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her own blood racing past her ears. She was excruciatingly, wonderfully, frighteningly aware of Jake's hands on her shoulders.
    His nearness blurred the edges of her thoughts so she couldn't remember what it was she'd wanted to ask him. His spearmint scented breath wisped past her, and his chest was so close she could have touched it...wanted to touch it, to take in the warmth of his skin, to press the hairs and feel them spring back beneath her fingers.
    His hands slid from her shoulders down her arms and he moved closer, so close his tingling warmth reached her skin through her cotton dress.
    Abruptly he turned away, leaving her arms cold where he no longer touched them and her face hot with embarrassment that she could have responded so hungrily to an incidental contact. Was she so desperate to find a family, someone to belong to, that the first stranger she met was a candidate?
    He flopped back onto the bed. "You're paying the bills," he said, his tone deliberately nonchalant but with an underlying huskiness as if he hadn't been totally unaffected by the strange encounter. "If this town is where you want to spend your vacation, go for it. I'll deliver a daily report every night, but you're not going with me to question Doris Jordan or anywhere else I have to go. Do you let other people sit in when you're doing whatever it is Directors of Human Resources at big hotels do?"
    "My boss sits in whenever he chooses to."
    "Lady, you may be paying for my services, but you're not my boss."
    Humiliated, angry with Jake and even angrier with herself, Rebecca took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. "There's no point in getting into semantics. You've agreed to perform a service for me, but that doesn't preclude my working separately on my own behalf."
    "It does preclude your hindering me in performing that service."
    Jake's tone, his exclusion of her, bothered her, but she refused to back down. She couldn't back down, couldn't let her life continue to spiral out of control. She had to take charge somehow on some level. "How do you think my presence is going to hinder you?"
    His gaze burned across the room with that same smoky intensity as a few minutes before, but his voice was cold when he spoke. "I can give you a good example. If you hadn't been here when Mayor Morton paid a call, I might have been able to get some information out of him."
    "I don't recall anything that would indicate he knows something."
    "That's because it's my job to notice things that you don't. That's why you hired me. Why'd the man come around at all? Why was he so interested in what I might find? Why is he so anxious to get us out of town? Why did he tell us Doris Jordan is senile? She sounded fine when I talked to her on the phone this morning."
    "You think he knows who my mother is?"
    "Maybe. He'd have been a young man when you were born. He might remember some high school girl leaving town for a few months, his buddy's sister, his buddy's girlfriend."
    A chill clutched Rebecca's chest. " His girlfriend?" She choked as she put the thought into words.
    "Maybe. But probably not. He didn't look at you in a fatherly way."
    Jake had noticed, too.
    "He made me feel very uncomfortable."
    "Why? You're a beautiful woman. I'm sure lots of men look at you that way."
    The thought of Morton's viewing her as a woman made her nauseous. "That's not the way he looked at me."
    Jake shrugged, neither accepting her denial nor arguing with her. "I'll see if Doris Jordan has anything to say about him when I talk to her tomorrow."
    After her protestations that she had no intention of hindering his investigation, Rebecca couldn't ask to go with him no matter how desperately she wanted to.
    "What time are you seeing her?" she asked instead.
    "I'm meeting her at ten in the morning. Why do you ask? Do you plan to come along and stand on her front porch, peeking in the window?"
    "I expect you to give me an oral report as soon as you get back. I'm in room 102."
    His eyes widened