A Bride For The Holidays. Renee Roszel

lips were nice, wholly masculine without the exotic plumpness of some male models.

      His eyes were sharp and assessing. That was obvious, even half masked beneath the long, thick sweep of his lashes. It was difficult to tell what color his eyes were, shadowed by such a sexy canopy. Brown, possibly gray.

      Her hesitation must have been overlong, because the stranger with the scintillating eyes cleared his throat. “I’d like a cup of coffee.”

      Trisha felt like a fool. What had gotten into her? She stepped around Amber Grace and her mop, noticing belatedly that the teenager had also gone stock-still. In an aside, she murmured, “That latte isn’t going to mop itself.”

      The teen blinked, coming back from never-never land. “Oh—yeah.” Her mop began to move.

      Trisha hurried to the counter and smiled, though the pleasant expression felt strained. That business loan would have helped her achieve her dream—and it was gone. She hadn’t begun to deal with the bitter and unjust defeat, but she shoved the pain and outrage to a back shelf in her brain. This was neither the time nor place to vent her spleen. “Good afternoon, sir,” she said as pleasantly as she could. “We have three special blends today, raspberry-vanilla, Jamaica-chocolate and orange—”

      “Do you have anything called coffee?”

      She could see his eyes better across the counter. They were gray. Steel gray. An unusual color, and attractive, yet a little too piercing for comfort.

      For some bizarre reason she had trouble remembering if they had anything called coffee. Working to get her brain on track, she responded, “Uh—how about our Colombian Dark Secret?”

      “As long as the dark secret is that it has coffee in it.”

      She found herself smiling, an amazing feat, considering her future had just been crushed under the unfeeling boot heel of corporate banking. “I promise it has coffee in it, sir,” she said, still smiling in spite of her broken dreams. “What size would you like, biggie, biggie-extra or biggie-boggle?” As she named the sizes, she pointed out the small, medium and large cups affixed to the top of the latte machine.

      “Medium,” he said.

      For some reason she liked that about him. He was a no-nonsense man who called a spade a spade. No fancy pseudo-speak cluttered his world. Just bare-boned facts. “Yes, sir.” She moved away to retrieve a cup and pour him a medium order of strong, black coffee. And he would drink it black, she knew. Black, strong and unadulterated. A real man’s cup of coffee.

      A real man’s cup of coffee? What a silly, fanciful thought to have about a total stranger. She shook it off.

      Her back to him, she sidled to the Colombian Dark Secret spigot and pulled the lever. Funny, she could feel his gaze on her. Not that lots of customers didn’t follow her movements as she got their order, but there was something different in the way she sensed his gaze. Her cheeks grew hot and she felt a tremor of feminine excitement, to think such a man might—

      “What is this business you can’t get a loan for?”

      She was so startled by his question she almost dropped the paper cup. When she regained her grip on it and opened the spigot again, she glanced over her shoulder. “Oh—I’m sorry you heard that, sir. I didn’t mean to…” Now the heat in her cheeks was due to humiliation. How unprofessional of her to rant about her bad luck in front of a customer!

      “No, tell me,” he said, looking completely serious. “I might know somewhere you can go for that loan.”

      With the full cup of coffee, she returned to the counter. “I don’t think so, sir,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve tried every place in town, plus everything on the Internet I can find.” She indicated the cup lids in a cubbyhole beside others containing sugar and creamer packets, as well as red plastic stirrers. When he shook his head to decline, she held the cup toward him. “The only companies that would lend me money charged loan-shark interest rates.”

      “That’s too bad.” He reached for the coffee cup.

      Just as he was about to take it, Trisha felt a sharp jab between her shoulder blades, hard enough to knock her off balance. She pitched forward, her forearms coming into explosive contact with the coffee bar’s brushed aluminum countertop. She winced at the pain. “Ouch! What in the world…” Struggling up, she reached back to rub the throbbing spot where she’d been jabbed.

      “Oops. What’d I hit?” Amber Grace asked in the nasal whine she used when she perpetrated one of her many crimes of incompetence. She turned around to face her boss. “Was it your back?”

      Trisha stared at the young girl, reining in her temper with difficulty. “You think?”

      Amber Grace wore her usual sheepish “lucky-I’m-Ed’s-niece” face, but an instant later her expression changed to horror. “Oh!” She let go of the mop with one hand and pointed. “Look what you did to that man!”

      Look what you did to that man!

      Those seven dreadful words exploded in Trisha’s head like gunfire. She didn’t have to look to know his expensive cashmere coat was drenched with Colombian Dark Secret. A mortified sound issued up from her throat, a strangled expression of her grief at the loss of this week’s paycheck. That’s what it would cost her to get his coat cleaned. With great reluctance and even greater regret she faced the man in dripping cashmere.

      His attention had dropped to the front of his coat. When their eyes met, his expression was not one of great cheer. “On second thought, a lid might have been a good idea.”

      “Oh, heavens!” Trisha would have given her right arm to take back the last few seconds. “I’m so sorry!”

      “Napkins?” he asked, holding out the same hand that had almost secured the cup a moment before.

      “Oh—of course!” She grabbed a stack from beneath the counter. Ed was stingy with his precious, printed napkins, insisting each customer get only one. But this was an emergency. “Amber Grace, run and grab some paper towels out of the back.” She pressed an inch thick batch of napkins against the man’s coatfront, mopping coffee from the material. Knowing Ed, she would have to pay for the napkins, too.

      “I can’t apologize enough, sir!” She flipped the batch of napkins to find fresh areas to absorb the spill. Sponging the man, she noticed there wasn’t a marshmallowy inch on his entire abdomen. He must have a washboard gut under all that expensive fabric. Even steeped in self-contempt and dismay she experienced a rush of feminine admiration. “I really must insist that you let me clean your stomach!” she said.

      His hands covered hers, removing the napkins from her fingers and taking over the job. “That’s not necessary,” he said, sounding less put-out than she would have imagined. “I think my stomach escaped most of the coffee.”

      Her gaze shot to his face. Had she actually offered to clean his stomach? Shamed to the soles of her feet, she cried, “Oh—I—I meant—your coat! I’d like to have your coat dry-cleaned, at my expense. It’s the least—”

      “Just fix me another cup of coffee,” he said. “Forget the coat.”

      She swallowed around the lump of wretchedness in her throat. In the five months she’d worked at Ed’s, she’d never spilled coffee on a single customer. And now, to spill a whole biggie-extra on this—this—gorgeous man—er—coat! And then, to make matters a thousand times worse, to offer to clean his stomach!

      She found herself staring into his sexy but oh-so-steely gaze, mesmerized. Looking into those eyes, she experienced a strange contradiction within her. His gaze was all business and bottom-line, yet there was something compelling and exciting in the way he was able to hold her attention, something she couldn’t name. But it was there, stunning and impossible to resist. Unnerved, she realized she’d lost her train of thought. “Er—excuse me?”

      He laid the soaked stack of napkins on the coffee-doused countertop and accepted