Protecting Peggy. Maggie Price
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normal responses to a beautiful, intriguing woman, he assured himself. Still, just because the demands of his job had prevented him from being with a woman at all for some time, that didn’t mean he was going to allow himself to start thinking about the landlady with the mind-set of a randy teenager. He intended to keep his thoughts on the sole reason he had checked into Honeywell House.
Charlie O’Connell.
Rory furrowed his brow as he began setting up his computer and preliminary testing instruments on the small writing desk that sat opposite the bed. It had been evident the EPA inspector wasn’t happy that Hopechest had hired a private chemist to test the ranch’s water. Could be, O’Connell simply resented the fact that the EPA’s failure to ID the contaminant had prodded Blake Fallon to take action. Then again, if O’Connell had something to hide, Rory knew his presence would have sounded an alarm in the inspector’s head to which O’Connell would react.
That, Rory thought, was a reaction he planned to watch for closely. And, while he was watching O’Connell, he would keep his eyes and his thoughts off Peggy Honeywell.
Good Lord, Peggy thought as she leaned against the wall just outside the door to Rory Sinclair’s room. Weren’t scientists supposed to be harmless-looking people who wore thick glasses, used pocket protectors in their white coats and had pale skin from being shut up in sterile labs?
That description didn’t come close to the man she’d just snapped the door shut on! Rory Sinclair was tall and lanky, with jet-black hair, a tanned, narrow face hardened by prominent cheekbones and killer blue eyes. His looks—combined with the fact that he’d been dressed all in black—had made her think of a highwayman who’d checked into her inn to take a break for the night from pillaging the countryside.
And the women who lived there.
Peggy closed her eyes. She pictured his hands, those long elegant fingers as he’d signed his name and address across the registration card. Somehow, someway, she had known, just by looking at his hands, how they might feel if he touched her.
“Get a grip, Honeywell,” she muttered.
Shaking her head, she pushed away from the wall and set off down the hallway. What was wrong with her? Just because a man’s hard features and dark clothes made him look absurdly dangerous didn’t mean he was. Rory Sinclair was Blake Fallon’s friend, a scientist who had come to Prosperino on legitimate business—which in no way encompassed him putting his hands on her.
She blew out a breath, having no idea where that crazy thought had come from. No doubt, the man had a wife and a couple of kids back in D.C., she reminded herself. Since it was getting late, she needed to rein in her imaginings and direct her attention to her own business, which included setting up for breakfast.
Her newest guest had caught her off-guard was all, Peggy reasoned as she reached the top of the staircase. When she’d first glimpsed Sinclair standing in the foyer, she had thought for the space of a heartbeat that he might be a ghost. After all, she hadn’t heard him open the inn’s front door. Hadn’t been aware of his footsteps as he crossed the foyer’s wooden floor. Yet, there he’d stood, watching in silence while she dealt with lecherous Charlie O’Connell. However mild Sinclair’s expression, she had seen in his eyes a quick and thorough measuring of the situation he’d walked in on.
How many times had she looked up and found Jay standing only inches away from her when she hadn’t even heard him walk into the room? How often had she seen her husband conduct the same instinctive evaluation of his surroundings as had Rory Sinclair?
Although she had used her skittishness over tackling her taxes as an excuse for her unease around Sinclair, she admitted to herself that her instinctive comparison of him to her late husband had knocked her off-balance.
Starting down the stairs, she pushed away the dull pang of the memory. Jay had been dead nearly five years; even after so long she sometimes wondered if the scars of grief she carried in her heart would ever completely heal.
She had healed, Peggy reminded herself as she shoved her hair behind her shoulders. She had carved out a new life for herself and Samantha. Her business was thriving—if she kept an eagle eye on the budget she would have two guest rooms added on to the inn before the end of the year. In her mind, expansion marked success.
Her mouth quirked when she reached the bottom of the staircase. She supposed she should give thanks that Rory Sinclair had arrived when he did. Successful innkeepers offered their guests openhanded hospitality, not slaps to the face like the one she’d been tempted to deliver to the EPA inspector.
Remembering the way Charlie O’Connell had slunk into her office, trapping her between the desk and his body while his hands gripped her waist had her temper spiking all over again. It took a real Neanderthal to assume that just because a woman was a widow she was lonely for a man’s touch. Granted, it had been a long time since she had stepped into a man’s arms, but that was by choice. If she decided she wanted physical contact, she was relatively sure she could make that happen.
Brow furrowed, she moved across the foyer into the book-lined study. Her gaze swept the oak floor, dotted by hooked rugs, then the small tables scattered about, checking to make sure everything was in place.
Satisfied with the state of the room and that Samantha hadn’t left any of her toys lying around, Peggy moved to the green-marble fireplace. There she crouched, her gaze going to the flames that ate greedily at the dry wood. Only to herself would she concede that on nights like this, when the wind turned sharp and a cold mist shrouded the inn, she felt her aloneness intensely. It was only human to long for someone to hold her, to again have a man to share her life with.
She knew she could pick up the phone, call Kade Lummus—a sergeant on the Prosperino Police Department—and he would come running. Kade was a good-looking man whose open expression and friendly brown eyes invited trust. More than once he had made it clear he was interested in getting to know her on a personal level. If she allowed herself to, she suspected she could become interested in him. Yet, that wasn’t going to happen. She had buried one husband who died because he wore a badge. That was enough for a lifetime.
She was twenty-eight; she didn’t intend to be alone forever. Someday, Peggy thought, shutting off the gas that fed the flames. Someday she would meet another man to whom she could give her heart. A man who would love her and Samantha equally. A man who didn’t have to strap on a bulletproof vest just to try to survive each workday. A man whose family didn’t have to wonder when he left each morning if he would walk back through the door that night. A safe man.
As if beckoned by some unseen force, her thoughts went to Rory Sinclair. He was a ruggedly handsome man who had an aura of danger about him, just as Jay had. An aura that had drawn her inexorably to the only man to whom she had given herself and her heart.
Never again, she vowed. The next time she got involved with a man, she wanted safe.
She was determined to have it, both for the sake of herself and her daughter.
Two
A persistent, unending droning penetrated Rory’s thoughts, dragging him from a deep sleep. When he pried his eyes open and waited for his brain to clear, he realized the noise was the wind. A brisk wind that battered the lace-covered windows that let in a gray morning gloom.
For the first time in longer than he could remember, he lingered in bed. He wasn’t sure what kept him beneath the colorful quilt and crisp sheets that he suspected had been ironed. Maybe it was an uncharacteristic urge to familiarize himself with this one room when he’d never felt the need to conduct more than a cursory study of the hundreds of other unfamiliar places he’d woken in during his career.
He propped his back against the headboard while his gaze slicked over the wallpaper spattered with small roses, the braided rug that pooled color across the wood floor, the little porcelain dish that held mints on the bedside table. His brow furrowed. No, he decided, it wasn’t the room itself. Although he appreciated ambiance, he never took much notice of it, especially in a place where he didn’t plan to spend