Free Where the Heart Leads by Jeanell Bolton Page A

mouth dried up.
    Calm down, Moira. This is just a courtesy visit. Yes, a courtesy visit to your boss’s home. Well, also to the home of a guy who’d propositioned her the first day they met. A guy who made her blood run hot and her mouth go dry whenever she thought of him, which was way too often.
    She drove past the single-story house at the gate and continued up the narrow tarmac road bordered by barbed wire on either side. Beyond the fences, black cattle built like tanks lifted their heads as the car passed, as if to check them out.
    The lane angled around a stand of tall trees, then broadened into a wide concrete circular driveway in front of a flat-roofed, two-story mansion.
    The outside of the house was faced with a hard-surfaced material that had the look of sunbaked adobe, while large, dark windows and long, iron-railed balconies punctuated its smooth lines and rounded corners. Four wide steps led up to the covered porch that stretched the width of the house, and several outsized urns of purple caladiums sat on either side of the giant front door.
    And Rafe, Mr. Cool, was sitting out front, waiting for them.

Chapter Five
    R afe unfolded himself from the wicker lawn chair and waited for Moira and her sister to come up the walk.
    Don’t rush it, cowboy. She’s got her sister with her. Pretend you’ve come out to sit out on the patio and enjoy the cool weather. Don’t let on you’ve been wearing out your watch looking to see how many more minutes it would be till they arrived.
    A wave of heat swept through him as he watched Moira come up the flagstone walk. She and her sister were both carrying broad-brimmed hats, but while Astrid was dressed in jeans and something that looked like an old hoodie, Moira had on a rose-colored, figure-hugging western-style shirt and jeans that were tight enough to show off her pert little bottom.
    Rafe smiled. No Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles this time around.
    God, he wanted her. He hadn’t been this fixated on a woman since…well, since Beth died. For the past three years, he’d been in some kind of sexual limbo, taking what was offered and moving on just as casually, but Moira—he’d like to keep her around for a while.
    “Really appreciate y’all comin’ out this afternoon,” he said, trying to inject a light tone into his voice as he escorted his guests toward the house. “Mom just phoned that she and Delilah are runnin’ a little late, so I thought we could go inside and visit a little before the tour.”
    He pushed open the center-balanced revolving door, and Moira looked up at the two-story skylight in the middle of the hexagonal foyer, then turned around slowly to see the rooms and the ascending staircase radiating out from it.
    He tensed, waiting for her reaction.
    God, he wanted her to like his house. He wanted her to like him .
    “This is beautiful, Rafe! I expected a ranch house like in the movies, maybe one story and spread out, or maybe a King Ranch–style Victorian, but this is so beautiful.”
    Relief flooded through him.
    “Actually, the original was a Victorian. Great-granddaddy Gilbert built it in the late 1800s, but termites took it down when I was in college. Dad hired one of my mother’s brothers—Uncle Al’s an architect—to build us a bug-proof house, and since I was pretty far into my degree by then, he took me under his wing, and we worked on the design together.”
    He moved up a step into the family room and swept his arm around, indicating the thick Navajo-style rug in front of the tall brick fireplace, plush furniture, grandfather clock, and old Baldwin upright. “My mother did the room. She used what we could salvage from the old house, then added some new couches and chairs.”
    An interior decorator friend of his had taken care of the rest of the house. She’d had taken care of him too for a while, until she realized Delilah would always come first.
    Moira wandered over to examine the yard-wide arrangement of photographs on the