Tycoon's Temptation: The Truth About the Tycoon / The Tycoon's Lady / HerTexan Tycoon

“I’m sorry.”

Funnily enough, she had the sense the words weren’t merely a platitude. She looked up at him and he wasn’t looking at the flowers, at all. “We all were.” And even though there were days she missed her mother with a physical ache, she’d lived through the worst of her grief and could think about her without wanting to dissolve.

She set the flowers safely to one side and returned to unpacking the rest of her purchases. Any minute he’d probably get bored and leave the room. “What about your parents?” she asked quickly, before she lost her nerve.

“Divorced a long time ago.”

She paused, caught by something in his expression that she couldn’t have defined had she tried. “That must have been hard,” she said quietly.

His gaze didn’t waver. “Be glad you never had to live through your own parents going to war.”

Hadley’s fingers tightened around a fresh tomato. She set it down before she punctured the skin. The war between her mother and natural father had gone on before she’d been born. Beau Golightly was her stepfather. “So.” She took a cheerful note. “What’s the word on your car?”

“Your brother is working up the estimate.”

“He’ll be fair. And not just in deference to my insurance rates that are undoubtedly going to go up again.”

“Again?”

She shrugged and smiled ruefully. What was the point in being offended over the simple truth? She folded the emptied canvas bags and stacked them beneath the sink. “We both know I’m not going to win any driving awards.” She straightened and brushed her hands down her slacks.

Maybe if she focused on the business at hand, she would prove she wasn’t inept in that area, at least. “We need to get you settled in a room, then. Can’t have you just hovering around the downstairs rooms with no place of your own.”

Joanie Adams padded into the kitchen, the ever-present cereal bowl in her young hand. “No sweat,

Had,” she said, obviously overhearing Hadley’s comment. “I told him to go up to the tower room. He’s the one you were expecting, right?”

Hadley’s smile wilted a little. Joanie had her heart in the right place. “Actually, he isn’t.”

Joanie’s sweet face fell. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

Hadley waved her hands. “Don’t be silly. I should have been here when Mr. Tolliver arrived. It’ll all be fine.”

“I’m not choosy,” Wood murmured. “As long as there’s a bed.”

But Joanie still looked troubled. Fat tears filled her blue eyes. “I was only trying to help.”

Hadley tucked her arm through Joanie’s, leading her from the kitchen. She knew from experience that once Joanie started the waterworks, it only got worse from there. “I know you were,” she soothed. “Truly, Joanie. It’s fine. No harm done.” She snuck an apologetic look over her shoulder at Wood as she herded Joanie back to her room. If he thought Joanie’s reaction extreme, it didn’t show on his face.

The man was proving to have the patience of Job.

The only other person she knew personally with that kind of patience was her stepfather, Beau.

By the time Hadley had opened a fresh box of tissues and Joanie’s wailing had ceased, Hadley wanted nothing more than to sit down with a good book and put up her feet. But lunch needed to be prepared, and she had to move Wood out of the tower and into the only other room she had prepared for guests.

Mrs. Ardelle was banging away on the piano keys, and Hadley stuck her head in the parlor, meaning to yell hello over the notes.

Wood sat on the bench beside the white-haired woman, holding the pages of the sheet music in place.

Hadley hovered, unnoticed in the doorway until Mrs. Ardelle finished with a flourish and dimpled at Wood. “Do you play?”

He lifted a shoulder. “Badly. Blame six years of enforced lessons. No—” he waved Mrs. Ardelle back in place on the bench when she made to move so he could take her spot “—you keep playing. My ego would roll over and die if I made an attempt at it.”

Mrs. Ardelle laughed gaily, clearly taken with Wood’s deprecatory drawl. Hadley smiled herself as she tiptoed back to the kitchen without disturbing the two.

Fortunately, lunch was easy, requiring little of her thoughts, which were definitely preoccupied again with her unexpected guest. Chicken salad, broccoli soup and pecan tarts. When everything was ready she set it all out on the buffet in the dining room using special containers that would keep the dishes hot or cold, and rang the dinner bell. They’d come by and eat when it suited them over the next hour.

Wood escorted Mrs. Ardelle into the dining room before Hadley escaped to spend her lunchtime as she usually did—squirreled away in her room for an uninterrupted hour of writing. But she surprised everyone, including herself, by fixing herself a serving and sitting down at the table.

Mrs. Ardelle’s bright eyes skipped from Wood to her as she chattered about the latest gossip going around Lucius, and Hadley had the suspicion that she’d just given the elderly woman a new topic to gossip about.

The presence of Wood Tolliver at Tiff’s.

Vince Jeffries ambled in. Next to Wood, who didn’t really count, Vince was her newest boarder. Typically quiet, the thirty-something balding man sat at the end of the table, barely nodding a greeting at the rest. Even Joanie came in after a fashion, keeping a wide berth between herself and Wood, as if he had been barking at her for the room mix-up when nothing could have been further from the truth.

Hadley couldn’t help wondering what he thought of his lunch companions and was no closer to a conclusion when the pecan tarts had all been eaten and the dining room was clear again, save the dirty dishes, her and Wood.

She tried waving him back when he began helping her clear the table, but he paid no heed, and in less than half the time it usually took, she had the dining room restored to order and the kitchen sink was full of soapy water.

“A lot of service you’re providing for a boardinghouse,” Wood observed.

She gave up protesting his help. The man seemed set on it regardless of what she said. “You’re pretty determined to do whatever you want, aren’t you?” She looked pointedly at the dish towel he’d picked up.

“Pretty much,” he allowed smoothly.

She smiled despite herself and shoved her hands back in the hot, soapy water. “So, what do you do back in Indiana?”

He dried a plate and carefully stacked it on top of the others. “This and that. What time is your special guest coming this afternoon?”

Hadley glanced up at the clock, dismayed to see how quickly the time was slipping past. “A few hours yet. She said to expect her around four. She’s coming up from Wyoming.”

He lifted his eyebrows at that, and Hadley shrugged. “From one snowy place to another. I know. But it’s business, and believe me, if I turn it away, I’ll hear about it from my sister, Evie. She’s on my case enough as it is for being too, well, too—”

“Soft?”

She looked sideways at him and felt her heart skid around in her chest again when their gazes met. “Yes.”

Steely blue roved over her and she felt it like a physical thing. “Soft isn’t necessarily bad,” he murmured.

Her face felt warm, and blaming it on the sudsy water would be an outright lie. “Well.” Her voice was even more breathless. “It is when the profit margin around here is as minimal as it is. She’d have this place listed on one of those Best of shows on television, if she were in charge, and never let any rooms go empty for long.”

He slipped the forgotten plate out of her fingers and ran it through the rinse water. “But you don’t run Tiff’s for the profit, do you.”

She blinked, trying to gather her scattered wits, few as they seemed. “When my mother died, my father and brothers wanted me to take over Tiff’s. Nobody could bear to sell it off. Evie was already married with her own responsibilities, and there was nobody left but me.”

“And what did you want?”

“To run Tiff’s, of course,” she said after a tiny hesitation that she assured herself wasn’t noticeable.