The Keeper. Rhonda Nelson

one Jack was trying to keep was as painful as it was significant.

      Charlie digging around in something her brother had decided was private wasn’t going to endear her to him if he found out. Of course, Jack probably knew Charlie well enough to know that she couldn’t resist a mystery and considered very little privileged information sacred. He almost grinned.

      It was part of the reason they’d hired her, after all.

      “It doesn’t make sense,” Jamie chimed in. “He can hear. Why would he need to know how to read lips?”

      Payne shrugged. “I’m sure he has his reasons.”

      Jamie took another pull from his drink and settled a hip against the pool table. “I just hope that Mariette doesn’t make things too difficult for him. We’re helping her, for heaven’s sake.” He shook his head. “Why is being grateful a concept women struggle with?”

      Payne felt his lips twist. “She didn’t ask for our help.”

      Jamie blinked. “That’s my point exactly. She didn’t have to ask.”

      “I don’t think it’s the help that she objects to, per se,” Guy remarked, his lips sliding into a smile. “It’s the us not leaving her a choice that’s got her back up.”

      “Charlie said we could have handled it better,” Jamie said. He paused thoughtfully and grimaced. “Actually, what she really said is that we were all a bunch of high-handed, knuckle-dragging idiots with the tact of a herd of stampeding elephants. Or something like that.”

      Payne chuckled. That sounded about right. And he’d never met a woman who liked being told what to do. He frowned thoughtfully.

      Mariette certainly wasn’t going to be the exception there.

      He hoped Jack realized that sooner rather than later.

       2

      MARIETTE LEVINE WAS IN the process of pulling a red-velvet cupcake from the display case when she heard the bell over the door jingle and saw a pair of impossibly long, jeans-clad legs come into view. They sidled forward in a walk that was so blatantly sexy and loose hipped that she momentarily forgot what she was doing.

      A flash of pure sexual heat instantly blazed through her, the sensation so unexpected and shocking she felt her eyes round and her breath catch.

      Instead of standing up—which would have been the logical thing to do—for reasons that escaped her, Mariette dropped into a deeper crouch so that she could get a better look at the rest of him. She was not hiding, Mariette told herself. She had no reason to hide, even if she would admit to being curiously … alarmed.

      How singularly odd.

      She had no reason to be alarmed, either, and yet something about the stranger—whose face she hadn’t even seen yet—triggered an imminent sense of danger. Not of the axe-murderer variety, but something else … something much more personal. Her racing heart stupidly skipped a beat and her mouth went dry.

      Intrigued, her gaze drifted up over his crotch—it had to, dammit, to get to the rest of him—and took a more thorough inventory. He wore an oatmeal-colored cable-knit sweater—oh, how she loved a cable-knit sweater on a man—and a leather bomber jacket that had seen better days. His hands were stuffed into the pockets, his broad shoulders still a bit hunched beneath the cold. He was impossibly … big. Not apish or fat, but tall and lean hipped and muscled in all the right places.

      And if his architecture was magnificent, it was nothing compared to the perfect harmony of his face.

       Sweet heaven …

      High cheekbones, intriguing hollows, an especially angular, squared-off jaw. His nose was perfectly proportioned and straight, his mouth a little wide and over full. Sleek brows winged over a pair of heavy-lidded, sleepy-looking light eyes—either green or blue, she couldn’t tell from this distance, though instinct told her blue.

      His hair was a pale golden-blond, parted to the side, almost all one length and hung to just above his collar. He exuded confidence, fearlessness and moved with a casual deliberateness that suggested he was a man who was well aware of his own strength and ability. He didn’t merely inhabit a space—he owned it.

      And she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. Several of her patrons had stopped to look at him—mouths hanging open, forks suspended in midair—and a quick look to her right revealed that her helper, Livvie, had gone stock-still.

      “Wow,” she heard Livvie breathe, her eyes rounded in wonder. “You’re tall. Like the corn man, but not green.”

      Charlie Martin Weatherford, her assigned daytime bodyguard working under the guise of helping out, exited the kitchen and her step momentarily faltered, then a brilliant smile bloomed over her mouth. “‘Bout time you got here,” she said to the mystery man with a good-natured snort of impatience. “You get lost, big brother?”

      Big brother? Mariette felt her eyes widen and the original irrational panic that had sent her pulse racing only a minute before was minimal to the arrhythmia that had set in now. This was Charlie’s brother? This air-breathing Greek god in a bomber jacket was the man who was going to be spending the night with her until this ignorant dairy thief was caught?

      Oh, no. No, no, no …

      She didn’t know why oh-no, but she knew it all the same. Could feel some sort of impending doom with every particle of her being.

      She’d been right to be alarmed.

      It was self-preservation in its purest form. He was disaster with a tight-assed swagger and she knew herself too well to think he’d be anything other than irresistible. Why couldn’t he have been the aging-detective type her too-vivid imagination had conjured up? She peered up at him again and resisted the urge to whimper. No paunch, jowls or receding hairline in sight.

      Just six and a half feet of pure masculine temptation.

      Livvie looked down at her and smiled. “Look at him, Mariette,” she said in a stage whisper, her small, almond-shaped blue eyes alight with wonder. “There’s a giant in the shop.”

      Following Livvie’s gaze Charlie looked down at her, as well, and her lips twitched with knowing humor, as though she knew exactly why Mariette was hiding.

      “He’s not a giant, Livvie,” Charlie told her, slinging an arm around the younger girl. “He’s just a very tall man.”

      She looked at Mariette, arched a questioning brow and mouthed, “Corn man?”

      Very reluctantly, Mariette rose, mentally braced herself and turned to meet Charlie’s brother. She could hear her heart thundering in her ears and her mouth had yet to recover any of its lost moisture. A breathless sort of anticipation gripped her as she looked up.

      She’d been right, she discovered—his eyes were blue. And not just any shade of blue. French blue.

      Her favorite, naturally.

      Though she was utterly certain the earth hadn’t moved, Mariette felt it all the same. The soles of her feet practically vibrated from the imaginary vibration. The entire room, with the exception of the space he occupied, seemed to shimmy and shake. Her lungs went on temporary strike and a hot flush rushed over her skin, as though she’d been hit with an invisible blowtorch from one end of her body to the other. Her toes actually curled in her shoes.

      Remarkable.

      At twenty-seven, Mariette had met many good-looking men and knew enough about sexual attraction to recognize it. But this was unmistakably different. It wasn’t a dawning awareness of an attractive man.

      This was a bare-knuckle sucker punch of lust—purely visceral—and undeniably the most potent reaction she’d ever had to a man. It was the sort of attraction that was rhapsodized in lyric and verse, secured the human race, rendered reason and