OU’LL NEVER GUESS,” SHE SAID BY WAY OF GREETING when she opened the door to him that night, “what came in the mail today.”

He tensed. “Another gift?”

“Something almost worse,” she grumbled. “Two job offers.”

His dark, level brows knotted. “And that’s bad, how?”

“They were postmarked Saturday. These people must have written the letters almost immediately after they heard about the Judge.”

“I repeat: That’s bad, how?”

She gave him an impatient glance. “Vultures. It’s like people who read the obituaries and call the surviving spouse for a date immediately after the funeral.”

“I think it’s smart, if they want you. Get an offer in first, and you might take it before any others come in.”

“Too late, since I had one week before last, right after that segment aired.”

“But they didn’t know that. I’d do the same thing,” he said reasonably. “I see you, I want you, I make my move and try to cut out anyone else thinking the same thing.”

She snorted as she pulled on her jacket. “Really bad analogy, Cahill. You saw, and you ran.”

“Don’t I get brownie points for working up enough courage to come back?”

“No. I don’t work on the points system.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to rely on physical coercion.” He caught the front of her jacket in his fist and pulled her to him. Sarah lifted her head to meet his kiss; it wasn’t until his mouth touched hers that she realized how sharp was her need to feel this again, to have him hold her. Their tongues engaged in slow combat, sliding, probing, twining. He wasn’t in any hurry, and neither was she.

He lifted his mouth enough to murmur, “Are you coerced yet?”

“Not yet. Keep trying.”

His mouth curled in a smile as he rested his forehead against hers. “I don’t want to overstep my bounds. Give me some ground rules, here. If I get rowdy and out of control, at what point do you slap my face? The trick is to stop just short of that point.”

Sarah lifted her brows. “I don’t slap faces; I kick asses.”

“Wow. That sounds interesting. Pants up, or down?”

She buried her face against his jacket, snickering. “I should have guessed you’d be a pervert.”

“A boy just wants to have fun.” His big, warm hand slid up and down her back in a restless movement that told her he didn’t like restraining himself, but was doing it anyway. “And if we don’t get going, I may get my ass kicked. I’ve never been very good at knowing when to stop.”

On the contrary, he had wooing down to a fine art—for wooing her, anyway. He made it very plain he was attracted, but didn’t come on too hot and heavy for the early stages of getting to know each other. She was thoroughly charmed by his wry humor, more charmed than she wanted him to know. If he pushed his luck, she thought, she might very well end up in bed with him, and she deeply appreciated that he was restraining himself because she suspected he knew exactly how charmed she was. Cahill was one sharp cookie.

“Did either of the job offers look interesting?” he asked as he opened the door of his truck for her.

“No, they both wanted me to start immediately, and that’s out. I’ll be here at least another month; when the house is ready to close up, I doubt the family will want to continue paying my salary just to sit in my quarters, so I don’t expect it to last much more than a month, but I’m not free until then.”

“You don’t think they’ll hold the position open? It isn’t as if butlers are thick on the ground around here.”

She shrugged. “They might, they might not. I think they only want me because of the so-called celebrity factor, and I don’t like the idea of that.”

“Since you’re trained as a bodyguard, too, will you consider only jobs with that need?”

“That would be nice,” she said wryly. “The pay is a lot higher. But, no, a lot of things come into consideration. How much I like the family, for one thing. Whether or not there are any positions open for both butler and bodyguard, where in the country the job is, things like that.”

“You don’t like certain parts of the country?”

“It isn’t that. I’m a military brat; I’m used to living just about anywhere. But my parents and sister live in Florida, and I like for visiting them to be fairly convenient.”

“You’re close to your folks?”

“We talk on the phone a lot. I don’t get to see them as much as I’d like, maybe three or four times a year, but I’d say we’re close. Even though my brothers are both in the military and are sent all over the world, still, we manage phone calls. How about you?”

“Well, we’re originally from this area, so I have aunts and uncles and cousins scattered all over central Alabama. My sister, DeeDee, lives in Redneck Riviera—that’s Gulf Shores, to outsiders—and my brother, Dudley Do-Right, lives in Montgomery.”

“DeeDee and Do-Right?” she asked, amused.

“She was named after the two grandmothers, Devonna and Darnelle. Which one would you like to be called?”

“DeeDee, hands down.”

“No joke. Dudley, now—his real name is Thane—is a state cop, so he wears the Do-Right uniform. Between the two of them, they’ve made me an uncle five times. DeeDee’s the oldest, by two years. I’m thirty-six, by the way.”

“You don’t have any kids?”

“No, thank God. That’s the only good thing about my divorce, that we didn’t have any kids whose lives we wrecked. The rest of the family always thought I was a slacker for not reproducing, but now they’re glad, too.”

“What about your parents?”

“They thought I was a slacker, too.”

She punched his arm. “Smart aleck.”

He grinned, then frowned a little and rubbed his arm. “Ow. You pack a punch.”

“I pulled it. You’re just a wuss.” Yeah, right. His arm was so hard, she could have seriously damaged her knuckles. “Your parents,” she prompted.

