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.It seemed to be something she did very easily, when she put her mind to it.“Sometimes I miss the sharing, the closeness.But I’ve learned to compensate.A man doesn’t have to take a wife to find companionship, if you get my drift.”That pretty much killed the conversation until they approached the outskirts of Salem where they stopped for a sandwich.“Not up to your omelet standard, by any means,” he told her, inspecting the sparse layers of his pastrami on rye.“Where’d you learn to cook like that anyway, at the Cordon Bleu in Paris?”“Among other places, yes.”He gulped and just about swallowed his sandwich whole.“You’re kidding, right?”“No.” She picked daintily at the shredded lettuce hanging over the edge of her chicken salad on whole wheat.“I spent eighteen months at the New York Restaurant School, followed that with nine months in Paris, and finished up in Brescia at the Italian Institute for Advanced Culinary and Pastry Arts, with a couple of externships at internationally renowned restaurants thrown in between for good measure.”“Cripes, no wonder you make a good cup of coffee and the best cornmeal muffins in the western hemisphere!”“Mmm-hmm.” Amusement danced in her eyes.“You really enjoyed making a damn fool of me, didn’t you?”She burst out laughing, a ripple of sound as sweet as the music of the stream running down beside his house, and he was stunned by the transformation.He’d thought her eyes were her best feature, but he saw now that she had a lovely, sexy mouth, a beautiful smile.“I did get a kick out it, yes.”“I can see I’m going to have my hands full with you.” Too bad his gaze happened to settle on her equally lovely breasts when he said that.Too bad, as well, that he couldn’t control the inappropriate stirring in his loins.She was a client, and that put her firmly off-limits as far as anything personal went.But it was a pity.She had the kind of subtle appeal that crept up on a guy.Under different circumstances, they could have enjoyed quite a fling together.“Have I spilled something on my shirt?” she asked him, so pointedly that he realized he was still staring.He cleared his throat and tore his gaze away.“No.I was just…thinking.”Suspicious as a Sunday schoolteacher patrolling the choir stalls in search of unseemly goings-on, she said, “About what?”“The best place to start,” he said, knitting his brows in what he hoped passed for a reflective scowl.“When we get to Vancouver, I mean.”“I should think, by then, you’ll have had enough for one day.”He checked his watch and pushed away from the lunch counter.“Could be.We’re going to hit the Tacoma-Seattle area right in the worst of the rush hour, and who knows how long we’ll be held up at the border crossing.Drink up, and let’s get a move on.”They covered the stretch between Salem and Portland in chitchat which, though casual enough on the surface, in fact resulted in a whole slew of personal information being exchanged.That was the problem with the enforced intimacy brought about by spending hours on end in a car with someone.It made strangers seem familiar, and lowered a guy’s guard to the point where he revealed things better kept to himself.The conversation finally petered out though when she lowered her seat to a reclining position and, settling her sunglasses more firmly on her nose, let out a mighty yawn.Cripes, if I was boring you, all you had to do was say so! he felt like telling her.On the other hand, her snooze did present him with the chance to make better time.Whistling under his breath, he kept one eye on her and the other on the road.When, after a good five minutes, she hadn’t moved a muscle, he turned on his radar detector and let the speedometer needle inch up another notch.“I’m watching you,” she said, her disembodied voice floating up accusingly.“Slow down.”“I thought you were sleeping.”“Uh-uh.Just thinking.”“About?”“You.”“Oh, yeah?” Her admission sent a strange jolt of awareness through his gut.“How so?”“You’re very handy in the kitchen.That steak you served last night was top-notch.”“So?”“So did you do all the cooking when you were married, or is it a skill you picked up after the divorce?”“Mostly after the divorce,” he said, wondering why she kept harking back to the topic of his failed marriage.“It was a question of doing that, or living on leftover pizza and beer.”“You could have hired a housekeeper.”“Not a chance,” he said.“I don’t need some woman underfoot all day, ironing my undershorts and overcooking the vegetables.”“That’s a pretty sexist attitude! Not all housekeepers are women, any more than all good chefs are men.”“Somehow, I don’t see myself living with a man, even one in a servant capacity.Alone and doing for myself suits me just fine.”“Do you ever think about remarrying?”“I already told you, I’m lousy marriage material.But just in case you’re wondering about my sexual preferences, I do like women.I just don’t want one moving in on me.”“Well, I didn’t think those were your bath crystals,” she said, hinting pretty broadly that she’d like to know who did own them.No dice, cookie! he thought.“But they were my condoms.”That shut her up.She pulled her glasses back over her eyes and didn’t say another word for the next thirty miles.Traffic started to build just north of Olympia, becoming so congested as it approached Tacoma that, rather than fight it, he swung off the I-5 onto Highway 16 and followed it west as far as Gig Harbor.“There’s got to be someplace decent where we can get dinner,” he said, cruising down the main street, “and I need to stretch my legs.”“I offered to drive so you could take a break.”“Thanks, but no thanks! A nervous Nellie like you doesn’t belong behind the wheel of a car like this.You’ve been hitting a nonexistent brake so hard this last hour, it’s a wonder your leg hasn’t fallen off.”“Because you drive like a maniac!”“You forget,” he said, pulling into a parking space half a block from a waterfront restaurant, “I spent a lot of years in a patrol car, chasing the bad guys.”“Well, you’re not in a patrol car now!”He stroked his hand down her face.“Relax, darlin’.We’ll have a nice leisurely dinner, take a walk along the harbor, and by the time we hit the road again, the commuters will have gone home and it’ll be smooth sailing all the way to the Canadian border.”She blinked slowly, giving him a close-up view of those ridiculous lashes, and nestled her cheek against his palm.“Promise?”“Promise.Now let’s eat.”They secured a table at the window and ordered wild salmon, caught that morning.It arrived flanked by asparagus spears, baby potatoes drizzled with butter and chopped parsley, and slivers of roasted red and yellow peppers.“I guess that once we get to Vancouver,” he remarked, as they finished off the meal with strawberry cheesecake and coffee, “the first thing I have to do after I drop you off at your place, is find a hotel.Any place close by that you’d recommend?”“No.You’ll stay with us.”“Us?” He finished his iced tea and got to his feet.“With my mother and me.”“You’re still living at home?”“Temporarily.Until the baby’s found.”“And then?”She licked a smudge of strawberry syrup from her lip, once again drawing his unwilling attention to a mouth he was finding increasingly fascinating.“I’m not sure I’ll stay in Vancouver.”“You think you might go back to Europe?”“Possibly.”Why did he care? he wondered, ticked off by the stab of dismay he felt at the thought of her living half a world away
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