Amazing Gracie

“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“It would give me a clue about why you’re interested in such a huge old house. Doesn’t seem like the logical choice for a woman all alone.”

“Sometimes logic doesn’t have a thing to do with wanting a piece of property. Sometimes you just fall in love.”

He’d never met a woman less inclined toward indulging a whim. Hot as it was, she was dressed in a suit, hose, and high heels that would have knocked the socks off a New York businessman. For his own purely masculine reasons, he’d have preferred she come calling in a sundress. Be that as it may, Gracie struck him as an exceptionally practical, businesslike lady, which meant she had plans for that house. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what they might be.

“Or sometimes you decide you’d like to start a little bed-and-breakfast maybe,” he suggested quietly and watched the telltale color bloom in her cheeks.

He was glad he’d done a little checking when he’d first heard about Gracie MacDougal and her fascination with Aunt Delia’s house. He knew all about her career with Worldwide Hotels. It hadn’t required a huge leap to figure out what she had in mind for the old Victorian. Without saying a word, she’d just confirmed his guesswork.

“If you think I’ll raise my offer, you can think again,” she said.

“Wouldn’t matter if you did,” he said. “It’s not for sale.”

“Then I suppose I might as well be going,” she said, then met his gaze evenly. “For now.”

“Then you’ll be back?”

“Oh, you can count on it, Mr. Daniels.”

Kevin couldn’t explain the odd sense of relief that stirred in him. He’d intended to rid himself of her, once and for all. He’d been as adamant as he’d known how to be about Aunt Delia’s house. And still, some part of him had obviously relished the first skirmish in what now promised to be all-out warfare. He couldn’t help wondering what wiles Gracie MacDougal had up her sleeve.

Not that it mattered. His cousins were masters of every form of sneaky manipulation in the book. Not a one of them had put anything over on him yet. He doubted Gracie MacDougal would, either.

It would be downright entertaining, though, to have her try.

Gracie had negotiated for supplies and equipment for entire hotel chains with more success than she had in that first meeting with Kevin Patrick Daniels. The man obviously had no idea of the actual worth of that run-down property. Didn’t seem to care, either. Otherwise, he would have recognized her bid for the preemptive strike it was and snapped it up.

All in all, the meeting had been a frustrating waste of her time. She had left his house feeling disgruntled, off kilter, and thoroughly frustrated.

Of course, that might have had something to do with the fact that the man had been half nude, with his shirt undone and jeans so old they were practically threadbare in some very revealing places. She had tried not to look, she really had, but it had been impossible not to notice the curling, dark chest hair and the very impressive bulge beneath the zipper of his jeans. Unless she’d been very much mistaken, the man had been turned on by taunting her.

Whatever, she had left Greystone Manor more determined than ever to get her hands on that house…or around Mr. Daniels’s neck.

She had grown very tired of hearing him declare the property wasn’t for sale. Of course it was. Everything in the world was for sale for the right price. She just had to figure out what would be persuasive enough to get his attention.

No, check that. She’d had his attention, all right. There was hard evidence of that, so to speak. Plus, she had caught the speculative, masculine gleam in his eyes, once he’d bothered to open them all the way. She supposed there was a way to use that to her advantage if she were that sort of woman. But, alas, she wasn’t.

No, what she needed to do was to get him focused on business, caught up in the deal, challenged by the negotiations.

Unfortunately, she had a feeling one of those day-long motivational seminars couldn’t stir up Kevin Patrick Daniels. One thing she had to say for Mr. Daniels, he was no Max. Obviously, he had about as much ambition as a slug. Lying around in a hammock in the middle of a workday said a whole lot about the man, none of it good.

Of course, some would say that maybe she ought to take a few lessons in relaxation from him. She’d been on vacation less than a week and already she was caught up in a business deal when she should have been following his example and sipping lemonade and lolling around in a hammock. What was it about her that drove her to succeed? If she could figure that out, maybe she could bottle it and slip a little into Mr. Daniels’s lemonade.

A good shrink would probably tell her that she spent so much time on her career, because she was better at it than she was at relationships. In fact, she’d grown so leery of men in recent years that she’d worked very hard to attain the kind of independence that made a male protector unnecessary. She could count on her career in ways she’d never been able to count on another human being. At least she’d been able to until Max had come along and thrown a monkeywrench into that side of her life, too.

Maybe that was why she had seized on the notion of getting that Victorian and turning it into a bed-and-breakfast. It was just one more way to solidify her independence, to make sure that she alone was in control of her future.

Right now, though, Kevin Patrick Daniels stood between her and the control over her own life that she craved. That put him in a very dangerous position. A woman scorned in love was nothing compared to the ire of Gracie MacDougal when she’d been scorned in business.

Yes, indeed, win or lose, the next few months were going to be very interesting.

4

“Why on earth didn’t you sell it to her?” Aunt Delia demanded of Kevin, after Gracie MacDougal had stalked out of the house, her spine rigid and her cute little behind swaying provocatively despite her annoyance.

“You been listening at keyholes again?” Kevin asked, regarding his eighty-seven-year-old aunt with amusement. She was wearing bright red sneakers, a purple skirt and a blouse with most of the colors of the rainbow in it. Compared to Gracie, she was a fashion nightmare.

Aunt Delia also had the hearing and curiosity of a kid. Nothing much got past her, as he had learned to his everlasting chagrin when he’d tried to sneak Marge Taylor up to his room late one night right after his aunt had moved in. Even though their rooms were in opposite wings of the house, Aunt Delia had apparently heard every creak of the stairs and enough of their whispered exchange to tell her they were up to no good.

Aunt Delia’s disapproving frown over breakfast the next morning—when Marge was long gone—had had a chilling effect on his lovelife. Of course, that scowl might have had something to do with the fact that Aunt Delia regarded that particular branch of the Taylor line as little better than trailer trash. Nothing he could say about Marge’s superb wit, high IQ, and college degree was likely to change her opinion.

“You keep snooping like that, you’ll get a crick in your back,” Kevin told her now.

“Didn’t have to put my ear to the keyhole this time,” his aunt replied, clearly unfazed by the accusation. “You two had the volume up so loud it interrupted my favorite show. It was a lot better than listening to some cross-dressing weirdo on a talk show.”

Kevin shuddered, appalled and thoroughly baffled by her addiction to tabloid TV. “Why do you watch that stuff anyway?”

“A woman my age has to keep on top of what’s going on in the world.”

“Then you must have a mighty peculiar view of the state of affairs,” Kevin said. “You need to get out more. See some normal folks.”

“You took away my car keys,” she reminded him.

“After you mowed down six mailboxes in a row.”

She shrugged. “Accidents happen.”

“A few too many times in your case. I’ll take you anyplace you want to go.”

“So you say.”

“I will.”

She gave him a sly look. “Including that off-track betting parlor on the river?” she inquired a bit too eagerly.

Kevin saw too late the trap he had set for himself and resigned himself to an afternoon of keno and horse racing. “Tomorrow,” he agreed.

Aunt Delia seemed surprised by the easy capitulation. “Must mean you’re hoping to run across that woman again. What did you say her name was?”

“I didn’t. It’s Gracie,” he said, rather liking the way it sounded. Old-fashioned. Prim and proper. Yep, that was Gracie, all right. Getting her to loosen up was going to improve his summer considerably.

“She’s right pretty, if you like the type,” Aunt Delia said slyly.

“I didn’t notice.”

“Hogwash! The day you don’t notice a woman will be the day they put you in the ground, Kevin Patrick. It amazes me still that one of them hasn’t caught you by fair means or foul. Goodness knows, half the female population of the Northern Neck has tried hard enough.”