He’d made that mistake twice before.
No, he told himself as he drove home, as he pulled into his driveway then into his garage, Nati Morrison might be funny and spunky and kind to old women; she might have great hair, great skin, lush lips, beautiful eyes, even a dimple, but it wasn’t enough for him to let down his guard.
So get on with this, get it over with, then get out, he told himself.
And that was exactly what he intended to do.
He just wished that his grandmother would have sent him on a mission that didn’t include someone whom he’d now spent an entire night and day thinking about.
And apparently smiling like an idiot over when he did….
Nati was five minutes early on Friday evening when she arrived at the Cherry Creek address that Cade Camden had given her the day before.
About a mile east of the Denver Country Club, the house was in a neighborhood comprised of older, upscale homes. Cade Camden’s house was a stately redbrick, two-story Georgian with decorative black shutters on either side of the black door and all of the white-paned windows. While it was hardly modest, it wasn’t the mansion she’d thought it might be.
For the sake of privacy, the front yard was bordered by redbrick columns and wrought-iron fencing. Two larger columns bracketed a double-car driveway. Nati drove her aging sedan around the block while she tried to decide whether she should pull into the driveway or park in front of the house on the narrow city street.
Nearing the house for the second time, she decided it might be presumptuous to park in the driveway, so she pulled up to the curb and turned off her engine.
Why am I so nervous about this whole thing? she asked herself as she unbuckled her seat belt and gathered the notebook with samples of her work and the pamphlets and fliers about wall textures and colors.
She’d arrived at any number of houses in the last six months to bid on jobs.
But none of those other bids had involved a Camden, she reminded herself.
Cade Camden.
The man she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about since she’d first looked up from behind her counter into those amazing blue eyes.
But if ever there was a guy for her to stop thinking about, it was him.
She’d spent a full year under legal siege from her now ex-husband and his family. Barely six months after the divorce, the very last thing she needed was to get involved with another spoiled rich boy and the family that came with him.
And if that weren’t enough—and it most definitely was—this particular rich boy was a Camden.
If dealing with the power bought by the Pirfoys’ money had been daunting, she couldn’t even fathom what kind of hell the Camdens could rain down on her.
And the Pirfoys hadn’t come with the reputation the Camdens did. Or with the track record the Camdens already had with the Morrisons.
Ruthless—that was what her grandfather had said about H. J. Camden. Whatever and whoever was in H. J. Camden’s way got run over, left as roadkill.
And how far from the tree could the apple have fallen? Nati asked herself.
Probably not far. It was unlikely that the Camden stores, the Camden empire, the Camden fortune had continued to thrive without H. J. Camden at the helm because his descendants were nice guys.
And the fact that Cade Camden had seemed like a nice guy yesterday?
Her ex-husband had seemed like a nice guy at the start, too.
She could still turn this job down, she reminded herself.
Maybe she should….
But her car was sixteen years old and making a bad noise. Plus, she had trouble getting it to start every morning. She had more bills due this month than she had money to pay them, her grandfather’s birthday was next month and with Christmas the month after that, there was no doubt that she needed the money this job would bring in. She just plain couldn’t afford to turn it down.
And this was just a job, after all. She would do what he hired her to do, get paid and go on her way. What went on in her head in the process didn’t matter. It was just a nuisance that she’d have to deal with until it wore itself out. Which she was certain it would do.
She was going to do this job, collect a nice fat check and get her car fixed and pay her bills. And in a way, the fact that Camden money would be paying those bills was a win for the Morrisons. Not that her great-grandparents would have considered it anywhere near restitution, but it was a teeny, tiny win nonetheless.
Nati pulled on the handle to open her car door but nothing happened.
The door needed to be fixed, too, and she suffered a moment of anger, frustration and longing for the luxury car she’d had to leave behind in the divorce.
“Don’t pour salt into the wounds,” she beseeched the old beige sedan that she’d used in college until she’d married Doug. She’d left it with her grandfather for the six years of her marriage and was now driving it again.
As if her plea had helped, when she tried the door a second time it opened and she got out.
“Thank you,” she said to the car when she closed the door, then she headed up the driveway to Cade Camden’s house.
There were two steps up to the small landing at the front door where twin marble planters bearing matching topiaries stood like sentries on either side. Nati rang the bell and instantly heard a muffled “Coming” hollered from inside.
A moment later, Cade Camden himself opened the door.
He was wearing suit pants and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and the collar button undone. There were some nearly transparent spots on the front of his shirt where water must have splashed him, and he was drying his hands on a dish towel.
“Right on time!” he crowed in greeting. “If you had been ten minutes earlier you would have caught me with dirty dishes in the sink.”
“Your maid didn’t do them?”
“My maid?” he parroted with a laugh. “I don’t have a maid.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I just figured—”
“They were my dishes from last night and this morning,” he explained. “My grandmother would have shot me if she knew that I hadn’t rinsed them and put them in the dishwasher when I’d finished eating, but you know how it is—sometimes you just feel lazy….”
“I won’t tell,” Nati promised, taking stock of his face again and realizing that no, she hadn’t been imagining him to be better looking than he actually was—something she was hoping she might have been doing. He was every bit as head-turningly handsome as she’d been remembering him, and he smelled wonderful, too. He appeared to be freshly shaven and the scent of citrus and clear mountain air was wafting out to her.
And weakening her knees a little…
He also had great hair, she realized in that instant. Thick and clean, he wore it cut short on the sides and back with the top just a bit longer but still neat. Not so neat that it looked as if he’d put much care into it, though. In fact, it was just tousled enough to keep him from appearing too businesslike, to give him a casual air. And somehow it made her want to run her fingers through it….
Nati tightened her grip around her notebook and pamphlets as if that was the only way she was going to be able to keep from doing it.
“Come in,” he invited then, moving to one side of the entry so she could step across the threshold.
The entry was large, with a steep set of stairs directly in front of the door, a hallway alongside the stairs that was