Cara/Cassidy Colter/Caron - Love's Nine Lives

She went very still. Comprehension dawned in her eyes. After a long time she said very softly, “Are you making fun of me, Mr. West?”

“Hell, yeah!” She winced when he said hell. “The game’s up. I know the guys put you up to this. A twelve-page prospectus for a cat door! Ha-ha.”

He slapped his knee, but noticed uncomfortably that Miss Bridget Daisy was not laughing.

Bridget stared at the big man, and she was struck again by how his big, powerful hand was making her teacup—a lovely Royal Doulton that she had inherited from her grandmother—look like a toy.

He was having the same effect on her sofa. With his huge frame jammed into the corner of it, a sofa she had always been perfectly content with suddenly seemed as though it belonged in a dollhouse.

In fact, Justin West, in the short time he had been there, was having the unfortunate and powerful effect of making it seem as if her whole life was make-believe, as if she had been playing with toys and imaginary friends and here was the real thing.

Justin West was real, all right. The man was one hundred per cent real—huge, handsome and infuriatingly male. She had felt addled from the moment she had opened the door, looked way up and seen him push his fingers through the chocolate silk of his hair. His eyes had been absolutely mesmerizing—a mix of gold and green, with a light burning in them that even she could see was frank male appreciation.

That light said Justin didn’t see her as little Miss Librarian, despite the severity of her hairdo and the straight lines of her skirt. Somehow he had seen through all that as if it was nothing more than a disguise—a role she played. He had seen her as a woman, and something shockingly primal in her had answered back.

Oh, not in words, thank God. In awareness. She had felt as though she sat on her edge of the couch practically quivering with nervous awareness—the easy play of his muscles; his scent, wild and intoxicating as high mountain meadows; the light in his eyes; the husky, deep sensuality of his voice.

Which was dreadful, of course. Because it went without saying that Justin West was the kind of man she absolutely loathed: full of himself, sure of his own attractions, shallow as a mud puddle. He would be just like all those athletic boys in high school and college who had known she was alive only long enough to poke fun at her. Justin West was one of the happy heathens of Hunter’s Corner.

Any small and secret hope that he might be different somehow than the other redneck men of this town were dashed. If Justin was really different she would have seen him at the library where the more refined citizens tended to gather. And she had never seen this man in her library.

This man thought the cat door was some sort of joke. He was making fun of her, just the way all those handsome, cocky boys in high school and beyond had always made fun of her.

Miss Priss. Four-Eyes. Brainiac.

As if there was something shameful about being smart. The painful taunts came back as though he had uttered them…and so did her feeling of helpless fury, not that she would ever allow him to see it. In her experience, showing vulnerability only made things worse.

With as much dignity as she could muster she said, “I don’t know what guys you are talking about, Mr. West.”

“Probably Harry Burnside, right?”

“Harry Burnside?” she said coolly. “I’m afraid I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“Yeah, right.” But doubt flickered across his features, and he looked down at her carefully prepared folder and frowned. “Well, come to think of it, I’m not sure Harry could spell infestation. Or rodent.”

“And this is a friend of yours?” she asked, her tone deliberately controlled, faintly judgmental. Given the unsteady hammering of her heart, she was quite pleased with herself.

He didn’t seem to hear her. He looked at the document, then back at her intently. His frown deepened. “And Fred would never be party to a plan like this, no matter how good the prank was.”

“You think my cat door is a prank,” she said, and she could hear the dullness creeping into her own voice. “I think it would be a good idea for you to leave now.”

He looked at her sharply, his gaze too all-seeing.

Was that pity she saw crowding the male arrogance out of his handsome features? She got up, nearly knocking over her teacup. She folded her arms over her chest and then released one just long enough to point at the door.

“Get out of my house,” she ordered.

He swore softly—a word only a barbarian would use—got up and moved toward her. He towered over her, and she knew if she moved one inch, he would think he had succeeded in intimidating her.

“Are you telling me this is for real?” he demanded. “I am insulted that you would think this was anything but real,” she said. She heard the hurt in her voice and tried to cover it by pointing at the door once more, more forcefully than the last time.

“You’re insulted?” He took a deep breath, looked away from her, ran a hand through his hair and then looked back. “Okay, Bridget, it looks like I made a mistake. I thought the guys hired you to play a prank on me.”

“Was that an apology?” she asked. “If so, I seem to have missed the I’m sorry part.”

Her breath caught in her throat. The man was looking at her lips! As if he found her aggravating and unreasonable and knew of only one way to solve that difficulty!

Well, he probably did only know one way. These types of men had limited methods of communication. Though he did have amazing lips, now that she was focused in that direction. The top one was a firm, hard line, but the bottom one was full and puffy. He wouldn’t dare kiss her!

But if he did, she wondered what it would taste like. Feel like.

“Get out,” she ordered again, but she could hear a despicable weakness in her own voice, and apparently he could, too, because he made no move toward the door.

