stopped six feet in front of her, as tall and solid as an oak. Even as he spoke, she had the unsettling feeling she’d been appraised from neck to knee without his glance ever leaving her face.
“I’d ask if you’re lost, but I figure you know your way around here a whole lot better than I do.”
It was as clear as the gray of his eyes that he remembered their meeting that morning. Specifically, that she’d barely spoken to him—which obviously would make him wonder what she was doing there now.
“I hope I’m not interrupting,” she replied, hoping she hadn’t offended him too badly.
“I’m not doing anything that can’t wait.”
Desperate not to appear as anxious as she felt, she held out the box containing one of the pies she’d baked between the breakfast and lunch that morning.
“You said you like apple,” she reminded him.
Curiosity slashed the carved lines of his face as he lifted the box from her hands. “What’s this for?”
“A chance to look around?” Looking past the impressive shoulders and muscular arms she’d once fantasized about, she glanced toward the old two-story house behind him. “I heard you’re tearing out walls in there. If you don’t mind, I’d like to see the house before it changes too much.” She hesitated, trying to act only casually curious. “How far along are you? With tearing them out, I mean.”
She thought he still looked skeptical of her presence. Or, maybe, it was interest in the contents of the box she saw in his expression as he pried up the front of the pink cardboard lid.
“I still have half the upstairs to go.” Distracted, he lifted the box to his nose and sniffed. “You use cinnamon.”
“It’s just your basic apple pie.”
“I’m a basic sort of guy.”
There was that smile again.
“So.” She swallowed, wondering if he had any idea how appealing it was to a woman to see a grown man grin like a boy at her baking. “May I go look around? I used to hang out here with my girlfriend when we were in high school. This was her grandma’s house,” she explained. “We’d come out in the summer and spend nights with her. Sometimes in the winter, too, when we’d skate on the pond.
“It’s a nostalgia thing,” she justified when his only response was the faint pinch of his brow. “I never thought anything about this town would change,” she hurried to admit, because that much was true. If finding that damnable diary hadn’t been so necessary, revisiting the memories honestly would have been important to her. Some of the best times of her life had been spent in and around the buildings beyond him. “As much as this house meant to me growing up, I’d really like to see it before what I remembered doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t know if you have any places like that from your childhood. Old hangouts, I mean. But this is really important to me.”
Nerves had her rambling. Realizing that, she shut herself up before she could betray just how uneasy she felt with what she’d written about him, and how totally lousy she was at being less than up-front and honest. She really had loved being in this charming old place. But the abandoned gristmill across the stream had been far more important to her. She had spent hours poking around the mill’s dim interior, wondering what life had been like for the miller who’d lived there a century ago. She’d spent even more time by its slowly moving waterwheel dreaming of her future, writing those dreams and plans in the diary she needed to find before Sam discovered just how large a part he’d played in her mental musings.
Apparently she hadn’t silenced herself soon enough. The curiosity in Sam’s expression changed to scrutiny as his eyes narrowed on hers.
Feeling exposed, not quite sure what to say, her glance fell to the ground. She figured she’d be better off to stay silent. Being a detective, he could probably spot a con at ten paces.
Sam was actually far better than that. He could spot a fraud a mile away and the woman now avoiding his eyes clearly had something more on her mind than revisiting memories of old times. She wanted into the house. Rather badly, he concluded, considering that she was willing to bribe him to get there.
Intrigued, his glance drifted from the rapid and betraying blink of her dark lashes and down her long-legged frame. Certain her motive was something other than what she’d claimed, his mind should have leapt to questions, possibilities, objectives. But a heavy dose of pure male interest had joined his more analytical instincts. Indulging it, he found himself fascinated as much by her as with discovering her purpose for being there.
Kelsey Schaeffer was the antithesis of the women he’d encountered day after day living undercover. Women who blatantly advertised what she seemed to deliberately underplay. But, then, when sex was for sale, a little advertising was simply good business. Those “ladies” wore their blouses cut to their navels, if the fabric reached that far, and their skirts or pants were inevitably spandex or leather and fit like skin. Their exotic makeup wasn’t used to enhance so much as it was to hide the ravages of drugs, poor nutrition and bruises from their pimps or their boyfriends. Then, there were the women who were so strung-out they didn’t bother to take care of themselves at all.
Sam pulled back his thoughts as his glance drifted over the sky-blue pullover Kelsey wore with her white capris. Everything about her was subtle. Her understated clothes. The natural shades of her makeup. Her quiet sensuality. She was the first woman to draw his interest in longer than he cared to remember, but he could only imagine the shape of her small breasts and the curve of her waist under her loose, boat-necked top. And those legs. Even covered to midcalf, they seemed to go on forever.
Something hot gathered low in his gut. With the scents of warm cinnamon and apples taunting an equally basic sort of hunger, he conceded that, in this particular instance, he could be bought.
“It won’t look like what you remember,” he warned her. “It’s pretty torn up in there.”
She still wore her sun-streaked hair back and clipped at her nape. Brushing at a strand that had escaped its confines, she offered a quick smile. “That’s okay.” She motioned toward the pie. “I’ll just peek inside while you put that away.”
“I’ll take you in. Like I said, there’s stuff everywhere.”
“I don’t want to keep you from what you were doing.”
“It’s not a problem.”
Kelsey opened her mouth, fully prepared to insist that she was fine on her own.
The slow arch of his eyebrow stopped her. It seemed as if he were waiting for her protest. Or, maybe, he was just waiting for her to move ahead of him. As thoughts of protest collapsed to a quiet, “An escort would be great,” she couldn’t really tell.
All she knew for certain as she headed along the walkway cutting through the weed-choked grass to the porch was that she wanted to be upstairs alone. She wanted to get in, get what she’d come for and get out. She couldn’t let Sam think it mattered one way or another if he was with her, though. Watching him set the box on the only sturdy-looking section of porch railing, she also realized she couldn’t appear to be in too much of a rush to get upstairs.
The sagging steps groaned beneath his weight. Skirting the pile of new lumber on the porch, he pulled open the screen door and motioned her ahead of him.
With a murmured, “Thanks,” she stepped past him and into an echoing and empty space. The cozy living room of cabbage rose-print wall paper, Victorian-style furniture and lace doilies was long gone. What little paper hadn’t been stripped from the walls had grayed and peeled with age. The carved wood molding that had edged the floors and ceiling lay in neat rows on the bare hardwood floor.
“Take your time.”
Kelsey swore she could feel Sam’s eyes on her back as she pulled her glance from the narrow door near the end of the room. That open door led to the stairway and the second floor.