But she was looking at him, her big blue eyes drawing him in deeper and deeper.
“No experience,” he told her, deliberately misunderstanding her. “No kids.”
“I didn’t mean—but you were so good with Kara, I just assumed...”
“You’ve known me six months,” he reminded her. “If I had a family, you would have seen them by now.”
“Why don’t you?” she whispered, then sucked in a gulp of air, shook her head and said, “Sorry. Sorry. Don’t know why I asked that. It’s none of my business.”
“Not a big secret,” he said with a shrug. “I spent the past ten years working, building my business. A wife and kids would have slowed me down.”
She blinked. “Well, that’s honest.”
“You’ll always get honest from me, Annie.” But his brand of honesty wasn’t the kind her type of woman wanted to hear. She wouldn’t be interested in a man who didn’t want to tie himself to a family. A home. And if he had any sense at all, he’d be pulling back from her right now.
“Um...”
Just do it, he told himself. Bust out of this conversation, rebuild that wall of formality and step away. His brain knew what to do, but his body was fighting him.
“I’m all finished, Mommy!”
A small voice shattered the growing tension between him and Annie, and Noah knew he should be grateful for the respite. He was attracted to her, sure, but Annie Moore and her daughter had complications written all over them. Complications he didn’t want or need.
“That’s great, honey,” Annie said, turning to face her daughter as if she, too, were thankful for an excuse to tear her gaze from his. “Why don’t you get your backpack and we’ll head home.” She checked her watch. “The bus is due in half an hour.”
“I don’t like the bus,” Kara complained, scuffing one shoe against the floor. “It smells bad.”
“Bus?” Noah leaned one hip against his desk and folded his arms over his chest.
Annie sighed. “My car’s in the shop. Something about points and pistons...or something like that anyway. It’ll be ready by next week. Meantime, the bus goes right by our house.”
“And smells bad,” Kara reminded everyone.
Why the idea of Annie and her daughter standing at a bus stop bothered him, Noah didn’t know. After all, Crescent Bay was a small town, and they’d no doubt be safe enough. Still, imagining the two of them on a damned bench when he had a perfectly good car parked outside was just irritating.
“I’ll take you home.”
“No,” Annie said, immediately shaking her head. “That’s not necessary at all.”
“Yay!” Kara crowed, and swung her pink backpack over her shoulder.
Odd, but it bothered him that she was willing to turn down a ride with him in favor of a public bus. Hell, he ought to be thanking her. Instead, he said, “It’s just a ride, Annie.”
She looked undecided, but her daughter turned wide, pleading eyes up to her and said, “Please, Mommy? I don’t like the bus.”
Annie was wavering, Noah could tell. Clearly her daughter was her weak spot, and he liked that about her. A kid deserved to be her mother’s focus. Even if she might be uncomfortable asking for help, she was willing to bend for her daughter’s sake.
“I don’t know....”
“It’s not like you’re out of my way,” he said reasonably, silently wondering why he was trying so hard to convince her. “Crescent Bay is so small, everything is close by.”
“Well...”
“That means yes!” Kara grinned up at him as if they were conspirators and had just pulled off a tricky mission. Noah found himself grinning back. Hard to resist a six-year-old heartbreaker with a gap-toothed smile.
Annie laughed shortly. “All right, then. We accept. And thank you. Again.”
He looked down at her. He didn’t want her gratitude. He wanted...something he shouldn’t from a woman so tied to home and family. “You’re going to have to stop thanking me.”
“You make that difficult.”
“Can we go now?” Kara wanted to know.
“Yeah. We can go. But first...” He pulled his wallet from his pocket, flipped through the bills inside and pulled out a five. “Here’s your salary, young lady.”
Kara took it with wide eyes, then shot her mother a victorious look. “Wow. Look, Mommy! I got paid just like you!”
“Yes, you did, baby. And you have a very understanding boss, it seems.”
Noah moved to the closet, grabbed his suit jacket and slipped it on. When he turned around to face her, he was caught up in the beauty of her smile as she looked at him. His chest felt suddenly tight and air had to force its way into his lungs. Six months was all he could think. Six months she’d been in his office, and this was the first time he’d seen that smile of hers directed fully at him.
He wanted to see it again. Soon.
Then she spoke. “Honestly, Noah, as nice as this is, you don’t really have to do it.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I think I do.”
He took her elbow and a slow rush of warmth filled him. He steered her toward the door, pausing only long enough for her to scoop her purse off the edge of her desk.
Kara hurried out of the office in front of them, her quick, light footsteps tapping like a racing heartbeat. “It’s just a ride, Annie,” he said again.
But even he didn’t completely believe that.
* * *
OVER THE NEXT few days the atmosphere in the office seemed to shift somehow. Kara had always been there after school, of course, but before the incident with the shoes, Noah had more or less ignored the girl’s presence.
Now Kara was running in and out of his office with impunity, doing her “job.” And Noah didn’t seem to have a problem with it at all. Most men would have been irritated by Kara’s constant stream of chatter. Instead, Noah was infinitely patient with the girl. Annie was frankly amazed at how well her daughter and her boss were getting along. And to think she’d believed Noah Fielding to be a cold man.
