Tangled Sheets, Tangled Lies. Julie Hogan

a faint shadow. What he hadn’t expected was the slight but unmistakable blush that rushed in to stain her smooth cheeks. “Room and board?” she repeated weakly.

      “The hotel I stayed in last night is the closest one I can afford. And it’s forty miles of winding country road from here. I’ll be able to start earlier and finish later if I stay here. I’d be willing to take something off my pay, of course, since you’ll be cooking for me.”

      Her lips parted as surprise touched every feature on her beautiful face. “You did taste my cooking tonight, didn’t you?”

      He tore his gaze from her sweet, bow-shaped mouth, nodded soberly and went on. “I worked out a simple plan while I was in the barn today. I’ll need to use a bathroom in the house for a week or so while I build your customer washroom, but I can fix up the loft as a bedroom right away.”

      She kept trying to get a word in, making her look like a cute little guppy.

      “Don’t you have a wife at home who might object to this plan?”

      He shook his head. “No wife.”

      “And you want to sleep in my barn.” It was a statement, but she sounded as if she’d run out of arguments.

      Even though he shrugged like he didn’t care one way or the other, the truth was he suddenly realized it felt like his whole life was hinging on this one conversation. “Only if you want me to finish this job on time.”

      Her eyes narrowed. “That sounds like blackmail.”

      “I call it practical,” he said, shrugging with a nonchalance he didn’t feel. “But it’s your choice.”

      She looked around the room, from the cracked floor-boards to the broken newel post to the fading paint. He tried not to feel satisfaction in the fact that she really had no choice at all. Finally, she looked at him and said, “Okay,” infusing her voice with none of the word’s meaning. “You can sleep in the barn.” Then she rose fluidly from the chair, held out a hand and smiled at him unsteadily.

      He grinned, came to his feet and wrapped his big palm around her warm fingers. “Congratulations, you just hired the best pair of hands west of the Mississippi.”

      She rolled her eyes at his cocksure statement. “Prove it, Cole. Just prove it.”

      His gaze roamed her face, from her famous green eyes down to her famous full lips, and couldn’t help himself. “Oh, I will,” he promised and wondered how long he was going to be able to keep his secret from Lauren—or keep the best pair of hands west of the Mississippi off the most beautiful woman on the planet.

      Three

      Lauren sat at her kitchen table, balancing the phone between her shoulder and ear as she stifled a yawn and fiddled with her cup of cooled coffee. Her friend and former agent, Sherry Buchanan, was going into hyper-drive as she told Lauren about the sheer hell that her retirement was putting the Boudoir Lingerie folks through.

      Truth be told, Lauren couldn’t have cared less. They’d had her dangling on a string since she was eighteen, standing around in her underwear in bizarre locations, working fifteen-hour days and waking up in the dark for indecently early calls that had made it almost impossible to care for her child. She’d earned a lot of money working as Boudoir’s lead model—enough to sustain her and Jem for a lifetime if she was careful. But she’d done her share by being part of the reason that the catalog could now call itself one of the world’s premiere fashion outlets.

      “I told them I’d ask, sweetie,” Sherry was saying over the Monday-morning din of her busy office. “Would you please come back just for the fall season?”

      As a cool morning breeze floated in the kitchen window, bringing with it the clean, country scents of the summer morning, Lauren laughed. She wasn’t leaving this small-town paradise for the fall season—or any other season, for that matter. “Jem is loving it here, Sherry. And if you remember, one of the reasons I quit was Boudoir’s habit of making motherhood about as convenient as being an international spy.”

      The older woman laughed, making Lauren smile. When Lauren had run away at sixteen, Sherry—who at the time already had two grown children—had discovered her in a shopping mall talent search. And since then, she’d been more of a mother to Lauren than anyone else ever had.

      “Okay, honey,” Sherry said. “I’ll tell them you considered it very carefully and that you decline.” The sound of Sherry shuffling through the heaps of head-shots on her desk rustled through the phone before she asked, “Hey, how’s your handyman search going?”

      Lauren stared down into the inky-brown liquid in her cup and remembered how Cole had looked last night sitting on her antique settee. With his natural handsomeness and well-muscled frame, he should’ve looked silly there amongst the faded cabbage roses and ornate woodwork. But he hadn’t looked silly at all. He’d been as cool as could be, like he’d spent many an evening chatting in a fancy old parlor.

      She pushed the vision out of her mind. “I’ll tell you about it if you stop working and shut your door for two minutes.” She kept her tone deliberately mysterious to tempt her workaholic friend into taking a break.

      The rustling stopped abruptly, and then Lauren heard the sound of a door shutting noisily. Sherry, who was a closet devotee of romance novels, sounded breathless when she said, “Do tell.”

      Lauren frowned. How could she describe Cole? Gorgeous, charming, good with kids, a drifter? “Well, you’d love him. If he was a model instead of a handyman, you’d have his headshot on your wall in nothing flat. And if he was a few years older, I’m sure you’d be working overtime to get him into your bed.”

      “Oh, really? Is he available?”

      Lauren realized in that moment that she had no idea if he was available, or even why he’d landed in Valle Verde. The last thing she needed was to get all chummy and personal with him.

      “I don’t know if he’s available, Sher. Sounds like he moves around a lot,” she said as she stood and walked across the kitchen and the cool, hard floor under her feet sent a shiver up her bare legs. “I guess he’s available if you don’t mind being a camp follower. Or getting your heart broken.”

      “Uh-oh.”

      “What?”

      “Nothing. I just thought I heard the distinct sound of you emerging from your post-Miles cocoon ahead of schedule.”

      Lauren almost dropped her cup. “What on earth are you talking about?”

      “I’m saying that it’s high time you ditched your silly rule about avoiding men. And it sounds like your handyman might be just the one to help you celebrate its demise.”

      “Not a chance.” And I’ll just keep repeating that mantra every time I see him and those seductive blue eyes of his.

      Sherry just laughed. “All right, all right. Have it your way.” She paused for a moment. “And if you do have it your way, don’t spare me the details.”

      Lauren laughed. “I miss you, you crazy old broad.”

      “Right back atcha, sweetie. Tell Jem his Grandma Sherry misses our Sunday dinners and that I can’t wait to see him. And you, get to work on that handyman!”

      “I have no intention of working on my handyman— Hello? Hello?” she said before she realized she was talking to dead air. Shaking her head, she walked to the opposite wall to hang up the phone, then stopped in her tracks. Her heart skipped a few beats, then picked up where it left off in triple time as she stared in utter dismay at her worst nightmare: Cole, standing in the living room not ten feet away from the kitchen door, his big, callused hands easing a pane of glass from her beautiful, rattling old windows. He stopped what he was doing long enough to turn and smile at her, his eyes sparkling with amusement.

      Lauren’s mind pumped feverishly as she tried to recall exactly what she’d just said.