Desire by Design - By Paula Altenburg Page 0,19
he knew something bigger was wrong. She’d been on edge since she’d picked him up at the hotel last night. He’d thought it was about the design, and maybe it was, but it certainly wasn’t the whole story.
It’s always the woman’s fault, never the man’s, Eve had said.
It still felt personal. But he no longer thought it was personal toward him.
He’d run by her house and at least make sure her car was in the driveway, he told himself.
As he ran, he tried to take note of the different architectural styles he saw. While it was true that the city had a certain period feel to it, as he moved away from the downtown business district, he saw more and more examples of multicultural influences. For centuries, people from all over the world had immigrated to Canada through this port city, and those who’d settled here had left their marks. He had no doubt he could design the perfect City Hall to reflect the city’s diverse history, yet still give his uncle a modern, trademark Matt Brison building.
Eve’s tidy little two-story house was located in an aging neighborhood of starter homes for young, upwardly mobile professional couples. Station wagons and minivans speckled the driveways of its steep, winding streets. Lattice-work fences, intertwined with creeping vines and scrubby underbrush, divided property lots. Ash, maple, poplar, and juniper sprouted in rocky, grass-retardant backyards.
And Eve, dressed in a pair of coveralls, with what appeared to be wood shavings in her ponytailed hair, was standing in a flowerbed at the side of her house, staring up at a window. It seemed she was an early riser, too.
He mopped at his forehead with the crease of his elbow, glad that the morning was cool and he wasn’t sweating too much. The breeze off the harbor kept the temperature down.
“Lose another earring?” he called to her from the safety of the sidewalk. He didn’t want to take her by surprise—not until he’d found out what kind of self-defense lessons her brother had given her and how warm she was feeling toward him that morning.
Eve spun around, and Matt blinked. Her coveralls were layered in a thick coating of sawdust and drywall spatters, and the dark circles under her eyes were big enough to cut the glare of a supernova.
He was doubly glad he hadn’t crept up on her. At this point, he doubted her nerves could survive it.
Eve didn’t answer his question. Instead, she scrambled over the clematis and cut him off at the corner of the house, as if there were something she was trying to keep him from seeing. Before he had time to wonder about that though, she’d tilted her chin upward and pinned him with those deep, dark-lashed eyes.
“I am really sorry about last night,” she said, looking so angelic that Matt might have been fooled if he didn’t have reason to know better. He was learning more about her all the time, and while she might be cute, she was definitely no angel. “I have no idea why I behaved the way I did.”
He thought that she did but didn’t want to explain it. And he thought it best not to pry.
“I came to apologize to you, too,” he said. “Oh, yeah,” he added, patting at the side pocket of his running shorts, “and to return your twenty dollars.”
“You don’t have to do either. I deserve to pay your cab fare after ditching you like that in the dark and the rain.”
The blaze of Eve’s smile left Matt bordering on tongue-tied. She really was cute.
He tried to shake it off with a joke. “In that case, you owe me money. Twenty dollars didn’t quite cover it.”
“I’ll have to write you a check.” Eve bounced her house keys in the palm of her hand, indecision etched all over her face. There was a palpable moment of awkward silence. “Or would you settle for a cup of coffee instead?”
Matt resisted the urge to reach over and pick the wood shavings from her hair, only because he didn’t want her to withdraw that offer of coffee. Her hesitation suggested she wasn’t enthusiastic about it, but he was suddenly very curious about how the inside of her home would look.
“Coffee sounds good,” he said, and followed her across the lawn, up her front steps, and into a small entryway.
She closed the door behind them, bent over and unlaced her steel-toed work boots, then dropped them in a corner.
“I’ll just put the coffee pot on,” she