LITMIR.BIZ

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are you? Really hypoglycemic, that is? No, of course you’re not. But I have to hand it to you, that was a good excuse. Just don’t ever repeat it around Zach, okay?”

      “So I get to start the fire?” Ryan asked, wondering if he sounded as pathetic as he felt. Here he was, a grown man, and he hadn’t the faintest idea how to do a simple household repair. But then, why should he? He’d been born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, and had never done any more onerous chores than making up his own bed. He didn’t know if he could justify his lack of mechanical skills, or if he was just plain embarrassed by that lack.

      Either way, he figured starting a gas grill won hands down over caulking tub tile.

      “Tell you what. You start the fire and I’ll caulk the tiles. Deal?” Janna said, and if she was laughing at him or rescuing him he didn’t know. He just knew he felt a sudden urge to grab her up, kiss her senseless for her compassion.

      Still, like a man fighting over a lunch check, he did the polite thing and responded, “No, no. There’s no need. I can fix the tile after lunch. Really.”

      “Really?” Janna shot right back at him. “Now, is it my turn to say you shouldn’t be silly, that I’ll do it? Because if it is, you’re plain out of luck, bucko, because you’re on. You can do the job after lunch.” She put down the caulk gun, laying it carefully on a plush rug with a huge pink rose sort of blossoming in the middle of it. “I’m feeling filthy after wading through the dirt in the garage. I think I’ll just go take a shower in the other bathroom, then come downstairs when I smell the burgers cooking.”

      Ryan watched her go, tried very hard not to imagine her in the shower. Her wet skin glistening. One of those weird “net” things all soapy as she ran it over her skin.

      Down her arm. Across her legs.

      Bending to soap her leg.

      He closed his eyes tight, tried to banish the image. Shame, shame, shame on him.

      Go downstairs and light the fire? He wouldn’t even have to turn on the propane. Hell, all he’d have to do was look at the coals and they’d ignite!

      Chapter Three

      Ryan was still muttering under his breath as he slammed out of the kitchen door and onto the small brick patio. Outfoxed by a woman. Outmaneuvered by a woman who knew darn full well she’d just scored and he’d lost.

      He knew that because she laughed—giggled, even—all the way back down the hall, until she turned into the second door on the left, which housed the main bathroom.

      Before he’d gotten halfway down the stairs he’d heard the shower turn on, and before he could make himself walk past the dining room mural that still drew him like a magnet, she was singing at the top of her lungs.

      She was taking a shower, getting clean. How nice for her.

      While he was hot, sweaty, dirty and felt pretty much like he’d been hired out to be on a chain gang. Oppressed. Overworked. Definitely not appreciated.

      And, unfortunately, not very well equipped to look good while he was mucking around doing ridiculous chores the rest of the male world could probably complete with one hand tied behind their backs.

      He had a huge pull in the front of his brand-new designer shirt, a cartoon bandage on his elbow, smears of dirt all over his khaki slacks and…as he passed by a small mirror in the hall…it would seem that he’d somehow gotten something green stuck in his hair that Janna hadn’t bothered to mention to him.

      Yeah. A root canal probably would be more fun.

      He could cheerfully strangle the woman, and lay the blame squarely where it belonged—on Allie. There wasn’t a jury in the country that would convict him.

      What really bothered him, and what he really wished he wouldn’t be considering, or worrying about, was what a really rotten impression he must be making on Janna Monroe.

      Not that he liked her. How could anyone like such an obvious…an obvious—was she really a flake? Could he honestly call her that?

      No. No, he couldn’t. She was a widow with a son. She had her own business, although he still didn’t know what that was. He only knew it took reams of paper to run that business, and he knew because he’d loaded about a ton’s worth onto the new shelves in the garage.

      She owned a home. She seemed to be a good mother. She knew how to use a caulk gun….

      “Damn her,” Ryan said, his heart not in his words enough to raise them much above a whisper. Still, the child heard him.

      He hadn’t heard the child, probably because he wasn’t looking at anything besides the old-fashioned barbecue grill he’d just uncovered. He’d planned on turning a switch and starting a propane gas grill. But there was no propane tank. There wasn’t even very much of a grill, just an ancient big kettle on three legs, a bag of charcoal stored under the hood, and some liquid fire starter and long matches.

      At least he wouldn’t have to rub two sticks together.

      “You’re mad at Mom?” the voice behind Ryan asked, so that he whirled around, the box of matches flying from his hand and opening, spilling all over the bricks. “What’d she do?”

      Ryan bit down on yet another “damn,” knowing that little pitchers have big ears, or whatever it was Mrs. Ballantine had said the day her young grandnephew had visited the household and Allie had plucked a few choice words from her vocabulary when the kid had put his foot through her new tennis racket.

      “Hi,” he said instead, plastering a wide smile on his face. After that, he was lost, because he’d never been around children much at all, and worried he might not be good with them.

      Zachary seemed to sense this, and tipped his head at him the same infuriating way his mother had done earlier, then said, “You don’t know how to light the grill, do you? Want me to do it?”

      “Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere else?” Ryan nearly growled. What had happened to him this morning? Had he suddenly turned transparent, his every flaw, his every lack, able to be seen?

      “I would still be at practice, except that Timmy Wetherhold took a header straight into the goal and Coach had to take him to the emergency room. Man, was he ever bloody. It was cool. So, what’s for lunch?”

      Bloodthirsty little savage, Ryan thought, then remembered his own youth, and how cool he had thought it the day Parker Soames had run into a lacrosse bat and nearly sliced off his ear. Parker had been fine, but definitely bloody, and Ryan, at the ripe old age of thirteen, still hadn’t figured out that injuries could be serious. That was a good time in life, when a kid believed himself and everyone else to be immortal.

      It had been, now that he thought back on it, only about three years before his parents died in that plane crash.

      After that, he had understood mortality, and his world had considerably sobered as he’d felt the need to grow up overnight.

      He wondered why Zach didn’t feel that way, after losing his father. He was younger than Ryan had been, granted, but life hadn’t exactly been kind to the kid. And yet he was just that—a kid. A happy, extroverted, pretty cool kid.

      Janna Monroe must be doing something right.

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