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  He flipped on the light as her heels click-clacked across the tile floor, then he closed the door and turned around just in time to see her perfect little behind in its tight black wrapper headed straight for his room.

  “Whoa, whoa. Hold it right there.” He came up behind her, put both hands on her shoulders and steered her toward her own room. Feeling as he did right now, having her anywhere near his bed would definitely strain his chivalry to the breaking point.

  She sat down on her bed with a plop, causing her cat to leap to the floor in a fit of hissing, its displeasure at being woken up evident.

  “Sorry,” she said, but so quietly he had to strain to hear her. She fell back against the pillows, curled up and closed her eyes. “I didn’t mean to scare you away.”

  Alec tugged off her sandals one at a time and thought about helping her undress but immediately discarded the idea as too dangerous. She looked so pretty, her hair splayed over the pillow, her hand curled next to her face, the barest of smiles on her lips.

  Lord help him, he was attracted to her even now. He had to get the hell out of there, so he pulled the blanket over her and headed for the door. Seconds later, the cat jumped back up on the bed, shot Alec a reproachful glare, curled himself up next to Daisy and fell instantly asleep.

  Too bad Alec wasn’t going to be nodding off that easily tonight. Not with the memory of Daisy in his arms, not with the feel of her lips and the pressure her body permanently tattooed on his mind.

  As he turned off the light and closed her door quietly, he thought about the words she’d mumbled just before she’d fallen asleep. And although he knew she’d meant them for her disgruntled cat, they could’ve easily applied to him. She had scared him—and in a way he’d never been before in his life.

  Because for the first time, Alec Mackenzie was attracted to a woman who made him smile, who made him think and who made him want to be a different kind of man.

  Daisy didn’t want to wake up, but eventually the roar of Bam Bam’s normally soothing purr forced her to crack an eye open. Then she immediately pulled a pillow over her face to drown out both the noise and the hideous amount of sunlight pouring into her room.

  “Why do I feel so awful?” she mumbled to Bam Bam from beneath the pillow. “Surely those two glasses of wine at dinner didn’t…”

  As the memories trickled in, her stomach sank. Ohmigosh. She sat straight up in bed, then cursed because the sudden movement made her head pound even harder.

  She’d thrown herself at Alec—and he’d thrown her right back.

  A strange sense of unreality fell over her, making her wonder for a moment if she’d really done what she thought she’d done. But she had only to close her eyes to find the answer. She could still feel the sensations of the silken pressure of his lips, the delicious slide of his tongue, the rough texture of his skin under her fingertips. Oh, yes, she thought with a pained groan. Yes, she had indeed kissed Alec, thoroughly and completely. And it had been better than all her many imaginings had prepared her for.

  As she swung her legs around and touched her bare feet to the cool tile floor, her memories of the party flowed back unrelentingly. She remembered her decision to, at the very next opportunity, be brazen and sexy like one of Alec’s bimbos. She remembered her careless consumption of beer and her wholehearted participation in all those drinking games. She even vaguely remembered her foolish decision to put it all on the line once and for all and kiss Alec. And then she remembered the cherry on top of her humiliation sundae: his firm rejection and his pronouncement that being with her would be “stooping too low.”

  She let her heavy, throbbing head fall into her waiting hands. Daisy had always had an active imagination. Over the past year or so, she’d created hundreds of short films in her mind that depicted—some in graphic detail—how an intimate encounter with Alec would go. But not one of them had ended with him telling her in no uncertain terms that she was so unappealing to him that he couldn’t possibly lower himself to be with her.

  Daisy got up, swayed a little, then began to pace the room slowly in her bare feet. Ever since she’d met him, Alec had been plowing through women like a wheat harvester. She’d put dozens of his bimbos’ names into her Rolodex, only to pull and chuck each card in a matter of weeks. It was his pattern. Tried and true.

  She pulled back the curtains and winced as more bruising light flooded the room. So what in the hell was wrong with her? Was she so repellent, so unpleasant and unattractive that he couldn’t even bring himself to have a meaningless fling with her?

