Page 34 of Serenity Harbor

“Good point. It’s nice you have all this space for him to run. Now you just need to add a swingset for him. And a dog.”

“A dog.”

She laughed. “You know you’re going to have to eventually. He loves them too much. You might as well surrender to the inevitable.”

She didn’t give him time to respond. “I really do need to go. The dinner party should be wrapping up by now. It ought to be safe for me to go home—for tonight, anyway, until my mom tries to set me up with her friend’s cousin’s son from Bozeman.”

“If you really want to avoid your mother’s matchmaking, you could always stay here while you’re in town.”

The words spilled out of nowhere, and he had to wonder just how long his subconscious had been mulling over that particular idea.

While he might have been a little surprised by them, she looked completely gob-smacked.

“Here?”

Maybe his subconscious was smarter than he gave it credit. The more he thought about it, the more he loved the idea. “Sure. I’ve got plenty of extra bedrooms, and that way I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping you after hours when I have to stay late on a project.”

“You want me to move in with you,” she said, her voice curiously flat.

“Why not? It would only be for a few weeks while you’re in town and would be a huge help to me. I’ll even add to the Adopt Gabi fund by paying you double our agreed-upon rate, since you’ll basically be on call twenty-four hours a day.”

There. That was a subtle way to help her meet her Adopt Gabi goal while at the same time giving himself a little breathing room on nights like tonight when he had to work late.

“Double,” she repeated. In the moonlight, her eyes looked huge, shocked.

“Look at it this way, if you’re not staying with your mom and stepfather, you won’t have to worry about your mom’s matchmaking while you’re home. Out of sight, out of mind, right?”

She stared at him for a long moment, and then she burst into laughter that had an edge of hysteria.

“You are delusional, Bowie Callahan,” she said when she caught her breath. “What do you think will happen if I move in with the most eligible bachelor in Haven Point? My mother will think she just won the matchmaking lottery.”

“You can explain it’s merely a business arrangement.”

“Oh, I can explain until I’m blue in the face. Remember what I said earlier? She thinks she knows me and what I want. She can’t see me as anything but silly, flirty, man-hungry Katrina. If I move in here for the few weeks I’ll be in town, somehow Charlene will think I engineered the whole thing to be closer to you. I have a feeling she already believes our encounter at the grocery store that first day was deliberate on my part, just a way of meeting the sexy new guy in town.”

He could only wish—both that he were the slightest bit sexy and that she might want to arrange things to meet him.

“So what? Let her think what she wants. You and I will both know there’s nothing between us, and that’s the only thing that matters, isn’t it?”

He could tell she was wavering.

“We could always prove it.”

“What did you have in mind?” she asked, eyes suddenly wary in the moonlight.

The same thing that had been on his mind since he walked into his house and found her sleeping on the sofa.

Kissing her.

He ached to taste her soft mouth, to pull her close and run his fingers through that silky hair. It probably wouldn’t prove a damn thing except that he was stupid and crazy and reckless, but he had resisted her as long as humanly possible.

“Bowie?”

“This,” he finally said. Tossing the rest of his common sense to the wind, he edged forward, slid a hand behind her head and lowered his mouth to hers.

She froze for a moment, her breath caught between them, long enough for him to be certain he had just made a terrible miscalculation. Then her mouth softened under his and she pressed that slender, luscious body against him and returned the kiss.

CHAPTER EIGHT

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