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They stepped into Josh’s foyer a little more than an hour later and Olivia gasped with appreciation. Pale oak trimmed the three-tiered stairway that led to an open second-floor hall. Ceramic tile glistened beneath her feet. A sparkling chandelier hung from a glittery chain.
“Oh, gosh, Josh, your house is fantastic.”
“Thank you. I like it,” he said, taking her summer-weight jacket when she handed it to him.
“Did you do this yourself?” she asked, peeking around the corner at a comfortable room that was furnished in Southwest American decor. Earthy greens, hazy pinks and muted browns in the accent rug, sofa, and chairs came to life as soon as Josh turned on an overhead light.
“Gina helped. But the truth is I know what I like, and when I see what I like I…” He paused, and his face scrunched with an odd look before he slowly added, “I usually go after it. Not always, though, because some things aren’t meant to be. Or aren’t meant to happen.”
When he said the last, Olivia got the distinct impression he wasn’t talking about furniture anymore. For a fleeting second she worried that he had somehow caught on to the fact that she was unreasonably attracted to him and was warning her off, but that couldn’t be it. He hadn’t in four years figured out she had a crush on him. It was a stretch to think he saw it now. Besides, she hadn’t succumbed to his magnetic pull yet. Her resolve was in place. He might be good-looking and sexy, but even if she loved him to pieces, he didn’t love her. She was done pining over unrequited love.
But as he led her from the homey living room, through a formal dining room and into a cheerful kitchen decorated with a red-and-white tablecloth, curtains and chair pads, Olivia had second thoughts about her resolution. In fact, being in the room felt downright spooky. All her girlhood she had dreamed of a kitchen exactly like this one, and though she hadn’t precisely envisioned the living room, she loved it. She could live in this house as comfortably as he could, and that seemed to point out that they were more alike than they realized and might even be a sign that they were made for each other.
She stopped that conclusion. Immediately. Her decision was final. The man didn’t love her. She needed to go. She was going. There was a big, wide wonderful world that she had missed while longing for him to notice her. She wasn’t missing another minute of it.
“So, is there anybody expecting you in Florida?”
“Oh, my gosh! Yes. My mother,” Olivia said. “I need to call her and let her know I won’t be arriving tomorrow.”
He smiled. “My thought exactly. Why don’t you use the phone in the den while I see if I can find something to make for dinner? If I can’t find anything, I’ll order out for pizza. Anything special you like on your pizza?”
“No. I’m sort of a cheese-and-sauce girl. Nothing fancy for me.”
“You don’t even like pepperoni?” he asked quizzically.
She grimaced. “I don’t mean to be difficult, but no. If you don’t mind, I hate pepperoni and I hate picking it off even more.”
Josh’s expression changed so rapidly, Olivia couldn’t follow it. “I hate pepperoni, too.”
They looked into each other’s eyes for about thirty seconds, and though Olivia knew she was digesting the significance of yet another thing they had in common, she also knew he was not.
He didn’t like her.
He wasn’t attracted to her.
Heck, he hardly realized she was a woman. She had to remember that!
“I’m going to go call my mom,” she said, then turned and fled the room. At least this time, she not only left as she planned, she actually made it away from him without him changing her mind.
She followed a logical path through the downstairs until she found his den. Walls paneled in rough wood greeted her when she opened the door. She walked to the utilitarian computer workstation, turned on a brass lamp and found the multiline phone under a stack of Hilton-Cooper-Martin marketing reports. Even at home the man worked.
Olivia got a tug on her heartstrings. He desperately needed someone to care for him, to bring love into his life, to make his world warm and filled with simple pleasures, and she wanted so much to be that person.
But she also knew she had wasted enough time. Josh didn’t want her. If she were truly the woman who could bring joy to his world she would have figured out a way to do it in four years.
“Hello, Mama?” she said, when her mother answered the phone. “It’s Olivia.”
“Oh, Liv, thank God it’s you,” her mother said, and though Olivia had heard that nickname a million times it suddenly struck her that only her mother ever used it. But, tonight, Josh had. “When you didn’t call from your hotel, we were worried sick that something happened.”
“Well, something did happen,” Olivia said, leaning back in Josh’s office chair and twisting the phone cord around her finger. “Since my job doesn’t really interface with anyone else’s, and they haven’t found a replacement for me yet…”
“Oh, my Lord, you’re staying aren’t you?” her mother said, sounding discouraged. “Liv, honey, I thought—”
“It’s not what you think,” Olivia said, interrupting her mother in a rush. “I’m staying the weekend. I’m going to explain my job to Josh and tell him where to find things, so he can train a replacement. We might have to go into the office tomorrow,” she said, realizing that unless she actually showed him her filing system Josh would never understand it. “But then I’ll be on my way.”