  Apparently, the answer was yes.

  Her anger flared and continued to blaze hotly, making her embarrassment and hurt feelings dim by comparison.

  This was it. What had happened last night really was the last log she would ever allow Alec to toss into the fire that had finally succeeded in burning her self-respect to a cinder. After all, he couldn’t possibly make his feelings about her any more clear. Sure, he’d said he needed her during their showdown in her kitchen, but that was in a work sense and nothing more. Last night had proved that, hadn’t it?

  And although she’d said it before, she knew right down to her bones that this time it was different. This time, she promised herself as she stalked to the bathroom and twisted on the shower’s hot water valve, her crush was truly extinguished. Never again would she risk her heart that way. Not with Alec.

  No matter what.

  Alec heard Daisy before he saw her.

  She was laughing, and the familiar, comforting sound of it rippled through him, making him smile in spite of his dark mood. When he opened the door, he saw that she was talking on the phone in the suite’s kitchenette, the receiver pressed between her shoulder and ear as she reached up to put something into one of the cabinets.

  While he’d visited the job sites this morning, he’d spent a considerable amount of energy convincing himself that what had happened between them was a fluke. In fact, until this moment, he’d been almost positive that his attraction to her would seem silly in the light of day. But that wasn’t exactly what happened.

  What happened was that he was frozen in place as he took in the enticing length of her—from her tanned, toned calves that flexed as she tipped up onto her toes, to her lovely behind encased in khaki shorts, to her light-green top stretched tight over her finely muscled back and shoulders. He shoved his hands into his pockets and willed the damnable tightness in his groin to melt away before she turned around and caught him staring.

  “I miss you, too, Tom,” she said in a fond voice as she took more groceries out of the bags on the counter.

  His head snapped up. Tom? She missed someone named Tom? he thought with a frown. Who the hell was Tom?

  “Well, you can always come out here. By boat, I’m just two hours away.” She paused, then laughed again. “That’s right. It’s just that you’re such a hunk,” she said as she leaned over and put something under the sink, “that I forgot you get seasick.”

  So Daisy’s Tom was a hunk who couldn’t hold down his cookies on a little boat ride? Alec thought as he tried not to admire her exceptional backside. If Tom was as big a wuss about flying, it would effectively eliminate him as competition—at least for the next few months.

  Alec blinked. He was tired, but not that tired. After a sleepless night and half a day thinking about it, hadn’t he’d already decided that he was going to put a stop to this…this thing that was brewing between him and Daisy? There was something brewing, he couldn’t deny that any longer. But he also couldn’t deny that she was all wrong for him. Dead wrong.

  She was the kind of woman a man brought home to meet the parents, the kind of woman who made a man willing to talk about kitchen remodels and the thread count of his sheets, the kind of woman who inspired a man to start thinking about forever.

  In short, she was exactly the kind of woman he’d been avoiding all his adult life.

  He must have made some kind of noise because Daisy turned around, and when she saw
him her smile faded and her laughter turned into a small choking sound. She leaned back against the counter and gripped the receiver tight enough to make her fingers turn white. “I have to go,” she said into the phone, never taking her eyes off him. “The boss is back.”

  The boss.

  She’d said the words flatly, putting a distance between them that he’d never felt before. In that moment he knew last night had changed everything. Never again could they be just two people who liked each other and worked well together. Not now that he knew what she tasted like, what she felt like in his arms, what sweet, murmured sounds she made when they were so close he couldn’t tell where she ended and he began.

  Unfortunately, he thought as he struggled to scatter the images that were popping into his mind, he couldn’t let anything happen. Among other things, she was the settling-down type and he really, really wasn’t. He was a rat in rat’s clothing, pretending to be nothing else but a man who liked to have a good time until the good times ended. It was all he was capable of and he’d always known it.

  No, the thing to do here, he thought with a lingering sense of regret, was to try to keep a professional distance. The only thing he wondered now was if she was thinking the same thing.

