the will while she relaxed just a little bit after what had been an extremely long, tense day.
She fell asleep as she was listening to the conditions of the bequest, her sleepy brain certain that everything seemed very reasonable indeed. She even nodded her approval.
The room was silent when she next had a conscious thought. She wondered why the fire wasn’t snapping and hissing. She considered opening her eyes to look at it.
Too much effort.
Someone was stroking her hair, she realized fuzzily. Static electricity had strands pulling away from the side of her face as the hand drew away. Gentle fingers returned to tuck the hair behind her ear.
Her eyes drifted open slowly. Spencer was crouched down at her side, one arm draped along the chair back, fingers tangled in her hair. His other hand rested on her knee. She felt a physical click run through her system as his gaze locked with hers, bringing her closer to wakefulness.
“You know, you’re incredibly beautiful when you sleep.” His voice was soft and low. Maybe she was still asleep. Now he was smiling at her. “It helps that your mouth is shut.”
His shadow fell over her first as he leaned toward her and then captured her lower lip between his and sucked on it lightly. She opened her mouth in surprise and he immediately covered it with his own, his tongue smoothly curling around hers in a dizzying attack on her senses. She was electrically conscious of where his hand was tracing small circles on her knee.
“What—” Her voice was sleep-rough as she tried to speak between kisses.
“You’re beautiful,” he murmured. She could feel the vibrations of his voice against her lips. “When you sleep.” His mouth pressed hers open again.
Someone was moaning softly. Addy was afraid it was her. As her body surged into awareness of this man who was kissing her, who she wasn’t even sure she liked but whose touch was turning her insides into a puddle of melted wax, her brain struggled to recall how she’d gotten into this situation.
His