Free Hidden Riches by Nora Roberts Page B

door slammed open, slammed shut.
    Jed strode down the hall, his hands balled into the pockets of his scarred leather bomber jacket. It was left unsnapped to the wind over a sweatshirt and torn jeans. His hair was windblown, his face unshaven—which suited the surly look in his eye.
    Dora had to wonder why, at that moment, she preferred Jed’s dangerous look to the three-piece-suited, buffed and polished accountant beside her. The lack, she decided, was most certainly in her.
    â€œSkimmerhorn.”
    Jed summed up Dora’s date with one brief glance as he fit his key into his lock. “Conroy,” he said. With that as greeting and farewell, he slipped inside and closed the door.
    â€œYour new tenant?” Andrew’s dark, well-groomed eyebrows rose into the high forehead his mother assured him was a sign of intelligence, and not male-pattern baldness.
    â€œYes.” Dora sighed and caught a whiff of Andrew’s Halston for Men, and the clashing, wild-animal scent Jed had left stirring in the air. Since she’d missed her chance to make excuses, she unlocked her own door and let Andrew in.
    â€œHe seems remarkably . . . physical.” Frowning, Andrew shed his London Fog overcoat, folding it neatly over the back of a chair. “Does he live alone?”
    â€œYep.” Too frustrated for tidiness, Dora tossed her mink, circa 1925, toward the couch on her way to the kitchen.
    â€œOf course, I know how important it is to keep an apartment tenanted, Dora, but don’t you think it would have been wiser—certainly safer—to rent to another female?”
    â€œA female what?” Dora muttered, then paused as she poured beans into her old, hand-cranked coffee grinder. “No.” While she ground beans, she glanced over her shoulder where Andrew was standing behind her, lips pursed in disapproval. “Do you?”
    â€œCertainly. I mean the two of you do live here, alone.”
    â€œNo, I live here, alone. He lives there.” Because it annoyed her to have him breathing down her neck while she worked, Dora said, “Why don’t you go put on some music, Andrew?”
    â€œMusic?” His blandly handsome face cleared. “Of course. Mood.”
    Moments later she heard the quiet strains of an old Johnny Mathis recording. She thought, Uh-oh, then shrugged. If she couldn’t handle an accountant who wore Brooks Brothers suits and Halston cologne, she deserved to pay the price. “The coffee’ll be a few minutes,” she said as she walked back into the living room. Andrew was standing, hands on his narrow hips, studying her new painting. “That’s something, isn’t it?”
    He tilted his head right, then left. “It’s certainly bold.” Then he turned to her to take a moment to admire how she looked in the short black dress covered with fiery bugle beads. “And it suits you.”
    â€œI picked it up at an auction in Virginia just a couple of days ago.” She sat on the arm of a chair, automatically crossing her legs without giving a thought to the way the movement urged her skirt higher on her thighs.
    Andrew gave it considerable thought.
    â€œI thought I’d enjoy living with it awhile before I put it in the shop.” She smiled, then catching the predatory look in his eye, popped off the chair like a spring. “I’ll go check the coffee.”
    But he caught her hand and swung her, in what sheimagined he considered a stylish move, into his arms. She barely avoided colliding her head with his chin. “We should take advantage of the music,” he told her as he glided over the rug. His mother had paid good money for dance lessons and he didn’t want to waste it.
    Dora forced herself to relax. He did dance well, she mused as she matched her steps to his. She smiled and let her eyes close. She let the music and the movement take her, laughing softly when he lowered her into a stylish