Nancy winced. “Oh, no. I see where this is going.”
“And that you’re definitely not married,” he concluded. “She also told me you’d be here for her birthday. She wanted to introduce us.”
“Oh, God.” Nancy turned pink. That manipulative schemer.
Lucia would never have done this to her if this guy was taken. A swift glance at Knightly’s left hand confirmed that he wore no ring.
A glance that he intercepted. His subtle eye smile deepened. Her mortification deepened, too. “I’m, ah, sorry about that. You being put on the spot, I mean. Lucia couldn’t stand it that I’m single.”
“Yeah, that was my impression. It is really strange, though.”
She covered her hot cheeks with her hands. “What’s strange?”
“Strange that you’re single. You’re not what I expected.”
Don’t ask it. Don’t ask it. Don’t. “Ah…what did you expect?”
“Well, she told me you were beautiful. I could see that from the pictures. But she didn’t tell me how beautiful. Photos can’t show that.”
Beautiful? Oh, God. Strange, wild energy crackled through her nerves, as if he had touched her.
Out of nowhere, she started to imagine how it would feel if he did.
She started to vibrate. Strange that she was single? Whoo-hah. Little did he know. She forced her voice not to shake. “Don’t flatter me.”
“Who’s flattering?”
She looked away, flustered. She had no idea what to say to him.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly after a long moment. “I can’t believe I just said that to you, right now. It’s a bad time. Please forget I said it.”
“Um, it’s okay,” she murmured. Right. Like she could.
The easy, unexpected intimacy she had felt with him before was gone. Knightly’s face was cool and distant as they exchanged numbers. He and his assistant, Eoin, would unload supplies that day and start the kitchen tomorrow, though she had to clean stuff out of it first. They set a time to meet for the following morning, and that was that.
It gave Nancy a pang to hand over Lucia’s house keys to a man she’d only just met, but the thought of having someone in the place was obscurely comforting. She hated the thought of the house lying empty and bereft.
After that exchange, there was no good reason to hang around. She put the carefully wrapped bronze sculpture into the car and took off. She felt uncomfortably guilty for being irritated with Lucia for setting her up. At the same time, she was missing her desperately. She felt so raw, so shaky. Desperate to glom on to something else to think about. And God knows, she’d been twitchy about the whole issue of dating and romance even before Lucia’s death. It occurred to her that Lucia had probably filled Knightly in on her daughter’s string of romantic disasters. The thought made her cringe.
The first time her fiancé had dumped her had been bad. The second time, worse. The third time, she’d gotten philosophical about it.
Maybe she would have to resign herself to never having children. Content herself with a series of cats. Or do what Lucia had done. Adopt some half-grown kids who needed a home. There was more than one way to have a family. The center of a woman’s life did not have to be a man. And men didn’t seem to enjoy being in the center of her life. By all accounts, it was a prickly, uncomfortable place to be.
Nancy’s sisters and Lucia had despised Freedy, Ron, and Peter. But was it their fault they’d fallen out of love? You loved someone or you didn’t. She didn’t want to be married to a man who didn’t.
She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. She must lack some innate womanly skill. She should have practiced gazing up through fluttering eyelashes, hanging on their every word. Puffing up their egos.
But she’d always been too busy managing their careers, making them take their vitamins, making sure their socks matched.
Freedy had said that she was too controlling. Ron had told her that she was too driven. Peter had told her that she was too prosaic, that she just couldn’t join him in that place full of dreams where he needed to live in order to make the magic happen. She lived in another world, he had explained.
Huh. He sure hadn’t minded her finding lucrative gigs for him from that other world. Too bad watching her scurry around to do the scut work for his career had been such a turnoff. Prosaic Nancy, the detail freak. And that damn cell phone of hers, ringing all the time, shattering his precious creative trance. Oops. So sorry.
Not that she was bitter or anything.
The strange, raw mood fostered brutal honesty. She stared, hot-eyed, out the windshield. The problem with her fiancés had been sex. Sex had always been problematic for her. She did not like feeling vulnerable, squished, or squeezed. Being overwhelmed in any way, physical or emotional, made her run away in her head. She became unreachable and detached. Instant Popsicle.
Her lovers, not surprisingly, had gotten impatient with this.
The thought of having one of those tense conversations about intimacy issues with Liam Knightly made her cringe.
After Freedy’s defection, she’d sworn off romance. Celibacy was less painful. No bikini waxing, scratchy lingerie, or contraception.
But the intensity of Knightly’s gaze made her feel as if he’d seen something in her she’d never imagined she could be. She wanted to see him again, to see if it was a fluke. A trick of the light. A passing spasm.
An experiment doomed to failure, of course. The guy was way too big. And he exuded an aura of controlled power that made her feel vulnerable even when she was fully clothed and an entire room away. She could only imagine how that vibe would feel if they were naked. Skin to skin. And oh, shit—
She screeched to a stop at the red light.
She, Nancy D’Onofrio, the born multitasker, couldn’t even think about the man while driving.
Chapter
2
Liam followed Nancy’s car with his eyes. Her taillights were a thread of connection until the car turned. He wanted to sprint to the end of the block, catch another glimpse. He didn’t. He had that much self-control.
Though that was about as much as could be said for it.
He let his breath out. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he hadn’t seen that one coming. He ran down the steps, and got into the truck. Eoin, the Irish kid fresh from County Wicklow who worked for him, gave him a questioning glance. “So? What are we doing?” he asked.
He shrugged. “We’re getting on with it.”
Eoin’s blue eyes widened. “The daughter wants to go ahead?”
He nodded, squeezing his hand around the sense memory of Nancy D’Onofrio’s cool, slender fingers. Eoin caught the vibe, the sensitive, curious little bastard, and shot him a sidelong glance.
“Daughter’s a looker, eh?” he commented.
“She just put her mother in the ground yesterday,” Liam snarled.
Eoin mumbled something apologetic that made Liam feel like hypocritical shit. Like he had a right to scold, after what he’d said. What the fuck was he thinking, coming on to a woman who’d just buried her mother? Still wearing her funeral dress? Red-eyed from crying? She probably took him for one of those slimy opportunists who preyed on grieving women. Idiot words, popping out of his mouth like they were spring-loaded. Telling her how beautiful she was. Christ, his tongue had probably dangled out of his head like a slavering hound while he said it.
Lucia D’Onofrio had been a classy old lady. Funny, smart, with a sharp, cutting sense of humor. She’d reminded him of Mom. He’d known Lucia for only a few weeks, but even so, her death made him feel as if something had been taken from him. A fucking burglar? What a stupid, offensive shame. It made him restless and furious.