Love By Proxy. Diana Palmer

she said. She named a figure twice what Callahan had paid Amelia. “Does that suit you? And would you like to live in?”

      “I would, if only to spite your grandson, but I signed a one-year lease where I am, and I like my landlords very much,” she confessed. “Besides,” she added, “I like my privacy. There simply isn’t any when you live with other people.”

      “How old are you, dear?”

      “Twenty-eight.”

      “Parents?”

      “Both living. They have a print shop back home in Georgia.”

      Jeanette stared into her tea. “And is there a man in your life?”

      She sighed. “Not unless you count Henry. He runs the paper back home and would marry me on a sunny day if it weren’t too inconvenient and didn’t happen on press day.”

      Jeanette laughed softly. “We’re going to get along very well. Yes, we are.”

      Amelia thought so, too. But when she came out two hours later, Wentworth Carson was waiting outside in the yard, hands in pockets and glaring holes in her.

      “What a snit we’re in,” Amelia chided. “Talk about bad-tempered people…”

      “It is not my fault you lost your job,” he told her bluntly. “And I like my life as it is. I want no part of you here. Tell my grandmother you won’t take the job.”

      “I like your grandmother,” she said curtly. “She’s just like my mother, crusty and unflappable and impossible to fool. I’ll take care of her.”

      He stared harder. “In return for what?” he asked, narrowed eyes telling her everything he wasn’t saying.

      “How often is she taken advantage of?” she asked instead.

      “Her heart is as big as the world,” he said. “She likes strays.”

      “I am not a stray. I have owners.”

      “Go home.”

      “I can’t.”

      “Why?”

      “Because I’d have to marry Henry!” she burst out. “If he’d still have me after he saw a copy of this morning’s paper. My reputation will be in shreds.”

      “Why not marry Henry?” He frowned.

      “Because the most exciting thing he ever said to me was, ‘Amy, your nose has a crook in it.’”

      His eyebrows lifted. “Not a passionate man.”

      “No.”

      His dark eyes roamed over her neat suit. “Are you a passionate woman?”

      “That’s something you’ll never need to know. I am going to work for your grandmother, not get involved with you,” she told him firmly.

      One corner of his disciplined mouth turned up. “She likes you. She’ll spend her days throwing you at my head and her nights finding more ways to get us married.”

      “You’re safe,” she told him, turning toward her old Ford. “I don’t like older men.”

      “Forty is not old,” he said shortly.

      “At twenty-eight, it is old,” she returned, facing him squarely. “I want somebody to play with.”

      He started laughing, and only then did she realize how he’d interpreted what she said. Her face flamed.

      “Baseball!” she burst out. “Tennis and swimming and jogging, not…not…that!”

      He laughed harder. She didn’t say another word. She crawled into her car and managed with the greatest of difficulty to get it turned around and headed out of the yard. He was still standing there laughing when she drove away.