Take a Chance on Me
Page 18
He didn’t want a housekeeper with a wide full-lipped mouth, creamy skin, and thick hair the color of rich, decadent caramel.
And he most certainly didn’t want a housekeeper with curves, endless curves, curves that did nothing but tease his control and inflame his imagination.
His jaw tightened. He battled his temper. “Don’t get too carried away,” he said curtly. “I’ll be back tonight. You’ll still have a job to do in the morning.”
Her tawny eyebrows arched even higher. Her long ponytail slipped over her shoulder. “Good, because I like the job. It’s just—” she broke off, lips compressing, swallowing the words.
“What?” he demanded.
She shook her head, white teeth pinching her plump lower lip.
He tried not to focus on the way her teeth squeezed the soft lip. He didn’t want to focus on her at all. “What?” he repeated.
She sighed and glanced down at her hands. “Nothing,” she said quietly.
He said nothing.
She sighed again, twisted her hands. “I like it here,” she added. “And I like you. So just be careful. That’s all.”
He stared at her, perplexed.
She was nothing like Maxine, his housekeeper of the past nine years. Maxine didn’t laugh or smile or cry. She arrived every morning, did her work, and then left every night when her husband came to pick her up.
Maxine was silent and sober and moved through the house as if invisible.
Harley moved through the house as if a beacon shone on her. She practically glowed, bathed with light.
He didn’t understand how she did it, or what she did, only that from the moment she’d arrived seven days ago nothing in this house had been the same.
Suddenly aware that they were standing so close he could smell the scent of her shampoo—something sweet and floral, freesia or orange blossom and entirely foreign in his masculine house—he abruptly stepped back, letting her pass.
His gaze followed her as she crossed the kitchen, hating himself for noticing how the apron around her waist emphasized how small it was as well as the gentle swell of hips. “Just leave my dinner in the oven,” he said.
“If that’s what you want,” she said, reaching for the coffee pot to fill his thermos.
“That’s what I want,” he growled, looking away, unable to watch her a moment longer because just having her in his house made him feel things he didn’t want to feel.
Like desire.
And hunger.
Lust.
He didn’t lust. Not anymore. Maybe when he was a kid, young and randy with testosterone, he battled with control, but he didn’t battle for control, not at thirty-nine.
At least, he hadn’t battled for control in years.
But he was struggling now, inexplicably drawn to this temporary housekeeper who looked so fresh and wholesome in her olive green apron with its sprigs of holly berries that he wanted to touch her. Kiss her. Taste her.
And that was just plain wrong.
He ground his teeth together, held his breath, and cursed the employment agency for sending him a sexy housekeeper.
She walked toward him, held out the filled thermos and foil-wrapped packets of cheese sausage and coffee cake. “Be careful.”
He glanced down at her, seeing but not wanting to see how her apron outlined her shape. Hips, full breasts, and a tiny waist he could circle with two hands. Even with her hideous apron strings wrapped twice around her waist.
Aprons were supposed to hide the body. Her apron just emphasized her curves. And olive was such a drab color but somehow it made her eyes look mysterious and cool and green and her lips dark pink and her skin—
“I’m always careful,” he ground out, taking the thermos and foil packages from her, annoyed all over again.
He was a man about to turn forty and he’d spent the past eleven years raising two kids on his own, and he might not be a perfect father or a perfect man but he tried his best. He did. And while he appreciated his new housekeeper’s concern, he didn’t have time to be babied, and he certainly wasn’t about to explain himself. Not to his brothers, his dad, and especially not to a staggeringly pretty woman from California who was now living in his house, under his roof, bending and leaning and doing all sorts of things with her incredibly appealing body, all the while humming as she went about her work as if she were Snow White or Mary Poppins.
Most annoying to have a beautiful housekeeper. He would never have hired her if he’d realized she was so damn pretty. He didn’t want pretty in his house. He didn’t want to be tempted. He had a ranch to manage and two children who would be home from boarding school for their holidays in another week and he couldn’t afford to get distracted by a pretty face or a shapely body.
His gaze narrowed as it swept Harley Diekerhoff’s long, lean legs and gently rounded hips before skimming her small waist, then lifting to her face. “Always careful,” he repeated, and stalked out through the kitchen door to the back porch.
Harley Diekerhoff might be a perfect cook and housekeeper, but she was also a temptation, and that was a problem he didn’t need.
Find out what happens next….
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About the Author
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of over fifty five romances and women’s fiction titles, Jane Porter has been a finalist for the prestigious RITA award five times and won in 2014 for Best Novella with her story, Take Me, Cowboy, from Tule Publishing. Today, Jane has over 12 million copies in print, including her wildly successful, Flirting With Forty, picked by Redbook as its Red Hot Summer Read, and reprinted six times in seven weeks before being made into a Lifetime movie starring Heather Locklear. A mother of three sons, Jane holds an MA in Writing from the University of San Francisco and makes her home in sunny San Clemente, CA with her surfer husband and two dogs.
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