A Very Special Delivery

“Just here to do a job?”

“I’m here to do a job,” he said.

Laura drummed her fingers lightly on the dashboard. The seeds of a plan—okay, the seeds of a very small plan—were building. Nothing great, but maybe more would come later.

“So…what do you usually do for supper?”

Mick turned curious eyes her way before looking back to the road. Suddenly he smiled.

“I usually eat,” he teased.

“Where?”

He shrugged. “Fast food, a local diner, that kind of thing. Why?”

“No special reason. Just that you’re away from home. Maybe you’d like food that was prepared just for you. Mrs. Parker has given me kitchen privileges if I want to have a guest rather than eat with all the other boarders. I could cook something for you. We could have a meal in my room, unless…”

“Unless?”

She felt her face burning. “I never thought. You don’t have a wife who would get upset about another woman making you a meal, do you?”

In the silence that followed, the sound of the truck’s engine filled her ears. Loudly.

“No wife,” he finally said. “I’m not exactly marriage material.”

His statement called for a question, but his tone told her he wasn’t interested in answering questions.

“So would you be open to letting me work off my debt to you with food?”

“You don’t have a debt.”

She shook her head. “I have a bodyguard. I don’t think most bodyguards work for free. Or at least they shouldn’t.”

Mick pulled up in front of the clinic. He cut the engine and turned dark, intense eyes her way, his arm looped over the steering wheel. Now that he wasn’t driving, Laura was even more aware that he was an attractive, unmarried man…and that he was very close.

As if to punctuate that point, Mick leaned even closer. “Laura,” he said softly. “I don’t know how to say this tactfully, but I’m not sure it’s wise for us to spend too much time alone in your room.”

She sat there quietly chewing on her bottom lip, horribly embarrassed that he must have known what she had been thinking.

A low groan slipped from his lips. “Don’t do that,” he whispered, brushing her lip with his fingertips. And at that point of contact, she knew that he was right. It would be very dangerous for her to bring him into the private confines of her room at the boardinghouse. She’d be in much more danger than she probably ever would be in at the clinic, even with some sort of criminal harassing the Maitlands.