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She ignored him and started rooting through the basket, pulling items out, one after the other, with a brief description of each. “Here’s a certificate good for free coffee and freshly made doughnuts every morning at the diner. And a jar of homemade jam—Margie Fontenot, the late mayor’s widow, makes the best jam in the state. A bottle of wine from Stan’s Liquor Stop, fresh bread from the bakery, a bag of ground Jamaican coffee beans—” she stopped to sniff the bag and sighed at the aroma, then continued “—there’s a jar filled with the best marinara you’ve ever tasted, from Clearwater’s restaurant—you really should get over there for dinner while you’re here. The outside dining area overlooks the lake and there’s no better place to catch a gorgeous sunset—”
“Ms. Sanders…”
“Keira,” she reminded him.
“Keira, then. If you don’t mind—”
“And,” she went on as if he hadn’t spoken, “there are a few more goodies in here, but I’ll let you discover them on your own.”
“Thank you.”
“Now,” she said, turning to face him from across the room, “is there anything else I can do to help make your stay more interesting?”
“Leave?” he asked.
Keira shook her head at him, as if she were sorely disappointed. Wandering the great room, she ran her fingers along the deeply carved mantel over the fireplace and, just for a second or two, enjoyed the heat pouring from the hearth. Her gaze swept the rest of the room and lingered on the view of the lake out of the floor-to-ceiling windows. The moon was just beginning its climb across the sky, and the water shimmered with a breath of light as if waiting for the show to start.
She gave herself a moment or two to calm the flash of irritation inside her. Wouldn’t do to insult the man whose very presence could mean so much to her town. But at the same time, she wondered why he was being so nasty. By the time she’d centered herself and turned her gaze back to him, still standing in the foyer as if he could force her to leave by simply not welcoming her in, she was wondering something else.
Why did he intrigue her so much when his rudeness should have put her off immediately?
And how was she going to make this man connect with Hunter’s Landing and make a commitment to see this through when he so obviously wanted nothing to do with her or the town?
Two
Nathan had had enough.
He’d been at the lakeside mansion for a little over an hour and already he had an uninvited guest.
Plus, Keira Sanders seemed to be oblivious to insults and clearly didn’t care that she was very obviously not wanted.
His gaze swept her up and down more thoroughly than he had when he’d first found her sitting in the snow. Her jeans were faded and hugged her long legs like a second skin. Her long-sleeved black sweater came down to her thighs and, ridiculously enough, made her figure look more exposed than hidden. Maybe it was the way the soft-looking fabric clung to her curves, but whatever the reason, Nathan could appreciate the view even while wishing she were anywhere but there.
Her shoulder-length, reddish-blond hair hung loose in waves that seemed to dance around her animated face whenever she moved—which was often. He’d never seen a more mobile woman. It was as if she couldn’t bear standing still. She was wandering the great room, her fingers touching, stroking, everything as she passed and he couldn’t help wondering what those fingers would feel like touching him.
Yet as soon as that thought hit his clearly fevered brain, he knew he had to get her the hell out of the house. He wasn’t interested in a monthlong fling. That was more commitment than he’d given to any woman he’d known in the last ten years.
Best to just get her out of the house now. And if that meant being even ruder than he had been already, fine.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, waiting until she gave up examining the bookshelves to look at him again, “but if you don’t mind, I’d like you to leave.”
There. A man couldn’t be any more plainspoken than that.
“Wow,” she said softly, her green eyes sparkling in reflected light from the fire, “nobody ever taught you how to treat your guests?”
He swallowed hard and pushed away the thought of just how horrified his grandmother would have been at his blatant rudeness. “You’re not a guest,” he said tightly, reminding her as well as himself. “You’re an intruder.”
She actually laughed at him. “But I’m an intruder who brought you gifts!”
Nathan finally left the foyer, since it seemed clear that standing beside the door wasn’t going to be enough to convince her to step through it. He’d never met anyone else quite like her. She seemed impervious to rudeness, just rolling right along with a cheerful attitude that must, he thought, really annoy the hell out of people who knew her well.
“Look,” Nathan said, walking across the polished floor toward her. “I’ve tried to be polite.”
She blinked at him and her smile widened. “Really? That was trying?”
Frowning, he ignored the jab and said, “I appreciate the gifts. Thank you for taking the time to come out here. But I would really prefer to be alone.”
“Oh, I’m sure you want to settle in,” she said, waving one hand at him, blithely ignoring his attempt to get rid of her. “And I won’t stay much longer, I swear.”
Hope to cling to.
“I only wanted to let you know that Hunter’s Landing is ready to help you and the other men who will be staying here in any way we can.” She wandered to the big-screen TV, picked up the remote and studied it for a second or two.
If she turned the damn thing on, she might never leave. Nathan walked to her side, took the remote and set it down on a nearby table. She shrugged, walked to the windows overlooking the lake and stood staring through the glass as if mesmerized.
