Passion's Baby. Catherine Spencer

its drawbacks. There was only so much intelligent conversation one could hold with a dog, even one as smart as Bounder.

      Apparently, Liam McGuire reached the same conclusion because a few days later, instead of leaving an offering of food, he left a note.

      You can come for dinner tonight, if you want to, and bring the dog. Seven o’clock.

      Not the most gracious invitation, perhaps, but a gilt-engraved summons issued by royalty could not have thrilled her more. “See you at seven,” she scribbled back, anchored the reply under a rock on his porch railing, and, in a fever of anticipation, rushed home to make wild raspberry tart.

      While it baked, she hauled the big tin bath tub in from the back porch to the middle of the kitchen floor, filled it with water heated in a pail on the stove, and soaked luxuriously. She shampooed the sea salt out of her hair, then rinsed it in cool water from the rain barrel outside. She creamed perfumed lotion all over her sun-dried skin and fished out the meager supply of cosmetics which hadn’t seen the light of day since she’d arrived on the island. She ironed one of the few dresses she’d brought with her, a sleeveless, delphinium blue cotton affair with a full skirt and fitted waist.

      After all that, when seven o’clock rolled around, she knew the most frightful attack of nerves, wiped the lipstick off her mouth, threw the dress to the back of the closet, and put on a clean pair of red shorts and a matching top.

      “As if it matters what I wear,” she told Bounder. “I could show up stark naked and he probably wouldn’t care, as long as I don’t presume too much on his hospitality.”

      He’d acted against his better judgment and was living to regret it. Had regretted it, if truth be known, ever since he’d slunk away from her front step after leaving the note. Cabin fever must have taken hold without his realizing it. Why else would he deliberately sabotage his well-ordered life by inviting her and her demented dog to intrude on it? And why would he waste the better of the afternoon trying to tart the place up to look more than it really was? The picnic table on the grass below the porch had seen better days, and paper towels hardly qualified as fine linen.

      He poured himself a glass of wine from the ice chest at his side and wheeled himself over to the railing overlooking the beach. It was almost a quarter after seven and she struck him as the punctual type, so the odds were she’d changed her mind about joining him for dinner, which was fine by him. It wasn’t as if her share of the food would go to waste. The energy it had taken for him to organize the meal had left him ravenous.

      Funny thing, though, how a man’s mood could shift. That afternoon, while he’d readied the outdoor fire pit for action, he’d found himself whistling under his breath. He’d believed he was looking forward to the evening, to watching her face break into a smile, to hearing her laughter.

      After a while, a guy got sick of the sound of his own voice, and sicker still of the same old thoughts chasing around inside his head. Was he ever going to walk under his own steam again? Was he finished as the expert everyone called on to design a new offshore project?

      He needed distraction and under normal circumstances, he’d have found it with other people. With women—though not with a particular woman because that usually led to complications.

      No, Jane Ogilvie had done him a favor by canceling out, no doubt about it. Start feeding her, and she’d be moving in before he had time to bolt the door. She had a thoroughly domesticated look about her, and if proof was what he needed to back up the opinion, she’d provided it with all that home baking. So what if she’d never actually produced bran muffins? She managed to make just about everything else, which amounted to the same thing.

      He took another swig of the wine and rubbed his newly shaven jaw irritably. Scraping off several days’ growth of beard had left his skin tender as a newborn baby’s backside—and that was all her fault, too. If she hadn’t moved in next door, he’d have remained a contented, unkempt slob of a hermit, instead of jumping through hoops trying to make himself look half decent when the only facilities at his disposal were a cold-water shower and a pint-size mirror hanging over the kitchen sink.

      From the corner of his eye, he caught a movement to the left of the porch, a flutter of red and a blur of black, followed shortly thereafter by the thud of paws galloping up the wooden ramp to the porch, and the unmistakable whiff of ripe berries.

      To counteract the completely absurd rush of satisfaction threatening to wipe out his ill humor, he shuffled lower in the wheelchair and glowered determinedly at the sun sliding down in the west. Why the devil couldn’t she have stayed at home where she belonged?