Home > Choose Me (The Lindstroms #4)(7)

Choose Me (The Lindstroms #4)(7)
Author: Katy Paige

Jane shuddered. “Do you have the keys?”

While Lars unlocked the door, Jane watched him from where she stood in front of the cottage, arms crossed, sucking on her lollipop, glad her sunglasses shielded her eyes.

For all he knew, she was evaluating the cottage. But she wasn’t. She already knew everything she needed to know about this disaster of a housing debacle. And she had a feeling it wasn’t going to get any better when he unlocked the door and showed her around the inside. No, Jane was checking out his long legs in worn jeans and the way the muscles in his back flexed when he reached forward to unlock the door. She sighed, finally removing her sunglasses, and headed up two concrete steps into the living room of the small cottage.

She couldn’t help it: she had this sudden mental picture of Sara’s face in her head and she burst out laughing.

The room had a cream, low-pile, wall-to-wall carpet, a living room set from Sears, a modest dining room table with four chairs, and a kitchen area with a white linoleum floor. The two cheaply paneled walls in the living room had several stock photographs of elk, deer and wolves blown up and framed without mats in serviceable medium-wood frames.

Lars crossed his arms, staring at her, his eyes wide and surprised, and a sour expression puckering his lips.

Jane stopped laughing.

She gestured to the four picture windows that spanned the length of the room, offering sweeping views of the vast meadow and mountains beyond.

“The view is very nice,” she said quietly, putting the lollipop back in her mouth.

“It’s brand new,” he explained again, his voice cool, though his cheeks were red. “It was just an empty cottage before. We had it…fixed up.”

“Yes. So you said.” She swallowed, noting his embarrassment, and suddenly she felt ashamed of herself for laughing, for making him feel bad. “It’s just…um…different from what she will expect.”

“I can’t do anything about that,” he said. “Unless you want to go back to Bozeman.” When she didn’t say anything, he shrugged. “Maybe I should start bringing her stuff in.”

“Lars,” she started gently, stopping him on the way to the door, though he didn’t turn around. She took the lollipop out of her mouth and crossed the room, touching the bare skin of his upper arm with her free hand. He turned around slowly, looking down at her hand first, then into her eyes. “Just so you know…if it were me staying here, I’d be thrilled. The views are beautiful, and”—she spread her arms, gesturing to the furnishings and decoration—“I have pretty simple tastes. I’d be happy here. Very happy. Very pleased. It’s clean and snug and new and—”

“She won’t like it?”

Jane shook her head slowly, adjusting her cap and putting the lollipop back in her mouth. “No. I’m afraid she won’t.”

“Anything we can do about it?”

Jane sighed and walked to the back of the cottage, peeking into the small bathroom, master bedroom and smaller guest bedroom. Lars leaned against the front door, probably trying to look nonchalant, though his arms were still crossed protectively over his chest.

There was no way, in a million, trillion years, that Samara Amaya was going to happily stay in this six hundred-square-foot, third-rate vacation cottage. Didn’t matter that the carpet smelled new, and the linoleum was spic and span. Didn’t matter that no one had probably dared sit on the toilet yet, and the views were gorgeous. Didn’t matter that good people had gone out of their way to make it as comfortable for her as possible. She was going to pitch a proper fit.

Lars tilted his head to the side, raising his eyebrows in question, and she couldn’t bear to disappoint him. Jane smiled at him with unforced warmth.

“We’ll just have to make it work.”

***

In the end, Lars upended the bed in the guest bedroom and put all of Samara’s luggage in there. It would serve as her dressing room, and Jane told him that she would get a room at the hotel with the rest of the crew, coming back to the cottage early in the morning to be on-hand for Samara before she woke up each day. Lars said he’d have an extra key made so that Jane could come and go freely.

To save his life, Lars couldn’t understand the fuss. For heaven’s sake, it was a perfectly nice little place, not to mention Miss Amaya would only be staying there for three nights before relocating to a resort in Jackson Hole next weekend.

He sensed that Jane was still uneasy about the arrangements, but he had been honest about the lack of options. There was simply nowhere else for Miss Amaya to stay that would meet her demands.

Since Jane had a good hour or two of unpacking to do, Lars said he’d be back to pick her up at five o’clock to take her to dinner and then to the Best Western to check into a room of her own.

Frankly, he was glad to get back in the empty van and drive away from the cottage. Aside from the fact that he was uncomfortable and embarrassed by Jane’s reaction to the tidy little cabin, two burning questions had been driving him crazy for almost an hour:

What grown woman walked around sucking on a pink lollipop?

And what red-blooded man was supposed to be able to concentrate on anything she was saying when she kept taking that pink lollipop in and out of her mouth?

It’s not like she was trying to be sexy with it. He would have known if that was her game. It wasn’t. Most of the time she had it wedged in the back of her cheek. But she couldn’t keep it in there indefinitely. It had to come out every time she said something.

In and out, in and out, and incredibly distracting.

As he made his way back to the small office of Lindstrom & Sons, feeling more than a little annoyed, he had to admit that he was sort of fascinated by her.

Her. Jane.

She was incredibly quirky, liking the same obscure music genre he did and softly singing along all the way to Gardiner. She wore that Red Sox cap low over her eyes like she was shielding herself from the world, but then she made all of these smart-ass comments that surprised him and kept him on his toes. And just when he thought that was all there was to her, she put her hand on his arm and assured him that she wasn’t the snob that her boss was, showing him a womanly, softer side of herself before popping that pink lollipop back in her mouth.

His breath came out in a whoosh, remembering.

He definitely didn’t have her figured out.

That, in itself, was new to Lars, because it had never been tough for him to figure out women. He was good at picking up on female body language, reading between the lines of what they said and what they meant. He knew when a no meant maybe and a maybe meant yes. Unlike many members of his sex who were constantly stumped by women, Lars had always felt comfortable and confident; he had cracked the secret code so long ago, he took it for granted.

And it didn’t matter if the women were pretty or plain, they all seemed to want to be with him, disarmed by his easy manners and enticed by his hard body. So, Lucky Lars had the pick of the litter and naturally he chose women that turned his head: exceptionally pretty, above-average beauties who—after a mild or overt flirtation—ended up in his bed.

Which is why it was out of character for him to be spending so much time thinking about Jane Mays. Aside from a mischievous smile and those twinkling, minxy eyes, she was…well, sort of plain next to the women he generally pursued. Unless she was really hiding something spectacular under those baggy clothes, she wasn’t pretty enough to tempt him. So why was she getting under his skin?

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