LITMIR.BIZ

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her head. It was impossible. She simply couldn’t do it. Whiskey River held too many painful memories.

      The thing to do was to spend the night here, since the idea of driving back down that twisting mountain road in the dark was less than appealing. By tomorrow morning, the storm would have passed and she could go to Kauai as originally planned, where she would spend the rest of the days she’d allotted for her vacation basking in the sun before returning to her uncomplicated life.

      As impossible as others might find it, Tara could actually hear her grandmother’s voice challenging that last thought.

      “All right. So, in this case, uncomplicated may translate to boring,” she allowed. “But it’s what I like.”

      It was also, she admitted as she changed into dry clothes, what she needed. A boring, predictable, normal life.

      She left the bedroom on her usual brisk, efficient stride determined to send Mr. Gavin Thomas back to wherever it was he’d come from.

      Gavin had just started a fire in the stone fireplace when he heard her coming back down the stairs and inwardly cursed Brigid—not for the first time—for getting him involved with her house. And as if broken windows and juvenile vandals weren’t enough, he now had her ill-tempered granddaughter to deal with.

      “I thought you might have left already,” she said pointedly.

      There was no way he was going to leave her alone in this house, without power or a telephone, with those potential juvenile delinquents running loose, but Gavin decided to save the argument until he learned her plans.

      “Actually, I was waiting around to hear the verdict. So what is it? Are you going to stay?”

      “Not that it’s any of your business. But no. I’m not.”

      He nodded. “I figured that would be your decision.”

      “Now you’re a mind reader?”

      “No. But I am pretty good at reading people. It only makes sense that if you had any deep feeling for the place, you would have come home before now.”

      While your grandmother was still alive. He didn’t say the words out loud, but Tara heard them, just the same.

      “Since you don’t know anything about me, it’s a bit presumptuous of you to pretend to understand my reasons for staying away.”

      “Ah, but there’s where you’re wrong.” A log shifted, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. He took a black iron poker and began rearranging the wood. “As it turns out, I know a great deal about you.”

      “From my grandmother.” It was not a question.

      “She talked a lot about you,” he agreed as he worked on getting the burning logs where he wanted them. “I figured a lot of the business and school stuff was typical grandmother bragging. But I was referring to more personal things.”

      “Such as?”

      He replaced the poker and turned toward her once again, enjoying the way her lips had formed into a sexy pout. “Such as the fact that part of the reason for your career success is that you threw yourself into your work after being stood up at the altar by that hotshot Montgomery Street lawyer.”

      Ignoring her sudden sharp intake of breath, he crossed the room, picked up a bottle of brandy he’d brought with him and poured the amber liquor into two Irish crystal balloon glasses.

      “She had no right to tell you about that.”

      “Brigid worried about you. She thought you needed a man in your life.” He held one of the glasses out to her.

      Tara took a sip of the brandy in an attempt to soothe her ragged nerves. Although it was smooth as velvet, and warmed her all the way to her toes, it did nothing to instill calm. Deciding the only way to tackle a man like Gavin Thomas was head-on, she tossed up her chin, determined to put a stop to this right now. Before it got out of hand.

      “For your information, Mr. Thomas—”

      “It’s Gavin,” he corrected.

      “For your information,” she began again, “I have men in my life. Lots of men. More than I can keep track of.”

      “Tara, Tara.” Gavin clucked as he shook his dark head with feigned disappointment. “What would your grandmother say if she could hear you telling such bald-faced lies?”

      “I’m not—”

      “Of course you are,” he smoothly overrode her protest yet again. “Look at you.” He eyed her over the rim of his glass. “You’re a lovely woman, but you insist on hiding any feminine attributes beneath that oversize shirt and baggy jeans.”

      She wished they’d never gotten on to the unpalatable subject of her love life. Or lack of it. She also wished he’d button his own damn shirt. His chest, gleaming copper in the flickering firelight, was unreasonably distracting.

      “Excuse me.” Frost tinged her voice, her eyes. “Perhaps I should go upstairs and change into my red lace teddy and hooker high heels.”

      Oddly enough, although she was practically spitting ice chips at him, Gavin was enjoying himself. “As appealing as that might be, it would also be a bit intimate. Since we’ve just met. But you could loosen up just a little.”

      He tossed back the brandy, then closed the gap between them. “Unbutton a couple of buttons so the collar isn’t choking you to death.” Without asking permission, he did exactly that. When his fingers brushed the skin framed by the now-open neck of her white blouse, Tara stiffened. “And next time tell the cleaners to go easier on the starch.” He frowned at the stiff pleated front. “A bulletproof vest would probably be softer than this.”

      Her fingers tightened around the stem of her glass. “My choice of clothing is none of your business.”

      “I suppose that’s true. In theory.” Gavin rubbed his chin. “But it offends my artistic sensibilities to see a woman working overtime to hide her beauty.”

      Before she could respond to that outrageous statement, a sudden crash shattered the silence, followed by the sound of breaking glass.

      4

      TARA SCREAMED as the glass from the leaded front window came flying into the room.

      Gavin shouted a raw, pungent curse and tore out of the room. She heard the front door open, heard his footfalls as he ran across the front porch. Her first coherent thought was that her grandmother was playing a trick from the world beyond. But blowing in windows wasn’t Brigid’s style.

      She’d be more likely to call down the moon than try to terrify her granddaughter into a man’s arms. Then Tara spotted the rock lying on the flowered carpet, a rock she knew that had landed there not by magic, but by very mortal means.

      Suddenly concerned that Gavin was putting himself in danger just to impress her, she took off after him and arrived at the front door just as he was dragging two obviously terrified boys up the porch steps by their shirt collars.

      “My cellular phone is on the table in the kitchen,” he told her. “Call 9-1-1 and have the sheriff come out and pick these two up for vandalism.”

      “It wasn’t vandalism,” the larger of the boys insisted. “Not exactly.”

      Gavin shook him. “Look, kid. You purposefully broke a window, just for the hell of it. What would you call it?”

      “A dare,” the other boy insisted in a voice that sounded perilously close to tears. “Eddie Rollins double dog dared us to break the window. Said we didn’t have the nerve.”

      “Since when does it take any nerve to throw a rock through the window of an abandoned house?” Gavin demanded.

      “It takes a lot of guts,” the other boy insisted. “’Cause everybody knows the Delaney place is haunted.”

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