Lonely Millionaire (2 page)

"I'll see what I can do, Mr. Gray." He seemed to be coming on a little strong, this Adam Gray. Did bed-and-breakfast guests really expect the hostess to take them sightseeing? Maybe they did. Maybe she should. After all, she had nothing else to do that couldn't wait.

"My sister Laurie lives with me. But she's a flight attendant and she's out of town right now. She's the one who suggested I advertise in Yukon Man," Mandy said. "She subscribes." She paused on the landing and looked at Adam over her shoulder.

"The same kind of men who advertise. It’s really a shame our society has come to this," she agreed, coming to a stop at the upstairs landing.

He leaned against the smooth, polished railing. "Well, now that we have that out of the way, what kind of man are you looking for?"

He put his hand on her arm. "Don't be. It’s over now and it was a learning experience. I learned what's really important."

The touch of his hand sent signals to her brain that said, Watch out. But for the moment she chose to ignore them.

"Which is?" she prompted.

"Freedom, independence, excitement, adventure." His gaze locked on hers, and the words sunk in and stayed there. His hand stayed on her arm, too, the warmth radiating all the way through her body. Mandy's breath sat stuck in her throat. There was an aura about him, a magnetic field she'd stumbled into by mistake and couldn't get out of. She was supposed to be going somewhere, doing something, but she couldn't remember what it was. Oh, yes. The room.

She pulled her arm away and turned around. "Right down here at the end of the hall," she said briskly. "I think you'll find everything you need. The bathroom's next door."

"Thanks."

She managed a smile, then hurried down the stairs to take refuge in the kitchen.

Chapter Two

Adam changed into shorts and a polo shirt in the bedroom he'd been given, ran downstairs and hit the beach running. It was exactly where she'd said it was, directly to the west and down the rickety wooden steps. His bare feet made wet prints in the narrow strip of sand. It was high tide and not a sign of the advertised tide pools was in sight. Everything else, however, was exactly as advertised. The house with the large, inviting bedrooms, views of the sea and extra-long beds with thick comforters, as well as the promise of delicious breakfasts to come. But he wasn't here for the bed or the breakfasts, he was here on a mission, and he couldn't let himself forget it.

He was here to check out Mandy Clayton for his friend Jack Larue. After a long, exhausting summer of wading through an avalanche of letters, Jack had narrowed the search for Miss Right down to two—Mandy Clayton and a former Miss Illinois. Since Jack was still at work back in the Yukon, and Adam had a business trip planned to California anyway, Adam had reluctantly agreed to take a look at Mandy and make a brief report, while he was in the neighborhood. Then Jack would know whether to pursue Miss Illinois at full speed or make Mandy his target.

But Adam was hardly an impartial observer. He'd helped Jack sort his mail and even written some letters for him. Actually, he'd written all the letters to Mandy for him. After all, the guy had been swamped and he really wanted to get married. Adam had noticed from the beginning that Mandy's letters were a cut above everybody else's and he had to admit it had made the summer months fly by anticipating her responses. She was funny, charming, witty and refreshingly honest. Or so he'd thought until she said she'd never answer an ad in Yukon Man magazine.

On the other hand, he'd just heard himself say that he knew anyone named Jack Larue, who was his best friend. So they'd each told one white lie. They were even. Except for the fact that Jack wasn't a millionaire. He planned to be a millionaire, right after he struck it rich in an abandoned Klondike gold mine but he wasn't, as he claimed in his personal ad, a millionaire. Lonely, yes, but not wealthy yet. Jack maintained that the right woman wouldn't mind, she would love him for himself and not his money. But Adam, who was more skeptical about women, doubted it. If somebody was inclined to answer an ad for a millionaire, she was going to be disappointed to find out he wasn't one.

He sat down on the wet sand and stared at the waves that crashed against the shore. That was the one thing he was supposed to find out. Was Mandy self-sufficient and self- supporting, or was she really after Jack's millions that he didn't have? And that wasn't all. There was a whole long list of questions Jack wanted answered. He wondered how long it would take to get the answers. He didn't have all week. He had a meeting scheduled next week at the office. And he hadn't counted on spending his vacation digging up facts for Jack.

He hadn't counted on Mandy looking as she did, either. She looked like sunshine and flowers, a breath of fresh sea air with her long legs and her rounded curves. When that door had opened and she'd stood there, he'd felt something so earthshaking he had known that it was Mandy Clayton. No question. He would have known her anywhere. If she'd suddenly appeared out of an Arctic blizzard, be would have recognized her. Only she was a hundred times better. Who could have expected she would have eyes the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean, or a dimple in one cheek that flashed when he least expected it, and honey-gold skin that looked as soft as silk?

Those were details that would interest Jack. They would interest any red-blooded American male. On the other hand, looks were important, but so were other things, and he had to get back and continue his investigation. He kicked up the sand with his toes and ran down the empty beach one more time, feeling the sun on his shoulders, the wind in his face, until his muscles ached and his heart pounded. Then he climbed the wooden steps back to the house.

There was a shower at the top of the steps just inside the fence, a small foot shower that he turned on to rinse his feet. He wouldn't want to track any sand onto her varnished floors. It was a great house, lovingly cared for, so welcoming, waiting patiently with no one there to appreciate it. Almost like Mandy herself, living alone on the edge of a cliff. She'd said business was good, but he doubted it. She hadn't even looked in her calendar to see if she had room for him.

