Wild about Harry

The words were no sooner out of her mouth when Tyler’s accusation echoed in her mind. You’re not happy.

The assertion would have been much easier to deal with if it hadn’t been fundamentally true. Amy loved her children, and she found her work at least tolerable. She had good health, a nice home and plenty of money.

Those things should have been enough, to her way of thinking, but they weren’t. Amy wanted something more.

By the time nine o’clock rolled around, Amy had put on jeans and a navy sweater with red, white and yellow nautical designs. She wore light makeup and a narrow white scarf to hold her hair back from her face.

“Am I presentable?” she whispered to Oliver with a twinkle in her eyes, when the doorbell sounded.

Oliver had already rushed to answer the door, but Ashley examined her mother with a pensive frown and then nodded solemnly. “I suppose you’ll do,” she said.

When Amy saw Harry standing there on the porch, looking rakishly handsome even in jeans and a white cable-knit sweater, her heart raced the way it did when she was trying to get in step with a revolving door.

His too-blue eyes swept lightly over Amy, but with respect rather than condescension. “G’day,” he said.

The children’s laughter seemed to startle Harry, though he looked suavely good-natured, as usual.

“You sounded like Crocodile Dundee again,” Amy explained with an amused smile. She was grateful to the children for lightening up the situation; if it had been left to her, she probably wouldn’t have been able to manage a word. “Come in.”

Harry smiled at the kids and rumpled Oliver’s hair. Then, as if he hadn’t already charmed the eight-year-old right out of her sneakers, he bowed and kissed Ashley’s hand. The effect was oddly continental, despite the child’s diminutive size.

Minutes later, after making sure that Oliver and Ashley’s seat belts were properly fastened, Harry joined Amy in the front seat.

“You’re quite competent at driving on the right-hand side of the road,” she remarked, strictly to make conversation, when Harry had backed the van out onto the quiet residential street. An instant later, Amy’s cheeks were flooded with color.

Harry’s grin could only be described as sweetly wicked. “I’ve spent considerable time in the States,” he responded after a time.

Amy ran the tip of her tongue over dry lips. With Tyler, there had always been so much to talk about, the words had just tumbled from her mouth, but now she felt as though the fate of the western hemisphere hung on every phrase she uttered.

Lamely, she turned to look out the window, all the while riffling through the files in her mind for something witty and sophisticated to say.

“Mom isn’t used to dating,” Oliver put in from the back, his tones eager and earnest. “You’ll have to be patient with her.”

Harry chuckled at Amy’s groan of mortification, then sent a seismic shock through her system by innocently touching her knee.

“It’s all right,” he assured her in his quiet, elegant, hot-buttered-rum voice. “Why are you so nervous?”

Why, indeed, Amy wondered. Maybe it was because she was really beginning to believe that a ghost had set her up for a blind date!

“Oliver was right on,” she said after a few moments of struggling to get her inner balance. “I’m not used to—socializing.”

Harry grinned, skillfully shifting the van into a higher gear and keeping to the right of the yellow line on the highway. “Dating,” he corrected.

Amy’s color flared again, and that only amused him more.

“No wonder Ty was so crazy about you,” he observed, keeping his indigo gaze on the traffic.

Foolishly pleased by the compliment, if mystified, Amy did her best to relax.

The lull obviously worried the children; this time it was Ashley who leaned forward to put in her two cents’ worth.

“Once Mom went out with this dude who sold real estate,” the little girl said sagely. “Rumpel bit his ankle, and the guy threatened to sue.”

Amy shook her head and closed her eyes, beyond embarrassment. Then she risked a sidelong glance at Harry. “Rumpel has always been an excellent judge of character,” she admitted.

Harry laughed. “All the same, I’ll watch my manners when the cat’s about.”

The thought of Harry Griffith not watching his manners made a delicious little thrill tumble through Amy.

Presently they arrived in west Seattle, and Harry took the exit leading to the ferry terminal. He paid the toll and drove onto the enormous white boat with all the savoir faire of a native.

Ashley and Oliver were bouncing in their seats, but Amy made them stay in the van until the boat had been loaded. Their eagerness carried a sweet sting; riding on ferry boats had been something they did with Tyler. He’d taken them from stem to stern and, on one occasion, even into the wheelhouse to meet the captain.

The four of them climbed the metal stairway to the upper deck, Oliver and Harry in the lead, and then walked through the seating area and outside. The wind was crisp and salty and lightly tinged with motor oil.

While Oliver and Ashley ran wildly along the deck, exulting in the sheer freedom of that, Amy leaned against the railing as the heavy boat labored away from shore.

She was only too conscious of Harry standing at her side, mere inches away. He was at once sturdy as a wall and warm as a fire on a wintry afternoon, and Amy was sure she would have sensed his presence even in a pitch-black cellar.

“Have you seen pictures of this place we’re going to look at?” she asked, and she sounded squeaky in her effort to keep things light.

Harry shook his head. “No, but the agent described it to me. Sounds like a terrific place.”

Amy swallowed. So far, so good. “You’ll be renting it, I suppose?”

“Buying,” Harry responded. “My company is opening offices in Seattle. I’ll be here about six months of the year.”

Amy had a peculiar, spiraling sensation in the pit of her stomach. “Oh.” She was saved from having to make more of that urbane utterance when Ashley and Oliver returned to collect Harry. They each took a hand, and in moments he was being led away toward the bow.