“Good. Good,” her mother said, her tone indicating that she was trying to be understanding and supportive.
“Mama, don’t worry,” Olivia said to alleviate her mother’s fears. “I’ve learned my lesson.”
“It isn’t that I don’t think Josh is a nice guy. When I met him at your company picnic, I thought he was a great guy. A very sweet, polite boy who seemed to focus too much on work. But, Liv, you have to start thinking about yourself and you have to stay in the real world. Remember what happened to me?”
Olivia bit back a sigh. “Yes, Mama.”
“After your father died I waited ten years for Greg Ruppert to marry me, but he never did. And two weeks after I came to my senses and broke up with him I found the right man. I’ve not only been happy as a clam since then, I’ve found peace, and joy, and a purpose in life.”
“I know,” Olivia said softly, realizing it was true.
“And I honestly believe your right man is just around the corner,” Olivia’s mother continued. “I can feel it. I can feel it in my heart and soul in the way only a mother can feel these things. I just know you’re about to find your real Prince Charming.”
At that, Olivia smiled. Her mother relied on instincts and what she called lessons from history to make some fairly accurate predictions. If Karen Brady Franklin said she believed with her mother’s heart and soul that Olivia was about to meet her Prince Charming, then Olivia also believed it was true. She felt a surge of regret that Josh Anderson wasn’t the man of her dreams, but put that feeling down as old habit. She had wanted him to be the man of her dreams for so long, it was hard not to think of him in that context, and she supposed that was really what her mother was worried about. She was afraid that Olivia wouldn’t be able to break the ties. And if she didn’t she would miss out on her real destiny.
Looking at the big picture of her life, and the four wasted years, Olivia had to agree that was probably true. Even if her Prince Charming was around the corner, if she didn’t get away from Josh Anderson, Olivia would never see him.
“Thanks, Mama,” Olivia said. “I’ll call before I leave.”
“Okay, Liv. I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mama.”
Olivia hung up the phone with the satisfied, warm feeling she always got after talking with her mother. Though Karen Brady Franklin was definitely opinionated and didn’t hesitate to give voice to her ideas or render her predictions, she had never been a pushy mother. She listened with warm-cookie sympathy to Olivia’s troubles in grade school. She taught Olivia to stand up for herself in middle school. And in high school she taught her to like herself exactly the way she was and to choose the career Olivia wanted, not the one offered by the expert of the moment.
She guided, she didn’t dictate. She listened. She led by example. She let Olivia make her own mistakes and then helped her pick up the pieces with a lesson learned. In Olivia’s eyes she was the perfect mother. And she was also the reason Olivia wanted to have kids herself. She wanted to give the benefit of the same experience to her own child. Both Olivia and Karen knew that if Karen hadn’t waited around for Greg Ruppert, she would have had more children upon whom to lavish love, but because she had waited Olivia didn’t have a sibling. Olivia lost out, Karen lost out. One more reason to heed the advice of a woman who had suffered losses waiting for a man who didn’t want her.
“So, did you talk to your mother?” Josh asked as Olivia stepped into his spotlessly clean red-and-white kitchen.
“Yeah. You were right. She had been a little worried, but I explained the situation to her and she won’t be expecting me or a phone call for a few days.”
“Always good to keep your mother informed,” Josh said. “I ordered pizza. It should be here any minute.”
She smiled. He smiled. For Olivia things began to fall comfortably into place. As long as she remembered her mother’s life, her mother’s warnings, she would get out of this with both her dignity and her sanity.
As they ate, Olivia began to detail her duties, most of which Josh had once performed himself but had forgotten, given that he hadn’t had much contact with them in at least two years. She rattled off a list so long, Josh began to get nervous. But when she described her system of filing documents in her computer and also the hard copies in the cabinets that lined the wall beside her cubicle, Josh felt light-headed. This time he couldn’t blame the feeling on being unreasonably attracted to Olivia. This time the feeling was overwhelm.
He didn’t realize how much work she did and wondered if he wasn’t going to have to replace her with two people.
“Wow,” he said, leaning back on his chair and tossing his paper napkin to the table. “I’m never going to learn all this stuff in a weekend.”
“Sure you will,” Olivia said confidently. “In fact, while I was on the phone with my mother I realized we could make this a lot easier if we just do the training in the office tomorrow. That way I can show you the filing cabinets, show you what’s in the drawers, show you the color-coding system for the different grocery stores, show you the document system in the computer.”
Josh heaved a heavy sigh. “Okay, makes sense.”
“Yeah,” Olivia said, then she yawned. “It does.”
“I’m sorry. You’re tired,” Josh said, rising from his chair. “I’m not a very good host. I hardly ever have people over…especially overnight,” he said, recognizing he was tripping over his tongue to make sure she knew he didn’t have women over often. Actually, he didn’t have women over at all. First, he worked too much. Second, if he was going to sleep with someone he usually preferred her turf. He didn’t like people invading his sanctuary, yet he had invited Olivia without hesitation or consideration. And he wasn’t uncomfortable with her being here.
