and changing since those days. Lucky, too, that he’d managed to put her off so completely with the very first words that had come out of his mouth. If anything, it had been a matter of annoyance at first glance.
And if there was one thing she was utterly sure of, it was that Mr. Jack Fortune posed no threat to her state of mind or the pact she had made with her sisters. If for some reason her hormones decided to go berserk and she was tempted to renege on that pact, it wasn’t about to be with a man who used his tongue as a carving knife at Thanksgiving.
For one thing, she’d seen warmer eyes on a mackerel lying on display at the fish market than the ones that were turned on her now.
She was acutely aware that they were being left alone in this cavern of an office suite. Patrick Fortune waved to her as he took out his cell phone and slipped away into a private alcove where he could rendezvous with his wife of more than forty years.
Must be nice, she thought, to love someone that much, to want to remain married to them for so many years. Like her parents. Too bad it was never going to happen to her.
But she had her business to keep her busy, she reminded herself. And so it was time to get back to that business.
She looked at Jack. “You’re not happy about this, are you?”
“Whether I’m happy has nothing to do with this,” he told her coldly, eyeing the purse she had tucked under her arm. It was one of those flimsy clutch things big enough for a change purse, a driver’s license and a set of keys. She obviously hadn’t brought any papers with her that he could look over. It figured.
“Since you don’t seem to have anything with you, why don’t we make an appointment for another time?”
She looked at him blankly. Maybe he should be speaking in monosyllabic words.
“Sometime when you have something with you for me to look over.”
“‘Something’?”
He took a breath, then spelled it out for her. Slowly. “Blueprints for the space you’ll need. Inventory of the items you’ll need on hand. Everything from shipping boxes to Bunsen burners. Cash-flow projections,” he added for good measure, wondering if she was following him at all.
“I don’t use a Bunsen burner,” she informed him tersely.
Jack looked down at her, then found himself caught in the fire in her eyes. He was about to say something else when he suddenly became aware that her very trim figure was just inches away from him and that something quite apart from a business meeting was going on here. It was as if all the pores in his body had suddenly opened up and were inhaling her very feminine, very unsettling perfume.
The woman was female with a capital “F.”
The very last thing he wanted in his life.
With effort, he steered himself back to his indignation. “Do you even have any idea what it takes to set up a business?”
She bit her lower lip. “I—”
He made himself look at her eyes instead of her mouth. Like a man sitting in the middle of a boat that had suddenly broken apart, he felt compelled to clutch at something for survival. In this case, he needed to drive her away. “Did anyone tell you that most businesses fail in their first year?”
She hated his high-handed tone and it took effort for her not to turn on her heel and just walk out.
She could feel her nails digging into her palms as she struggled to rein in the temper she had inherited from her mother. This pompous ass was actually talking down to her, treating her as if she was some kind of a kindergarten dropout. Just because his last name was Fortune didn’t give him the right to act as if she was some kind of mental incompetent.
Because she owed it to Patrick not to kill his son, she forced a smile to her lips. “Then I guess we have nothing to worry about.”
“Meaning?” Jack demanded, the word scratching his throat as it climbed out. Jack felt like a man who was losing his mind. Part of him wanted to walk out and slam the door on this woman. And another part of him wanted to find out what full lips with a slash of pink lipstick tasted like.
“Meaning this isn’t my first year.”
Flipping open her purse, she took out a folded magazine article. Very precisely she unfolded it, then handed it to him.
“I’ve been in business for two years now. My store was located in Denver.” She took the article—clipped from a local Denver Sunday supplement; a story featuring her unique designs—out of his hand, noting that he hadn’t even glanced at it. He kept his eyes on her. “I’m not a virgin, Mr. Fortune.”
Chapter Four
It took Jack longer than he would have liked to pull himself together. “Bragging, Ms. Johansen?”
Gloria raised her chin, a bantam rooster unafraid of the fox.
“It’s Mrs. Johansen—or it was.” She was seriously thinking of changing her name back to simply Mendoza but for now she kept that to herself. “But since we’re going to be working together, I think you should call me Gloria, Jack.” She looked him in the eye as she deliberately emphasized his name. “And what I’m saying—” God, it was hard to talk to this man without clenching her teeth and pushing the words out “—is that I had a good business going in Denver.”
“Then why move?”
If there was one thing that got the hairs on the back of her neck to stand up straight, it was having to explain herself. She’d resisted the truth when the questions had come from her parents and she liked them a whole lot better than she did this intrusive man.
But she needed this boost. The Fortune backing meant a great deal in these parts and she was not about to turn her back on that just because Patrick Fortune had had the distinct misfortune of siring one very mean-spirited son of a gun.
Telling herself that pride went before the fall, Gloria forced her lips into a wide, beatific smile. “Because this is home and I decided it was time to come home.” And then, because she hated being on the hot seat, she turned the tables and asked him a question.
“Where’s home for you?”
He’d been unprepared for her prying. And there was no way he was about to discuss anything private with a complete stranger. “That doesn’t matter.”
To which she responded by widening her smile. He could feel it slipping in under his skin. Warming him. But whether that was due to annoyance or just a man-woman thing, he couldn’t tell.
“Home always matters,” she told him in a voice that was far too sultry for the message it delivered.
Jack fought the effects the only way he knew how: with a sarcastic remark he knew would put her off. “That sounds like something you’d find embroidered on a kitchen towel.”
Undaunted, her smile never waned. “The kitchen’s usually the heart of a home, especially in my house when I was growing up.”
She kept throwing him curves. Did the woman suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder? “Just what does any of this have to do with business?”
This time he noticed that her smile did frost over just a little. “I’d thought you might want to know a little about the person whose business you’re dipping your fingers into.”
Jack frowned. She made it sound as if he was deliberately invading her. As if he even had any interest in such a small venture. She could just take herself to one of their branch offices and arrange for a loan if that was what this was all going to boil down to.
“There’s no ‘dipping,’” he informed her tersely, “there’ll just be straightening.”
Temper. Remember to keep your temper, Gloria cautioned herself. There wasn’t anything