Then, as if it had just occurred to him that she might not want his company, he said, “Unless you’d rather be alone—”
“No,” Kit answered much too quickly. “I just don’t want to be a bother.”
“It’s no bother. I’ve been kind of enjoying myself,” he said.
That pleased her more than it should have but Kit tried to ignore it and made her way to the table.
They settled in across from each other and as Kit took a sip of her tea she worked to come up with something to talk about with this man she’d just met…and couldn’t seem to keep her eyes off of.
But then she doubted it would be easy for any normal, red-blooded woman not to look at that handsome face and the muscular body that went with it.
It was that robustly healthy physique that suddenly spurred the memory of the newspaper article that had been her first exposure to Ad Walker and she seized that to make conversation with.
“I heard about you and Cutty saving that family from their burning house and about you both getting hurt. How are you after getting beamed?”
Ad smiled. “Shouldn’t that be beaned?”
“As I recall you didn’t get hit with a bean, you got hit with a beam,” she said, smiling to let him know her play on words had been just that.
“I’m as good as new.” He tapped on his head as if knocking on a door. “Hard head.”
“Not hard enough to keep you out of the hospital for a couple of days—or so I heard.”
“I’m okay now, though. But thanks for asking.”
“Kira said Cutty got the cast off his ankle last week and he’s doing all right, too,” Kit said, trying to keep things going.
“He did. And the burned house has been repaired, and the family we dragged out of it has moved back in, and even the dog’s singed tail looks normal again. It’s as if it all never happened.”
“Except that as a result of it I no longer have my best friend living across the hall from me,” Kit pointed out as a waitress served her meal.
When she’d thanked the woman, Kit shot another sly smile in Ad’s direction and added, “Of course I blame you for that.”
Ad laughed. “Me? What did I do?”
“You talked to Kira about Cutty and that was instrumental in her decision to pursue her relationship with him.”
“Ah.” Ad’s engaging grin said that he realized she was only teasing him. But rather than commenting on the subject of the part he’d played in his friend’s romance, he nodded at her plate with his chin. “How’s your food?” he asked.
Kit had tasted both the beer-battered, deep-fried cod and the French fries and could honestly say, “It’s the best fish-and-chips I’ve ever had. But don’t think it makes up for costing me my best friend.”
“Doesn’t it make up for it a little?”
Was he flirting with her?
Had she been flirting with him?
Kit wasn’t sure on either count. But she was enjoying the exchange just the same.
“It makes up for it very little,” she countered.
“Hmm. Well, as I understand it, you did some encouraging of your own when it came to the fork in the road for Kira and Cutty. Kira told me you opened her eyes to some things that got her to thinking and ultimately coming back here to Cutty.”
“It was already too late by the time I got in on this. I just had to roll with things,” Kit claimed. “So I still blame you.”
Okay, maybe that had sounded slightly flirtatious.
Stop it! she told herself.
“I guess I’ll have to think of a way to make it up to you,” Ad conceded with an innuendo-laden tone of his own.
Kit played along with skepticism. “That’s a tall order.”
“I love a challenge,” he said.
His aquamarine eyes glinted with mischief and held hers in a spell that left Kit completely unaware of anything or anyone else around them.
So completely unaware that she only realized her friend was standing right beside the table when she heard, “Umm, are we interrupting something?”
Ad seemed as surprised as Kit felt to discover that Kira Wentworth and Cutty Grant had joined them.
“Kira!” Kit exclaimed, jumping to her feet to cover her own preoccupation with a man she had no business being preoccupied with.
Kira gave her a hug and said, “I’m so sorry I couldn’t meet your bus! I made you come all the way to Montana, and I wasn’t even there when you got here. But Mel fell against the corner of the fireplace in the new house and cut her forehead. We had to take her in for stitches.”
“I know, Ad told me. It’s okay,” Kit said.
But Kira went on anyway. “I couldn’t leave her. She was scared and upset and she doesn’t like anything to do with doctors as it is, let alone having to get three stitches, poor thing. And then we decided that rather than push it, we should just get the girls home and put them to bed and call the sitter to stay with them after we got them to sleep for the night.”
“I totally understand. You needed to do what was best for the babies. Really, it was no big deal. I’m just glad to see you now,” Kit assured.
Ad had risen to his feet when Kit had and he’d been very busy pulling two chairs from another table.
“What can I get you guys?” he asked then. “Something to eat? To drink?”
“I’ll have a beer,” Cutty said.
“Nothing for me,” this from Kira. “I just want Kit to meet Cutty.”
While Ad got Cutty’s beer Kira introduced Kit and Cutty and by the time that was accomplished and the four of them were situated around the small table whatever it was that had been going on between Kit and Ad Walker before Kira’s and Cutty’s appearance had been put to an end.
But as happy as Kit was to see her best friend and to meet the man who had made Kira nearly glow with delight, as happy as Kit was to know that their baby daughter was okay, there was still a tiny speck of regret lurking deep down in her.
A spark of regret that had something to do with Ad Walker.
And with that interruption of whatever it was that had been going on between them.
Chapter Two
A fter a night of tossing and turning, Ad was up early Sunday morning. Not only was he up, he was in the kitchen of his apartment rushing to fix a big breakfast, keeping a vigilant eye out the window over the sink that afforded him a view of the alley—and the landing he shared with Kit—and silently berating himself for all of it.
The tossing and turning hadn’t been simply an ordinary restless night. He hadn’t been up since the crack of dawn just because he was an early riser. The breakfast he was making was double what he could eat and he wasn’t in a hurry because he was hungry. And he wasn’t watching the weather change through that window.
Kit MacIntyre—she was the reason for everything.
He’d had a bad night’s sleep because he hadn’t been able to get her out of his head, and dreaming about her had woken him up before his alarm had gone off in the morning.
He was making double the food so he would have an excuse to invite her to breakfast.
He