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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 thefact 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