Mills & Boon Christmas Set

Though it was now late at night, he was aware he would not sleep. He went into his office and shut the door. He was in the middle of a contract to revamp the computer systems for the City of Portland. This was what he loved and this is what he could lose himself in: researching, planning and coordinating the selection and installation of the software systems that gigantic enterprises, towns and cities, corporations and businesses counted on for smooth and efficient operation.

He sat down at his computer and sighed with satisfaction at the reassuring world devoid of emotional complexity. This was his world: analysis. Numbers and graphs and statistics appeared on the screen before him.

“Two weeks?” he told himself. “That’s nothing.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

ANGIE AWOKE IN the morning, bright light embracing her. For a moment, she had no idea where she was. But the ceiling had a display of dancing light on it, the windows reflecting patterns off the nearby water. She remembered the lake. She remembered arriving at the Stone House. And finding this bedroom and surrendering to the exhaustion that had been building in her.

And then, she remembered last night.

She remembered the panic that had clawed at her throat as she woke up to see a man’s figure silhouetted in the doorway.

Disoriented, her fears and stresses must have been playing out in her dreams, because Angie had thought, Winston found me. She had reached for that lamp and attacked with full force.

But it had not been Winston. She hoped it had all been a bad dream.

But, no, it was all true. There was the lamp, with a large chunk missing from its glass base and the shade completely crumpled, lying on her floor.

It hadn’t been Winston. It had been a man she barely knew. It had been her new employer, Jefferson Stone.

Heat raced up her cheeks as she remembered him comforting her even after she had smashed a lamp over his head. When he had climbed onto the bed? That’s when she should have protested more convincingly that she did not need him! When he had pulled her onto his lap? That’s when she should have put the wall up and resisted with all her might.

But, no, instead, weakling that she was, she had surrendered into it, allowed herself to feel something she had not felt in months, not even with the police.

It was a sensation beyond feeling safe. Angie had felt protected.

Even if Jefferson hadn’t said to her, over and over, that she was safe, she would have felt protected by him. It was not his words that had comforted. Unlike her, he was incapable of lying about who he was. She had felt the truth that was at the core of Jefferson Stone. She had felt the great strength and calm in his physical presence.

She had felt he was that man—that one-in-a-million man—who would lay down his life to protect someone he perceived as weaker than himself, or vulnerable.

Fresh from terrifying dreams—not to mention months of uncertainty—she had not been strong enough to resist what he had offered. It was what she had wanted most since her terrifying ordeal with Winston had begun. To feel safe again in the world.

And after she had felt safe? After she had realized she was in a lovely bedroom at a house on a lake that most people would not be able to find, even with a map? Then she should have told him to go, released him from that primal duty he felt to protect someone not as strong as him.

But, oh, no, she had given herself completely over to the temptation of being weak. She had relished his presence. The solidness of his chest, that delicious scent that was all his, the tenderness of his hand in her hair. She had lapped up his attention like a greedy child lapping up ice cream, and in the light of morning, that was exceedingly embarrassing.

Had he really kissed her cheek before he left the room? Her hand flew there as if she would be able to feel the evidence of it lingering. She had let down her guard. She had told him her name was not Brook. It was a moment of terrible weakness that had allowed these indiscretions. She vowed there would not be another.

Though maybe that would not be her choice. She had admitted she had lied to him. She had hit him with a lamp! He would be within his rights, in the cold light of day, to ask her to leave. Or at least to demand an explanation.

A half hour later, showered and dressed and ready for her first day of official duties—if she still had a job—she realized her new boss must also have a plan of avoidance. Obviously, she had managed to embarrass him, too.

His office door was shut when she went by it. There was coffee ready in the kitchen, but investigation did not show much else for breakfast. The man did not even have a loaf of bread! There was an empty box on the counter.

She picked it up and read the label. Apparently Jefferson had indulged in a microwavable bean burrito for breakfast. It was quite pathetic, actually.

