LITMIR.BIZ

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taste like? He hoped she wasn’t perceptive enough to gauge that renegade thought!

      “Okay,” he said, as if he had not thought about the full puffiness of her lips. “It seems like a rough neighborhood.”

      She cocked her head at him, as if she was politely interested in his opinion, so he rushed on.

      “And the house seems, um, like a lot of work for a woman on her own. Why did you sell your Riverdale house for this?”

      She took a sip of her coffee, as if debating whether to talk to him at all. Then she sighed. “That house never felt like mine. It was Blair’s, his love of status in every cold stone and brick. I hated that house. I especially hated it after the renovation. A glass wall thirty feet high is monstrous. Besides, it was a ridiculous place for a woman alone to live.”

      Rick hadn’t much liked the house after Blair’s renovation, either. It had lost its original charm and become pretentious. Still, he had always assumed Blair was solely responsible for the problems between he and his wife. Suddenly it was evident that they had been very different people, their values on a collision course. Linda, more down to earth, wholesome, uncomfortable with Blair’s aspirations, his runaway ambition, his defining of success in strictly monetary terms.

      Rick didn’t want to be exploring the complications of the relationship between Linda and Blair. But he had always known a simple truth: Linda was too deep for his friend. Too good for him. He did not want to be here, in her house, with those thoughts running through his mind.

      “Great coffee,” he said, wishing he could deflect this awkward moment with a discussion about rich flavor. “What kind is it?”

      “I grind my own—several different combinations of beans.” Like her daughter, she was not easily deflected. Her eyes asked what she was too polite to, Why are you here?

      One more question, and still not the one he had come here to ask. “Why didn’t you list your house with us? It is your company. Half of it.”

      Her eyes became shuttered. “I think I’ve provided quite enough fuel for gossip and speculation at Star Chasers, Rick. I don’t want one more single fact about my life to be the conversation at morning coffee, ever.”

      He wanted to deny that. But he couldn’t. Every agent, secretary and file clerk had discussed the scandal surrounding Blair’s death incessantly. Each of them had slid Linda slanted looks loaded with sympathy and knowing on those rare occasions when business had forced her to come to the office.

      He did not know how she had made it through the funeral with such dignity and grace. He did know he did not deserve her forgiveness for his part in the scandal. He did not deserve it because he guarded one of Blair’s secrets, still. He felt guilty just standing here with those clear eyes regarding him so strippingly.

      Do what you came to do and leave, he ordered himself. Instead he studied the little devils on her pajamas and found himself wanting to know more about the Linda Starr who would wear pajamas like that, outside in her yard at dawn.

      “You said you had a problem,” she reminded him, still polite.

      He tried to think of a problem, but none—aside from the brown of her eyes—came to mind. Thankfully he had made a plan. That’s why men made plans, for moments just like this one, when their wits fled them.

      He had known he couldn’t exactly offer her a job. It would have been unbelievably condescending. She owned half the company. What could he say? Come and be senior vice president?

      “I’m having problems with a house,” he said.

      Ah. He saw the flicker of interest in her eyes, and knew, somehow, he had stumbled on just the right way to get to Linda. She loved old houses. The one they were standing in was evidence of that!

      “It’s an Edwardian, 1912, Mount Royal.”

      She could barely contain a sigh.

      “It’s a nightmare.” He told her about the water damage, the bad renovations it had suffered over the years, and especially about the daughter of the previous owner who kept coming over, wringing her hands and crying. “She’s seventy years old and she laid down in front of the bulldozer when we tried to rip off an add-on porch. Now she has the neighbors signing petitions about everything. I’ve had two project managers quit.”

      He had not expected this: that it felt so good to unburden himself.

      “And what do you want me to do?”

      “Take it over. Be my project manager.”

      Her mouth fell open. “I can’t do that.”

      “Bail me out, Linda. I made a mistake,” he admitted. “I fell in love with the place. I bought it on pure emotion, never a good thing to do.”

      Pure emotion, he reminded himself, was always a bad thing. Always. Which is why he had to be very careful around Linda. He felt things he didn’t want to feel, even after just being with her for a few minutes.

      She turned away from him, and dumped her coffee in the sink, but not before he’d seen the look in her eyes.

      Memories.

      This was the problem with having come to see her. Their lives intersected and crossed, drifted apart and then intersected again. In her eyes he had seen the memory as clearly as if it had flashed across a video screen.

      Him and her and Blair, so young, at the very beginning, buying those horrible old houses, slapping on paint, filling flower boxes, making cosmetic changes and then keeping their fingers crossed when the For Sale sign went up.

      “Flip-flop,” he remembered out loud. That was what she had called it. Blair had wanted a more sophisticated name for the company, the one they had gotten from combining both their surnames.

      She turned from the sink and smiled weakly. In her eyes, he saw yearning. For the way things had once been? For the laughter and excitement of those first few sales? Of those early years?

      Bobbi had asked him to help her. More than asked. She had begged him. And Linda still loved these old houses, as much as he did, maybe more. He wanted to walk away from her, for his own self-preservation. But he did not think a man who would walk away from a woman who needed something just to protect himself was a man he wanted to be.

      “Will you come?” he asked. “At least have a look at the house I’ve invested your daughter’s college fund in?”

      What he saw in her eyes was way more powerful than that.

      “I don’t think I should.”

      It wasn’t the out-and-out no that he’d expected to hear.

      “You do still own half the company,” he reminded her.

      “No, really.” She pointed at the unpacked boxes. “I’ve got a ton of stuff to do. Really.”

      It was the fact that she said really twice that made him know what she really wanted.

      “Come,” he said softly, foolishly. “Just help me talk to this woman. Look at the house. See if you get a feel for it.” He knew if he got Linda over to that house the rest would be a done deal.

      “You don’t need me,” she said.

      She was not the only perceptive one. Because in those words he heard how she longed to be needed, how the death of her husband and the departure of her daughter had set her adrift.

      Bobbi had been right. He had abandoned Linda when she most needed a friend. It did not make him think highly of himself.

      “No,” he said. “I don’t need you.” He wagged his eyebrows devilishly at her. “But I want you.”

      She laughed, just as he had hoped she would. It was a good sound and a bad one both. It was the kind of sound a man could get addicted to, that could stop him in his tracks when he was way too sure he was doing the right thing.

      She

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