He watched her and couldn’t help feeling a little mesmerized himself. The fall of her hair on her shoulders. The curve of her behind. The defiant tilt to her chin. She turned to look at him and her wide, shining eyes fixed on him with a slam of power he didn’t want to think about.
“You’ll only be here a month,” she said quietly, “and maybe you don’t realize just how important your stay and the others’ are to Hunter’s Landing.”
Nathan sighed and resigned himself to at least a few more minutes of conversation. It seemed plain that Keira Sanders wasn’t going to leave until she was good and ready. “I know about what your town stands to inherit from the estate.”
“But you can’t know what it means to us,” she insisted, half turning to lean one shoulder against the cold glass. “With that influx of cash, we can build a new courthouse, expand our clinic…” Her voice trailed off and she smiled as if already seeing the changes that would happen to her town.
“And speaking of the clinic,” she said quickly, straightening up and walking toward him. “I want to invite you to the town potluck dinner tomorrow night. We’re raising money to get the expansion started and—”
“But you’ll have the inheritance—”
“Can’t count on that until it’s reality, can we?” she pointed out, neatly cutting him off before he could finish his sentence. “Anyway, our clinic is good, but it’s not nearly big enough. Of course, there’s a terrific hospital in Lake Tahoe, but that’s a long drive, especially in the winter snow. We need to be able to take care of our own citizens right here and, with the potluck dinner, all the money collected will go directly into the fund for…”
She was talking so fast Nathan’s ears were buzzing. He had no interest in going to her community fundraiser and he suspected that she didn’t really want him there, either. What she wanted was a donation. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted from him in the end?
With the Barrister family fortune behind him, Nathan had long ago accepted that he was seen first as a bankbook and second as a man. Which suited him fine. He didn’t want friends. Didn’t want a lover or a wife. What he wanted was to be left alone.
And he suddenly knew just the way to hurry Keira Sanders out the door: Give her what she wanted. What she’d really come for. While she continued to talk in nearly a stream of consciousness while hardly pausing for breath, he stalked across the room to where he’d dropped his briefcase on one of the overstuffed, burgundy leather chairs. Quickly, he opened it, grabbed his black leather checkbook and flicked his ballpoint pen.
Shaking his head, he wrote a check made out to Hunter’s Landing, and then tore it from the pad and walked back to where Keira was still smiling and outlining the plans she had for her little town.
“So you see, it would be a great chance for you to meet everyone in town. Nice for you to see the place you’ll be living for the next month and maybe it will help you see how important it is to us that you and your friends complete the stipulations of Mr. Palmer’s will.” She finally took a breath. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll pick you up tomorrow about six and drive you to the potluck myself. I can take you on a tour of the lake if you’d like too and—”
“Please,” Nathan said, interrupting her when it became obvious it would be the only way to keep her quiet. He held out the check and waited until she’d taken it, a question in her beautiful eyes. “Accept this contribution to your clinic fund.”
“Oh,” she said, “that’s very generous of you but—” She stopped, glanced down at the check and Nathan actually saw all the blood drain from her face. She went absolutely white and her hand holding the check trembled. “I…I…you…”
Her mouth opened and closed, she gulped noisily and wheezed in a breath. “Oh. My. God.”
“Are you all right?” Nathan reached for her, grabbed her upper arm and felt the tremors that were racing through her body.
She raised her gaze to his, waved the check in a tight fist and swallowed hard a time or two before trying to speak. Apparently, he’d finally found the way to make her speechless.
“Are you serious about this?”
“The check?”
“The amount,” she said harshly, then added, “I’ve got to sit down.”
And she did.
Right there on the floor.
She pulled her arm free of his grasp and folded up on herself. Leaning her head back against the closest chair, she looked up at him in stunned amazement. “I can’t believe you—”
“It’s just a donation,” he said.
“Of five hundred thousand dollars,” she pointed out.
“If you don’t want it…”
“Oh, no!” She folded the check and stretched out her right leg so she could stuff it into her jeans pocket. Then she patted it carefully and gave him a grin. “We want it. And we thank you. I mean, the whole town is going to want to thank you. This is just wonderful. Completely generous. I don’t know what to say, really—”
“And yet you keep trying,” Nathan said, feeling oddly embarrassed the longer she went on about a simple donation.
“Wow. My head’s still spinning. In a good way,” she insisted, then raised one hand toward him. “A little help here?”
Nathan sighed, reached for her hand and, in one quick move, pulled her to her feet. She flew off the floor and slammed into his chest with a whoosh of air pushed from her lungs. His hands dropped to her waist to steady her and, for a quick moment, he considered kissing her.
Which surprised the hell out of him.
Keira Sanders wasn’t the kind of woman who usually attracted him. For one, she was too damn talkative. He liked a woman who appreciated a good silence. And she was short. He liked tall women. And he preferred brunettes. And blue eyes.
Yet, as she looked at him, her green eyes seemed to pull at him, drawing him in, tugging him closer than he wanted to be.
With her breasts smashed up against his broad chest, Keira felt a rush of something hot and needy and completely unexpected. The man was as closed-off as a dead-end road, and yet there was something about him that made her want to reach up, wrap her arms around his neck and pull his head down for a long, lingering kiss.
