Kyle came around the desk quickly, grabbing her arm as she turned to leave.
“You obviously aren’t as pleased to see me as I am to have finally found you again,” he said.
She still hadn’t spoken a single word. Just stared at him like a trapped bird. Her reaction puzzled him—a lot. The last time he’d seen her had been in that Las Vegas hotel. She’d been sleeping in his bed, a half smile on her face.
What on earth had gone wrong?
“Do you have any idea how many Jarnies I’ve chased down trying to find you?” he asked, smiling at her. Putting people at ease was something he did well. One of his few natural talents.
Had he suddenly lost his touch? She was still staring at him like he was a dead man come to life.
“Wouldn’t you know it.” He continued to hold her arm, though not so tightly that she couldn’t get away from him if she wanted to. “The first time I hear the name and I don’t wonder if just maybe... And it’s the one time it turns out to really be you!”
Okay, so maybe he was rambling. But he couldn’t believe he’d finally found her. The woman of his dreams. Literally.
“I—” She broke off, swallowed, tried again. “You looked for me?”
“Of course!” Kyle couldn’t believe she had to ask. They’d shared some pretty emotional moments, not to mention the best sex he’d ever had.
“Why?”
“Why what?” He was still holding her arm, but only because she felt so good. So warm.
“Why did you look for me?”
Kyle grinned at her, cocking his eyebrows a time or two. Trying desperately to find the warm, funny woman he’d spent the best night of his life with. “Need you ask?”
His answer must have disappointed her somehow. She looked away, down at the floor. He could almost feel her gathering her strength. He just had no idea why she felt she needed it.
“I’d never talked to a woman as openly as I talked to you that night,” he said, forgoing light and easy for complete honesty.
That was better. She was looking up at him again, a question hovering over the panic in her gaze.
“I’ve never met anyone since then that I wanted to repeat the experience with.”
“Talking, you mean?”
Well, the sex, too, but... “Yes.”
Feeling the muscles beneath his hand relax, Kyle took his first full breath since he’d glanced up and seen her standing there. Phew. He’d finally said something right.
“I should probably go,” she said, nodding toward the door. But she still didn’t pull out of his light grasp. Kyle found her passivity rather odd.
“We haven’t even discussed my records yet.” He had to keep her there. At least long enough to be sure that he’d see her again. That she wasn’t going to just disappear the way she had the last time he’d been with her.
“Surely you don’t still want me to do your taxes.”
He frowned, truly puzzled. “Why not?” He could understand a certain reluctance to follow him home and climb with him into his unmade bed—though there was nothing he’d like more at that moment. But what was so alarming—or intimate, for that matter—about taxes? IRS agents would be going over them pretty carefully and he’d never even met them. Not even once....
“Well...because...surely you don’t.”
Now probably wasn’t the time to ask her out to dinner. “Of course I do. Dean Patterson says you’re the best.”
She took a full minute to digest that remark. Or at least Kyle figured that was what she was doing while she stood there silently gazing at him. During the brief time he’d known her, she’d been a woman of few words, a woman who kept most of herself locked away. But by the end of that night, he thought he’d been admitted inside—though just inside—the locked corridors of her mind. He’d been looking forward to exploring those corridors much more fully.
And then she’d vanished.
Jamie’s next comment had nothing to do with taxes. “You cut your hair.”
Ridiculously pleased that she’d given him that much notice, Kyle shrugged. “Made me look older.” He’d worn a ponytail the night she’d met him.
“Looking older’s important?”
“Maybe not, but when you’re in the classroom and you want to discourage any interest from nubile college girls, it can’t hurt.”
Obviously uncomfortable with his vaguely sexual reference, Jamie simply looked away.
“It would have to be business only.”
She’d said the words so softly he barely heard them, but his heart jumped with hope just the same. “Of course. If that’s what you want.”
Her gaze met his solidly then, filled with strength, with conviction. “That’s the way it has to be.”
He refused to be disappointed so quickly. “You’re married?”
“No.”
Then he could wait. “If you say it has to be just business, just business it is,” he told her, forcing himself to release her arm as he headed back around his desk. So it was going to take longer than an hour or two to unlock her defenses this time around. He’d waited more than five years. He could be patient.
Holding out his tax file, he said, “It should all be in there. You can reach me here or at home if you have any questions. Both numbers are on the inside jacket.”
Nodding, she took the file and flipped it open.
And for the first time since she’d walked back into his life, he caught a glimmer of a smile.
“What?” He was grinning from ear to ear. She’d almost smiled. He was climbing already.
“You want me to submit a bunch of maps to the IRS?”
He wouldn’t bother telling her what he really wanted. Not yet. At least not until he got as far as a full smile. He handed her the correct folder, instead. And was still grinning as he hurried across campus to his next class. He’d just found the woman he was going to marry.
CHAPTER FOUR
KAREN SMITH LOVED her husband. But she didn’t want to have his baby. Not again. Not alone.
She didn’t think he wanted her to have his baby, either. Which made telling him that she might be pregnant almost impossible.
She paced her living room, where the girls sat watching cartoons, little legs straight out in front. Their closeness comforted her, even if the irritatingly high voices on the cartoons did not. Jamie was due any minute. Her appointment with the new client from the university had been more than an hour ago.
Jamie was so damn lucky. She had it all. A career. A home. And Ashley. Oh, and a planner with appointments and meetings written in for practically every day. Karen didn’t have enough to keep track of to need a planner.
Jamie had a life. And probably because of that, she was the most unflappable, centered person Karen knew.
Karen, on the other hand, got up every morning, sent her baby off to school, cleaned, ironed and cooked, only to start all over again the next day. Cleaning the