She remembered her resolve, even before last night’s kindness, to make his life better while she was here. Now, standing there holding the burrito box, she committed more fully to that. She would see that he had proper meals and clean clothes, and that every surface of his house shone, reminding him of what a beautiful place he lived in. Maybe reminding him that it was a beautiful world.

That awareness, that it was a beautiful world, had evaporated from her in the past while, too. Maybe, in helping him discover it, she could recover some of her own faith in the world.

A little frightened, Angie realized she was allowing the most dangerous thing of all into her world.

She was allowing herself to hope.

That hope infused her as she did normal things. She made a grocery list, put dishes in the dishwasher, cleaned crumbs off the counter. It was a testament to how crazy her life had become that doing these small things filled her with such pleasure. She had never really appreciated how wonderful it was to just be normal.

Still, she could not use these simple pleasures as an excuse to delay seeing Jefferson this morning. With her list in hand, she approached his office door. It was true her boss had made it plain he didn’t like interruptions, but she couldn’t very well ignore the events of last night. And she needed to know if he planned to oust her over her deception about her name.

Standing in the hallway, she was aware her heart was beating too hard. She rehearsed what she would say. If he did keep her on, she needed him to know that his tender concern, while appreciated, was not in any way expected by her. The exact opposite, in fact. She would prefer they stay on less familiar terms. The list was a pretext to get into his office and make her speech.

She knocked.

“Yes?”

She opened the door a crack and peeked in. Jefferson looked exhausted. Here, she had vowed to make his life better, and it was apparent it was already worse!

“You haven’t been up all night, have you?” she asked, appalled, her rehearsed speech forgotten.

He glowered at her. “You’re my housekeeper, not my mother.” His tone was unnecessarily curt.

But all she heard was you’re my housekeeper. He wasn’t firing her!

She was relieved that the tenderness she thought she had experienced last night had been largely imagined. At the same time, she was aware that she was ever so faintly annoyed that he had reached the conclusion, all by himself, that his tender concern would not be necessary in the light of day.

“I just wanted to apologize for last night,” Angie said, the opening line of her speech. It would be a shame to let the whole thing go to waste. She opened the door a little more, though he clearly had not invited her to.

“No need.” He waved a dismissive hand at her. The message was clear—Leave me alone.

“I was very tired...” She felt driven to explain, stepping over the threshold into his office. “I’m sure it won’t happen again.”

“Great,” he said. He glanced up from his computer, acknowledged the fact she was actually in his office with a slight frown and looked back at the computer. “I only have so many lamps.”

This was very good. He was going to make it about the lamp instead of about her. And him. And embarrassingly tender moments.

“I’ll pay for the lamp,” she insisted, following his lead. Let’s make it about the lamp. Only that was harder than it should have been. Even with that scowl on his face, he was a very attractive man. It was not so easy to dismiss the fact she had been on his lap last night.

“I don’t care about it, actually.” Apparently, it was easy for him to dismiss it.

“Well, I do. I’ll pay for it. I insist.”

“Whatever.” This was a discharge.

In case she didn’t get that, he waved a hand at her, as if she was a bothersome fly. She noticed a lump on his head and stepped in to his office even farther. She didn’t stop until she was standing right in front of him.

He looked up from his computer and folded his arms over his chest, clearly annoyed. “You’ve apologized. We’ve established you are paying for the lamp. Was there anything else?”

“Are you having any symptoms of concussion?” she asked. “Because you have quite a large lump right—”

She reached for him; he reared back. She snatched her hand away and touched her own forehead above her eyebrow. “Here,” she finished weakly.

“I am not having the symptoms of a concussion,” he said.

“How’s your head?” He had a lump rising above one of his slashing eyebrows.

She thought he would at least express some curiosity about her real identity, but he did not.

“Aren’t you going to ask me why I gave you a false name?” she said.

He studied her for a moment. “No.”