Puzzled by that notion, Josh led Olivia upstairs. He carried her small suitcase and she brought her overnight bag. He tossed her luggage onto the bed, and then immediately pivoted and left the room, telling Olivia he was going for clean sheets.
He really was going for clean bedclothes, but the truth was he was confused by how intimately he felt about a woman he hardly knew. He wasn’t so blind or so foolish as to dismiss four years of working together for eight hours a day as meaningless, but they’d rarely held personal conversations. He hadn’t told her his deepest, darkest secrets. She hadn’t told him hers. Yet, he felt comfortable letting her into his house. Even reminding himself that he should be more wary if only because of their age difference, he still wasn’t getting qualms of conscience or darts of fear.
Josh liked Olivia a lot more than he realized, but more than that, all this ease had to mean that he trusted her. Pushing himself to the limit on the issue, as he stretched to the top shelf for new—he wasn’t letting her sleep on old—sheets, he realized he would trust her with his life.
That took away some of the incredulity and replaced it with simple curiosity. The only other person he trusted like this was his uncle, Hilton Martin. He didn’t even trust Gina this way.
When he entered the room, Olivia had already stripped the bed of the old linens. The sheets and pillowcases were wadded in a ball on the floor. The blankets and floral comforter lay on the cherry-wood cedar chest at the foot of the bed. She stood with her back to him, staring out the window, waiting for him, and Josh felt a hundred strange sensations. The one that seemed to clamor for more attention than all the rest was an intense desire to kiss her.
Just the thought of kissing her made his lips tingle. All his blood surged to his chest and his heart beat wildly.
He cleared his throat. “Here are the sheets.”
She turned with a smile. “Thanks, you can go. I’ll get this.”
“You sure?” He knew the polite thing to do would be to help her, but red lights and warning signals were flashing in his brain. The polite thing might be to help, but the smart thing would be to run.
Her smile grew. “Of course I’m sure. I’ve made the bed a hundred times.”
He almost asked for whom, as irrational, unwarranted jealousy swept through him. He tried to stop it. He tried to reason it away. In the end, he tossed the linens to the bed and grabbed the fitted sheet and snapped it open.
“Josh, really, I can do this,” Olivia protested, but she giggled as if seeing him doing housework appealed to her.
He gritted his teeth. “I’m fine.”
“Josh, I want to make the bed and take a shower,” she said, then walked over and tried to yank the sheet from his hands. “If you go I can have this done in two minutes.”
“What? And with me here, it will take longer?”
“No,” she said, but she laughed again. At his stupidity, no doubt, because Josh knew he was acting stupid. But whatever her reason for laughing, Josh recognized he couldn’t remember the last time he had heard her laugh. More than that, though, he liked the sound. It warmed him all over.
With that thought, he realized he was staring down at her. She turned her beautiful green-blue eyes up at him, and he noticed that they were standing so close that with one lift of his hand he could be touching her. If he lowered his face just a couple of inches he could be kissing her.
He swallowed.
Two minutes ago he had his first ever thought of kissing her. Now, suddenly, he felt he would die if he didn’t.
Chapter Three
When his gaze stayed on her mouth, Olivia realized Josh was going to kiss her and her breath froze in her throat. Her blood tingled through her veins. Her knees weakened. For four long years she had been waiting for this man to kiss her. Now that the moment had arrived, she savored every second of the exquisite torture of anticipation, stunned that her dreams were about to come true.
But when he returned his gaze to hers, she also saw from the look in his eyes that he was confused about why he wanted to kiss her—confused enough that he didn’t follow through. He didn’t kiss her. He took two paces back and spun away so quickly, Olivia felt a breeze.
“Well, I guess you can handle putting these sheets on by yourself. Good night, Olivia,” he said as he bent to grab the old linens from the floor, and nearly sprinted out of the room.
Olivia collapsed on the bed, wondering what the heck had just happened. He seemed to be seeing her differently, but since he didn’t follow through it also confirmed that he was fighting the fact that the way he saw her was changing. Which meant she couldn’t let the near miss with kissing cloud how she felt about him or her decision to leave. She might have had twenty seconds of glorious anticipation, but for him that “almost kiss” was nothing more than a fleeting, confusing thought.
If she were a silly woman, she might be insulted that he was rebelling against viewing her as anything other than a loyal employee. But she wasn’t a silly woman. She was a realist, on her way to a new life and only detained in her old one because she didn’t want to leave any loose ends. It would be horrible if Josh called her for assistance a few weeks after she was gone, on a day when she was homesick, because she might be lonely enough to return. Then she would be right back where she started. She needed to teach him her job, so she could move to Florida knowing they would have no more contact. She wanted to go and not look back.
