One Kiss In… Miami. Katherine Garbera

his search had ultimately resulted in only one serious candidate … along with the indelible memory of Daisy. Now he had the ideal opportunity to mold the woman he actually wanted into the perfect wife.

      “I thought we were going to talk,” she prompted with another of her irresistible smiles.

      “Talking is the easy part.”

      Again, the wariness. “And the not-so easy part?” she asked.

      “I don’t cook and neither does Pretorius.”

      She glanced around. “Maybe that explains the lack of appliances.”

      “There’s a fully stocked refrigerator and freezer in the cabinet behind me, as well as a full complement of appliances.” He took a seat beside her. “I also have someone stop in once a day and prepare our meals, so you can cross that concern off your list.”

      She blinked. “I didn’t realize I had a list.”

      “I’m making one for you.”

      Daisy’s eyes narrowed. “And why would you do that? And why should it matter whether or not you can cook, or whether or not you have someone fixing your meals? It has nothing to do with me.”

      Now for the hard part. No point in delaying the inevitable. Better to get right to it. “It’s about to have a lot to do with you, because I want you and Noelle to move in here with me and I’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen.”

      She shook her head before he even finished speaking. “Forget it, Justice. I’m not interested in having you in my life any more than you’re interested in being in mine.”

      He lifted an eyebrow. “You’d rather share custody of Noelle?”

      The breath left Daisy’s lungs in a rush. “What?”

      “You said she’s mine. Now that I know about her existence, I’m willing and able to be a father to her. There’s only two ways that’ll work. Either we live together or we shuttle her back and forth between us. I’m thinking it’s in our daughter’s best interest for her to live with both of us. Together.”

      Her gaze swept the room and he struggled to see it through her eyes. Despite the state-of-the-art equipment and electronics tucked neatly behind warm oak cabinets, it came up lacking. Empty. Cold. Aw, hell. Dark and dusty, even with the lights.

      “You want us to live out here, in the middle of nowhere?” she asked in disbelief. “What sort of life is that for a child?”

      “We can work around any of your objections,” he insisted doggedly. “There are reasons I choose to live in the middle of nowhere.”

      “Such as?”

      “Pretorius? Permission, please.”

      There was a momentary silence, then, “Tell her.”

      “My uncle has a social anxiety disorder. It’s one of the reasons I was put in foster care after the death of my parents. The courts didn’t consider Pretorius an acceptable guardian.”

      Compassion swept across Daisy’s expression and he realized that it was an innate part of her character. It always had been. “Agoraphobia?” She hazarded a guess.

      “That’s probably part of it. More, it’s people in general he has difficulty handling.”

      “Huh. I have that same problem … with certain people.”

      He acknowledged the hit with a cool smile. “Whereas he needs the isolation, I value my privacy. When I turned eighteen and had nowhere to go, my uncle opened his home to me, even though he found it a very difficult adjustment. Since then, it’s worked for us. Or rather, it did.”

      “Should I assume something changed?”

      Time to be honest with her. Totally honest. “Yes. It changed a couple of years ago.”

      “What happened a couple of years—” He caught her dawning comprehension and again that deep flash of compassion. How did she do it? How did she open herself up like that and let everyone in? Especially when it guaranteed she would be hurt in the process. “Oh, Justice. The car wreck?”

      He nodded. “It made me realize what I had wasn’t enough.”

      “And …?”

      He chose his words with care. It felt like tiptoeing through a minefield. “I asked Pretorius to rewrite a business program he marketed a few years ago. I gave him a set of parameters combining qualities important to me, with characteristics that would also be compatible with my uncle.”

      She stared blankly. “You just lost me.”

      “He asked me to find him a wife,” Pretorius interrupted. “One that we’d both like.”

      Justice swore. “I’m telling this story, old man.”

      “And I’m just filling in the parts you seem to be skipping over.”

      “I was getting to them. I just wanted to do this in a logical order.”

      Pretorius snorted. “Right. And E-equals-MC-you’re-full-of-crap.”

      Damn it to hell. “Computer, close circuit to kitchen and keep it closed until I say otherwise.”

      “No, I want to hear—” Pretorius’s voice was cut off midsentence.

      Justice took a deep, steadying breath. “Now, where was I?”

      He could see the laughter in Daisy’s eyes before gold-tipped lashes swept downward, concealing her expression. “I believe you were explaining how you used a computer program to find a wife.” The merest hint of amusement threaded through her words.

      “It made perfect sense at the time.”

      “Of course it did.”

      “The Pretorius Program has been quite successful at choosing the perfect employee in the business sector.” He heard the defensive edge slashing through his comment and took a moment to gather himself. What was it about Daisy that caused him to lose his composure with such ease and frequency? “I had more specific requirements to take into consideration for a wife, so Pretorius tweaked the parameters.”

      “What sort of specific requirements and what parameters?”

      Hell, no. He would not walk down that road. “That’s not important.”

      Unfortunately, she seemed unusually adept at adding two and two together, squaring it and leaping to a completely illogical, though accurate, conclusion. “You were looking for a wife at that engineering conference, weren’t you? That’s why you were so mad when you discovered I wasn’t an engineer.”

      “That’s a distinct possibility,” he admitted.

      She leaned forward, staring intently, her spring-green eyes disturbing in the extreme. “Are you telling me that Pretorius devised a computer program to find you the perfect woman and she was supposed to be at that conference?”

      Damn, damn, damn. “Yes.”

      “Are you seriously going to sit there and admit that you thought you could waltz into that conference, check out the women your uncle’s program selected and convince one of them to marry you?”

      He gritted his teeth. “Engineers are very logical. The women involved would have seen that we were an excellent match.”

      Her mouth dropped open. “And agreed to marry you right then and there?”

      “That would have been helpful, though unlikely.”

      “You think?”

      He suspected from her tone that the question was both rhetorical and a bit sarcastic. Just in case he was mistaken, he gave her a straight answer. “Yes. But Pretorius suggested a way around that.”

      “Oh,