He walked through the kitchen door and up the stairs toward the bedroom. Music reverberated through the house. He recognized the B52's and he heard her singing along with them to the song "Roam." Roam, it was his own personal philosophy of life. If you kept on roaming, you would never be anywhere long enough to miss it when you left. He paused outside the bathroom door and knocked. The music stopped abruptly. She opened the door a crack and peered out at him. Billows of steam obscured her oval face and tall, curvaceous body.

"Sorry," she said. I’ll be out of here in a minute. I was trying to finish up before you got back."

He craned his head to look inside. "Go ahead. Finish your shower. I didn't mean to interrupt."

"I'm not taking a shower. Why would I be taking a shower with my clothes on? I'm steaming the paper off the walls." She pulled the door open. "See?"

Through the steam he saw a room with a porcelain claw-foot tub along the wall. There were piles of thick towels stacked on shelves and hand-painted tiles in peach and moss green around the sink. And in the middle of it all was a stepladder, with scraps of wallpaper scattered underneath it

He also saw tiny rivulets of perspiration trickling down her face, and her T-shirt was clinging damply to her breasts. He noticed that she'd changed into shorts, revealing smooth, shapely legs, but he forgot to notice the walls. Instead he stepped into the room and closed the door behind him, feeling an acceleration of his pulse rate.

She picked up a metal scraper and studied him carefully as if he'd applied for a difficult job, one that she doubted he could handle. "Well..." she said dubiously.

"Wherever they send me," he answered, looking up. His gaze followed her long, bare legs, her shirt that hung wide and loose. For a brief second he had a breathtaking view of her firm, ripe breasts unencumbered by a bra. He took a deep breath and went down on his knees to attack the wall with the scraper. And while he was there, he said a prayer for strength enough to resist the temptation to come on to Jack's girl. It would be wrong, unethical, inadvisable and definitely distract him from his goal. "I really don't have a home," he added.

"I wouldn't like that," she mused, sending a strip of loose paper floating down to land on his shoulder. She mumbled an apology and he smiled, brushing it away easily.

"Most women wouldn't. Moving around, that is. Women are nesters. Men are migrators."

"Is that right?" she asked. "I don't think you can put people in categories, like birds. Some men want to settle down. Some women are always on the move, like my sister. She's in New York this week, and Toledo next week. But that doesn't mean she doesn't want to settle down, if she found the right man."

"Maybe she'll meet someone on the plane. If she's half as attractive as you are." A blob of dried wallpaper paste fell on his head and he jerked his head up. "What was that for, can't you take a compliment?"

"I prefer honesty," she said.

His ears burned. Everyone preferred honesty, only sometimes it just wasn't possible. So far he'd only lied to her once, and maybe he could get through the week without another fabrication.

"Anyway," she continued. "She meets lots of men on planes, but you have no idea how many men are out there pretending to be something they're not."

Like Jack, he thought, keeping his head down. Pretending to be a millionaire. He'd told him not to do it, but Jack said it was just a way of catching their attention, of standing out from the crowd of personal ads. He was right. He'd caught their attention all right, the attention of hundreds of women. Was Mandy the one in a hundred, the one for Jack? Or was she too good for Jack?

How was he going to find out? By spending as much time as possible with her this week, he answered himself too eagerly, by finding out everything he could about her, including how she felt about Jack, if possible.

Mandy rubbed her hands on a damp towel and decided to put an end to the work party. Not that it wasn't enjoyable to have someone share the work and discuss the difference between men and women, but she had other things to do. And she'd discovered that she'd been peeling the same spot for the past fifteen minutes while spending too much of the time looking down at the back of Adam's head. She'd even wondered how his dark hair would feel if she ran her fingers through it. Definitely not appropriate thoughts for a hostess to feel about her one and only single male guest.

No wonder she couldn't keep her mind and her eyes off him. She'd been alone too long, without guests, without men in her life. She started down the ladder and he steadied it for her. But instead of holding the ladder, he moved his hands to her bare legs, sending tremors up the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. The ladder shook, her knees wobbled and his hands moved to her hips and stayed there. She landed on the floor with a thud and turned to face him. The steam swirled around them, creating their own little biosphere. Their eyes met and held for a long moment.

"Look," he said, "everyone prefers honesty, but sometimes they have their reasons for not telling the truth. Sometimes it’s just to spare other people's feelings, like when someone asks what you think of their new baby or their new car. You don't want to say it looks like Winston Churchill or it gets lousy mileage. You can't tell me you haven't told a little white lie once or twice?"

He took the towel out of her hand and put it down on a ladder rung, holding her hands in his. She looked into his eyes and immediately got a picture of a tough Arctic man who radiated rugged sensuality from every pore, and who could see into the depths of her soul. Someone who knew that she'd lied about never answering an ad in Yukon Man. She had to get out of this small, steamy bathroom, but she couldn't seem to move, couldn't even tear her eyes away from his.

"Of course I've told little white lies," she confessed breathlessly. "After all, I'm only human." Never before had she felt so human than at that moment. It was a combination of the heat, the guilt, and the close proximity of this man who made her feel like a melting marshmallow over a hot fire.