“You heard me right, boy-o.”
“Naked? You saw Dr. Vance naked?!”
“Mmmhmm,” he mumbled, as the image seared a little deeper into his brain.
“Holy cow. I know some guys who’d give up their grants to glimpse the Ice Queen without her lab coat, never mind….”
Ice Queen? Logan raised his lashes to watch the lady in question shove her hands into the folds of her pants.
“So?” John said. “Got anything to tell me? I mean—”
“Absolutely not.” And John should know better than to ask for details. “She’s right here, maybe you’d like to ask her some questions yourself.”
Logan held out his cell to a startled Dr. Vance. She took the phone without touching his fingers and turned away to grant him a view of a sweetly curved back. He let his gaze slip over the narrow shoulders to the slender waist, to the curves hidden under the folds of her pants, working more on memory than his sight to recreate the vision he’d glimpsed for just a single blessed moment in that bedroom.
She swiveled and caught him ogling. The temperature in the room dropped so fast that frost practically rimmed the windows.
“Dr. Springfield – John,” she corrected, somewhat reluctantly. “Please don’t apologize. It’s just a mix-up.”
John gushed more apologies through the tinny speaker, and Logan grudgingly accepted that John’s remorse must be genuine. Even if John had set him up, it would have come from a place of good intentions. Jennifer Vance would have been a hell of a distraction from his troubles, for at least a little while, if she’d been interested in some hot, no-commitment sex. By the chill in the room, clearly she wasn’t. It was just as well that every tailored inch of her looked the part of the composed intellectual. Judging by the sudden technicality of the conversation between her and John, she was.
“No, John, I insist.” Her voice changed as her gaze to flit to Logan. “We are two rational adults, we’ll work something out.”
Logan dropped onto the sofa and folded his hands behind his head. She didn’t like surprises. She looked like the kind of woman who willed the world around her to conform to her speed and her rules. He had his own rules he lived by these days. And they didn’t include smooth-skinned women who bathed their hair with—he breathed the fragrance a little deeper—strawberry shampoo.
“Here.”
Her eyes were the color of iced tea with a healthy slice of lemon.
“John wants to talk to you again,” she said, as her pearls swayed against her throat.
He took the phone. “Well, buddy?”
“She says you two can work something out.” John said. “Are you good with that?”
No. But he knew John had enough on his plate dealing with a wife still in childbed and a preemie newborn in the NICU. “No worries, John. We’ll figure it out.”
“I owe you one. Listen, I think I just saw the pediatrician cross into Judy’s room. I’ve got to go.”
“Send Judy my love.”
He hung up the phone, tossed it on the coffee table, and then eyed the problem before him. He’d lied to John. This wasn’t going to be easy. John had offered this place to him for an indeterminate time, because Logan didn’t have an apartment to go home to, and he needed a place to land. He sure as hell wasn’t going back to Montana.
“Seems you were right,” he said, as he stood up from the couch. “You do have permission to shower in the bedroom.”
“Seems you were right, too,” she countered, putting a recliner between them and digging her nails into the leather back. “You didn’t have to knock before barging into the cabin. Or into the bedroom.”
The air thickened with her unspoken demand for an apology. Considering the vision he’d been a witness to, he wasn’t sorry at all.
He chose silence over lying.
“It seems,” she continued in a voice so cool it should form a visible mist, “we have a situation here, Macallister.”
“Logan. Just call me Logan.” He narrowed his eyes, seized with the urge to knock some of the frost off her. “And what should I call you, Dr. Vance? Jennifer? Or just Jenny?”
“Jenny?”
“We may as well be informal,” he said, “seeing as we’re going to be roommates.”
CHAPTER TWO
Jenny? He was going to call her Jenny? The last person to call her that was her grandmother, back when Jenny was fourteen-years-old. On his lips, it sounded like a call out to the restless tomboy of the girl inside her.
“Students call me Professor Vance.” She pushed the words through the stretch of her throat. “My closest colleagues call me Jennifer. If either of those names is too much of a mouthful for you, Jen would be fine.”
“No, it’s definitely Jenny for you.” He gave her a wolf’s grin. “I think it fits you fine.”
Her pulse jumped as if pulled by a string. What the hell had the kid in the coffee shop slip into her brew that morning? “The point is moot, Macallister. Since we won’t be sharing this cabin.”
“John would have my head on a platter if I shipped you off to a hotel.”
“That’s not an option. A hotel won’t have a laboratory with a hood and gas lines. Dr. Springfield converted the basement of this building into a mini-lab with all the necessary equipment and safety specifications—”
“So?”
“I’m here to work. My work requires a lab.” According to John, this guy was here just to crash, just to take care of the place. Hewing logs and pounding nails, if those muscle-honed arms were any indication “I’ll be doing distillations and wet extractions. I need a hood, the proper equipment. They won’t have those amenities at the local Bed & Breakfast.”
Crossing those arms, he scrutinized her, his shadowed gaze stripping right through the linen and silk for the umpteenth time since she entered the room, heating the surface of her bare
