“True enough,” Sophie murmured.
Moments later, they reached a closed door. Griffin tried the knob. “Locked.” He glanced at her. “In this case, expediency trumps privacy.”
Putting his shoulder to the door, he braced against it, half turned the knob and then gave a sort of combined jerk-kick that looked as if he’d practiced it to perfection. The door popped open, swinging inward to reveal a simply furnished sitting room.
“Thank God,” Sophie breathed. Telling herself not to wonder where he’d learned how to pop a door off its lock without breaking any of the surrounding wood, she stumbled through the door.
Gemma and Erik’s apartment proved to be a small, simply furnished suite done mostly in neutral beiges and browns, with accents of rust and navy. There was a kitchen and bathroom off to one side of the sitting room, and two doors leading from the other side. Sophie made a beeline for the doors. One opened into a small office filled with landscaping books and magazines. The other yielded pay dirt, not in the neat queen-size bed and southwestern-print curtains, but in the dresser and his-and-hers closets, which were full of clothes.
Wonderful, warm, dry clothes.
There were also photographs everywhere, scattered around the room in a variety of wood and metal frames. Even though she was freezing, Sophie couldn’t help pausing for a quick scan of the pictures. She’d always been fascinated by families, and that was clearly what these photographs chronicled: a man and woman’s lifetime together.
The earliest of the pictures showed the couple mugging for the camera from atop a pair of bored-looking horses in Western tack, against a backdrop of purplish mountains and a wide-open sky. The woman looked to be in her early twenties, dark-haired and pretty, with regular features and an open, engaging smile. Her eyes twinkled with mischief. The man was maybe a few years older, blond and fair-skinned, with the beginnings of a sunburn. He was looking at her with an expression of complete and utter adoration.
The other photos showed the couple at different points in their lives together—their wedding; a baby, then two; family candids as the children grew. The man’s hair went from blond to white, while the woman’s stayed relentlessly—and perhaps unnaturally—dark brown, but her face softened with age, and living. There were other weddings, other vacations, until the last photo, which sat on the beside table and showed just the man and the woman, in their late fifties, maybe early sixties, wrapped around each other at the edge of Lonesome Lake, with the now-demolished bridge in the background.
The woman’s expression still twinkled with mischief. The man still had eyes only for her. That love, and the sense of family unity that practically jumped out of the photos, put an uncomfortable kink in Sophie’s wind-pipe, right in the region of her heart.
“Here.” Griffin appeared in the doorway behind her and tossed an armload of terrycloth towels on the bed, having apparently raided the bathroom. He moved past her and rooted through the dresser and closet, coming up with jeans, a shirt and thick sweater, along with two pairs of wool socks and a worn men’s belt. Then he headed back out, saying over his shoulder, “You take this room, I’ll change in the office.” Then he paused in the doorway. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She made herself move away from the bedside photo and start picking through the dresser. “I’m guessing we’re out of luck in the shower department?”
“Sorry. The pump is battery-powered, so we’ve got running water, but it’s going to be cold. I’ll have to get the generator going for hot water. First, though, I want to get us dry and see about starting a fire.”
Sophie nodded. “Of course.” As he left the room, she pawed through the dresser, telling herself not to waste time feeling squeamish about going through a stranger’s things. The worst of the bone-numbing cold had eased now that they were out of the storm, but getting dry and warm was still a major priority.
“I’ll reimburse them for the clothes,” Griffin said unexpectedly from the other room. “So stop stalling. If I don’t hear you getting naked in the count of ten, I’m coming in and doing it for you.”
From another man the words might’ve been a tease, or a threat. Coming from laconic Griffin Vaughn, who didn’t seem to suffer from the same zing of chemistry Sophie felt every time she was within five feet of him, they were simply a fact. As far as she could tell, he hadn’t even noticed she was female—theirs was purely a business relationship. Or rather, the possibility of one, if she worked very hard and managed not to dump any more coffee on him.
Unfortunately, she got clumsy when she was nervous, and something about the way he looked in the throes of negotiation—all stern-faced and dark-eyed, with a flash of excitement when he moved in for the coup de grâce—well, that made her all too aware that he was male. Which made her nervous, and therefore clumsy.
“Sophie?” Griffin called, and his low-voiced inquiry buzzed along her nerve endings like liquid fire, the heat brought by the thought of him undressing her, and focusing all that dark-eyed intensity on her.
But the threat got her moving, and she started stripping out of her wet, clinging clothes. “You don’t have to come in,” she called after a moment. “I’m naked.” She blushed at the echo of her own words, bringing stinging warmth to her cheeks. “Never mind. Forget I said that, okay?”
She grabbed the towels he’d left for her and scrubbed them over her skin, warming some life back into her chilled flesh, which seemed strange and disconnected, as though it didn’t belong to her anymore. Soon, though, life began to return—pins and needles at first, then stinging pain. Skin that had been fish-belly-white moments earlier flared to angry red, and she hissed with the return of feeling as she drew on a pair of borrowed jeans and a turtleneck, socks and thick sweater.
She soon realized that she and Gemma were built very differently: the other woman was taller and significantly narrower in the hips and bust. Doing the best with what she had, Sophie rolled up the cuffs to deal with the too-long jeans, and hoped the sweater was loose enough to disguise how tightly the clothes fit across her chest and rear. Like Griffin, she skipped borrowing underwear, instead going commando beneath her clothing.
Logic said that shouldn’t have felt daring under the circumstances, but she was acutely aware of the chafe of material against her unprotected skin as she left the bedroom. Not that he would notice, because he was all about business. Which was a relief, despite the fact that she’d developed a mild crush on him. Indeed, she only allowed herself the crush because he wasn’t interested. After what had happened at her last job, where she’d been romanced and played by a jerk of the first degree, and said jerk had set out to destroy her career options, the last thing Sophie was looking to do was get romantically involved with her boss. No thanks, not going there again.
Heading out of the bedroom into the main sitting area, Sophie found Griffin crouched by the fireplace. Kindling and mid-sized logs were neatly organized in a burnished copper tub to one side of the hearth, and a small drift of ashes and charred wood inside the fireplace suggested it was fully functional, which was very good news indeed.
Griffin had used some of the kindling to build a neat teepee, with crumpled paper in the center, and a trio of larger logs crossed in a tripod arching over the kindling. The setup, like the hip-check he’d used to open the door, looked practiced and professional, which didn’t fit with the image of the polished businessman she’d spent the past month assisting.
The Griffin Vaughn she worked for wore custom suits and monogrammed shirts, yet cared little for fashion. His entire focus was centered on VaughnTec. He was seeking to grow the company by shrinking their products even further