And it wasn’t the huge check that was sitting in her pocket like a red-hot coal.
“You’re a very surprising man,” she finally said when she was pretty sure she could speak without her voice breaking.
His hands dropped from her waist and he stepped back so quickly that her shaky balance made her wobble unsteadily before she found stability again.
“It’s just a check.”
“It’s more than that,” she assured him. God, she couldn’t wait to show his donation to the town council. Eva Callahan would probably keel over in a dead faint. “You have no idea what this means to our town.”
“You’re welcome,” he said tightly. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have some work I have to get to.”
“No you don’t,” she said, smiling.
“I’m sorry?”
“You don’t have any work,” Keira said, tipping her head to one side to study him, as if getting a different perspective might help understand why such a deliberately solitary man could give away so much money without even pausing to think about it. “You just want me to go.”
“Yes.” His frown deepened. “I believe I already mentioned that.”
“So you did.” She patted the check in her pocket, swung her hair back from her face and gave him a smile. “And I’m going to oblige you.”
A flicker of something like acceptance shot across his eyes, and Keira wondered about that for a second or two. But then his features evened out into a mask of granite that no amount of staring at would ever decipher.
“Okay then,” she said, starting for the front door, only half surprised when he made no move to follow her. He’d seemed so anxious to get rid of her, she’d just assumed that he’d show her out once he had the chance. But when she turned to glance back at him, he was standing where she’d left him.
Alone, in front of the vast windows overlooking the lake. Behind him, the water silvered under the rising moon and the star-swept sky seemed to stretch on forever. Something inside her wanted to go back to him. To somehow make him less solitary.
But she knew he wouldn’t welcome it.
For whatever reason, Nathan Barrister had become a man so used to solitude he didn’t want or expect anything to change.
Well, Keira wasn’t going to allow him to get away with an anonymous donation. She was going to make sure the town got the chance to thank him properly for what he had done for them with a click of a pen.
Whether he liked it or not, Keira was going to drag Nathan into the heart of Hunter’s Landing.
By the next evening, Keira was running on adrenaline. She’d hardly been able to sleep the night before; memories of Nathan Barrister and the feel of his hands on her had kept her tossing and turning through some pretty detailed fantasies that kept playing through her mind.
Ridiculous, really. She knew the man would be here for only a month. She knew he wasn’t interested—he’d made that plain enough every time he looked at her. But, for some reason, her body hadn’t gotten the message.
She felt hot and itchy and…way more needy than she’d like to admit.
Apparently it had been way too long since she’d had a man in her life. But then, the last man she’d been interested in had made such a mess of her world that she’d pretty much sworn off the Y chromosome.
Then grumpy, rich and gorgeous Nathan Barrister, rolled into her life and made her start rethinking a few things. Not a good idea.
She spun her straw through her glass of iced tea and watched idly as ice cubes rattled against the sides of the glass. It felt good to sit down. She’d been running all day, first calling an emergency meeting of the town council so she could tell them about Nathan’s donation. And, she smiled as she remembered, Eva Callahan had behaved as expected, slumping into a chair and waving a stack of papers at her face to stave off a faint.
Once the meeting was over she’d had to take care of a few other things, like depositing that check, talking to the contractor about the renovations to the clinic, settling a parking dispute between Harry’s Hardware and Frannie’s Fabrics and finally, coming here to the Lakeside Diner.
Being mayor of a small town was exhausting, and it was really hardly more than an honorary office. Her duties consisted mainly of presiding over town council meetings once a month, playing referee to adults old enough to solve their own problems and trying to raise money for civic projects. And yet, she seemed to always be busy. She didn’t have a clue how the mayors of big cities managed to have a life at all.
But then, Keira thought, isn’t that the way she wanted it? Keeping busy gave her too little time to think about how her life had turned out so differently from what she’d expected. She picked a French fry off her plate and popped it into her mouth. Chewing, she glanced around the crowded diner and took a deep breath. Here, no matter what else was going on in her life, Keira could find comfort.
The Lakeside Diner was a tiny coffee shop and more or less a touchstone in Keira’s life, the one constant she’d always been able to count on. Her parents had owned and operated the diner before her and she herself had started working here, clearing tables, when she was twelve.
Then, when her parents died, Keira had taken over, because there was her younger sister, Kelly, to provide for. Now, she had a manager to take care of the day-today running of the diner, but when she needed a place to sit and recharge, she always came here.
The red Naugahyde booths were familiar, as was the gleaming wood counter and the glass covered cake and pie dishes, the records in the jukebox her father had loved hadn’t been changed in twenty years. Memories crowded thick in this diner. She closed her eyes and could almost see her dad behind the stove, grinning out at her mom running the cash register.
This diner—like Hunter’s Landing—was home.
“Hey, Keira. Can I see it?”
She opened her eyes, startled as an older woman slid onto the bench seat opposite her. Sallye Carberry grinned, and held out one hand dotted with silver rings.
