LITMIR.BIZ

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lips. ‘I thought I made it clear I wasn’t staying for dinner.’

      As she passed by the kitchen her nostrils were filled with that same delicious soy and honey aroma she had smelled earlier. Her stomach grumbled and she placed her hand over it to quell the noise, hoping Jacob had not heard.

      ‘Do you have dinner plans already?’ he asked. Another hot date with a potential husband, was left unsaid, but it echoed clearly enough in the air between them.

      Holly opened her mouth to answer and in the moment during which she should have come up with a believable lie, she wavered, picturing her dark, empty apartment and the leftover tuna casserole she was planning to reheat.

      Still she was about to decline when she caught the look on Jacob’s face. Though he was acting cool, aloof, indifferent, he was obviously sweating on her answer. His lips had thinned, pressed together too tightly, he was stirring the dinner ingredients more vigorously than seemed necessary and he kept shooting her short, accusatory sideways glances. If she hadn’t known him better she would have thought him jealous.

      After several moments of telling silence, Jacob’s shoulders relaxed, his thinned lips softened into his usual crooked, beguiling smile and she knew he had caught her hesitation loud and clear.

      ‘Good,’ he said. ‘So stay.’ He added the vegetables to the mix with a deft hand.

      He seemed so relaxed. As if he had flipped a lever and they had gone from God knew what to business associates in the blink of an eye. Maybe he could turn his nature on and off like that but Holly was not so fortunate.

      ‘Don’t you find this in the least bit uncomfortable?’

      ‘What’s that?’

      ‘That you know about my future plans and desires. I find it uncomfortable enough to face you as a friend of a friend, much less as a prospective client.’

      That earned her another of his unreadable glances. ‘I understand what you think you mean,’ he said, ‘but I just don’t believe you.’

      ‘Excuse me?’

      He paused, stopped stirring and stared. ‘The truth is I like you, Holly.’

      Holly gripped her briefcase tight, clinging to it, feeling as though if she let go it would rise to the ceiling like a dozen helium balloons and take her with it.

      He paused a moment to taste the stir-fry and, obviously finding it satisfactory, he finished his thoughts.

      ‘My closest friends are your closest friends. My business and your business will be of great benefit to each other. So what if I know that your current goal is hooking a husband and I am still willing to have you over to my place on a dinner date? Maybe one thing does not have to exclude the other.’

      Holly’s knees all but buckled beneath her.

      So much for his agenda. So much for it’s business not personal. Who was he kidding?

      She was one big spanner in the works of any agenda he could ever hope to follow. Standing there, her glorious hair spilling over her shoulders, her huge eyes pleading for him to put her out of her misery, one way or the other. It was all he could do not to just haul her off to his bedroom like some caveman and show her exactly how uncomfortable she made him feel. He didn’t know what they were. But they were no more ‘friends of friends’ than they were business associates.

      He should change his mind. Thank her for her thorough presentation and send her home. But the words that came out of his mouth were, ‘It’s not complicated. Let’s stop avoiding each other when we could be having so much more fun enjoying each other. At least until the thing you most wish for becomes more imminent anyway.’

       There. Now how’s that for a spanner in the works?

      Jacob wiped his hands on a clean teatowel, poured two new glasses of wine and grabbed two rolled-up napkins from the kitchen bench. He passed her on his way to the dining table, the determined look in his eyes daring her to disagree with his perfectly sensible proposal.

      What thing? Holly wondered, the idea of she and Jacob ‘enjoying each other’ pretty much blotting out the rest of his speech.

      Oh, a husband. A partner. Someone to love you. Someone like Jacob.

      And like a bolt of lightning it hit her. Right in the stomach. Like a sucker punch. And she was lucky not to have collapsed under its weight.

      Talk about complicating things. She was head over heels for Jacob.

      Ever since she had seen him dragging his heavy luggage along the footpath, she had been lost. She had been filled with a longing, which she had mistakenly tried to shoulder onto someone else, anyone else, other than the one who had produced it in the first place. She knew without any doubt her husband hunt had been over from the moment it began.

      He lay the glasses on the table, unrolled the linen napkins, which contained two sets of cutlery, and shifted a small vase of wildflowers so they would not hamper their view of one another across the table. Every move appeared to her in slow motion.

      It cannot possibly be love, she thought. I barely know him. But you can know someone for ever and not love them, so why can’t the opposite be possible? And the unremitting feeling of weightlessness since he’d admitted to merely liking her was like nothing she had ever felt before.

       But he’s not the marrying kind and has said as much from day one.

       Remember?

       And the whole perfect-husband theory meant you were not to fall for a guy like him. A guy who was self-important, shallow and self-serving.

       Remember?

      But she could not remember how she could ever have thought those things about Jacob. The man whistling melodiously along with the lovely music was confident, to be sure. But more than that he was protective and generous, kind and considerate. He was also barefoot and cooking up a storm. For her.

      The stir-fry sizzled enthusiastically and Jacob jogged back to the kitchen and turned off the stove. He grabbed two dinner plates, onto which he heaped generous portions of the delicious-looking dinner.

      ‘No more excuses, okay,’ Jacob said.

      Holly did her best to compose her features to appear the same as she had looked before her alarming revelation.

      ‘I have cooked enough of this lip-smacking dinner for the both of us. You have no other dinner plans. You are here already. You are able-bodied enough to grab the bottle of wine and bring it to the table. Put down that heavy briefcase and come give me a hand.’

      Okay, Holly thought, knowing something had switched inside of her and she was going to have a hell of a time switching back. Whatever you say.

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      HOLLY finished off the last morsel on her plate. She had long since discarded her suit jacket. But even in just her filmy frilly top, in the fire-lit room she was warm and cosy.

      ‘That was heavenly,’ Holly said, patting the napkin to the sides of her mouth and then placing it on the table.

      ‘Hmm. Heavenly,’ Jacob agreed.

      Watching Jacob sitting back, his hands clasped across his stomach, a contented smile lighting his lovely face, it was too easy for Holly to let herself believe he was thinking the same thing she was. That it was heavenly enough just to be sitting there together.

      ‘Where did you learn to cook like that?’

      Jacob reached for his wine. His eyes seemed to narrow briefly as he took a determined gulp, but after swallowing the mouthful he answered her. ‘I moved out of home when I was sixteen so if I wanted to eat more than tinned soup and toast I had to learn how to cook.’

      ‘Sixteen, really? Were you young and rash and ready to take on the world?’

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