Of course. Now she was. Whatever was between them was something she’d obviously misread—she was so good at misreading men—and—
“What are you looking at?”
Until that moment, she hadn’t realized she was looking at anything. But then he swung around to follow her gaze. They both stared at the photo of the bride.
Lori swallowed. “Your wife?” She thought her voice sounded normal.
Josh nodded.
“She’s beautiful,” Lori said. Then she smiled at him, because it was going to be okay. He was safe now. He was married.
But he didn’t smile back as a shadow crossed his face. “She was. Kay died five years ago. I’m a widower.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Lori said, her voice soft and sincere.
“Thank you.” Josh looked away from the photo and back at the beautiful woman standing on the other side of his desk, cursing whatever it was about her that made him feel as if his hands, his feet, his Adam’s apple were all too big. But he felt more than just physically awkward at the moment.
When was the last time he’d told someone he was a widower? In the small town of Whitehorn, after that first, awful day, everyone had known.
He cleared his throat.
She shuffled her feet.
“Is there—”
“Why don’t—”
They both broke off.
Josh took a breath. “Ladies first.”
Lori clutched her notebook against her chest. “I was going to ask if there was anything else you wanted to tell me before I went back to my desk.”
Yeah. He wanted to tell her she was the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen. It was the damn truth. Dark hair, blue eyes, creamy skin tinged with just a hint of peach. And her voice…it was moonlight. It was Southern, moonlit nights with fluttering lace curtains and bodies tangled on a bed.
He wanted to tell her he’d never considered himself a romantic man, but looking at her filled his thoughts with an embarrassment of bad lyrics to a country western song.
He wanted to tell her he’d fallen to the floor of the gym on Christmas Eve a settled, thirty-seven-year-old man and gotten up a randy teenager again, in instant lust for her long legs, her long dark hair, her full mouth. The way she’d stared back at him, her gaze filled with equal parts attraction and wariness, had done nothing to cool him off. That same gaze from her now didn’t dampen his interest one bit.
Yet, see, there was that wariness, so instead he said, “Sit down for another minute. I want to know a little more about you.”
Snails moved more quickly. Rain clouds appeared cheerier. After she finally returned to her chair, she reached inside her notebook and slid out a sheet of paper. “My resumé,” she said, handing it to him.
He didn’t even glance at it. “Why don’t you tell me?”
She delivered the facts without emotion. “I moved to Montana from South Carolina last week. I signed on with the Whitehorn Temporary Agency. They sent me to Lucy. Lucy hired me.”
Despite the dryness of the details, he could listen to that soft accent all day. South Carolina. Montana. The words were prettier in her Southern voice. “But why?” he asked. “Why Montana?”
She shrugged. “I grew up in the South. It was…time for something different. Someplace different.”
“But why would you pick Whitehorn? We’re not exactly Billings or Missoula.”
She shrugged again, and her gaze dropped to her notebook.
Frustrated, he looked down at her resumé. She was twenty-eight years old. She’d gone to college in South Carolina, in a town he thought he recognized as located at the southern end of the state. She had a degree in business administration. He looked up. “You have a college degree and you’re temping as a receptionist?”
“It’s work,” she said. “Experience.”
That non-explanation sent him back to perusing her resumé. Which made her even more of a mystery. For more than two years following her college graduation, there was no employment listed. And in the past three years she’d held seven different jobs in several different South Carolina cities.
She was either easily bored or on the run.
He frowned. “Why—”
“Does it matter?” she interrupted. Steel suddenly hardened that soft Southern accent. “I’m technically employed by the temp agency, Mr. Anderson. They were satisfied. If you’re not…” She shrugged, as if she wouldn’t care if their paths never crossed again. “Call them and they’ll send someone else over.”
Okay. That put him in his place. Josh had no reason to feel she’d slapped him across the face, because she was right. Her employment history—or lack thereof—was none of his business. Not as long as she fulfilled her duties as Anderson, Inc.’s receptionist.
But he was irritated by her reticence because he wanted to know about her. Know her. And a few minutes ago he could have sworn there were sparks flying between them. Even before that, at the gym, her gaze meeting his had given him an I’m-Adam-you’re-Eve rush that he hadn’t felt in a long, long while.
With a mental shrug, he threw off his disappointment. Lori was beautiful, but so were a lot of women. She was an enigma, but he’d never been very good at puzzles. And the bottom line was that she wasn’t interested in his…interest.
Sure, their mutual attraction was undeniable. Some things a man just knew; like, he knew which side to part his hair on or the exact spot to hit the basketball backboard for his best lay-up. But, right now Lori was putting up a sign that screamed Back Off in big neon letters, and she didn’t need to flash it at him more than once.
So fine. The lady wanted nothing to do with him. He got it. He’d put his focus strictly on business and forget all about her.
He did okay for a while. A few hours. There were a dozen phone calls to field, a fire or two to put out at one of the construction sites. By afternoon, though, when he was back at his desk and staring at piles of work, the only thing moving through his head was the enticing, peachy scent of his new receptionist.
Ms. Hanson. He’d decided to call her that.
She responded in the prim manner of the schoolmistress who had once ruled over this old building. With an efficiency that put his teeth on edge, she located the files he asked for. Tracked down a wayward bill. Watered the plant in the corner of his office that he usually treated to desert rations. After those words over her resumé, never once did she seem to be aware of him the way he couldn’t help being aware of her.
When the sky outside his window started to darken, he wandered into the office’s reception area to check on the supply of firewood in the brass box sitting beside the woodburning stove. But it was chock-full and there was a telltale, winter-air pink on the receptionist’s cheeks and nose.
He frowned at her. “Ms. Hanson. Restocking the wood isn’t your responsibility.”
From the chair at her desk, she looked up at him. A pencil was stuck behind her ear, pushing a lock of hair forward so that it tangled in her curly black eyelashes. “I don’t mind.”
“Well I do.” His voice was just short of surly. “It’s heavy. You could be hurt.”
She brushed the hair out of her eyes. “I’m stronger than I look.”