Sweet Thing / Make Me Want. Nicola Marsh

belly and a welder’s mask tipped back on his head. “What can I do for you?”

      “Come on.” Matt nudged his arm. “Let’s get back to work.”

      Cord stepped back. “Thanks,” he called to her, giving it one last shot.

      “You’re welcome,” she replied, still polite, and turned her focus to the other men demanding her attention.

      Cord felt his forehead pleat as he turned around himself, and started to walk away. Her eyes seemed to light up for everyone else when she smiled. Just not for him.

      He glanced back, saw her look down as she made change from the pack around her slender waist. He wondered if they’d met before. If maybe he’d run into her at one of the local nightclubs and if he’d done something to offend her. He made it a point to never offend a woman if he could help it. He’d discovered the hard way that a woman scorned could not only be furious and hellish to deal with, but downright expensive.

      The woman he’d heard the other men call Madison didn’t seem at all familiar, though. He would have remembered the name. He definitely would have remembered that smile. It lit her eyes, made her seem friendly, approachable, as if she glowed warmth from within. Without it, she was just another pretty face.

      “Does she come here every day?”

      “Who?” Matt glanced behind them. “The gal with the snack wagon?”

      “Yeah.”

      “We have a couple of trucks that come through here,” he said, looking as if he were trying to recall the specifics of this one’s owner. “I think she’s been around pretty much since we broke ground.” A quarter of a muffin disappeared, totally muffling his “Why?”

      Cord shrugged. “Just wondered,” he said, and sank his teeth into a bit of heaven that tasted of sweet butter and lemon and had him closing his eyes in pure bliss.

      Madison watched the two big men in the silver hard hats walk away, devouring her muffins as they headed past a huge pile of steel beams and a bright-orange crane that sat still and silent while its operator drank coffee and smoked a cigarette. The workers only had fifteen minutes for a break. They usually cleaned out a third of her stock in five. That gave her ten minutes to pull her restock from the storage compartment at the back of the truck, fill in the gaps in the three tiers of muffins, cookies and rolls, consolidate the fruit so it didn’t look picked over, and change the coffee grounds in the built-in urn so there would be two freshly brewed gallons by the time she reached her next stop on the dock twenty minutes away. She had another stop farther down the dock a half an hour after that. After a quick stop at a small tool-and-die operation, it would be back home to restock with the sandwiches and desserts she’d already made for the lunch run that started at 11:15 a.m.

      Male laughter drifted toward her as she set her empty stock box in the back, flipped the switch to start the coffee and closed the stainless steel door. As she did, she consciously kept herself from looking around to see if Cord was still anywhere in sight. She hated the thought that he might catch her and think he had made any sort of impression. And he hadn’t. Not really. Not in any way that mattered.

      She had never before met a man anywhere near his social or economic stratosphere, or one whose presence seemed quite so…large. She was around his basic type a lot, though. The attractive irresponsible type whose sole goal was to get into a woman’s pants and be gone before breakfast. She’d met plenty of them coming and going from her friend Mike’s pub, since she happened to live upstairs from it and routinely borrowed his kitchen to prepare her food. And men like them, even if they were rich and famous, weren’t worth the time it took to give them a second thought.

      She didn’t think about him, either. Not until twenty-four hours later when she found herself in the same spot she’d been twenty-four hours before, doing pretty much the same thing she did at that same time every Monday through Friday.

      Cord Kendrick had so slipped her mind that she hadn’t even remembered to call her grandma last night to tell her she’d met him and given the dear woman the opportunity to demand details.

      The only reason she was thinking of him now was because Matt Callaway’s secretary had just called her on her cell phone to order a dozen muffins of the sort she’d given Cord yesterday, along with six large coffees. She wanted them delivered to the construction trailer, which Madison could see parked a city block away toward the middle of the work site.

      “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Madison replied, going through the same motions she had a thousand times before as she closed the back of her truck and started to close the side. “I’m on a schedule, so I can’t make individual deliveries. If you can send someone,” she suggested, being as accommodating as she could, “I’ll have it ready when they get here. I won’t be leaving for another couple of minutes.”

      The harried-sounding woman asked her to hold on, which Madison did while pulling six empty cups and lids from the dispenser and popping open a cardboard tray to set them in. A half a block ahead of her the huge orange crane started up with a rumble and a roar. Break time was over.

      A rustling sound came over the phone.

      “I understand you don’t make deliveries.”

      The voice on the other end of the line was suddenly much deeper, much richer and carried a faint hint of challenge. She recognized that disturbing voice in an instant. That threw her, too. She didn’t want to think that anything about Cord had made an impression. She especially didn’t want anything about him messing with her heart rate.

      Had the secretary come back on the line, Madison would have caved in and run the order over. It sounded as if the woman could have used a break. Since it was Cord, Madison’s soft streak succumbed to self-preservation. “It would throw off my schedule.”

      “You don’t ever make exceptions?”

      “I’m not in a position to do that,” she replied, pretty sure Cord Kendrick didn’t eat many meals from a catering truck. If he had, he’d have some idea of how important it was to stay on time. “I have people who will be waiting for me for their break.”

      “What about the people here?” he asked with the ease of a man who knew exactly which buttons to push. “We need a break, too. But we’re in a meeting no one can leave and we really need coffee. We need those muffins, too.”

      “Isn’t there a coffeemaker in the trailer?”

      “It’s broken. Look,” he said, having failed to elicit her sympathies, “I’ll give you a fifty-dollar tip. Just bring the order. It won’t take that long. Okay?”

      Madison could practically feel her back stiffen as she set down the cardboard box she’d started to fill and glanced toward the long white trailer. It was as clear as the patches of blue in the early May sky that Cord Kendrick felt whatever he was doing was far more important than her schedule. It seemed just as apparent that he felt his money would get him anything he didn’t want to bother getting by persuasion.

      For a moment she was sorely tempted to tell him he was just going to have to go without today. As she let her more practical nature take over, she grudgingly admitted that, just this once, she could be bought.

      Ever since she’d started her catering business, she had dreamed of expanding it. In the past six months, that dream had become an obsession. She wanted to cater parties. Big ones. Little ones. Maybe even weddings, where the food she presented could be elegant rather than everyday. She’d done a couple of small events already. Not that a birthday party for the McGuires’ nine-year-old could be called an event, but the Lombardis’ oldest daughter’s engagement party had been rather nice. She desperately needed equipment, though. Having to rent serving pieces ate up all her profit. And fifty dollars could help buy the professional double chafing dish she had her eye on.

      Aside from that, if she hit the lights right on Gloucester, she usually had a couple of minutes to spare.

      “It’ll take me at least five minutes to get there,” she finally said.