“No, I’ll have it between my teeth.” His deadpan comeback startled her into laughter. “How will I know you?”
“I have brown hair in a bun, a brown suit and glasses.” Boy, that sounded boring. She frowned at her outfit. No time to go home and change. Oh, well. She was near the end of tax season and didn’t have much clean laundry anyway.
“Okay, Keeley. I’ll see you at three.”
“See you, Dane.” She hung up and drummed her nails on the desktop. No time for a manicure, either, noting her buffed natural fingertips.
Oh, well. It wasn’t as if she needed stripper nails like Sugar’s anyway.
2
KEELEY PUSHED through the bakery door and dangled her wet umbrella over the mat. A spring squall had broken over the city after her intriguing phone conversation and had driven rain under her umbrella, spattering her glasses and pulling damp strands of hair loose to straggle along her cheeks.
She probably looked like something the cat dragged in, but after all, accountants didn’t get paid for their hairdos, just what was under it.
The teenage girl behind the counter greeted her with a slight Polish accent. Yum, she loved Eastern European bakeries. None of that low-fat, high-fiber, no-taste nonsense.
Maybe one treat. Since she was sitting at her desk more and more, she had to be careful of her carb intake. Hmm, chocolate chip cookies, donuts, sweet rolls, apple crisps and—ooh, cherry tarts. With a delicious sense of irony, she ordered the tart and a skinny latte.
She put her change in the tip jar and carried her coffee and sweet to a table on the side wall, where she could watch the door without being in its direct line of sight. A tall potted plant blocked her a bit, but she’d manage.
She placed a napkin on her lap and carefully bit into the tart, the flaky crust breaking apart on her tongue. The cherry filling was better than the usual canned pie filling, with vanilla and almond extracts mixed in. Delish. She really needed to treat herself more often. After all, a few extra minutes—or hours—on the elliptical trainer would take care of it.
Not quite three o’clock. Keeley’d have time to finish her tart and get down to business with Binky’s buddy, Dane. The bell over the glass door chimed, and she peeped though the leaves like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, sizing up her prey.
Rowrrr. A big blond guy walked in, black trench coat dripping on the floor mat. He flipped his wet hair off his forehead and wiped his eyes. Keeley couldn’t exactly tell at this distance, but she guessed they were probably blue. He had the total Nordic-god, lusty-viking-raider look going on, probably several inches taller than her own five foot eleven and three quarters.
He ordered a drink and took his change with a ring-free left hand, promptly dropping the coins into the tip jar. Not a cheapskate. Then he smiled at the girl behind the counter, and dimples popped up in his cheek. She blushed and stammered, and Keeley shifted in her seat. Come on, open that trench coat. She wanted to see if he had a gut like other big guys often did.
As if he’d heard her mental begging, he undid his coat buttons. No way. No way. The trim blond hunk wearing a white shirt and red tie couldn’t be Binky Bingham’s right-hand man. She’d imagined some older guy in his forties or fifties who just happened to have a voice as sexy and sinful as dark chocolate. This guy was some coffee junkie popping in for his afternoon fix.
As if he’d felt her astonished stare, he turned to meet her eyes. Keeley froze, hunter becoming the prey as he stalked toward her through the coffee shop. For a big guy, he moved easily through the maze of tables with a loose-hipped stride.
He stopped next to her table and stared at her. His eyes were blue, after all—cool blue like a spring sky. “Is this seat taken?”
As one final test, she raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know. Do you have a rose?”
He grinned. “Sorry to disappoint, but it’s impossible to drink coffee with a stem between my teeth.”
Bingo. “Dane Weiss?” She stood and had the unusual sensation of looking well up into a man’s face. A welcome change from having short guys staring into her cleavage. “Keeley Davis.”
“Pleased to meet you.” He set his coffee on the table and enfolded her hand in his own large one. Her fingers, almost always chilly, tingled as he warmed them. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
Just long enough to get herself all hot and bothered. “Not at all. It was nice to get out of the office for a break. I usually push myself pretty hard.”
“Me, too.” He released her hand, and she missed his warmth. “Mind if I sit?”
“Be my guest.” She nodded at the seat across from her. He sat on the small wooden chair, testing his size on it first before settling all the way. It looked like a child’s chair under him.
“Cherry tart?”
“What do you mean?” Sugar hadn’t told Binky about her, had she? She promised she wouldn’t.
He gestured at her pastry. “I see you like cherry tarts.”
“Oh. Yes.” No reason to get defensive. “They’re my favorites.”
“Mine, too. I grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, and we have several cherry trees in the orchard. My mom makes the best cherry jam, pies, tarts, you name it.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had fresh cherry pie.” She’d mostly grown up on snack pies her mother had brought home from the convenience store.
“You don’t know what you’re missing. The fruit explodes on your tongue, a bit tangy at first, but then mellowing into pure sweetness.”
Keeley tried not to gape at him. My God, the man should be narrating erotica audiobooks. Cherries exploding into pure sweetness on his tongue? She really, really wanted to see that tongue in action. “You sound like you miss it. Would you like some of mine?” She pushed her plate toward him.
“Oh, no, I couldn’t eat your sweets on you.”
Oh, yes, he could. “Really, go ahead. It’s a big tart.” And so, apparently, was she. Old habits died hard.
He smiled at her the way he’d smiled at the teenage counter girl. Friendliness, but nothing more. “Just a small taste.”
She didn’t want friendliness. She wanted him to feel the same achy awareness that he was stirring in her. And during tax season, of all times. “Take as much as you want. Big men like you have big appetites.”
He gave a quick blink at that statement, but broke off half the tart and took a bite with white teeth that had obviously received above and beyond the recommended daily allowance of dairy products. “Mmmm, not as good as Mom’s, but still delicious.”
“Isn’t it?” She swirled her finger through the cherry filling and slowly sucked it clean. He sipped his coffee, the only hint of interest a slight flaring of his nostrils.
Good grief, the only way she could be any more obvious was if she unbuttoned her boring, off-white blouse and flashed him her rack. But she did admire self-control. Such a rare quality in a man.
DANE DRANK his coffee, hoping his rain-dampened hair would mask the fact that he’d started sweating at the sight of Keeley sucking cherry filling off her finger. “So about the project.”
“Yes.” She flipped open her leather-bound notepad, all business now. “Tell me what’s going on.”
He quietly filled her in on Binky’s suspicions of his grandson and she nodded as she took notes. “I see,” she began. “The subject of your investigation is the chief financial officer who has access to pretty much every account in the company, but other people obviously have access as well.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”