“They live in Kentucky. They had a reason for moving there, but I don’t know what it was.”

“What’s wrong with Kentucky?”

“It snows there.”

“What’s wrong with snow?”

“I’ve been a patrol cop, you know. Have you ever seen what happens down here when it snows?”

She began to laugh, because one inch of snow could and did cause havoc with traffic. Southerners didn’t deal well with snow; it was a giant headache for patrol cops, with all the accidents. For someone who had spent one memorable winter in upstate New York, the alarm caused by a snow flurry down here was hilarious.

Abruptly she noticed that they were heading south, away from town. “Where are we going?”

“How do you feel about high school baseball?”

She paused. “Is that a rhetorical question, or are you telling me something?”

“One of my cousins has a game tonight, a doubleheader. We’ll miss the first game, but by the time we get something to eat and get to the field, we should be just in time for the second game. JoJo plays shortstop.”

JoJo was evidently the cousin. “I like baseball, but this jacket isn’t heavy enough for sitting out for hours in the cold.”

“I have a blanket behind the seat, a thick wool one. We can cuddle on the bleachers, and with the blanket wrapped around us no one will know if I sneak a feel every now and then.”

“I’ll know.”

“God, I hope so. If you don’t, then I’ve either lost my touch or my aim.”

Maybe a public place was the safest place to be with him. “All right,” she said. “I’m willing. We can even grab a hot dog at the game if you want to catch some of the first one.”

“I knew you were good folk,” he said happily.

Sitting on cold bleachers on a chilly night, surrounded by yelling, laughing, chatting parents and siblings, a few teachers, and clumps of students, turned out to be more fun than she remembered from the days when Daniel and Noel had played baseball. For one thing, Cahill’s cousins—there were about ten of them there—were all loony. She had to wonder if the sense of humor was a family trait. For another, cuddling under that blanket with him was... more than fun.

The king-size blanket, as he promised, was thick wool. He wrapped it around both of them before they even sat down, so even her legs were protected from the chill. His body heat and the blanket combined to keep her toasty warm, even though the April night was so chilly their breaths fogged. He was pressed all along her left side, his hard thigh rubbing hers, and he kept his right arm around her except for those times when he felt compelled to leap to his feet and yell insults at the home plate umpire who, as it turned out, was yet another cousin.

A few times he even managed to cop a feel, as he had promised. The caress was subtle, just his thumb rubbing against the side of her right breast, but it was deliberate and she knew it. The first time it happened, she glanced sharply up at him to find him innocently watching the game, a slight smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. She retaliated by trailing her left hand up his thigh, oh, so slowly, stopping just south of the bull’s-eye. He tensed, the smile leaving his mouth, and though he kept his gaze on the game, he had that unfocused look that told her he’d lost track of the action on the field.

She felt terribly naughty, doing such things in public, even though they were wrapped like mummies in that wonderful blanket and no one could tell a thing. She wanted to forget about teasing him and go for the gold with a stroke that would make his eyes roll back in his head; she wanted to twist her body a little so his hand was fully cupping her breast.

She didn’t have to twist her body. He managed just fine without her help.

She caught her breath at the warm pressure of his hand, at the stroke of his thumb over her nipple. It didn’t matter that the triple layers of bra, shirt, and jacket protected her skin from his touch; her breasts tightened, her nipples drawing into hard little peaks, and her entire lower body clenched in response.

“Are you okay?” he asked, his tone casual, as if he were asking if she was cold.

She really, really wanted to grab him, but squeezing a man’s genitals on the first date was way out of her league. She settled for burrowing her right hand inside his shirt and pulling his chest hair. Hard. He couldn’t control a flinch.

“I’m a little hot,” she said, just as casually. “Maybe we can loosen the blanket.”

“Good idea,” he said, sounding a little strangled now, and they both shrugged the blanket down to their waists. They resorted to coffee to fight the chill for the remainder of the ball game.

Because he had to work the next day, after the game was over he drove her straight home. When he kissed her good night, she was smart enough to hold his hands while he did. He was grinning when he lifted his head. “I haven’t had my hands held during a kiss since high school.”

“I haven’t been groped at a ball game since high school, either.”

“It was fun, wasn’t it?”

She found herself smiling. “Yeah, it was.”

“Do you have plans for tomorrow night? And every night this week?”

“You’re asking me out every night?”

“I have to wear you down. How else am I going to get to second base without getting tagged out? Here’s the agenda: tomorrow night we go bowling—”

“Bowling?”

“Cosmic bowling. It’s a hoot.”

She didn’t bother asking what cosmic bowling was. “What about Wednesday?”

“Movie.”

“Thursday?”

“Symphony.”

From the ridiculous to the sublime. She shook her head in amazement; at least she wouldn’t be bored. “Friday?”

“I’m hoping by that time we’ll have moved on to the wild monkey sex.”

She hooted with laughter, and he smiled as he leaned against the doorjamb. “Is it a date?” he asked. “Or dates.”

“Up until Friday.”

“We’ll see,” he said, and whistled as he walked back to his truck.

He was positively Machiavellian.