She couldn’t have been more wrong. He treated Kara like a miniadult. He listened when she told him stories about school and gave her his full attention when she talked about Gracie and the princess shoes Kara was planning to buy for her friend.
He’d even insisted that Kara call him Noah, saying that Annie’s direction to her daughter to call him “Mr. Fielding” was not necessary. And between the two of them, Annie had simply lost that minor battle.
Hard to argue with the growing relationship between her little girl and Noah, though. Kara was blooming under his interest. Annie hadn’t even realized how much Kara needed a male influence in her life. With her father gone and no family to speak of, there really hadn’t been a male role model for Kara. Now it seemed that Noah had stepped into the position seamlessly, and Annie felt a tenderness growing inside her for him.
If there was one sure way to a mother’s heart, it was for a man to take an interest in her child. But the moment that thought entered her mind, she frowned a bit. What if there was an ulterior motive to Noah’s kindness? What if he was being attentive to Kara to get closer to Annie?
No.
If that had been his plan, she told herself, he wouldn’t have waited six months to begin it. She glanced up from her desk to see Kara’s pale blond head bent next to Noah’s dark one over his desk. He was explaining subtraction in a patient voice and Kara was hanging on his every word.
Annie couldn’t quite quell a rush of wishful thinking. Up until recently she’d avoided categorizing her boss as an attractive single man. She’d trained herself to pay no attention at all to Noah’s immense sexual energy. After all, she was his employee. But the truth was, he fairly oozed sensuality when he walked into a room, and he had the ability to send a shiver along her spine with a glance.
All of which was just a little disconcerting to a woman who hadn’t had a man in her life in six years.
“That’s why,” she muttered, keeping
her voice a husky whisper as she typed up one of Noah’s letters. “You’ve been too long on your own and now you’re starting to daydream. Do yourself a favor and cut it out.”
“Who are you talking to?”
Briefly, she closed her eyes and muffled a groan as Noah walked up to her desk. Please God, he didn’t hear me.
“Oh, just talking to myself.”
“About anything interesting?”
When she looked up at him, something inside her turned over in a slow, easy roll. “No,” she lied, then looked past him for Kara. Her daughter was sitting in Noah’s chair at his desk, still doing homework. “If she’s bothering you...”
“Do I look like I’m bothered?”
“No,” she admitted, sliding her gaze back to him. “You look like you’re being nice.”
“And this worries you?” One corner of his mouth lifted into a half smile.
Oh, yes, it really did, Annie thought. Because the kinder he was to Kara, the warmer Annie felt toward him.
“Should it?”
He perched on the edge of her desk and looked down at her. “Depends,” he said, “on what exactly you’re worried over. Me spending time with Kara, or the time I’ve been spending with you?”
“Well, that gets right to the point of things, doesn’t it?” she asked quietly, so that her daughter couldn’t overhear.
“I told you that you would always get honesty from me, Annie.”
“You did,” she agreed, still meeting his gaze. She wished she could read his thoughts in his eyes, but she knew, from long experience with the man, that he guarded what he was thinking very carefully. He had a perfect poker face, in fact. Annie had seen him use that talent to his advantage in negotiations on more than one occasion. He was able to get exactly what he wanted from his business opponent without giving away any more than he planned to.
But it was a different matter altogether having those cool, carefully shuttered eyes focused on her.
Wants she’d denied, desires she hadn’t given thought to in years were suddenly racing through her mind, her body. So far, Annie hadn’t been able to squash them.
Maybe it was time to try.
“So, Noah, being honest, why are you being so nice to us?” She was holding her breath as she waited for his answer and vaguely wondered if he could tell.
“Fair question,” he said with a nod. “The honest answer is...I don’t know.”
A short laugh shot from her throat. Not what she’d expected, but somehow his answer made her feel less...uncomfortable. “Okay, that’s honest.”
He smiled at her. “I could say that I like your daughter, but then you’d worry that I was cultivating her to get close to you.”
She flushed and he noticed.
“Already considered that, have you?”
“And dismissed it,” she admitted. “As long as we’re being honest, I did wonder. But if that was what you were up to, you would hardly have waited for months to try out your plan.”
“Unless I’m diabolical.”
Annie laughed again, as she was sure he’d meant her to.
“Look,” he said, standing up from the desk and shoving his hands into his slacks pockets, “I don’t have an ulterior motive in this. Kara was upset. It was easy enough to give her chores around here to help out.”
“And the rides home every night?”
He shook his head. “You’re really dissecting everything, aren’t you?”
“I suppose I am,” she said, giving her daughter another glance to make sure she was still in Noah’s office and out of earshot.
“There’s no ulterior motive,” he told her again, his eyes locking with hers as if he was willing her to believe him. “But if you want to pay me back, make me dinner.”
“Dinner?”
“Do I make you nervous?”
“Yes.”
He grinned. “You don’t have any reason to be.”
“Yet somehow that changes nothing,” she told him. Swarms of butterflies took off in the pit of her stomach. Her mouth went dry and her palms were damp. Being the sole focus of a man like Noah was enough to make any woman feel a little...out of her depth.
