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She didn’t seem interested in conversation with him, either.
He could always get a woman talking. Young. Old. In between. Especially in between.
Hating to think he was losing his touch, Cord skimmed a glance over her once more. “You don’t look anything like my idea of a Mama O’Malley,” he confessed, slowly shaking his head. She didn’t look like anyone’s mother. She had incredible eyes, skin so smooth it begged to be touched and a mouth that made his water just looking at her. And those legs. They went on forever. “Why do you call your business that?”
“Because O’Malley is my last name and I liked the alliteration. Hi, Bob.” There was the smile. All five hundred watts of it. It wasn’t for him, though. It was for the guy with the belly and a welder’s mask tipped back on his head. “What can I do for you?”
“Come on.” Matt nudged his arm. “Let’s get back to work.”
Cord stepped back. “Thanks,” he called to her, giving it one last shot.
“You’re welcome,” she replied, still polite, and turned her focus to the other men demanding her attention.
Cord felt his forehead pleat as he turned around himself, and started to walk away. Her eyes seemed to light up for everyone else when she smiled. Just not for him.
He glanced back, saw her look down as she made change from the pack around her slender waist. He wondered if they’d met before. If maybe he’d run into her at one of the local nightclubs and if he’d done something to offend her. He made it a point to never offend a woman if he could help it. He’d discovered the hard way that a woman scorned could not only be furious and hellish to deal with, but downright expensive.
The woman he’d heard the other men call Madison didn’t seem at all familiar, though. He would have remembered the name. He definitely would have remembered that smile. It lit her eyes, made her seem friendly, approachable, as if she glowed warmth from within. Without it, she was just another pretty face.
“Does she come here every day?”
“Who?” Matt glanced behind them. “The gal with the snack wagon?”
“Yeah.”
“We have a couple of trucks that come through here,” he said, looking as if he were trying to recall the specifics of this one’s owner. “I think she’s been around pretty much since we broke ground.” A quarter of a muffin disappeared, totally muffling his “Why?”
Cord shrugged. “Just wondered,” he said, and sank his teeth into a bit of heaven that tasted of sweet butter and lemon and had him closing his eyes in pure bliss.
Madison watched the two big men in the silver hard hats walk away, devouring her muffins as they headed past a huge pile of steel beams and a bright-orange crane that sat still and silent while its operator drank coffee and smoked a cigarette. The workers only had fifteen minutes for a break. They usually cleaned out a third of her stock in five. That gave her ten minutes to pull her restock from the storage compartment at the back of the truck, fill in the gaps in the three tiers of muffins, cookies and rolls, consolidate the fruit so it didn’t look picked over, and change the coffee grounds in the built-in urn so there would be two freshly brewed gallons by the time she reached her next stop on the dock twenty minutes away. She had another stop farther down the dock a half an hour after that. After a quick stop at a small tool-and-die operation, it would be back home to restock with the sandwiches and desserts she’d already made for the lunch run that started at 11:15 a.m.
Male laughter drifted toward her as she set her empty stock box in the back, flipped the switch to start the coffee and closed the stainless steel door. As she did, she consciously kept herself from looking around to see if Cord was still anywhere in sight. She hated the thought that he might catch her and think he had made any sort of impression. And he hadn’t. Not really. Not in any way that mattered.
She had never before met a man anywhere near his social or economic stratosphere, or one whose presence seemed quite so…large. She was around his basic type a lot, though. The attractive irresponsible type whose sole goal was to get into a woman’s pants and be gone before breakfast. She’d met plenty of them coming and going from her friend Mike’s pub, since she happened to live upstairs from it and routinely borrowed his kitchen to prepare her food. And men like them, even if they were rich and famous, weren’t worth the time it took to give them a second thought.
She didn’t think about him, either. Not until twenty-four hours later when she found herself in the same spot she’d been twenty-four hours before, doing pretty much the same thing she did at that same time every Monday through Friday.
Cord Kendrick had so slipped her mind that she hadn’t even remembered to call her grandma last night to tell her she’d met him and given the dear woman the opportunity to demand details.
The only reason she was thinking of him now was because Matt Callaway’s secretary had just called her on her cell phone to order a dozen muffins of the sort she’d given Cord yesterday, along with six large coffees. She wanted them delivered to the construction trailer, which Madison could see parked a city block away toward the middle of the work site.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Madison replied, going through the same motions she had a thousand times before as she closed the back of her truck and started to close the side. “I’m on a schedule, so I can’t make individual deliveries. If you can send someone,” she suggested, being as accommodating as she could, “I’ll have it ready when they get here. I won’t be leaving for another couple of minutes.”
