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floor. “I’m starting to, too. It was”—she closed her eyes—“amazing.”
    “What did he look like? Hot and sexy, or homely, diligent, and excellent at his job?”
    “About six three, dark, shoulder-length hair, five-o’clock shadow, superdark brown eyes. Not an ounce of body fat. Broad shoulders, rock-hard . . . abs, strong hands. And big . . . feet.”
    “Are you making him up? This is a real guy, right? You aren’t anthropomorphizing BOB, are you? Quite understandable, of course; we all do it.”
    Mia plucked a crumb from between her toes. Her new pinkie toe ring glinted as she rotated her foot to admire it. Maybe she’d get a tattoo. . . . “A real, heart-pounding, flesh-and-blood man of gigantic proportions.”
    “Judas! Be still, my jealous heart. Not to be prurient, but what size condom did he wear? Tell me it was a Highway to Heaven?”
    “Oh, shit!” She suddenly remembered the enormous box of condoms in the drawer in her bedside table. Condoms had been the last thing on her mind because he’d driven her mindless in the damned kitchen, and the first time he’d finally used his penis, he hadn’t given her warning. She made a mental note to keep a handful in every room of the house from now on. “You just made that up.”
    “No, actually, I— Holy crap, Louise! You rode this stud bareback?”
    Mia shook her head with a combo of amazement and appreciation, and felt a rush of residual heat. She ached in places she’d never ached before, her breasts felt tight, her nipples hard with arousal just thinking about the hot, wet suckle of his mouth on her sensitized body. “He didn’t give me time to think of anything other than what he . . . gave me.”
    “And that would be . . . ?”
    “My first screaming orgasm. One of many.”
    “Jesus!”
    “That name came up several times,” Mia told him, voice dry. “Yesterday, I must admit, was a red-letter day. I baked cookies last night. Number four on my list. And while the fruits of my labor were a casualty of kitchen counter sex, I consider them a win. Today, number five: Following a recipe with more than six ingredients. Hear me roar.”
    Todd didn’t comment on her change of subject. “All theway here in San Francisco, babe. I’m proud of you. You’ll bring all these news skills home with you soon.”
    “By the time this is all over, I’ll weigh three times what I weighed before I left.”
    “You can afford a few extra pounds. What’s on your schedule today?”
    The sun had vanished in the last few minutes, and rain pounded the windows, making musical notes on the tin roof, and not-so-musical notes as it filled the strategically placed buckets throughout the house. “Remodeling the kitchen is top priority. I’ll hire someone to tackle that. I have a company coming to replace the roof in a couple of weeks. And I need to figure out if I want to tackle the porch myself or hire out—”
    “Or find a lovely rental—furnished condo with a view of the ocean so you can relax— Oh, wait, I forgot who I was talking to. ‘Relax’ isn’t in Amelia Wellington-Wentworth’s vocabulary.”
    No, it wasn’t. But she was trying to shoehorn it into Mia Hayward’s.
    There was a loud knock at the back door. She had a discreet parade of deliveries every day, but it hadn’t been that long ago that a bullet shattered the window in her office, and unexpected loud noises still made her start and caused her heart to race. Especially after she’d first moved into the two-hundred-year-old house tucked away on a cul-de-sac next door to the graveyard. Alone. No bodyguards. No secure building. For what either of those had been worth in San Francisco.
    And she’d still been shot at.
    The house was only ninety minutes outside New Orleans and she hadn’t been there once since she arrived almost a month ago, but it seemed half of NOLA arrived at her doorstep on a regular basis with deliveries.
    “Someone’s at the door. Either my new gardener