“Oh.” She realized she was disappointed in his lack of interest—not that she wanted to get into the whole tawdry tale of her failure to discern a bad person from a good one. Still, she felt driven to say something else.

“I just want you to know, I’m not a person you can’t trust.”

He looked at his watch, a hint that she didn’t have to say anything else.

For some reason, she babbled on. “I don’t have a list of aliases. There is no dead person in an attic somewhere that can be attributed to me. I’m not on the run from the law.”

Something like a smile tickled at the edges of his lips. “You think you had to tell me that you’re not a murderer or a fugitive?” he asked.

She nodded vigorously.

“It’s imminently apparent that you are not.”

“That’s good,” she said, though she wasn’t so sure. He had managed to say that as if she had boring written all over her, as if she was exactly the kind of woman whose fiancé would leave in search of excitement elsewhere.

“It’s also imminently apparent that something, or someone, has thrown a very bad scare into you. If it’s a man—” the smile had disappeared completely and something dangerous darkened his eyes “—you need to get rid of him and never look back.”

She opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. Jefferson was already looking back to his computer. It was a man, but it was too complicated to explain, and he clearly did not want an explanation. Despite the advice, he was letting her know that theirs was a temporary arrangement and that she had to handle her life herself. He had absolutely no interest in her personal dramas. He did not want a repeat of last night any more than she did.

Except that looking at him, she did feel a strange longing to see the tender side of him again, to feel his hand in her hair and his lips on her cheek.

After a moment, he glanced at her, and she realized she was still standing there, trying to reconcile this cold indifference with the man who had comforted her last night.

Yes, that lump on your head, right over your scowling brow, needs some attention. And I would love to finish what I started, to lean over and put my fingers on it, as if somehow I could soothe the pain away. The way you soothed mine away last night.

But he was looking at her like the man least likely to want his pain soothed away. She thought of the little lost boy in that photograph in the living room. And she suspected the lump on Jefferson Stone’s head was the least of his pain.

She was glad she had the grocery list and didn’t have to make up an excuse for the fact she was standing there staring at him. “You asked me if there was anything else and yes, there is. There’s this.”

Trying not to feel as if she was scurrying under his impatient eye, she crossed the room and thrust the list in front of him.

He picked it up and studied it. The annoyed scowl creased his brow again. “Good grief, are we supplying a barracks?” he said, lifting his eyes to hers.

“It’s really just basics.”

He glared again at the list, then lifted those cool gray eyes to hers. “Cumin is a basic?”

His pronunciation of cumin was way off. He made it sound like something quite erotic.

“It’s a spice! You don’t have any spices,” she sputtered. She willed herself not to blush over something so silly as the pronunciation of cumin.

“Well, I doubt if they have anything quite so exotic in Anslow. There’s no big-box supermarket there. It’s a little family general store.”

“It’s not exotic,” she said. Good grief. She sounded defensive over a spice. She was pretty sure she was blushing.

“Well, I’m still not going to go ask for it. People would get the wrong idea entirely.” He took a pen off his desk and put a line through cumin.

“They might indeed get the wrong idea if you said it like that.” She could not resist commenting. “It’s not coming.” Now her cheeks felt as if they were on fire. “It’s pronounced coo-men.”

“Huh.” Unsaid: I don’t give a damn, though he was watching her face with interest now.

“I use it in homemade guacamole. I make really good burritos. You’ll never want a frozen one again.” She was hoping to get him to put cumin back on the list and to distract him from her schoolgirl reaction to what was simply a wrong pronunciation.

“That’s the problem with improvements,” he said. “They make you dissatisfied with the way things were before.”

“Well, in terms of frozen burritos for breakfast, that can only be a good thing.”

He appeared about to remind her, again, she was not his mother. Instead, he looked back at the list.

“I don’t know where any of this stuff is,” he said. “Cornstarch. Where do you find that? In the vegetables or in the laundry supplies?”

She pressed her lips together to keep from laughing.