The harried-sounding woman asked her to hold on, which Madison did while pulling six empty cups and lids from the dispenser and popping open a cardboard tray to set them in. A half a block ahead of her the huge orange crane started up with a rumble and a roar. Break time was over.
A rustling sound came over the phone.
“I understand you don’t make deliveries.”
The voice on the other end of the line was suddenly much deeper, much richer and carried a faint hint of challenge. She recognized that disturbing voice in an instant. That threw her, too. She didn’t want to think that anything about Cord had made an impression. She especially didn’t want anything about him messing with her heart rate.
Had the secretary come back on the line, Madison would have caved in and run the order over. It sounded as if the woman could have used a break. Since it was Cord, Madison’s soft streak succumbed to self-preservation. “It would throw off my schedule.”
“You don’t ever make exceptions?”
“I’m not in a position to do that,” she replied, pretty sure Cord Kendrick didn’t eat many meals from a catering truck. If he had, he’d have some idea of how important it was to stay on time. “I have people who will be waiting for me for their break.”
“What about the people here?” he asked with the ease of a man who knew exactly which buttons to push. “We need a break, too. But we’re in a meeting no one can leave and we really need coffee. We need those muffins, too.”
“Isn’t there a coffeemaker in the trailer?”
“It’s broken. Look,” he said, having failed to elicit her sympathies, “I’ll give you a fifty-dollar tip. Just bring the order. It won’t take that long. Okay?”
Madison could practically feel her back stiffen as she set down the cardboard box she’d started to fill and glanced toward the long white trailer. It was as clear as the patches of blue in the early May sky that Cord Kendrick felt whatever he was doing was far more important than her schedule. It seemed just as apparent that he felt his money would get him anything he didn’t want to bother getting by persuasion.
For a moment she was sorely tempted to tell him he was just going to have to go without today. As she let her more practical nature take over, she grudgingly admitted that, just this once, she could be bought.
Ever since she’d started her catering business, she had dreamed of expanding it. In the past six months, that dream had become an obsession. She wanted to cater parties. Big ones. Little ones. Maybe even weddings, where the food she presented could be elegant rather than everyday. She’d done a couple of small events already. Not that a birthday party for the McGuires’ nine-year-old could be called an event, but the Lombardis’ oldest daughter’s engagement party had been rather nice. She desperately needed equipment, though. Having to rent serving pieces ate up all her profit. And fifty dollars could help buy the professional double chafing dish she had her eye on.
Aside from that, if she hit the lights right on Gloucester, she usually had a couple of minutes to spare.
“It’ll take me at least five minutes to get there,” she finally said.
“You’re less than a minute away if you drive.”
“It’ll take me that long to close up and drive around the cordoned-off area across from where you are.”
“Forget going around. Just pull up to where it’s barricaded and park across from the stack of trusses. Ignore the sign.”
“What sign?”
“The one that says No Admittance. And bring one of those coffees with…”
“Cream,” she completed, then sighed because she rather wished she hadn’t just let him know she remembered that. “Does anyone else take anything in theirs?”
She heard him ask. Then she heard him tell her they had sugar and powdered cream there before he thanked her and hung up.
She didn’t know why his thanks surprised her. Maybe it was because he seemed a little impatient this morning. Maybe it was because it seemed pretty clear that he expected his wishes to be met so thanks weren’t necessary.
Suspecting that not many people did deny him what he wanted, annoyed that she’d just done what everyone else probably did and caved in to his expectations herself, she finished boxing up the muffins and filled cups, closed the side of her truck and drove it at a crawl past girders rising from huge concrete slabs and the giant orange crane now swinging its boom toward a stack of steel beams.
Because she was always careful to park only in areas where she and her customers would be safe from traffic and heavy equipment, she was very conscious that she was going where she normally wouldn’t go. She was now close enough to the actual construction to see individual sparks fly from welders’ torches and feel the vibration of a back-up horn blaring as a churning cement truck edged toward massive wood forms. A forklift rolled past, carrying a large blue drum on a pallet.
Ahead of her, wooden barricades blocked vehicle access to the construction trailer. Assuming that the cars parked near the trailer had entered from the street on the other side, which she had originally thought to do herself, she looked around for the sign Cord had mentioned. She couldn’t see it, but the stack of trusses that would eventually be part of a roof was impossible to miss.
Parking across from them, she shook off the niggling feeling that she shouldn’t leave her truck there and slipped out, carefully balancing the box so she wouldn’t tip the coffees. She would only be gone for a minute. Two max, she thought, stepping around the barrier.
