“Too bad, and don’t ask me to feel sorry for you. You get paid to sit around talking to students about old novels. You couldn’t run a hot dog stand out in the real world, and don’t know how to build anything people actually want.”
Anger gathered. Maybe she’d never managed a hot dog stand, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t if it was necessary. Jack Latimer was ill-mannered and ignorant about fine literature, but he held the keys to the kingdom. She needed to find common ground with him if there was any hope of saving the Roost—and the first step was changing the subject.
“Have you had dinner yet? I’ve just made a pot pie.” And it was magnificent. She might not be the world’s best history professor, but nobody could fault her ability to turn out a perfectly prepared meal.
“I’m too mad to eat.” A sheen of sweat glistened on his face, throat, and on the muscles of his forearms. She filled a glass with ice from the freezer door.
“Water or iced tea?” she asked.
“Beer.”
“I don’t have any beer. Water or tea. And if you want tea, your choices are sweet tea, raspberry tea, or plain.”
“What kind of person bothers to make three types of tea?”
“You must have a very low opinion of me to think I’d resort to illegal tampering to stab you in the back.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. He simply gaped at her, all corded muscles and sweaty masculine intensity. For once, it appeared she had rendered him speechless.
“You’re right,” he finally said. “You don’t strike me as the sort of person who’d stoop to something underhanded or illegal. So maybe I owe you an apology, Professor.” He cleared his throat and a hint of humor lightened his face. “I hardly ever do this, soI’m probably lousy at it, but you didn’t deserve that broadside I just flung at you. I’ve got a lot riding on this golf course, but that’s no excuse for taking it out on you. I owe you an apology and hope you can forgive me.”
For someone who claimed not to know how to apologize, he’d just done a bang-up job of it.
“Water or tea?”
“Whatever you’re having. And for the record, that thing you just took out of the oven smells so good that the caveman inside me just woke up and is dying to attack it.”
“Would you like to join me for dinner?”
He grinned. “Yes, ma’am.” That drawl was both sexy and wholesome at the same time. The tanned skin on his neck and throat made him look healthy and strong, but the scarred, mottled skin on his arms spoke of something else. Diabetes?
“Are you . . . do you have any allergies or food sensitivities I should know about?”
He chuckled. “I like red meat, red wine, and anything with frosting on it. More often than not I settle for a microwaved burrito and a Twinkie.”
He must have noticed the way she glanced at the track marks on his left arm and he sobered. “It’s hemophilia.”
He said the word lightly, as though it was no big deal. Hadn’t hemophilia been the disease that afflicted the Russian czar’s only son? The boy suffered so terribly his mother turned to an insane monk in a desperate attempt to assuage the child’s agony, but that was the extent of Alice’s knowledge about the disease.
“Is it true that you can bleed to death from a papercut?”
He shook his head. “Not really. If I get hurt, I take an injection of the missing blood factor to give my clotting ability a boost.”
She nodded to the mottled skin on his arms. “It looks like you’ve taken a lot of injections.”
“Three times a week ever since I was eight years old. Those injections mean that run-of-the-mill bumps and bruises won’t send me to the hospital like they did when I was a kid. Things were a lot worse back then. I was a normal kid who always wanted to jump on the mattress or slide down a banister. It drove my mother nuts. A bumped elbow that wouldn’t hurt normal kids could send me to the hospital for a week. Anyway, that chicken pot pie smells mighty good, and I’m up to date on my injections, so there’s no worry of any traumatic bleeding emergency tonight.”
It was a relief he could joke about his condition. From the outside, he looked extraordinarily healthy, but looks could be deceiving.
She filled his glass with sweet tea, then watched as he tilted his head back to drink, the cords in his throat moving as he drained the glass, then he slammed it down on the counter. She winced, grateful the glass didn’t shatter because that was a hand-blown Murano tumbler brought back from Italy.
She set out her less valuable Staffordshire plates while Jack glanced around her home. It was hard to read his expression as he scanned the dried flowers on the mantel and the live herbs on her windowsill. Lace from France covered the end tables and Meissen figurines decorated the fireplace mantel. She braced herself for a snide comment. The porcelain sculptures were ridiculously feminine. She’d bought them for their idealized image of women from centuries past, ranging from the milkmaid wearing an apron to the grand lady with her tiny waist, piles of hair, and elegant hat perched atop her head. Each figurine was a masterwork of grace, their facial features delicately sculpted in perfect tranquility. She loved them. If he insulted them . . .
“I kind of like this place,” he said.
It was the last thing she’d expected him to say. “You do?”
“Yeah, I do. It feels like I just stepped back in time, but I like it. This place suits you.”