“How essential can something called cornstarch be, anyway? I don’t even like my shirts starched. That was my grandfather’s generation.” He took his pen and struck another item from her list.

“It’s for thickening sauces, not for doing laundry,” she said, but he did not appear to hear her.

“Dark chocolate ice cream? Not just ordinary chocolate?”

She had been planning on making iced mocha for the heat of the afternoon. In truth, it was all part of her plot to make him happy.

It was more than obvious happiness did not come naturally to him. Rather than seeing that as a challenge, she should just admit to herself that she had set an impossible task.

If only bringing someone happiness could be as simple as giving them an iced mocha on a hot afternoon.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“THE ICE CREAM may not be essential,” Angie admitted, though she was reluctant to give ground.

“Good.” Jefferson crossed it off the list with a little too much enthusiasm, and then muttered, “If I was going to get ice cream, it wouldn’t be chocolate, anyway.”

“What kind would it be?” she asked, curious despite herself. You could probably tell a lot about a man by the kind of ice cream he liked.

But he only spared her a glance that made her feel as if the question had been highly personal, like asking if he preferred boxers or briefs.

“You know,” he said, displeasure deepening his voice even more, “I offered to pick up a few things in town because I have another errand to do there, but a list like this? I’ll be wandering in the market for hours. They’ll have to send in a Saint Bernard to find me, hopefully with a keg of brandy around his neck. Brandy.” He squinted at her list and crossed something off. She was fairly certain it was the cooking sherry.

“I hate going to the market, anyway,” he admitted.

“That explains the frozen bean burrito for breakfast.”

“Yes, it does,” he said unapologetically. “One-stop shopping. I stop at the freezer, fill my basket, and leave. I can be done in forty-three seconds.”

“Well, you should at least be familiar with where the ice cream is if you’re such a fan of the freezer section,” she said. She should leave it at that. Really, she should. But she didn’t. “Why do you hate going to the market?”

“These people have known me since I was six years old. They have an annoying tendency to fuss over me,” he snapped. “You’re not the first person to think my food selections are not that great. All those busybodies peering in my basket.”

Not everyone, she guessed. Women. It was a small town. He was probably its most eligible bachelor. And damned unhappy about it, too. She could just imagine them clucking over him at the supermarket.

She made a note to herself. No clucking. No fussing. He was right. She was not his mother.

“There’s only one solution,” he said.

She held her breath. Either he was going to throw out the list or reconsider her employment.

But as it turned out, there was a third option, which she had not even considered.

“You’ll have to come and do the shopping yourself.” He held out the list, and she snatched it from him, trying not to show her delight at this unexpected turn of events. “I’ll send you off to the market while I run my other errands.”

“It won’t put you out in the least to have me along,” she said. It sounded like a promise.

“Yeah, whatever.” He didn’t have the grace to appear even slightly grateful she was going to get some decent supplies for him. He glanced at his watch. “I can’t go until later this afternoon. Can you be ready around four-thirty?”

She sighed. “That means frozen bean burritos for lunch, I’m afraid.”

“You say that as if it’s a bad thing,” he said drily.

It was when she left his office that she remembered he said he went to Anslow by boat. And she had said she thought that was romantic, even though she shouldn’t have done. Anyway, she scolded herself, if that was her idea of romance, it was no wonder that her fiancé had left her for someone who wanted to live on a beach in Thailand!

Well, if she was not Jefferson’s mother, she was even less likely a romantic prospect. Luckily for her—and for tired-of-women-fussing-over-him Jefferson—she was completely disillusioned in that department. Harry, and then Winston, had seen to that.

What a relief. Because feeling romantic about her boss in any context, including a boat ride, could lead to dreadful complications, even in two short weeks.

But for some horrible reason, even as she vowed off romance, Angie thought of his lips brushing her cheek the night before. And she blushed even more deeply than she had over the mispronunciation of a word.

