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about the way he moved made her pulse quicken and her brain start scrambling. Ridiculous! She was far above this kind of girlish reaction. She muttered quickly into the phone that she’d report back as soon as she found anything. Guilt made her fingers tremble as she ended the call.
    She stood and clutched her bag to her chest. “Ready?” Her voice sounded a little too perky.
    “Yup. A rep from the dealership has dropped off the new key, so you’ll be a free woman again in no time.”
    She smiled and carefully took the key he dangled from his fingers, without letting her skin touch his. “Thank goodness.”
    “You’re welcome to stay at the hotel, of course. There really isn’t anywhere else that’s convenient. The Holiday Inn is at least twenty minutes away, and that’s with no traffic.”
    “That will be fine.” Her words sounded clipped. Thank goodness there was another hotel! Staying here had proven to be an even worse idea than she’d suspected. Hopefully they could both forget completely about that insane lapse of judgment last night and get back to business.
    His gaze hovered over her mouth for a moment, and her lips parted. She sucked in a hasty breath. “Let’s go.”
    “Of course.” He held out his arm.
    She ignored it, gripping her bag tighter.
    He pulled his arm back with a rueful glance. Was he really flirting with her? He must be doing it to toy with her. She wasn’t stupid enough to think that a man like John Fairweather could actually be attracted to and interested in her. It must be a game for him, to see if he could get the prim little accountant all hot under the collar.
    She’d rather die than let him know how well it was working.
    In the front seat of his big sedan she pressed her knees together and forced herself to focus on the road ahead. Nothing good could come of watching his big hand on the manual gearshift, or noticing the subtle shift in his powerful thigh muscles as he pressed his foot on the pedals.
    “What a beautiful day. I can’t believe I lived in the city for so long and didn’t even think about what I was missing.” His low voice rumbled inside the car.
    Constance tugged her gaze from the smooth surface of the blacktop and tried to appreciate nature. Trees crowded the road on both sides, filtering the sun. “How come it’s all wooded? Why aren’t there farms, or, well, anything?”
    “Around the turn of the last century, this was all farmland, but it wasn’t close enough to the cities or fertile enough to be profitable, so it was all abandoned. So far suburbia hasn’t reached out here, either. If it wasn’t for the new highway exit, we’d still be in the middle of nowhere.”
    “But you grew up here?”
    “Yup.” He smiled.
    She squeezed her knees tighter together. It was just a smile, for crying out loud. No need to get all excited.
    “I couldn’t wait to get away. I thought this was the dullest place on earth. We had fifty dairy cows and I had to help milk them every morning and evening. Makes tabulating columns of figures look really interesting, let me tell you.”
    “You’ve got to be kidding.” She couldn’t imagine him milking a cow. “I thought that was all done by machines these days.”
    “It is. But someone has to hook them up to the machines.”
    “Do they mind? The cows, I mean.”
    “On the whole they’re pretty enthusiastic about it. I guess it feels good to lighten the load.”
    “And now you milk people foolish enough to gamble their hard-earned money.” She looked straight ahead. “You help lighten their heavy wallets.”
    He turned and looked at her. “You think what we do is wrong, don’t you?”
    “I’m hardly unusual in that.”
    “It’s entertainment. People have free will. They can come and gamble or they can go do something else.”
    His calm response only prodded her to goad him more. “Do you gamble?”
    He didn’t say anything. Silence hummed in the air until she got curious enough to turn and look at him.