Yet at the same time there was a small thrill of excitement, edginess that she hadn’t felt in far too long. And realizing that made her say honestly, “As flattered as I am, I’m not in a position to indulge myself in a flirtation with the boss, Noah.”
“Who said anything about a flirtation?”
She shook her head. “Whatever it is you’re hinting at, then. I have Kara to think about.”
“It’s just dinner, Annie.”
Oh, it was much more than dinner, she thought, and she knew that he was aware of that fact, too. There was so much tension between them, she could hardly draw a breath. She was very much in danger of breaking her own solemn vow not to become involved with a man until Kara was older. And if she did, she could very well be risking the job she needed to keep the home they both loved.
But how could she say no to making him dinner when he’d been nothing but kind to both her and her daughter?
CHAPTER
FOUR
NOAH LOOKED AROUND the small, tidy kitchen and smiled to himself. Annie’s house was just what he would have expected. A cottage, filled with homey furniture, colorful rugs and pillows and a sense of welcome that had reached out to him the moment he walked through the door.
“I hope spaghetti’s okay,” Annie was saying as Noah took a seat at the kitchen table.
“Sounds great,” he said, shifting his gaze to the backyard, where Kara played on a swing set. “I like your house.”
Annie laughed a little and gave the sauce another stir. “Thank you. It’s small, but it’s perfect for Kara and me.”
It was small, he thought. He could probably fit the entire cottage inside his house three times over. His place was everything he’d once dreamed of owning. A showplace that proved to him he’d finally arrived. But somehow he’d never noticed that the big, expensive house was really pretty much an empty shell. It was nothing like this place, filled with warmth and life and— He cut that thought off fast. No point in being dissatisfied with the very thing you’d always wanted. But the sound of Kara’s laughter spilling in from the yard put the lie to that.
He needed to turn his thoughts somewhere else. To focus on something other than the way Annie Moore looked as she stood at the stove in faded jeans, a T-shirt and bare feet. “So tell me about Kara’s friend. The one who started this whole thing.”
“Gracie,” she said, moving to the refrigerator, where she pulled out a pitcher of iced tea. While she spoke, she set the pitcher on the table and went to get glasses. “As soon as we moved here, Gracie and Kara became instant friends. The kind of best friend you only seem to make when you’re a child.”
She smiled, poured them both tall glasses of tea then sat down opposite him. “Moving is hard on children, you uproot them from the familiar and settle them down in a place where they have to make new friends.”
Noah knew all about that. He remembered all too well the anxiety of never knowing which day might be his last with his current “family.” “Yeah,” he said simply, “it can be tough.”
Her eyes met his briefly, and he saw questions written in their depths. He ignored them. “So Kara and Gracie became friends.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling again. “Every day after school it was ‘Gracie said this. Gracie said that.’ Then...” Annie sighed a little and cupped her hands around the glass. “Before we moved here, I knew all of Kara’s friends. But since coming to Crescent Bay, I’ve been so busy trying to get us both settled into our new life, I haven’t had the time—” She broke off and shook her head. “No. I haven’t made the time to get to know our neighbors and the kids at the school. If I had, I might have seen this coming. Because, Kara being who she is, I’m not surprised at all that she decided to ‘fix’ Gracie’s problems herself. That’s what best friends do, isn’t it?”
“I
suppose,” he said, enjoying the ease between them. Truthfully, he was enjoying being here, in this warm kitchen with a pretty woman opposite him and a child playing in the yard.
Strange, but in the years since he’d set out to make his fortune, he’d never really taken the time to realize what he’d been giving up by being so solitary. He’d been so attentive to his career, to the life he’d wanted to build for himself, that he’d never noticed that the luxurious world he’d constructed was an empty one.
“Mrs. Higgins—at the shoe store—” Annie qualified.
“I know who she is.”
She nodded. “When I took Kara there for her to apologize, Mrs. Higgins told me that there were other children in town doing without decent shoes. Apparently Gracie isn’t alone in this. And I just...”
“You just what?”
She turned her head to look at her daughter shooting down the slide. “I hate to think that there are children out there with no one to help them. I hate thinking about parents who are forced to make their children do without.”
“Sometimes,” he said quietly, “there’s nothing you can do about the problem. Sometimes a thing just is.”
“I don’t believe that.” She whirled back to look at him, her gaze meeting his almost defiantly. “And I don’t think you do, either. If you did, you wouldn’t have given Kara a chance to earn the money to buy those shoes.”
“That was different. That was helping a little girl who was crying. I can’t change the world, Annie. Neither can you. And if you try, you’ll only end up breaking your own heart.”
“If everyone felt that way, nothing would ever be solved.”
He shook his head and leaned back in his chair. “I admire the fire behind the words,” he said, couching his own words carefully. “But you don’t know what it’s like. A new pair of shoes isn’t going to make a big enough difference in a child’s life to worry about. Their families will still be struggling. They might still be hungry. What does a new pair of shoes change?”
More Than Words: Acts of Kindness: Whispers of the HeartIt's Not About the DressThe Princess Shoes Page 15