She squeezed as much activity as she could into the day. By the time four-thirty rolled around, the dishes and laundry were completely caught up and the kitchen was gleaming. It was hot, though. A thermometer on the outside of the kitchen window told her it was a hundred and two degrees outside when she slipped up to her room and showered the day’s grime off.

Angie had hauled her meager suitcase up the stairs to her room. She had not, in her panicked flight from Calgary, packed one thing that might impress Jefferson Stone. It was too hot to impress, anyway. She slipped on a clean white T-shirt and a very simple wraparound skirt she had designed and made herself. Then she ran a brush through hair that was springing up all over the place.

“Ready?” he asked as she came down the stairs.

“Is it always so hot here?” She regarded Jefferson. He didn’t look hot at all in a summer sports shirt and light khaki shorts. He looked cool and confident and composed—a man who did not invite fussing at the supermarket.

“This is a pretty average summer day. You could have turned on the air-conditioning.”

“I was hoping to freshen up the house by leaving all the windows open. I think I’ve succeeded only at letting the heat in. How are we going to keep the groceries from wilting?”

We. As if they were a partnership. She contemplated how easily the “we” had slipped from her lips.

He grabbed a large cooler from the storage cabinet by the back door and then led her out the back door and across the deck. She noticed he did not bother locking the door they came out. He paused before taking the stairs down, scanning the nearby mountains.

“What?”

“Just looking at the clouds,” he said.

She followed his gaze. The clouds were huge, pure white and fluffy as cotton balls, obliterating the tops of the mountains. “They’re beautiful,” she said. “Can you see anything in them?”

He cast her a glance, shook his head and snorted.

“Well, I can,” she said stubbornly. “It looks like a horse kicking up clouds of snow behind it.”

He looked back at the clouds, squinted, then shook it off.

“It’s not unusual to get a thunderstorm late in the day when it’s hot like this,” he said. “Hopefully, it will hold off.”

“I don’t know. I feel as if I’d love to stand out in the rain right now.” The heat was absolutely withering.

He looked as if he was going to say something but, with one more glance at the clouds and at her, changed his mind.

They went down a steep staircase, carved into stone, that led to a crescent of private white-sand beach and to a boat dock. It seemed with every step closer to the water, the air cooled.

“Oh,” Angie said, looking at the sleek boat bobbing at its moorings. “It looks like something out of James Bond.” Come to think of it, he looked like something out of James Bond!

He stepped from the dock to the boat with absolute ease despite the cooler in his hands and the bobbing of the boat.

“Wait,” he snapped when she tried to follow. He stored the cooler and came back. He reached out his hand to her, and she took it and leaned forward for the long and rather scary step down. He sensed her hesitation and let go of her hand. Then he put his hands around her waist, lifted her easily into the boat and set her back on her feet.

For a moment they stood there, looking at each other, his hands still cupping her waist. She glimpsed the man he had been last night. Angie had a sense of time stopping, of being highly aware of the way the hot afternoon sunshine felt on her skin and of how it looked in the crisp darkness of his hair. She was aware of the shape of his lips and the moody gray of his eyes, the strength in those hands that practically encircled her waist. She was aware of the birds calling all around them, the annoyed chatter of a squirrel, the gentle lap of water against the hull of the boat.

She was aware of feeling exquisitely alive.

Then Jefferson abruptly released her. He tossed a cover over a seat beside the wheel, and she took it, aware of the scorching heat coming up through the cover. It was the kind of gorgeous white leather she thought was reserved for higher end cars.

He was back out on the dock releasing the boat from its moorings. He tossed the lines in the boat then gave it a shove with his foot before leaping with mountain goat agility over the swiftly widening gap of water between the dock and the boat.

He took the seat beside her, put a key in the ignition and powerful engines thrummed to life.

He motioned to a sliding panel located between their seats, slid it open briefly to show her a staircase leading into the hull of the boat. “Life jackets are in here, if we should need them. And facilities.”