one appreciated tradition, she thought with a spark of mutiny as she stepped backward toward the curb. Her gaze was trained on the hotel, counting floors and picking out the windows of the suite where she had grown up. Everyone wanted everything to change, all the time. Newer, improved, bigger, better. It was absurd. Some things deserved to stay just the way they were. And Callender House was one of them. Her father had entrusted her with it, and she wasn’t going to let him down.
It was a little disconcerting that she couldn’t pick out the old suite’s windows automatically, however. Once upon a time, she’d been able to do it in her sleep—she’d spent the first eighteen years of her life there, after all. She took another step backward, craning her neck as she counted up each floor, then over five windows—or was it six? The perspective was a little different now that she was taller.
She stepped backward again, squinting now, trying to remember—until a pair of very strong hands thrust her forward and a cab blared its horn.
She was still stumbling for balance when she heard something else hit the pavement with a wet splat, and then an irritable, “Oh, bloody hell.”
Uh-oh.
She grabbed hold of a parking meter to right herself and turned around to find a cabbie giving her a one-fingered salute as he drove off—and a rock star covered with what looked like a mocha latte, an exploded suitcase and a dropped backpack at his feet. The sidewalk was littered with jeans and T-shirts.
He looked like a rock star, at least. First there were the faded jeans and what looked to Olivia like motorcycle boots, black leather that had seen better days and plenty of wear. Then the layered shirts, a long-sleeved gray one under a short-sleeved dark blue one with Mick Jagger’s luscious pout on the front. Finally there was his hair, dark and shaggy around his face—and splattered with creamy white foam, just like his face. And the white snakes of his iPod, which he pulled from his ears and shook over the sidewalk, spraying foam and coffee.
She swallowed hard. “I’m so sorry. So sorry. You don’t even know…”
“I can imagine well enough,” he said with a dry smile, shaking latte out of his hair like a wet dog. His eyes were gray, she noticed. Deep, stormy gray, and fixed on her face. “You and that cab would have ended in blood and tears, now wouldn’t you?”
“Um…” She knew, vaguely, that her mouth was hanging open, but she couldn’t seem to close it, much less find an intelligent response. She hadn’t expected the British accent. Something inside her melted into a warm puddle.
She’d dreamed about men like him. Well, fantasized was probably more accurate. In her sleeping dreams, men tended to be a strange combination of Cary Grant and that guy from the Verizon commercials.
But men like this one, those were the kind in her daydreams. Except this one was possibly better.
And she’d…splattered him.
“You’re all right, yeah?” he asked, wiping his face. “I didn’t mean to shove you quite so hard.”
“You…Well, you saved me from being hit by a cab.” She shrugged as a heated blush spread over her cheeks. “I’m fine. You’re…”
“A bit of a wreck at the moment, I know.” He grinned at her then, a sudden flash of mischief and sunshine. Licking his upper lip, he added with a wink, “Brilliant latte.”
Completely cool. Completely confident.
Completely unlike any man she had ever met.
In her head, there was no problem. She would say something witty, or smart, or maybe even flirty. He would lean in and flirt back, invite her to dinner. She would give him a mysterious little wave when she left, maybe flip her hair a bit. In her imagination, hair-flipping got them every time.
But this wasn’t her imagination. This was real, right here, right now. This was overwhelming.
Especially when he pulled up the hems of his T-shirts and wiped his face off, revealing a lean, muscled abdomen.
So much for offering him a towel from the hotel. So much for any hope of getting her racing pulse under control.
And he wasn’t even going to give her a chance to try. “Bit of a trick, walking backward, yeah?” he said, letting his shirts fall and wiping his hands on the back of his jeans.
“Oh. Right.” Her cheeks were on fire. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see an actual flame lick at the tip of her nose. “That was…dumb.”
“Not in an empty meadow, maybe.” His grin was as lopsided as the hotel’s nameplate now, and a lot more appealing. “On a Manhattan street now…”
“I know. I am sorry.” She gestured helplessly at his ruined shirts, at the empty cup on the pavement.
“No worries, love. Pleasure to meet you…?”
“Olivia.” She put her hand in his when he offered it, and an actual thrill of excitement raced through her. Which was silly, because he was simply being nice. It was probably a British thing. Nothing to do with her at all.
“Rhys,” he said, and she realized he was still holding her hand. His was nice, firm and warm and stronger than she would have imagined for a man with such long, lean fingers.
But she couldn’t stand here all day holding hands, mooning after him like some teenager, even if she wanted to. It was time to step away. Get back to work. Take her tattered dignity back to her office and mend it with a big fat muffin.
Right. She was stepping away now. Yes, now.
Except for the fact that it wouldn’t be polite to leave him to the scattered contents of his suitcase all by himself, would it?
She untangled her fingers from his and knelt down to pick up a pair of jeans—and found a jumbled pile of boxer briefs beneath them. She dropped the jeans with a little gasp of embarrassment, and looked up to see Rhys grinning at her.
“I’ll take the unmentionables, love.”
If she kept blushing like this, she was going to have to stick her face in the freezer to cool off.
When Rhys had crammed the last of his shirts and a scuffed dop kit into his suitcase and zipped it up, Olivia straightened up and took a step toward the curb. “It was very nice to meet you, Rhys.” Her cheeks were still flushed with heat, but she managed another smile before she said, “I have to…well, I have things…”
There was no denying it. She couldn’t flirt if her life depended on it. She sounded as if English wasn’t even her first language. Finally, tearing herself away from the amused grin that still lit up his face, she ended with, “Well, good-bye.”
Then she turned around and started for the hotel, pretending she couldn’t feel him watching her go, and trying not to wonder what her butt looked like in her old gray trousers. Not sexy, she was sure. Definitely not cool.
Not that it mattered. She could dream about guys like Rhys, but that was where the sentence ended. Guys like Rhys were all rock and roll and straight-up whiskey and motorcycles. She was Top 40 and hot tea and the occasional bicycle. Some things definitely weren’t meant to change.
Guys like Rhys were what daydreams were for.
And as she pushed through the revolving door of the hotel, she figured daydreaming about Rhys could happily take her right through lunch with Uncle Stuart.
If nothing else, she did daydreams like a pro.
Not what he’d expected from New York, Rhys Spencer thought as he righted his battered suitcase and slung his backpack over his shoulder again. All right, yeah, getting knocked over and splattered with latte was a bit what he’d expected, but Olivia whatever-her-name-was? Not in a million.
If you believed the movies and the telly, which he usually didn’t, New York women wore black like a bloody uniform and were about as likely to be caught woolgathering on a sidewalk