Tall, Dark & Rich. Кэрол Мортимер

as he preceded her out of the kitchen and walked with her to the lift.

      She grimaced once she had stepped inside the lift. ‘I’m not sure if I said this before, but thank you for sending Bob over this afternoon to fix my window.’

      Jonas had totally forgotten that was the original reason she had followed him home! ‘But don’t do anything like it again?’ he guessed dryly.

      ‘No.’

      He nodded. ‘That’s what I thought. I—If I don’t see you again before then—Merry Christmas, Mac.’

      She eyed him quizzically. ‘And I’d already marked you down as the “bah, humbug” type!’

      ‘I am the “bah, humbug” type,’ he admitted with a quirk of his mouth.

      Mac nodded as the lift doors began to close. ‘Merry Christmas, Jonas.’

      Jonas continued to stand in the hallway long after she had gone down to the car park and no doubt driven away on that powerful motorbike as if the devil himself were at her heels.

      He liked Mac, Jonas realised frowningly. Liked the way she looked. Her spirit. Her independence. Her optimism about life and people in general. Most of all he admired her ability to laugh at herself.

      Unfortunately, he also knew that allowing himself to like Mac McGuire was as dangerous to the solitary lifestyle he preferred as having a sexual relationship with her would have been.

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      IT WAS late in the morning when Mac parked her four-wheel-drive Jeep next to her motorbike in the garage on the ground floor of the warehouse after arriving back from a three-day pre-Christmas visit to her parents’ home in Devon.

      She had felt the need to get away for a while after the disastrous and humiliating end to the evening spent with Jonas at his apartment. And as the men had duly arrived the following day to install the alarm system to the warehouse, and the exhibition at the gallery was going well—Jeremy had informed Mac when she spoke to him on the telephone that the paintings were all sold, and the public were pouring in to see them before the exhibition came to a close at Christmas—she was free to do what she wanted for the next few days, at least.

      Just as she had hoped, the time spent with her parents—the normality of being teased by her father and going Christmas shopping with her mother—had been the perfect way to put things in her own life back into perspective. For her to decide that her behaviour that evening at Jonas’s apartment had been an aberration. A madness she didn’t intend ever to repeat. In fact, she had come to the conclusion that ever seeing Jonas Buchanan again would be a mistake…

      Which was going to be a little hard for her to do when he was the first person she saw as she rounded the corner from the garage!

      Mac’s hand tightened about the handle of the holdall she had used to pack the necessary clothing needed for her three days away, her gaze fixed on Jonas as she walked slowly towards him. She unconsciously registered how attractive he looked in a brown leather jacket over a tan-coloured sweater and faded jeans…

      Any embarrassment she might have felt at seeing him again was forgotten as she realised he was directing the actions of the two other men, workmen from their clothing, who seemed to be in the process of building a metal tower beside the warehouse. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Mac demanded.

      ‘Oh, hell!’ Jonas muttered as he turned and saw her, his expression becoming grim. ‘I’d hoped to have dealt with this before you got back.’

      ‘Hoped to have dealt with what? What on earth…?’ Mac stared up at the wooden sides of the warehouse. Her eyes were wide with shock as she took in the electric-pink and fluorescent-green paints that had been sprayed haphazardly over the dark wooden cladding.

      ‘It isn’t as bad as it looks…’

      ‘Isn’t it?’ she questioned sharply, the holdall slipping unnoticed from her fingers as she continued to stare numbly up at that mad kaleidoscope of colour.

      ‘Mac—’

      ‘Don’t touch me!’ She cringed away as Jonas would have reached out and grasped her arm. ‘Who—? Why—?’ She gave a dazed shake of her head. ‘When did this happen?’

      ‘I have no idea,’ Jonas rasped. ‘Some time yesterday evening, we think—’

      ‘Who is we?’

      ‘My foreman from the building site next door,’ he elaborated. ‘He noticed it this morning, and when he didn’t receive any reply to his knock on your door he decided to report it to me.’

      Mac swallowed hard, feeling slightly nauseous at the thought of someone deliberately vandalising her property. ‘Why would anyone do something like this?’

      ‘I don’t know.’ Jonas sighed heavily.

      ‘Could it be kids this time?’

      ‘Again, I have no idea. These two men are going to paint over it. They should be finished by this evening.’ He grimaced. ‘I had hoped to have had it done before you got back—’

      ‘I thought I had made it plain the last time we met that I would rather you didn’t go around arranging things for me?’ Mac reminded him coldly.

      Jonas eyed her with a frown, the pallor of her cheeks very noticeable against the red padded body-warmer she wore over a black sweater and black denims. He didn’t like seeing the glitter of tears in those smoky-grey eyes, either. But he liked the cold, flat tone of her voice when she spoke to him even less. ‘Would you rather I had just left it for you to find when you got home?’

      ‘I have found it when I got home!’ Her voice rose slightly, almost shrilly.

      Jonas shook his head. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to be back just yet; I had hoped it would be later today, or even better, tomorrow morning.’

      Those huge grey eyes settled on him suspiciously. ‘How did you even know I had gone away?’

      Jonas knew he could have lied, prevaricated even, but the suspicion he could read in Mac’s expression warned him not to do either of those things. ‘The Patels,’ he revealed unapologetically. ‘Once I had seen the mess, and you obviously weren’t at home, I went to their convenience store and asked if they had any idea where you were.’

      Those misty grey eyes widened. ‘And they just told you I had gone away for a few days?’

      He gave a rueful nod. ‘Once I’d explained about the vandalism, yes.’

      ‘Tarun always puts a daily newspaper by for me,’ Mac muttered absently. ‘I cancelled it while I was away.’

      Jonas smiled. ‘So he told me.’

      She sighed and ran a hand through her hair. ‘Nothing like this ever happened before I met you—’

      ‘Don’t say something you’ll only have to apologise for later,’ Jonas warned through suddenly gritted teeth.

      ‘Even before,’ Mac continued as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘when your assorted employees came here to try and persuade me into selling the warehouse, nothing like this happened. It’s only since actually meeting you—’

      ‘I said stop, Mac!’ A nerve pulsed in his tightly clenched cheek.

      Her gaze narrowed as she focused on him. ‘Since meeting you, I’ve had my window broken and my home vandalised,’ she said accusingly. ‘And now some helpful soul has decided to redecorate the outside of the warehouse for me. Bit too much of a coincidence, don’t you think, Jonas?’ Her eyes glittered with anger now rather than tears.

      Jonas had known exactly where Mac was going with this conversation, and had tried to stop her from actually voicing those accusations.

      Damn it, he had considered himself well rid of her once she’d left his apartment on