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the symptoms of a concussion,” he said.
“How’s your head?” He had a lump rising above one of his slashing eyebrows.
She thought he would at least express some curiosity about her real identity, but he did not.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I gave you a false name?” she said.
He studied her for a moment. “No.”
“Oh.” She realized she was disappointed in his lack of interest—not that she wanted to get into the whole tawdry tale of her failure to discern a bad person from a good one. Still, she felt driven to say something else.
“I just want you to know, I’m not a person you can’t trust.”
He looked at his watch, a hint that she didn’t have to say anything else.
For some reason, she babbled on. “I don’t have a list of aliases. There is no dead person in an attic somewhere that can be attributed to me. I’m not on the run from the law.”
Something like a smile tickled at the edges of his lips. “You think you had to tell me that you’re not a murderer or a fugitive?” he asked.
She nodded vigorously.
“It’s imminently apparent that you are not.”
“That’s good,” she said, though she wasn’t so sure. He had managed to say that as if she had boring written all over her, as if she was exactly the kind of woman whose fiancé would leave in search of excitement elsewhere.
“It’s also imminently apparent that something, or someone, has thrown a very bad scare into you. If it’s a man—” the smile had disappeared completely and something dangerous darkened his eyes “—you need to get rid of him and never look back.”
She opened her mouth to say something and then closed it again. Jefferson was already looking back to his computer. It was a man, but it was too complicated to explain, and he clearly did not want an explanation. Despite the advice, he was letting her know that theirs was a temporary arrangement and that she had to handle her life herself. He had absolutely no interest in her personal dramas. He did not want a repeat of last night any more than she did.
Except that looking at him, she did feel a strange longing to see the tender side of him again, to feel his hand in her hair and his lips on her cheek.
After a moment, he glanced at her, and she realized she was still standing there, trying to reconcile this cold indifference with the man who had comforted her last night.
Yes, that lump on your head, right over your scowling brow, needs some attention. And I would love to finish what I started, to lean over and put my fingers on it, as if somehow I could soothe the pain away. The way you soothed mine away last night.
But he was looking at her like the man least likely to want his pain soothed away. She thought of the little lost boy in that photograph in the living room. And she suspected the lump on Jefferson Stone’s head was the least of his pain.
She was glad she had the grocery list and didn’t have to make up an excuse for the fact she was standing there staring at him. “You asked me if there was anything else and yes, there is. There’s this.”
Trying not to feel as if she was scurrying under his impatient eye, she crossed the room and thrust the list in front of him.
He picked it up and studied it. The annoyed scowl creased his brow again. “Good grief, are we supplying a barracks?” he said, lifting his eyes to hers.
“It’s really just basics.”
He glared again at the list, then lifted those cool gray eyes to hers. “Cumin is a basic?”
His pronunciation of cumin was way off. He made it sound like something quite erotic.
“It’s a spice! You don’t have any spices,” she sputtered. She willed herself not to blush over something so silly as the pronunciation of cumin.
“Well, I doubt if they have anything quite so exotic in Anslow. There’s no big-box supermarket there. It’s a little family general store.”
“It’s not exotic,” she said. Good grief. She sounded defensive over a spice. She was pretty sure she was blushing.
“Well, I’m still not going to go ask for it. People would get the wrong idea entirely.” He took a pen off his desk and put a line through cumin.
“They might indeed get the wrong idea if you said it like that.” She could not resist commenting. “It’s not coming.” Now her cheeks felt as if they were on fire. “It’s pronounced coo-men.”
“Huh.” Unsaid: I don’t give a damn, though he was watching her face with interest now.
“I use it in homemade guacamole. I make really good burritos. You’ll never want a frozen one again.” She was hoping to get him to put cumin back on the list and to distract him from her schoolgirl reaction to what was simply a wrong pronunciation.
“That’s the problem with improvements,” he said. “They make you dissatisfied with the way things were before.”
“Well, in terms of frozen burritos for breakfast, that can only be a good thing.”
He appeared about to remind her, again, she was not his mother. Instead, he looked back at the list.
“I don’t know where any of this stuff is,” he said. “Cornstarch. Where do you find that? In the vegetables or in the laundry supplies?”
She pressed her lips together to keep from laughing.
“How essential can something called cornstarch be, anyway? I don’t even like my shirts starched. That was my grandfather’s generation.” He took his pen and struck another item from her list.
“It’s for thickening sauces, not for doing laundry,” she said, but he did not appear to hear her.
“Dark chocolate ice cream? Not just ordinary chocolate?”
She had been planning on making iced mocha for the heat of the afternoon. In truth, it was all part of her plot to make him happy.
It was more than obvious happiness did not come naturally to him. Rather than seeing that as a challenge, she should just admit to herself that she had set an impossible task.
If only bringing someone happiness could be as simple as giving them an iced mocha on a hot afternoon.
“THE ICE CREAM may not be essential,” Angie admitted, though she was reluctant to give ground.
“Good.” Jefferson crossed it off the list with a little too much enthusiasm, and then muttered, “If I was going to get ice cream, it wouldn’t be chocolate, anyway.”
“What kind would it be?” she asked, curious despite herself. You could probably tell a lot about a man by the kind of ice cream he liked.
But he only spared her a glance that made her feel as if the question had been highly personal, like asking if he preferred boxers or briefs.
“You know,” he said, displeasure deepening his voice even more, “I offered to pick up a few things in town because I have another errand to do there, but a list like this? I’ll be wandering in the market for hours. They’ll have to send in a Saint Bernard to find me, hopefully with a keg of brandy around his neck. Brandy.” He squinted at her list and crossed something off. She was fairly certain it was the cooking sherry.
“I hate going to the market, anyway,” he admitted.
“That explains the frozen bean burrito for breakfast.”
“Yes, it does,” he said