It was then that she noticed the sign. The wording on the barrier faced the trailer and its parking lot. From there, the words No Admittance Without Authorization and Hard Hat Area practically screamed at her to go back.
Turning, she picked up her pace, her athletic shoes leaving curvy little patterns in the dirt and the three wooden steps that led up to the long white trailer’s door.
She didn’t have to knock. The door bearing a plaque that indicated the trailer to be the construction office opened before she could even decide if she needed to.
Cord’s big body filled the doorway. Yesterday’s designer Italian had been replaced with designer American. Aware of the Ralph Lauren logo on the sweater pushed to his elbows, she glanced from the wall of his chest past the lean line of his jaw. She had no idea if his smile was for her or for what she carried, but he looked tired, handsome and definitely anxious to get his hands on caffeine. “Am I ever glad to see you,” he murmured, and relieved her of the box. “Come on in.”
He turned away, leaving her to stare at his broad back a moment before she stepped inside. As she did, Matt Callaway rose from a long blueprint-covered table where three other men gathered. All seemed to be talking at once. A middle-aged woman wearing the look of a harried den mother cradled a phone against one shoulder while she pulled incoming faxes from the machine behind her desk and fed them directly into a copy machine. The smile she gave Madison was quick and decidedly grateful.
While one of the other men retrieved the copies and passed them out, Matt reached for his wallet. “Thanks for bringing this,” he said to her. “It’s not a good morning for the coffee machine to be out of commission.” He nodded to where Cord and the others were lifting foam cups from the box. “We have a little problem this morning and none of us can leave right now.” A good-natured note entered his voice. “There are also some of us who had a late night last night and are a little more desperate for caffeine than the others.”
“Hey, I was here on time,” Cord defended, his tone as affable as his friend and business partner’s. Lifting a cup toward the secretary to let her know it was hers, he set it on her desk. “If I’d known you wouldn’t have coffee here, I’d have brought some myself.” He reached into his own pocket. “I’ve got this,” he insisted. “I owe her a tip, anyway.”
Stepping in front of Madison, Cord held out a hundred-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” he said.
Madison blinked at the face of Benjamin Franklin. Beside her Matt had already turned to pick up his coffee and was asking one of the men about some sort of design change. The others were peeling the lids from their cups as they looked over the pages coming from the copier and talking about variances and bearing loads. The numbers and phrases they threw around wouldn’t have made any sense to her even if she hadn’t been so distracted by the man watching her from an arm’s length away.
She caught hint of his soap, and of aftershave lotion laced with citrus and spice. Two relatively fresh nicks on the underside of his carved jaw indicated a close and hurried encounter with his razor.
“You said fifty,” she reminded him, not wanting to notice such personal things about him. It sounded as if he’d had a late date last night. Rushing to make his meeting on time could easily account for why he’d missed breakfast. “With the muffins and coffee that’s only seventy-one dollars.”
There were slivers of silver in his compelling blue eyes. She didn’t want to notice that, either.
Someone’s cell phone rang. Across the room the fax machine beeped. “Consider the difference a delivery fee.”
Her voice dropped. “That’s very generous.”
“I’m very grateful,” he said, echoing her phrasing as she took the bill and slipped it into her waist pack. “You have no idea how I’ve fantasized about those muffins.”
His smile was all the more dangerous for the hints of fatigue that might have tugged at any other woman’s sympathies. But his notorious charm was wasted on her. She’d heard too much about it. It also had nothing at all to do with the jolt that had her flattening her hand over her heart.
An echoing boom shook the trailer from ceiling to tires. Windows rattled. Conversation died. Surrounded by the vibrating cacophony of crunching metal and something heavy collapsing just beyond the trailer’s walls, Madison wondered for a frantic second if they were having an earthquake. But just as suddenly as the sound hit, it stopped.
The men began speaking at once. Two engineer types headed for windows. The rest headed for the door.
Cord reached the door first, throwing it open so hard that it bounced back on its hinges. Matt was right behind him, hard hat in hand and shoving Cord’s at him as soon as his feet hit the dirt.
Caught in the surge of bodies as everyone else now rushed out, Madison found herself hurrying down the steps then stepping aside so she wouldn’t be in the way or get knocked over in the ministampede of foremen and the secretary coming through the doorway. Everyone else seemed to realize that whatever disaster had caused the noise was man-made rather than natural, but Madison barely had a chance to hope that no one had been hurt before she looked to where the wall of men now blocked the No Admittance sign.
They couldn’t go any farther.
The crane that had been lifting long steel I-beams had lost its load. Right on her truck.
