CHAPTER TWO

      DREW REGARDED BECKY ENGLISH thoughtfully. He had expected a high-powered and sophisticated West Coast event specialist. Instead, the woman before him, with her sunburned nose and pulled-back hair, barely looked as if she was legal age.

      In fact, she looked like an athletic teenager getting ready to go to practice with the high school cheer squad. Since she so obviously was not the image of the professional woman he’d expected, his first impression had been that she must be a young Hollywood hanger-on, being rewarded for loyalty to Allie Ambrosia with a job she was probably not qualified to do.

      But no, the woman in front of him had nothing of slick Hollywood about her. The vocabulary threw his initial assessment. The way she talked—with the earnestness of a student preparing for the Scripps National Spelling Bee—made him think that the bookworm geeky girl had been crossed with the high school cheerleader. Who would have expected that to be such an intriguing combination?

      Becky’s hair was a sandy shade of brown that looked virgin, as if it had never been touched by dye or blond highlights. It looked as if she had spent about thirty seconds on it this morning, scraping it back from her face and capturing it in an elastic band. It was a rather nondescript shade of brown, yet so glossy with good health, Drew felt a startling desire to touch it.

      Her eyes were plain old brown, without a drop of makeup around them to make them appear larger, or wider, or darker, or greener. Her skin was pale, which would have been considered unfashionable in the land of endless summer that he came from. Even after only a few days in the tropics, most of which he suspected had been spent inside, the tip of her nose and her cheeks were glowing pink, and she was showing signs of freckling. There was a bit of a sunburn on her slender shoulders.

      Her teeth were a touch crooked, one of the front ones ever so slightly overlapping the other one. It was oddly endearing. He couldn’t help but notice, as men do, that she was as flat as a board.

      Drew Jordan’s developments were mostly in Los Angeles. People there—especially people who could afford to buy in his subdivisions—were about the furthest thing from real that he could think of.

      The women he dealt with had the tiny noses and fat lips, the fake tans and the unwrinkled foreheads. They had every shade of blond hair and the astonishingly inflated breast lines. Their eyes were widened into a look of surgically induced perpetual surprise and their teeth were so white you needed sunglasses on to protect you from smiles.

      Drew was not sure when he had become used to it all, but suddenly it seemed very evident to him why he had. There was something about all that fakeness that was safe to a dyed-in-the-wool bachelor such as himself.

      The cheerleader bookworm girl behind the desk radiated something that was oddly threatening. In a world that seemed to celebrate phony everything, she seemed as if she was 100 percent real.

      She was wearing a plain white tank top, and if he leaned forward just a little bit he could see cutoff shorts. Peeking out from under the desk was a pair of sneakers with startling pink laces in them.

      “How did you get mixed up with Allie?” he asked. “You do not look the way I would expect a high-profile Hollywood event planner to look.”

      “How would you expect one to look?” she countered, insulted.

      “Not, um, wholesome.”

      She frowned.

      “Take it as a compliment,” he suggested.

      She looked uncertain about that, but marshaled herself.

      “I’ve run a very successful event planning company for several years,” she said with a proud toss of her head.

      “In Los Angeles,” he said with flat disbelief.

      “Well, no, not exactly.”

      He waited.

      She looked flustered, which he enjoyed way more than he should have. She glared at him. “My company serves Moose Run and the surrounding areas.”

      Was she kidding? It sounded like a name Hollywood would invent to conjure visions of a quaintly rural and charming America that hardly existed anymore. But, no, she had that cute and geeky earnestness about her.

      Still, he had to ask. “Moose Run? Seriously?”

      “Look it up on Google,” she snapped.

      “Where is it? The mountains of Appalachia?”

      “I said look it up on Google.”

      But when he crossed his arms over his chest and raised an eyebrow at her, she caved.

      “Michigan,” she said tersely. “It’s a farm community in Michigan. It has a population of about fourteen thousand. Of course, my company serves the surrounding areas, as well.”

      “Ah. Of course.”

      “Don’t say ah like that!”

      “Like what?” he said, genuinely baffled.

      “Like that explains everything.”

      “It does. It explains everything about you.”

      “It does not explain everything about me!” she said. “In fact, it says very little about me.”

      There were little pink spots appearing on her cheeks, above the sunburned spots.

      “Okay,” he said, and put up his hands in mock surrender. Really, he should have left it there. He should keep it all business, let her know what she could and couldn’t do construction wise with severe time restraints, and that was it. His job done.

      But Drew was enjoying flustering her, and the little pink spots on her cheeks.

      “How old are you?” he asked.

      She folded her arms over her own chest—battle stations—and squinted at him. “That is an inappropriate question. How old are you?” she snapped back.

      “I’m thirty-one,” he said easily. “I only asked because you look sixteen, but not even Allie would be ridiculous enough to hire a sixteen-year-old to put together this cir—event—would she?”

      “I’m twenty-three and Allie is not ridiculous!”

      “She isn’t?”

      His