The next morning, Josh peered over his bowl of cereal at Olivia as she entered the kitchen. Though he had tried to cover his mistake, he wondered if she realized he had considered kissing her the night before. That in and of itself would have made facing her hard enough. But much to his consternation he had dreamed about her while asleep.
The dream, more than the near miss with kissing, was what really made this first encounter difficult, because in his dream Olivia was dressed in something filmy and sexy, close enough to touch, but always eluding him. That was the good part of the dream. The bad part, the part that woke him with shock and a feeling of bewilderment, was that she also told him that she was leaving him because he didn’t love her. Which was ridiculous. Completely ridiculous.
Actually it was wishful thinking. Every time they talked last night, first at her apartment, then at his house over pizza, he discovered there was more to like about her beyond her good looks, which were sufficient reason to grovel at her feet in most male circles. He could understand himself wishing she were interested in him. Any normal man would want this woman yearning for his affection. But given that she was leaving, it was fairly obvious that she wasn’t longing for his love, so the second half of the dream was pure fantasy.
“Hi, Josh.”
Glancing up, Josh swallowed hard. Olivia stood in the kitchen doorway with her voluminous hair pulled into a ponytail and her body encased in cute jeans and a fitted top, both of which were perfectly innocent. But when he looked at her, he imagined her dressed in the red filmy thing from his dream. In his mind’s eye, he saw the swell of her breast caressed by what appeared to be see-through chiffon. He saw the curve of her hip shift against the lightweight material. He saw the long length of her legs.
He would have been mortally embarrassed, except Olivia didn’t know about the dream and he certainly wasn’t going to tell her. Particularly since her chipper greeting proved she wasn’t holding that “almost kiss” against him.
“Hi.”
“You got any Frosted Flakes?” she asked, ambling into the room like they were best friends who always had sleepovers. As if she wasn’t troubled or titillated by the fact that they’d spent the night under the same roof.
“Turntable below the microwave. Bowls are in the cupboard by the sink.”
“Thanks.” She walked into the room, her ponytail swishing around her.
Josh rubbed his hands across his face as if he was attempting to awaken himself, but, really, he was stifling a groan. It was pretty damned hard to miss the fact that this woman was gorgeous. He blamed her conservative work wardrobe for his not seeing any of this before, but even that excuse only went so far. She never hid her hair, those eyes or that soft-looking skin. He had to have had his head in a cloud. God only knew what else he missed about her in the past four years. But that didn’t worry him as much as the fact that he couldn’t seem to be in the same room with her without having thoughts that were definitely inappropriate. Some even bordered on downright lusty.
“What time are we going in to the office?” she asked, bringing a bowl to the kitchen table.
Josh leaped out of his seat. “As soon as I shower,” he said, and chuckled a little nervously. “That’s why I just jumped up like that…I need to go shower.”
“Good.” She poured Frosted Flakes into the bowl. “You go shower and I’ll eat while I catch the morning news.”
“Good.” He began backing out of the kitchen. “Let me know if anything interesting happened while we were sleeping.”
For some reason or another that comment struck her as funny and she started to laugh. Josh took advantage of her preoccupation with giggling to get out of the kitchen, but also to remind himself that that was the kind of relationship they had. Buddies. Friendly coworkers. Gumbas.
Otherwise she would have noticed and reacted to the fact that he was only wearing a robe. Sure, it was a long, commonplace—all right, ugly—robe, but it was only one layer of material. She could have at least tried to peek around in an attempt to see if he wore other clothes beneath it. Instead, she acted as if she wouldn’t care if he were stark naked, sitting beside her.
He frowned. Now that he thought about it, that really rubbed him the wrong way. He might be older than she was but he wasn’t unattractive. Ignoring him shouldn’t be so easy. In fact, since she made it look like such a cakewalk, Josh had to wonder if she wasn’t somehow faking. Maybe the real deal was that she was attracted to him, but pretending not to be since he had never seemed to be attracted to her?
He knew that was reaching, but the truth was it felt out of balance to be this captivated by her when she didn’t even notice his handsomeness, his innate goodness or his sexuality. Women were always telling him he was handsome, or kind, or sexy.
Surely something about him appealed to her.
He considered the situation in the shower, while pulling on his jeans and sliding into dock shoes, and he decided he needed a test of some kind. He couldn’t come right out and ask if she was interested, but he could most certainly hint and see where that led them.
As he locked the house and, with Olivia, walked through the connecting garage, no good opportunity presented itself, and no obvious test popped into his mind. So in the car he asked, “Did you sleep well?” if only because he ultimately concluded that was at least a way to open the door of communication. If she said she hadn’t slept well and gave him a flirty little smile, he would know he wasn’t crazy.
