onto the second step and stared at Reece’s door.
Wow. That had been a surprise.
Maybe she should have forced him out of his comfort zone sooner. Certainly that Bulgarian restaurant hadn’t been a comfortable place for him. Neither had he felt at home in the B and B’s kitchen. He’d bungled around like… well, like a macho man in a kitchen.
She’d been surprised each time he’d risen to her challenges. He’d tried the slightly strange food. He’d allowed her to show him things in the kitchen.
And then he’d kissed her. Connection?
The only problem was, what was she going to do now? Had she started something she wasn’t prepared to finish?
She used to take romance lightly, easy come, easy go. If a relationship didn’t work out, she might be sad for a short time, but there were always new men to be found.
Recently, however, she’d been wondering whether she had a soul mate out there. Allie, who only a few weeks ago had been confirmedly single, had found love with Cooper Remington, and Sara had begun to feel left out.
But if she were to “settle down,” it would take a special kind of guy, one who was as adventurous as she was, who loved traveling and trying new things.
She had to admit, Reece didn’t strike her as the least bit adventurous. He was ultraserious, a buttoned-down CPA who loved to talk about risk management and long-term projections.
Her projections usually didn’t extend past what she planned to have for lunch that day.
And yet…he was so delicious. Not only that, but he was a good guy. He hadn’t balked-not really-when she’d volunteered him to handle the B and B finances while Miss Greer took care of her health. Delicious men came and went, but ones with character-they were a bit more rare.
Maybe she ought to decide what she wanted from Reece before she did something crazy.
SARA WAS UP before light the next day, but when she reached the kitchen, she found Reece already there, pondering the workings of the coffeemaker. She liked seeing him there. His very male presence balanced all the Victorian froufrou.
“You already changed the lightbulbs?” she asked, instead of saying good morning.
He jumped. “Oh. Yeah.” He looked everywhere but at her.
He was probably regretting last night’s moment of weakness. Fine. If that was how he wanted to play it, she could pretend it never happened. “I’ll get the coffee ready. You can preheat the upper oven to three hundred ten degrees, and the lower one to four twenty-five.”
“Okay.”
That took him all of twenty seconds. When he was done, he intently watched her make coffee, as if committing every step to memory. His attention, so focused, gave her a delicate shiver.
“Are you cold?” he asked. “I opened the window when I came down because it seemed stuffy, but I can close it.”
“No, the fresh air is nice.” She chuckled. “I’m surprised you were able to get the window open at all. Miss Greer has a phobia about fresh air. Even in the dead of summer, she’s sure everyone will catch their death of cold if there’s a draft.”
“Well, Miss Greer isn’t here, and what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”
Sara’s heart thudded hard as she chanced a look over her shoulder at Reece. His brown eyes sparkled with mischief. Was he trying to tell her something else? Did he know that she’d been holding back a bit because he was a guest, and hitting on guests was frowned upon?
Now that Reece was sort of part of the management, did that change everything?
She looked away quickly, wondering if it was too late to undo last night’s kiss. For the first time in her life, she was a bit scared of getting involved on any level with a man, and she wasn’t quite sure why. Would she get out unscathed if she and Reece got carried away with this attraction thing?
He was just so different from the guys she usually went for, and she felt she didn’t know the rules anymore.
“Why don’t you set the table?” she suggested brightly. “Linens are in the buffet, dishes in the china cabinet. Set six place settings.”
“What about me?” he asked. “Don’t I get to eat?”
“You’re the hired help now. We eat in the kitchen.”
“I don’t see how I can be hired help if I’m not getting paid,” he pointed out good-naturedly, though he moved to the dining room to follow directions.
She pushed the coffeemaker’s on button as she realized what he said was perfectly true. She was getting free room and board, but no one had promised Reece a similar deal for helping out.
She poked her head through the doorway. “You’re absolutely right. But I’m sure Miss Greer doesn’t expect you to pay full price for staying here when you’re running the place.”
Reece shook his head as he took out a floral tablecloth and laid it over the huge mahogany dining table. “I was only kidding. I don’t need to be paid. I don’t mind helping out, and it gives me something to do.”
“Don’t you have to work on the accounting for Remington Charters?” Sara asked.
“Well, yeah, but that’s not exactly a full-time job.”
“I thought you’d be done with all that by now.” She helped him straighten the cloth, then dug out coordinating place mats while he grabbed a stack of plates from the china cabinet.
“I have a few more things to set up, then I have to train Allie and Cooper how to use the program.”
“Train Allie, you mean,” she said. “Cooper doesn’t have the patience for dealing with numbers.”
Reece looked at her quizzically. “That’s true, but how did you know that?”
“Duh. You guys lived here for more than a week before Cooper and Max found their own places. I observed you. I watched conversations. I can tell you a lot about your cousins.”
Reece crossed his arms. “You eavesdropped?”
“Absolutely not.” She hoped she wasn’t blushing. Maybe she’d listened to Reece more than was strictly accidental because of her fascination with him. “Hired help is often invisible. People talk as if I’m not there, though I make no effort to sneak around. Sometimes I can’t help overhearing.”
“You weren’t invisible to me.”
“Ha. When you have your nose in your laptop with some accounting program, you wouldn’t notice an atomic blast going off in the next room. I used to vacuum right under your chair and you never twitched.”
“I did notice,” he insisted. “I noticed lots of things about you.”
“Like what?”
“Like some guy named Ike from Santa Fe called you at least three times a day on your cell phone. You didn’t want to encourage him, but you didn’t want to hurt his feelings, either.”
She blinked in surprise. “Now who’s eavesdropping?”
“Sometimes I couldn’t help overhearing,” he said, echoing exactly what she’d just said to him.
Gracious. He wasn’t nearly as oblivious as she’d guessed. Here she thought she hadn’t even registered on his radar, and he’d been listening to her conversations.
“What else do you know about Cooper?” he asked.
“Aren’t you more curious as to how much I know about you?”
He looked away. “I don’t give off that many clues.”
“You’re thirty-four years old. You’re the youngest of two brothers, your brother is named Bret, and he dumps a lot of work on you.”
Reece opened his mouth, but no words came out.
“You’ve never been married,” she continued. That was more of an educated guess than actual knowledge, but she could see the moment she said it that it was true, and she felt unaccountably relieved. “Bret is already married and has two kids, a boy and a girl…Bret Jr. and Jessica.”
“Not bad.”
“You like things neat, and you make your bed every morning even though that’s my job. You get seasick and you have seasonal allergies.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m the maid. I clean your bathroom and I’ve seen the medicine you leave out on the counter.”