  “Hello, Alec,” she said stiffly as she hung up the phone.

  Okay, she was thinking the same thing. “Hello, Daisy,” he said, and knew he was flirting with disaster as he walked toward the small kitchen. “Did you sleep well?”

  A light flush spread across the smooth skin of her cheeks. “Like the dead, but I guess you already knew that considering the, uh, state I was in when you poured me into bed.” She looked down at the floor. “I apologize for that, by the way.”

  “No need. Happens to the best of us.” He reached past her to close a cabinet door she’d left open, then caught a whiff of the enticing fragrance he’d come to think of as Eau de Daisy.

  Uh-oh.

  For a moment it seemed like they’d both stopped breathing. He knew right then that if he didn’t move away, he wasn’t going to be able to resist kissing her—and he also knew that kissing her would definitely mess up that whole “professional distance” thing he’d just cooked up.

  But he couldn’t seem to move.

  All he could think about was feeling her soft skin beneath his hands, of tasting her again, of hearing her make that little sound of pleasure he’d heard last night. He turned his head toward her and knew he was a fool and then…

  She stepped gracefully away and left the kitchen and didn’t stop until she was standing behind one of the large oak tables in the main room. “All our office stuff came today. I’ve almost got the computers hooked up,” she said brightly.

  Alec took a deep breath and leaned back against the edge of the counter she’d just abandoned and managed to say, “That’s good,” as he took a long look at her. Her eyes were downcast, her dark hair was tumbling over her shoulders in a curtain of curls, and even from that distance he could see that her hands trembled slightly as she slipped on her glasses.

  Sunlight poured into the room through the French doors, and Alec watched as dust motes floated around in the beam of bright light that spread across the table in front of Daisy. And that’s when he noticed for the first time that the furniture had been reorganized. Instead of being side by side, two of the tables faced each other from across the broad expanse of room and the third was set up smack in the center of them.

  “Who moved the furniture?” he asked.

  Daisy didn’t look up. She was far too busy scooting her office supplies around on the tabletop. “I did.”

  For some reason it irritated him that she clearly wanted as much physical distance between them as possible. And the simple fact that she was acting like he suddenly had the plague made him want to bait her when the smart thing to do would be to just let things lie. “Are we going to install an intercom so we can talk to each other?”

  She looked up, her dark eyes full of fire. “I thought you’d enjoy a little privacy for your phone calls.”

  “Hmm,” he said as he walked toward her, never taking his eyes off her. “What if I don’t want any privacy?”

  “Well, maybe,” she said, and he saw the light in her eyes flicker a bit, “maybe I want some privacy, then.”

  When he reached her desk, he put his hands down in the center of it and leaned forward until he was so close, he could see her pulse pounding at her throat and feel her warm, sweet breath on his face. Danger signals went off in his head, loud and insistent, but he ignored them. “So you can talk to Tom?”

  Predictably, she blushed a deeper shade of pink. He’d never noticed how damn cute that blush was. “Tom or…whoever,” she said, then changed the subject abruptly. “Everything should be working now except our Internet connection. Bill and I should have that fixed by the time we start work Monday morning.”

  “Who’s Bill?” And who’s Tom? And, Lord, why do I care so much?

  “You know him. He’s the desk clerk here. And he also works for the island’s freight delivery company.” She smiled a bit, apparently forgetting to be mad at him for the moment. “Did you know everyone on this island holds down a couple of jobs? Even the local pastor works at the grocery store during the week and—”

  “Would you like to have dinner tonight?”

  Her smile flat-lined as she lowered herself into her chair and stared at him in silence. In truth, he couldn’t believe he’d asked her, either. Not when he’d just decided to minimize their contact to keep from making a mistake he’d regret.

  “With you?” she asked, her voice tinged with skepticism.

  “Of course, with me. Who else would I mean?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes you…” She shook her head and opened up her laptop. “Never mind. I don’t want to have dinner with you.” Then she started to tap away on her keyboard like a woodpecker.

