The Man Behind The Mask: How to Melt a Frozen Heart / The Man Behind the Pinstripes / Falling for Mr Mysterious

“They look like they would provide the perfect home for a three-legged dog,” she said to Brendan when she saw that he had noticed her watching them.

“Now who is spoiling the moment? Can you stop worrying about your animals for one minute and focus on the question? Lack of focus! It’s on this list of symptoms!”

“I seem to be getting a headache right now.” Nora was trying so hard to steel herself against him, but honestly, when he turned on the charm? It was nearly hopeless. That thing he had done with his eyelashes? The big, innocent blink?

Criminal, really.

“I’m being serious!” he insisted, glancing at his iPad and then scowling back at her. As long as he didn’t blink!

“So am I!”

“You have a headache?”

“Yes.”

He scrutinized her, and looked as if he was going to scoop her up and rush her off to the hospital. Really, she didn’t quite know what to do with all this chauvinistic caring.

What if she just surrendered to it? She’d had a bump on the head. She could be forgiven a weak moment.

“Could be brain freeze. From the milkshake,” she told him.

“Ah.” He looked genuinely relieved, but she wasn’t letting him off the hook yet.

“Of course, it could be from being nagged by an exceedingly annoying man!”

His lips twitched a little, with amusement, not annoyance. He didn’t look the least contrite. In fact, he consulted his tablet again. “I’m not being exceedingly annoying. I’m being mildly annoying. For your own good.”

She rolled her eyes and took a long sip of her milkshake. Huckleberry Heaven really was heaven. But to be sitting across the table from a man like this on such a gorgeous summer day, and be asked about your cognitive function?

“Are you having any foggy feelings? Like you can’t concentrate?”

Only when you blink at me.

“Would that be the same as lack of focus?”

He considered this thoughtfully.

“Can I taste your milkshake?” she asked him.

“I’m going to put yes for that one. What does tasting my milkshake have to do with feeling foggy?”

“I’ve never tasted a licorice milkshake before. I’ve decided to live dangerously, since a blood vessel in my head may be perilously weakened, getting ready to explode as we speak.”

He glared at her.

She put a hand to her forehead, swayed. He furrowed his brow, baffled.

“My best impression of pre-aneurism,” she told him.

She wasn’t sure what it was, but he brought out something zany in her, a kind of lack of inhibition that she had not experienced often.

She liked it, especially when he shoved his milkshake across the table to make her stop. Before he gave in and laughed.

She put his straw in her mouth. She was way too aware of the fact that her lips were where his had been. She thought maybe he liked it, too. He suddenly didn’t seem nearly so interested in his silly questions. Instead, he watched her suck on his straw, and there was something so intense in his eyes it made her shiver.

“Whoo, that’s cold,” she said, to explain the shiver. She suspected he was not fooled. She pushed the shake back across the table at him. “Not to mention surprisingly good.”

Deliberately, his eyes still locked on her, he took the straw. He was caressing the damn thing with his lips.

It was the closest she’d ever been to being kissed without actually being kissed. What he was doing with that straw was darn near X-rated. She shoved her milkshake across to him.

“Want to try mine?” she asked softly. She was encouraging him!

Apparently he did want to try hers. Intensity sizzled in the air between them as he grasped her shake, lifted it to his mouth, took the straw between his teeth and nipped before closing his lips over it.

“What else do you want to do?” he asked softly. “To live dangerously. Before the blood vessel in your head lets go.”

The thing was, he was kidding. But the other thing was it was no joke. Life was not predictable. Her sister the health nut, dead in her early thirties. His wife in a car accident.

Suddenly, it seemed to Nora that she had not taken nearly enough chances. That she had not lived as fully as she should have.

If it was all going to be over, what had she missed?

It was easy to see the answer right now, with him sitting across from her, doing seductive things to her straw. The sun was gleaming in his dark hair; the faintest shadow of whiskers were appearing on the hardhoned planes of his cheeks.

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