Instead he folded his arms over the enormousness of his chest and gazed down at her, aggravated.

“Just for the record, you aren’t the only one who got insulted here. Lady, I have built whole houses on a handshake. I am not signing a twelve-page contract to build you a stupid cat door.”

“Stupid?” she said huffily.

“Yeah, stupid,” he said.

“Fine,” she said stiffly. “I wouldn’t offer you this job if you were the last man on earth. I will find someone to build my door who has enough integrity that signing a contract doesn’t frighten them. And who doesn’t think my project is stupid! And who doesn’t think I’m an eccentric old—”

“Okay,” he said, mercifully preventing her from having to say it—that she was an old maid. “Nice meeting you. Have a nice life.”

He went to move by her and then paused, sending a wary glance at the couch to see if his work clothes had marked it. Bridget actually felt a treacherous softening for him when he looked relieved to see they had not. He edged his way to the door.

“Look,” he said, an infuriating note of protectiveness in his voice, as if he was the big, strong guy and she was the frail, feeble woman. “Be careful.”

“Of?” She tapped her foot and looked at her watch.

“Anyone who needs those kind of instructions for such a minor piece of work is going to be nothing but trouble.”

“I’ll judge that for myself, thank you.”

“I’m just telling you this because Fred would probably kill me if I didn’t.”

“I am eternally in your debt,” she said, but he missed the sarcasm entirely and kept on talking.

“You can buy a cat door at the local hardware. If someone charges you more than fifty bucks to install it, they’re cheating you.”

“I don’t want the kind from the hardware,” she said tightly.

“Why the hell not? They’re not R28, but I’m sure they work fine.”

She debated telling him the truth. She did not want to, and yet the words just slipped out of her mouth. “Conan might get stuck.”

She felt an instant sense of having betrayed her cat.

Justin turned and studied Conan. “Why do I get the feeling if that cat was any bigger and I was any smaller, he’d have me for supper tonight?”

He doesn’t like you. He’s a good judge of character. But she retained any dignity she had left by not saying it.

“Okay, so you want a custom cat door. No more than a hundred and fifty bucks. The fence is the bigger job. I wouldn’t pay more than fifteen hundred for it, including materials. Two thousand if it’s cedar.”

She felt good manners entailed she should say thank you, but she didn’t.

The thought evaporated instantly when he spoke again anyway.

“And don’t show that SOW-COW thing to anyone. No self-respecting contractor will want to work for you. It makes you look like a nitpicking perfectionist.”

A nitpicking perfectionist? That was at least as hurtful as being called Four-Eyes. Miss Priss. A brainiac. Old maid.

“And let me warn you, there are plenty of contractors out there who aren’t the least self-respecting. Crooks, who would milk a girl like you for all you had.”

“I did a lot of research to prepare that document,” she said with all her dignity. “And I’m not a girl.”

“I’m telling you that SOW COW spells one thing—T-R-O-U-B-L-E.” He looked her over, put his hand on the doorknob and then grinned at her with seducing and wicked charm. “And so do you,” he said.

Then he was gone.

Bridget snapped the front door closed behind Mr. West and then turned her back and leaned her full weight against it as if she had just narrowly escaped…well, something.

She wasn’t quite sure what.

Or maybe she was.

Though she firmly ordered herself not to, Bridget drifted over to her front window and peeked around the edge of the curtain.

She watched as he leaped into a truck that she probably would have needed a stepladder to get into.

Despite her firm orders to her mind not to think about his body, she remembered it in sharp detail: him sitting on her couch, the large muscle in his forearm jumping every time he took a sip of tea, his jeans molded over the ridged muscles of his thighs, his chest huge and solid under a stained T-shirt. He had probably done that on purpose, made those muscles leap, the swine.

“Well, who is swooning over the swine?” she demanded of herself. The truck started with a roar and pulled away from the curb in a spray of gravel.

He would do everything too fast. A blush heated her neck and her cheeks as her mind flew with that one. “I just meant,” she told herself sternly, “that Justin West is a man of rough edges and no refinement whatsoever.”

He had insulted her and treated her like an idiot.

“I’ll show him,” she told Conan. “You wait and see.”

Conan opened an eye and regarded her, looking unconvinced.

But Bridget went right to the phone book and made a list of every contractor in the county. In the morning she would check them out with the Better Business Bureau. Within a week she would have a cat door, and Justin West would be a faint, unpleasant memory.

Only that wasn’t quite how it worked.

Because a week later she was no closer to getting Conan his cat door. After submitting her prospectus by fax or courier to over a dozen contractors, she had been laughed at, sworn at and hung up on.

Even when she reluctantly retired her SOW, no one had the time to do such a small job. The one quote she was given seemed outrageous, and it didn’t even include an automatic cat-door opener. She was reluctantly grateful that Justin had given her a guideline for the pricing of her project.