  Let it go, he thought as he straightened and gazed down at her. It’s for the best. But then his curiosity—or was it pride?—got the better of him so he asked, “Why?”

  Tappity-tap-tap. “Because.”

  He smiled. “Care to elaborate?”

  Tappity-tappity-tap. “I have plans.”

  “I see,” he said, and resisted asking what he really wanted to know. Where? With who? And when will you be back? Lord, he was losing his mind.

  She stopped typing long enough to glance at her watch. “I’m sorry, Alec. I have to go.”

  He glanced at the clock on the wall, noted that it was two o’clock, then asked the question he had no right to ask. “When will you be back?”

  “You sure are nosy today,” she said as she gathered up her things.

  “And you sure are mysterious.”

  When she opened the front door, the clanging of the harbor’s buoys slipped into the room. “Let’s just say you shouldn’t wait up. Have a nice night, Alec.”

  Alec frowned. How was he supposed to have a nice night when she was going to be out God-knew-where with God-knew-who until God-knew-when? And how was he supposed to have a nice night when he was all alone with his realization that what he really wanted was to be with her?

  “You, too,” he called out as the door closed behind her. But anybody with a decent sense of hearing should have been able to tell that he didn’t really mean it at all.

  Six

  Daisy could still hear the tone of Alec’s husky, sexy voice as she pushed away her half-eaten sandwich and smiled at her lunch date, Virginia Baldwin.

  “Anyway,” Daisy said with a shrug, “I don’t think I’m cut out for the whole dating game. I guess I just never developed any of those girly-girl qualities I would need to be good at it.”

  Virginia reached out across the red-checked table and patted Daisy’s hand. “Small wonder, considering you lost your mother so young. I’m sure your father did his best,” she added. “But there’s no way anyone could expect him to have taught you all the things you needed to know.”

  Daisy smiled at the older
woman and fiddled with her iced tea, a little embarrassed that she’d unloaded so much on Virginia who was, after all, a Mackenzie client. The thing was, though, for Daisy, Virginia had already become much more than a client. She was more like a kindly old aunt—although Daisy had still been careful to leave out all the little details concerning Alec when she’d confided that she was in a bit of funk today.

  “Sometimes it feels like I’m invisible to the opposite sex,” Daisy said. “Which is probably because I look like a librarian.” She smiled as she pushed her reading glasses further up her nose. “But it doesn’t make any difference. Even if I looked like a pinup girl, everything I know about meeting and attracting a man could almost fill a Dixie cup.”

  And last night had only served to prove that all over again.

  “There’s nothing wrong with how you look,” Virginia said as she reached out impulsively and tucked a curl behind Daisy’s ear.

  The gesture reminded Daisy so much of her own mother, she went all soft inside. “I’m sorry, Virginia. We were getting together to talk about the project, and here I’ve been yammering—”

  “Not at all,” the older woman said with a wave of her bejeweled hand. “I wanted to spend some time with you and that’s exactly what we’re doing. Now,” she said as she chewed on one perfect, oval fingernail and looked at Daisy appraisingly, “I have an idea.”

  Something about the gleam in Virginia’s eye made Daisy a little uneasy. “An idea about the project?”

  “No, no,” she said as she gestured to the waitress and scribbled in the air with an invisible pen. “An idea for you. What you need is a good old-fashioned makeover. Hair, makeup, manicure. The works. And we’ve got some wonderful designer boutiques on Bayside Avenue, so we can give your closet a makeover, too,” she said as she signed the bill with a flourish. “In one afternoon, we’ll banish your blues and give you the confidence boost you obviously need to see how irresistible you are.”

  “Oh, I don’t think—” Daisy began, but stopped in mid-protest. How great would it be to feel honest-to-God feminine for once in her life? Wouldn’t it be empowering to have men twist their necks around to look at her as she walked by? And wouldn’t it be thrilling to feel as though she had what it took to be a woman who was pursued by men?