LITMIR.BIZ

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instead. “Is there something I can do for you?”

      A raft of dirty suggestions popped to mind, but since he wasn’t a damn fourteen-year-old—even if that was the way he invariably felt around her—he wisely swallowed them. Particularly since he didn’t know why he’d come to grill her in the first place. Hell, hadn’t he given her his card so she could be the one to get in touch with him?

      Whatever his reasons for showing up unannounced, here he was, so he might as well make the most of it. Hooking a hip on the corner of the tub, he braced his other foot against the grass and ignored the splashed water soaking into the seat of his jeans. “You said yesterday morning you could tell me how to make the next pancake breakfast more profitable. How would you do that?”

      She merely looked up at him for a moment. Wreathed in steam, moisture beaded her face, and her hair, pulled atop her head in a high ponytail, curled wildly, crazy little corkscrews plastered damply to her temples and nape. “Buy me a Coke and I’ll tell you.”

      Good idea. A nice cold drink might cool him down, help him quit thinking about licking the water drops sliding down her silky-smooth cleav—

      He surged to his feet. “Be back in a sec.” Fishing his wallet from his back pocket, he crossed to the vending machine in the ice machine room attached to the pool house.

      Moments later he was back. He popped the tab on one icy can and handed it to Harper, then opened his own and knocked back half of it as he resumed his perch on the edge of the tub.

      She took a long swallow herself and used the tip of her tongue to absorb a drop of soda from her upper lip as she lowered the can. Setting it aside on the little shelf that filled the gap between the back of the hot tub and the pool house’s outer wall, she focused her attention on him.

      “One way to make your breakfast more profitable,” she said, “is to host a silent auction. That can be as elaborate or as simple as you want, but you have a captive audience in the people who come to eat, and everyone loves the idea of getting something at a bargain price.”

      Pushing against the foot planted on the ground, he straightened. “Is it hard to do?”

      “Not really. It can be time-consuming, but that’s where volunteers like me come in. You use us to solicit donations from local businesses and set up a table or two to accommodate the acquisitions. We can also help with things like deciding on a price to start the bidding for each item and at what increments to increase and make individual sheets for them—”

      “Wait, wait. Explain what you mean. And pretend I don’t have a clue.”

      She laughed. “Because you don’t?”

      “Yeah.” His own mouth crooked up in a smile. “I’m a cop—and before that a marine. Stuff like this is way outside my experience.”

      “Okay.” She scooted to the edge of her submerged seat. “Say Wendy at Wacka Do donates a haircut and she usually charges thirty-eight dollars. You’d make a sheet that says Haircut at Wacka Do’s, value thirty-eight dollars. And since it’s a service and not, say, a pretty gift basket that visually pops to catch a potential bidder’s attention, you might want to add a photo of Wendy doing a haircut, or a styled wig on a wig stand. You with me so far?”

      “Yep.”

      She took another sip of her pop. “Regardless of the visual, the sheet needs a starting bid, so say three-fifty or around ten percent of its value, with fifty-cent or one-dollar increases. Now, if your brother were to donate one of his photographs, on the other hand, you’d have a much higher value amount because he’s well known in his field. That would make both the starting bid and the increments higher. See?”

      “Yeah, I do.” And he liked the idea. No one else in town was doing anything like it. “So you just flop the stuff down on a table and you’re good to go?”

      “God.” Her mouth quirked up. “You’re such a guy. The idea is to try to make the presentations as striking as possible to capture as much bidder interest as you can. You also need to give people enough time to both look at what’s offered and to bid again if someone trumps them. And have a clear end time. Then you’d need someone responsible to collect the money, but that’s pretty straightforward. The winner simply brings the sheet to the cashier and pays the final bid amount on it. And since it’s for a charity, you don’t have to deal with collecting sales tax—although I’d double-check that one in case Washington state differs in that respect.”

      “That’s so cool. What else you got?”

      She blinked those olive-green eyes at him. “’Scuse me?”

      “You said ‘for starters.’ Does that mean you have even more ideas?”

      “Oh, honey.” Stretching her arms out along the tub’s rim, she tipped her head back and let her torso float up to the surface again. Smooth skin stretched over toned thigh muscles and all that beautiful cleavage as her various curved parts cleared the roiling water. Raising her head again, she caught him dead to rights checking out the entire kick-ass package and sank back beneath the water. “I’ve got a million of ’em.”

      “Excellent.” He grinned and settled in, feeling truly comfortable with her for perhaps the first time since they’d met. Hell, she had pointed it out herself; he was a guy. When guys were presented with tits and gorgeous legs, they looked. They sure as hell didn’t apologize for it. “Let’s hear ’em.”

      “Was the community center space donated?”

      “Yeah. We had to put down a damage deposit, but we got it all back. Well, except for the cost of replacing some broken glasses.”

      She grinned at him. “Yes, I was having my tray refilled when that happened. Did you solicit the food and the paper goods?”

      “Huh?” That straightened him up. “No. We got a rebate from the pancake manufacturer for fund-raising, but it never occurred to us to ask The General Store to donate it.”

      “Next year make a list of everything it takes to put on the fund-raiser, then try to get as much of it donated as possible. I’m guessing your boys are from places other than just here, right?”

      He nodded. “We don’t actually have any kids from Razor Bay—they’re mostly from the Silverdale or Bremerton areas. But some come from as far away as Seattle or Olympia.”

      “From what you’ve said about some of the boys’ home lives, parental involvement might be far different from the families I’ve worked with. But if any of the parents do actively engage in their kid’s recovery—especially if they live in the nearby areas since the regional aspect works best—get them to hit up their local grocers, printers, party stores—anyplace that might contribute something you’d otherwise have to buy. The idea is to funnel as much profit back into the program as possible, right?”

      “Absolutely.” The timer for the jets clicked off, but for once his attention didn’t go to her suddenly much more visible body. He gave her a puzzled look. “How do you know so much about this?”

      “I’ve had a bazillion temporary jobs, and one of them was taking over an auction coordinator position for a private school when the one they had was put on bed rest during the final trimester of her pregnancy.”

      “And you just—what?—knew what to do?”

      “No.” She gave him a rueful smile. “Far from it. I didn’t have the first notion how an auction was run. Luckily for me, several of the parents who’d spent their PIP hours working on the auction did, and they taught me.”

      “What the hell are PIP hours?”

      “Oh, sorry. It stands for Parent Involvement Program. Most private schools designate a given number of hours parents are expected to volunteer at their kids’ school.” She stood up and water cascaded down her. “Hand me that towel, will you?”

      Sweet Mother Mary. His good intentions went up in smoke, but screw it—he claimed

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