“Paper route?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “First job?”
“If you don’t count weeding Mrs. Ellerby’s vegetable garden.”
“That was seasonal work. It’s different.”
Molly had no response to that, so she simply watched him. The collar of his white shirt lay in stark contrast to the bronzed column of his throat. Was it her imagination, or was his tan deeper this morning than it had been on Friday? She simply couldn’t picture him doing anything as mundane or sedentary as strolling along the beach at Martha’s Vineyard. She thought about the scrape she’d seen on his fingers and could easily imagine him, shirtless, laboring under the afternoon sun. Maybe on a sailboat, though even that seemed too much like recreation. He leaned back in his chair and placed his hands behind his head. “My first job was a paper route. I liked the way the papers smelled when I picked them up.”
The admission surprised her, and yet, it didn’t. Edward Reed’s son probably wouldn’t have needed a paper route for spending money. The renowned media mogul could well afford to give his son a generous allowance. Though few people in the industry were unaware that Sam was Reed’s illegitimate son, Reed had made his acceptance of the child abundantly clear. But, the same thing that told her he didn’t spend weekends at the beach said he hadn’t spent his childhood living on his father’s money. “Did you have to roll and band them for delivery when you picked them up, or did they come that way?”
“I did it,” he said with a slight nod. “Kids today have it easy. They get those plastic bags.”
“Rolling’s half the skill,” she concurred. “If you don’t tuck the edges, you can’t toss the paper right.”
“Comes unwrapped in midair.”
“Plus you get paper cuts when you pull ’em from the bag.”
He smiled. It was dazzling. Molly couldn’t ever recall seeing him smile so naturally. This was a smile straight from a remembered pleasure. Her heart skipped a beat. His eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled. The observation surprised her. The slight lines suggested that his smile, like his laugh, was something he used often. “The day I finally mastered the doormat toss onto old man Greely’s porch—” he shrugged “—I felt like Nolan Ryan pitching a no hitter.” The faraway look left his eyes as he met her gaze again. “He had shrubs. Boxwoods. They blocked the sidewalk.”
Molly nodded. “I had a house like that. You had to float the paper over the shrubs so it landed on the mat.”
“Um. And Greely had a covered porch. So the paper had to go between the roof of the porch and the boxwoods and land on the mat—”
They said in unison, “Without hitting the door.”
Molly laughed. “I’m impressed. I was pretty good, but not that good.”
“I practiced for weeks.”
“I hope he tipped well.”
“I don’t think I ever got a tip out of the man. But he didn’t yell at me for hitting his door either. And when the paper I worked for threatened to take away my route and consolidate it into truck delivery, he went to the circulation director and saved my job. I never knew what he told that guy, but I kept the route until I graduated from high school.” He shook his head. “The day I graduated, Fred Greely sent me a check for a hundred dollars.”
Molly found her first smile of the morning. “No wonder you love the newspaper business.”
“Just like you?” he asked softly.
She hesitated. “Yes. Just like me.”
“I thought so. So find something else. You can’t quit.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said carefully.
Sam pushed the paper aside and folded his hands on his desk. “May I make a suggestion?”
“Since when do you ask me if you can make a suggestion?” she quipped.
Another slight smile. The dent—dare she call it a dimple—in his left cheek deepened when he smiled. And that dimple, that infuriatingly devilish dimple, did something to his face that made her stop breathing.
Oh, dear Lord, she thought, as she felt the flutter in the pit of her stomach, and recognized the way her lungs constricted. It can’t be. It can’t and must not be. But even as she struggled for breath and pressed a hand to her belly, she knew the signs. They were horrifying and impossible evidence that she found the man attractive. Her sisters had been telling her for weeks that the animosity she felt toward him was one step away from passion. She’d denied it. Vehemently. Too vehemently. With the sun glinting on his dark hair, and his damned dimple making her body temperature notch up, she had to fight the urge to bury her face in her hands.
Not again, she told herself fiercely. And for God’s sake not now. For years, she’d known that she had a chronic habit of falling for unsuitable men. With the same reckless abandon she lived life, she’d tumbled headfirst into relationships. Her sisters had been warning her for years. If they found out she’d fallen for Sam Reed, she’d never hear the end of it. Blissfully, Sam seemed unaware of her momentary lapse into insanity. He chuckled softly at her quip, and the sound made her stomach flip-flop. “Oh, no,” Molly muttered beneath her breath.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she assured him, fiercely demanding that her nerves quiet down. “You were saying?” she asked with a feeling of dread.
He looked at her curiously but continued, “I was saying that I’d like to offer you a way to make reparations for this—indiscretion.”
“What do you want?” she asked warily. She had a sinking feeling that whatever it was, it would be far worse than losing her job.
“I want you to have dinner with me.”
Chapter Two
She was sputtering. There wasn’t any other way to describe it, he thought, fascinated. Sam Reed was fairly certain he’d never seen a woman sputter. He watched her closely as she struggled for breath. “Dinner? With you? You mean, like a date?”
He was screwing this up, he thought wearily. No big surprise there. How he managed to succeed in business and fail so spectacularly at anything requiring tact, he hadn’t a clue. He’d obviously inherited the trait from his father. “Like a date,” he affirmed carefully, wondering why the word seemed so old-fashioned and quaint. He frequently took women to social events. He’d had his share of lovers. But he hadn’t “dated” since high school. “Don’t you have them?” She drew her eyebrows together in a sharp frown. Was baffled or just annoyed.
“Excuse me?”
He didn’t think he was imagining the way the spray of freckles on her nose had blended with the heightening color in her face. From the day he’d met her, he’d found Molly Flynn’s freckles fascinating. They formed a steady trail, which disappeared beneath the collar of her sweatshirt. The thought of following that line of freckles to its end made his mouth water—that and her maple-leaf–red hair and her eyes the color of summer clover. Nothing about Molly Flynn was bland. She had vibrancy and life—something Sam had begun to fear he himself was missing.
Perhaps that explained why he’d caught himself imagining her lingerie. Sam had never found speculating on women’s lingerie to be particularly time worthy, but this was different. He had an unshakeable feeling that underneath her ubiquitous jeans and sweatshirts were laces and satins in a range of colors and styles that would knock his socks off.
He forced himself to concentrate on getting her to agree to a date. Plenty of time later to contemplate her lingerie. He