Heart Of The Hunter. Bj JamesЧитать онлайн книгу.
a part of her resisted as another argued he was perfectly innocuous and just a customer. Summoning an elusive discipline she tried to quiet the notion there was anything familiar about him, and attend to the last details of the sale.
Five long, unproductive minutes later Annabelle Devereaux bustled in, her usual good-humored apology and bawdy explanation bursting from her before she realized Nicole was not alone.
“Oops!” She clapped a hand over her mouth, hiding a grin as she looked from one to the other. “Sorry!” she said, and was obviously anything but sorry. “The French libido isn’t exactly a proper topic with business afoot, but I didn’t realize there was business afoot already this morning.
“Wow!” She interrupted herself to lean over the desk. “What are these? No!” She warded off an answer. “Don’t tell me.” Canvases were shuffled slowly and her grin grew wider.
“Ashley!” Rising on tiptoe to shift a haunch onto the edge of the desk, she rested a stack of canvases on her knee. “You did it! Nicole Callison, you did it! Ashley Blackmon painted these, and somehow you’ve accomplished the impossible and convinced him to let us show them.”
“No,” Nicole demurred. “Ashley convinced himself.”
“Whatever. I don’t care, so long as we have them.”
“I’d like to include them in this showing.”
“You mean to sell?” Annabelle lifted an incredulous brow.
“Not this time.” Nicole shrugged. “Maybe never. Still, I’d like to include them.”
“Which means we’ll burn the midnight oil to change the exhibit.”
“One of us will.”
“Wrong!” Annabelle slipped from the desk and straightened her skirt. “Two of us will.”
Nicole laughed. “I knew I could count on you.”
If Annabelle’s grand entrance and conversation commanded Jeb’s attention, Nicole’s laughter stopped him cold. Before, it had been self-conscious and mechanical. But beyond that, he couldn’t remember ever hearing her laugh with such abandon and delight.
As he saw her now, in an element she’d created, speaking with this irrepressible woman who was clearly a trusted friend, he knew he’d never seen her as happy.
When this was finished, when he’d done what had to be done, he wondered what would be left of her life.
“Good morning,” a cheerful voice boomed out. “The boss lady suggested that there might be something I can show you.”
Jeb turned automatically toward the woman who had appeared at his side. In his millisecond of distraction she’d moved with an astonishingly quiet step after her boisterous entrance. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.”
“I can understand that. The wolf is beautiful.”
“The wolf?”
A dramatic gesture indicated the massive head of bronze where his clenched fist rested. “Since you’re two of a kind, it’s natural he would be one of your favorites.”
At a bit less than five feet, the woman called Annabelle was a foot shorter than he, but what she lacked in height was compensated for by unrestrained flirtation. As their gazes met, hers was flashing, unrepentantly appreciative. His was as aloof as an autumn mist. “I beg your pardon?”
“Honey.” Annabelle’s eyelids drooped in speculative appraisal. “Any man who looks as good as you, or as bad, has no need to beg anything from me.” A hearty laugh bubbled somewhere in the depths of her bosom as her shoulders shook. “At least, not too hard.”
“Good and bad?” Jeb mused. “An interesting if peculiar analogy.”
“Interesting, maybe. But not peculiar,” Annabelle declared. “Not peculiar at all. On the surface you’re good-looking in a rugged sort of way, but you can’t fool me. Underneath it you’re as wild and wily as the wolf, and twice as fascinating.”
“Wild and wily?” Jeb was chuckling now. The woman was outrageous and loved every minute of it. “Just an off-the-cuff analysis, huh? And if you had more time, you could delve a little deeper?”
“I wouldn’t mind the delving, but it isn’t necessary. Any woman worth half her salt can take one look at you and she knows.”
“But what does she know?”
A bold look moved over him again. “She knows everything.”
His chuckle turned to laughter. “I hope not. Sounds dangerous.”
“Only for the woman, sugar. But taking a crack at taming you would be worth it.” Abruptly her thoughts hopscotched in another direction. “Now that we’ve settled that, is there something special you wanted to see? Besides the wolf and me, of course.”
“Nothing, yet.” The words were hardly spoken before he recognized he’d made a tactical error. If he needed to establish himself as a regular and welcome client, he must play what was evidently a game greatly relished by this small person. Play it he would. Teasing her with a look as lecherous as her own, he grinned a lazy grin. The cool gray of his eyes became warm silver. “When I do...need help, that is, should I ask for...?”
As his voice trailed into another tantalizing pause, he saw delight flash in her eyes. Though she was short, shorter than Nicole, and much heavier, the weight was solid and perfectly distributed. With flawless, copper-hued skin and a Gypsy’s black mane tousled to perfection, she was a handsome woman. Clearly no stranger to masculine attention.
Indeed, she was handsome, but not beautiful, he decided. Not as Nicole was beautiful.
Keeping his attention focused on Annabelle, he didn’t need to glance at Nicole to make comparisons. How she looked had been burned into his brain in his study of her dossier and by weeks of surveillance.
He didn’t need to look at her to remember, nor to know that she had abandoned the pretense of working and watched him openly.
“I need to know your name,” he reminded Annabelle. “To be sure I get the right woman.”
Annabelle’s laugh set her bosoms struggling to be free of whatever superstructure confined them. “You are a devil. But you Californians usually are. Always ready to give a woman her comeuppance by reminding her there’s other fruit on the tree.”
“What makes you think I’m from California?” Jeb was a little alarmed by her astute deduction.
“I don’t think, I know. It’s the accent. You’ve been away from it long enough and trained enough that there are only little nuances of it left.”
Her allusion to his training was so perfectly on target that Jeb’s escalating alarm flickered for a moment in his eyes. For once the little woman seemed blithely unaware and chattered smugly on. “The average person wouldn’t hear it, but people come from all over the world to visit Charleston and the islands, and more than a few of them find their way to this gallery. After a while one learns. To be less than modest, I have an exceptional ear for accents and,” she added drolly, “it doesn’t hurt that I work for a former Californian.”
“I’m beginning to think there’s a lot about you that’s exceptional, Annabelle.”
“Annabelle! You devil!” She wagged a finger at him. “You’ve known my name all along. But how?”
“The boss lady mistook me for you when I came in.”
Annabelle’s rollicking laugh soared. “That would be a little hard to do.”
“Not when there are Ashley Blackmon paintings to distract one.”
“That would tend to distract her. At least until she got a good look at you.” She leaned closer, lifting her round face to his, to whisper. “Now that she