She flipped through the stations until she came across one of her all-time favorite movies—a romance made in the 1940s. She adored it and knew she’d be up until the wee hours watching it. The hero always reminded her of the one man who had made her heart rate soar into the heavens and her body feel like it was on fire.
Unfortunately, just like the man on the screen, Tom Prince had married another woman. A beautiful, sophisticated, sexy woman. The kind of woman that drew every male eye when she walked into a room. The kind of woman Maggie knew she would never be.
Tom had been her employer and housemate in college and in many ways, no matter what she’d said to the contrary when they parted, the closest friend she ever had. She’d been thinking about him a lot lately. Something about Gianni and Anna brought back memories of him and the feelings he sparked inside her.
She’d been having more of the dreams, too…the erotic ones where she relived the sensations she’d known in his arms that fateful night six years ago. She didn’t understand the connection and liked it even less.
It had been hard enough losing him to Liana and learning to live without his daily presence in her life once. But now she felt like she was going through the withdrawal all over again and she didn’t even understand why.
Determined not to think about the past and its pain, she focused on the movie, but for once, her favorite love story could not hold her attention and soon she was lost to memories she couldn’t stifle no matter how hard she tried…
Maggie nervously smoothed her hands down her skirt. The letter had said casual attire for the interview, but she had wanted to make a good impression.
So, she’d pulled her long, kinky blond curls into a ponytail and pinned it into a bun, hoping she looked just a little older than her eighteen years. She was wearing a longish twill skirt, the color of wheat, and a classic white button-up blouse she’d bought at the secondhand store the year before to wear to her part-time job as a waitress.
And she’d washed all the scuff marks from her single pair of white sandals, the ones her foster mom had bought her in exchange for mowing the lawn two summers previously. Her nails were clean, but unpainted. Her lightly freckled and very ordinary features were without makeup. Which was a good thing because if she’d been wearing lipstick, she would have chewed it off her bottom lip in nervousness by now.
She needed this job. The salary listed wasn’t huge, but the live-in position would make it possible for her to pursue her studies without getting another low-paying job to cover living expenses.
She rang the doorbell and took a hasty step backward when it opened almost immediately to reveal a man who was way younger than she’d expected. In fact, he wasn’t much older than her. With curly black hair, a face that could have been chiseled by Michelangelo, blue eyes that would have graced an angel and a body that towered over her with finely honed muscle, he was also drop dead gorgeous.
“There must be…I think I made a mistake.” She looked away from his to-die-for body and surveyed the other homes on the tree-lined street.
Had she gotten the number wrong? She pulled the paper from her purse and looked down at the highlighted address. The number was the same as the one beside the open door.
“Are you here about the housekeeping position?” Tall, Dark and Gorgeous asked in a voice that made her stomach flip.
“Um…yes.”
He looked her up and down, his expression weighing. “I expected you to be older.”
“Me, too.”
“You thought you were older?” he asked with a gleam of amusement in his cobalt-blue eyes.
“I thought you would be older,” she corrected, blushing.
He stepped back and indicated she should enter. “Then we were both destined for a surprise, were we not?”
“I suppose so.”
“I’m Tom Prince and you must be Maggie Thomson.”
“Yes. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Prince.”
“Tom, please.”
“All right.” She followed him into the living room.
“You have experience keeping house?” he asked as they took seats on opposite sides of a glass coffee table.
Remembering her years taking care of her foster siblings and ailing foster mom, she nodded with vehemence. “Lots.”
Then realizing that probably wasn’t as specific of an answer as he would like, she proceeded to outline her household duties for the past few years.
His expression was odd. “You took care of the house, the children and your foster mother while working a part-time job?”
“I’m good at multitasking.” Hopefully that would be in her favor.
“But now that you are eighteen, you have moved out?”
“Once I turned eighteen I was no longer eligible to be part of the system. Helen couldn’t get help for my living expenses, and needed me to leave so she could take another child in.”
Knowing that, with all she’d given to her foster mom, Maggie still hadn’t meant any more to the older woman than the money she brought in from the state had hurt. She didn’t share that bit with Tom though.
His too observant and surprisingly compassionate eyes said he’d read between the lines anyway. However all he asked was, “The small salary is not a deterrent for you?”
“No. It would be a godsend to tell the truth. My scholarship doesn’t stretch to living expenses.”
“You are attending university on scholarship?”
“Yes. An academic one.” As if there would be any possibility that her average build would somehow have managed to enable her to attain an athletic scholarship. She smiled self-deprecatingly.
“You must be very bright.”
That made her shrug. Her intelligence was something she’d always taken for granted. If she hadn’t been smarter than the average student, she would have flunked out of high school for lack of time to study between her part-time job and caring for her foster family. “I like school.”
“What is your major?”
“Early childhood development.”
He didn’t laugh like a lot of people did when she told them. For some reason, the idea of going to college to earn a degree so she could care for children seemed amusing to most people.
“What do you want to do?”
“One day, I want to have my own day care center.”
“You should take some business courses as well then,” he said rather bossily.
But she didn’t mind. “I plan to.”
He nodded his approval at this and the interview went on from there. Surprisingly they had a lot in common. Neither liked to watch television very much, they both liked the same authors and they shared a similar sense of humor. It was nice.
She would have thought she would be tongue-tied around him, but she wasn’t because although he was the most beautiful man she’d ever met, he didn’t act at all conceited or cocky about his looks.
She was getting ready to go when he said, “I have one last thing I need to discuss with you before I can make my decision.”
“Yes?”
For the first time in forty-five minutes he looked less than totally self-composed. “I think we could be friends.”
She