Chapter Two
Utter disbelief kept Madison rooted right where she stood. Mouth open, too stunned to speak, she stared at the pile of crisscrossed beams that had just annihilated her vehicle. Other than those twenty-foot-long, two-ton girders of tempered steel, she couldn’t see anything but part of the white cab’s cratered roof and a spray of glittering glass shards that had been its windows and headlights.
Her first thought as she screamed, “My truck!” and panic sent her into motion was to save what she could of her food. As she darted toward the men, her second was that she smelled gasoline.
Shoving her way past the barrier of bodies and the barricade, intent on saving what she could, it vaguely occurred to her that the gas tank had ruptured.
“Hey, lady! Stay back!”
“Somebody stop her!”
She had no idea who’d yelled at her. “That’s my truck!” she cried again, only to feel something hard clamp around her arm.
That iron grip stopped her cold.
Disbelieving, distraught, she whirled to see Cord holding her back as the other men slipped past the barricade.
“What are you doing?” she screamed, struggling to break his hold.
“I’m saving your neck!” The heat of his palm burned into her, his grip as unyielding as his tone. “That claw is still swinging up there, and the beams it dropped aren’t stable. If one lands on you, it’ll break half the bones in your body.”
Even as he spoke, a long, heavy girder slipped from the top of the pile. It slid to the dirt with the groan of metal and a resounding thud that had men jumping back as if they’d been jerked by strings. Someone yelled for someone else to put out his cigarette. Overhead, the huge black claw that had held the beams swung from its cables like the pendulum of a clock.
Madison’s glance fell back to what was left of her truck and the dark pool slowly seeping from under it. With a shiver, she realized a single spark could turn the pile of collapsed metal into a bonfire.
“You’re lucky you were bringing the coffee,” Cord muttered above her. “If you’d been inside there, you’d have been history.”
Shock turned to incredulity.
“You think my bringing you breakfast saved me from being hurt?” Adrenaline surged as her eyes collided with his. “Are you delusional? If I hadn’t delivered that order, I would have been halfway to my next stop by now. That’s clear over by the docks, miles away from that…that…thing,” she concluded, waving her free arm at the crane.
“Hey,” he soothed. “Take it easy.”
Easy? “How am I supposed to do that?” she demanded, offended that he would even suggest it. “Because I did deliver that order, I’m not going to make that stop or any of my other stops. My truck has been reduced to a manhole cover, and the food I got up at three o’clock to make is mush. That truck is my livelihood, Kendrick, and the people at my stops depend on me to be there on time.”
Her outstretched arm reminded her that he still had her other one shackled. Not caring at all for the patient look he had the nerve to give her, she jerked back. Hard.
Suspecting that she hadn’t freed herself so much as he had let her go, not liking the idea that he held power over her in any form, she spun away, only to spin right back. He actually thought he’d helped her?
“I never should have listened to you,” she insisted, her chin up, her voice quavering with anger and the anxiety that got a firmer grip with each passing second. “I should have stuck to my schedule and not paid any attention to anything you offered or anything you said. You’re the one who told me to park there. Right there. In that very spot,” she reminded him, poking her finger toward the pile. “You even told me to ignore the warning sign. So, don’t you dare act like you’ve done me any favors.”
She was furious. She was distraught. She clearly blamed him and him alone for what had happened.
She also looked as if she could go for his throat because she’d done what he had asked. Fearing she might do just that, anxious to avoid a scene, Cord ignored the lack-of-sleep headache brewing in the base of his skull and started to reach for her again.
She immediately stepped away. Since calming her down by touch didn’t appear to be an option, he made his manner as placating as he could.
“You’ll get another truck,” he assured her. “I’ll buy you a new one and you’ll be back in business in no time.”
Her eyes flashed at his attempt to appease. The bits of gold in their liquid brown depths reminded him of flame. “I need to be back in business now,” she informed him. Her hand darted toward the pile of rubble again “Throwing your money at this isn’t going to fix it. You can’t replace a catering truck the way you can a car. New ones have to be ordered.”
“So I’ll order one.”
“It took me three months to get that one! What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
Cord opened his mouth to reply. Having no idea what to say that wouldn’t just add fuel to her fire, he shut it again. Jamming his hands into his pockets, he watched her walk off. Stalk, actually, though even angry, she moved with a feminine grace that held his focus on the slender line of her back, the gentle flare of her hips, her long, long legs. She did more for cotton knit and denim than most women did for cashmere and silk. Definitely more than many of the women he’d met over the years. Especially the models. There was a softness about her curves that told him she at least had some meat on her bones.
