“Yeah, Phil has expressed himself to me.” One side of Noah’s mouth turned up. “Probably a lot more crudely than he did to you.”
“He wasn’t crude,” she conceded. “In fact, he was so delicate, I can’t absolutely swear I understood what he was saying. It was something to the effect that the builders liked having a good relationship with the planning department, and they knew how to take care of their friends in government. What’s good for me is good for them, and vice versa.” She wrinkled her nose. “I think that was the gist of it. Good is his favorite word, apparently.”
“He didn’t say, ‘You scratch our backs, we’ll scratch yours’?” Noah asked sardonically.
She laughed. “No, no, he was much too subtle for that.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
For all his amusement, she didn’t kid herself that the question wasn’t dead serious.
“Nothing,” she told him. “Nothing at all.”
After a minute, that too-sexy mouth curved again. “Good.”
“Can we label my tactics something else?” she begged. “Smart, maybe?”
Now he did laugh, stretching at the same moment. She heard a few bones crack and saw an impressive flexing of muscles.
“More?” she said hurriedly, poking the pizza box toward him.
“Nah, thanks. I’ll leave you some leftovers.” He frowned. “Are you serious about heading out this evening?”
“I really need sheets and a towel, if nothing else. I won’t worry about groceries until tomorrow. Thank goodness for the weekend.”
“Where are you going?”
“Walmart or Target. All I need is one set of everything, plus some basics like a can opener and a coffeemaker. I’ll eat out a lot until my stuff shows up.”
“All right,” he said reluctantly. “I’ll follow you over there.”
Indignant, she stared at him. “What? No. You’re not going shopping with me.”
“Wasn’t offering. I’ll just make sure you’re not being followed.”
She argued; his face looked like one of the Easter Island statues. Once he made up his mind, he was not a flexible man. What a surprise, Cait thought in irritation.
But also, she had to admit as she made the drive in the dark, there was a tiny bit of gratitude mixed in. She had no doubt that if Blake had been lurking down the street and was following her, Noah would have noticed. At least she could feel pretty confident Blake wouldn’t appear tonight in the bedding aisle at Target.
Noah, though, scared her a little, with his combination of unexpected charm, sense of humor and outright kindness, all coupled with the personality of a bulldozer. A big one, not one of the wimpy little machines gentlemen farmers bought as toys to push earth around their five acres. Noah was the leveling-forests kind.
So far, she hadn’t demonstrated any ability to stand up to men who wanted to push her around. Wrinkling her nose, she thought she’d probably still be okay if she weren’t attracted to him.
Unfortunately, that was a big “if.” Exasperated with herself, she found a parking spot only steps from the doors leading into Target.
As she locked her car and hurried in, it struck her that she was in trouble in more ways than one.
CHAPTER SIX
NOAH DID HIS damnedest not to think about Cait over the weekend, and he dodged her for most of the following workweek. Every time he saw her coming his way, he summoned his new mantra: Use Your Head. Usually followed by: For God’s Sake. Add an exclamation point.
There were a lot of reasons why any kind of personal relationship with her wasn’t smart, starting with the fact that, yes, she worked for him. Women employed at Chandler’s were off-limits, too.
It wasn’t only that, though. Cait McAllister had wounds that he could almost see, like the fading yellow of bruises. She was not up for casual sex, and that was all that interested him. The emotional crap wasn’t his style, and God knows he had never imagined a wife and family. He had neither the experience nor the skill set to make a success of either. He barely remembered the father who’d appeared and disappeared from his life until that last fishing trip when Noah was something like eight or nine. Mom had remarried about then, and his stepfather had been disgusted with the baggage she brought. He was never abusive, just tried to pretend Noah didn’t exist. Kind of like a man who’d reluctantly allowed the kids to get a dog but didn’t want anything to do with it and threw a fit if it tripped him or dug a hole in the lawn. Noah thought he’d been eleven or twelve—huge for his age and, predictably, clumsy—when one day he overheard him and Mom talking in their bedroom, the door not quite closed.