LITMIR.BIZ

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his son tugged impatiently at his hand.

      “Yeah, probably. You?”

      “I’ll be there.”

      “Daddy. Train,” the little boy insisted.

      Stan sighed. “Gotta go. See you tomorrow.”

      “Yeah. See ya’, Stan.” Max watched the trio move away, then shook his head sympathetically. Poor guy.

      He headed again for the escalators. His winding path took him past the gingerbread house in the center of the mall, where a long line of ankle-biters waited to sit on Santa’s plump lap. Now there was a nightmare of a temporary job, Max thought with a shudder. He wondered how many times a day Santa’s lap got soaked by leaky toddlers.

      As if he’d heard Max’s thoughts, the white-bearded, red-suited man glanced his way. Their gazes held for a moment. The older man smiled and nodded, almost as if they’d met before.

      Max returned the nod and told himself the guy was just doing his job, spreading Christmas cheer among the shoppers to make them more inclined to spend their money. He moved on, though he had the odd sensation that he was being watched as he shuffled onto the escalator between an elderly woman and three giggling teenage girls.

      RYAN WAS TAKING a lunch break in the mall food court on the ground floor. She sat alone at one end of a long table, a fast-food salad in front of her.

      She would have worked straight through the day, but business had slowed a bit during the past hour and Lynn had insisted she take a break. Lynn was sometimes fussier than an old mother hen, but now that Ryan was sitting down, she was glad she’d let her assistant talk her into the respite.

      She took a long, appreciative sip of her iced tea, then opened a packet of low-fat ranch dressing and squeezed some onto her salad. She had just stabbed her plastic fork into a crisp chunk of lettuce when someone slid into the seat directly across the table from her.

      She glanced up and was glad she hadn’t yet started to eat. She was quite sure she would have choked.

      “Mind if I join you?” Max Monroe asked, smiling across the table at her as he unwrapped a bacon double cheeseburger.

      It annoyed her that she remembered his name. It irritated her that he had found her now, when there was little she could do to avoid him. And most of all, it made her absolutely furious that the sight of his unruly, gold-streaked hair and ridiculously crooked grin made her go all breathless and quivery like some awestruck adolescent.

      She took a deep breath, had a stern mental talk with her hormones and gave him a cool shrug. “It’s an open food court,” she said. “You can sit wherever you like.”

      Unfazed by her less-than-gracious reply, Max arranged his meal in front of him—the burger, a large order of fries, a jug-size soft drink and a deep-fried apple pie. Glancing from the high-calorie, high-everything-else food to his slim, firm waist, Ryan wondered jealously if he routinely ate that way, and if so, where did it all go.

      She took another bite of her low-calorie, low-fat, low-taste salad, finding less pleasure in it than she would have a few minutes earlier.

      “Didn’t we meet yesterday in the doll shop upstairs?” he asked, though she suspected he remembered their meeting as well as she did.

      She gave him a polite, deliberately distant smile. “Yes, I believe we did.”

      “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m Max Monroe. And you’re Ryan, right?”

      “Ryan Clark.” She made no pretense at being flattered that he’d remembered.

      “How’s business today?” he asked, after swallowing a hefty bite of his sandwich.

      She concentrated on her salad—or pretended to. “Busy.”

      “That’s good, isn’t it?”

      “Yes, of course.” She wondered why he was wasting time talking to her when she was making it obvious that she wasn’t interested.

      At least, she was trying not to be interested.

      Okay, the guy was gorgeous. His knock-your-socks-off smile made her toes curl.

      If she’d run into him even a year earlier, she’d probably have bantered right back at him, maybe thrown a few passes of her own. She’d have been open to the possibility of a frivolous flirtation, maybe a light-hearted, unquestionably temporary affair—though such encounters had been extremely rare for her. A year ago, she’d been busy preparing to open her business. She hadn’t been ready for a serious relationship, though she might have made time for a bit of fun with a man like Max, had one come along.

      But that had been then, and things had changed. Her life was moving along exactly the way she’d planned, and a brief fling didn’t fit in with her new goals. Now it was time to get serious about looking for Mr. Right.

      She would almost have bet her precious shop that it would be a complete waste of energy to expect anything permanent with a man like Max Monroe. If she was going to start a family before she reached thirty, there wasn’t time to get distracted by a charming heartbreaker.

      She looked up and her gaze met Max’s. His smile crinkled the corners of his blue-gray eyes with tiny lines that hinted at hours spent in the sun. It made her want to smile back at him. It also made her think of fun and laughter and lighthearted conversation and teeth-rattling lovemaking.

      If only she’d met him a year or so ago, she thought wistfully. Back when she’d still had time to have her teeth rattled a bit.

      Her iced tea splashed precariously against the sides of the paper cup when the table was suddenly jarred from close by. Both Ryan and Max grabbed their drinks to prevent them from spilling. Ryan looked down, not quite sure if she was relieved or disappointed that the spell that had fallen when her eyes locked with Max’s had been abruptly broken.

      Two children, a boy and a smaller girl, were just sliding into seats close to Ryan and Max. The boy flushed and looked sheepish when he saw that Ryan was looking at him. “Sorry,” he said. “I stumbled against the table.”

      “That’s okay,” she assured him. “No harm done.”

      She started to turn away, then hesitated when she noticed the little girl across the table from the boy. Big blue eyes. A mop of white blond curls. A Cupid’s bow of a mouth. And the boy—sandy haired, with blue eyes that looked surprisingly shrewd for his age and a no-nonsense little chin that would one day be formidable.

      She’d seen them before, she realized. Yesterday, in her shop.

      The little girl was smiling at her. Ryan instinctively returned the smile, which made the child giggle.

      “Kelsey,” the boy murmured, handing his little sister a decorated box that held a McDonald’s Happy Meal. “Settle down and eat your lunch.”

      Ryan glanced at Max, who was watching her with a grin. She knew he was as amused—and bemused—as she by the boy’s overly mature manner. She smiled wryly back at him.

      “Look at what I got in my Happy Meal, Pip,” the child he’d called Kelsey said, holding up a molded-plastic figure. “Minnie Mouse!”

      “Yeah, that’s cool,” her brother said, taking a bite of his own small cheeseburger. “Hang on to it or you’ll lose it.”

      Kelsey clutched the toy more firmly in her chubby hand. “I won’t lose it.”

      “Eat your lunch, now.”

      “Okay, Pip.” The little girl obediently took an enormous mouthful of her own burger.

      Biting the inside of her lip to avoid laughing, Ryan wondered if the children were eating alone while their mother shopped. They seemed awfully young to be wandering through a crowded mall on their own.

      She remembered that they had seemed unaccompanied the day before, in her shop, and she shook her head slightly in disapproval of

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