On top of everything else, there was something dreadfully wrong with the room. The reception was supposed to be in an elegant hillside mansion overlooking the city. Instead, she was standing in an empty, windowless warehouse.
The tantalizing smell of something delicious being cooked nearby distracted her from the chaos. She realized that she was very hungry, but she could not abandon the client to go get something to eat. She was a professional, after all…
Hannah came awake with a start and found herself gazing into the depths of the impenetrable fogbank that hovered outside the window. For a few disorienting seconds she thought she was still in Portland trying to hold together the unraveling threads of a disastrous wedding reception.
Then she smelled the exquisite aromas from downstairs. Reality returned, jolting her out of bed.
Rafe. He had not vanished discreetly at dawn as she had expected. He was down there making himself at home in her kitchen. She had been so sure that he would be gone by the time she awoke.
She looked at the foot of the bed. There was no sign of Winston. What had become of her faithful pal?
Now that was a really dumb question, she thought. Winston was a truly fabulous dog in many respects. But in the end, he was still a dog. If she wanted to find him, she had only to follow the smell of food.
She staggered into the bathroom, the last wisps of the familiar anxiety dream trailing after her. She’d been plagued by the wedding-reception-from-hell nightmare for months before she had made the decision to sell Weddings by Harte.
She gripped the edges of the white pedestal sink and stared at herself in the mirror. Her hair hung in lanky tangles. There was a sullen, surly look in her eyes, and the flush in her cheeks was unbecoming, to say the least. She could not face Rafe in this condition. Her only hope was a shower.
She whipped the long-sleeved nightgown off over her head and stepped beneath the hot spray. Seizing the shampoo in both hands, she went to work with near-violent determination. It had not been a good night.
When she emerged a short time later she felt infinitely better. She pulled on a sweater and a pair of jeans, brushed her freshly washed hair behind her ears, and anchored it with a headband.
She took another look in the mirror just before she left the room. With dismay she realized that she still looked a little too pink. Probably because of the shower, she decided. All that heat and steam. The effect would surely fade quickly.
She squared her shoulders, opened the bedroom door, and stepped out into the hall.
By the time she got downstairs her mouth was watering. She saw Winston sitting just inside the kitchen doorway. He rose to greet her with his customary gallantry, but it was clear that he was distracted by what was going on in the vicinity of the stove.
Rafe looked just as she had known he would look in the morning. Incredibly sexy, right down to and including the shadow of a beard that gave the hard planes of his face an even more dangerous cast than usual.
It really was not fair. A gentleman would have been gone by dawn. But, then, no one had ever called Rafe Madison a gentleman.
“Right on time.” Rafe’s eyes gleamed as he surveyed her with one swift, all-encompassing look. He picked up an oven mitt. “You can pour the coffee.”
She watched as he removed a pan from the oven. The faint scent of vanilla teased her. “What is it?”
“French toast.” He put the pan on the stove and tossed the mitt onto the counter. “Baked instead of fried. Sort of a cross between a bread pudding and a soufflé.”
She gazed at it longingly. “It’s beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.”
He grinned. “Thanks.”
So the man could cook. She already knew that. It was not a sufficient reason to fall in love. Lust, maybe, but not love.
She dragged her gaze away from the golden-brown French toast and saw that Rafe was watching her with an odd expression.
“I’ll get the coffee.” She whirled around and seized the pot.
Rafe arranged the French toast on two heated plates and carried the food to the table. Hannah studied the casually elegant fashion in which the puffy, golden-brown triangles had been positioned. There were little sprigs of fresh mint on top of the toast. The syrup in the small pot in front of her was warm.
She picked up her fork. “You know, there’s a theory in some quarters that you turned to a life of crime in order to support yourself after you left Eclipse Bay.”
He nodded. “I’ve heard that theory.”
“But after dinner the other night and breakfast this morning, I think the evidence is clear that you went to a blue-ribbon culinary academy instead of jail.”
He looked up very quickly.
She paused with a bite of French toast poised in midair. “Good heavens, I was joking. Did you really take cooking classes?”
He hesitated. Then shrugged. “Yes.”
She was fascinated. “When?”
“After I got married. In the back of my mind, I think I always had this idea that when you were happily married, you ate at home most of the time. But Meredith wasn’t big on cooking, so I took over the job. The better I got at it, the more restless and unhappy Meredith became.” Rafe made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “After a while I realized that she wasn’t real big on staying at home, either.”
She gazed at him in disbelief. “Meredith left you because you’re a fantastic cook and because you like to eat at home?”
“Well, those weren’t the only reasons,” Rafe admitted. “She might have been willing to tolerate my cooking if I had agreed to go to work at Madison Commercial. But I refused, so in the end she gave up on my future prospects and left.”
Hannah savored another bite of French toast while she thought about that. “I’m sorry your marriage didn’t work out.”
“You should be. I figure it’s your fault that it bombed.”
She nearly dropped her fork. “My fault. How in the world can you blame me?”
He met her eyes across the short expanse of the table. His mouth curved slightly. “That night on the beach you told me I didn’t have to follow in my father’s and my grandfather’s footsteps when it came to marriage, remember? So a couple of years later, I figured I’d give it a try. I mean, after all, it was advice from Miss Overachiever herself. How could it be wrong?”
“Now, hold on one dang minute here.” She aimed the fork at him. “You can’t blame me just because you chose to follow my perfectly good advice and then messed it up by picking the wrong woman.”