One Night With a Billionaire - By VickiLewis Thompson Page 0,43
she met his gaze while keeping her expression friendly but neutral. “Hi.”
“Hello.” He glanced at her with the same carefully neutral expression. But then a spark of interest lit his green eyes.
Her breath caught. She’d never looked into those eyes before. Grandpa Ike’s binoculars were good, but not that good. Yet she felt as if she’d met his gaze before, and seeing it—again?—brought back a half-remembered thrill. Crazy.
Even crazier, she flashed on the image of the black wolf in the clearing—a green-eyed wolf with dark, luxurious fur the same color as Jake’s collar-length hair. Clearly his purchase of the carving was messing with her mind.
The interest reflected in Jake’s eyes slowly changed to speculation. Maybe something in her expression had given her away, or maybe he’d picked up enough of her quiet conversation with Ted to figure out who she was. In any case, she needed to vamoose before he started asking questions.
Quickly breaking eye contact, she grabbed her canvas bag from the counter. Her smile probably looked more like a grimace, but it was the best she could do. “You two have a nice day!” She headed for the screen door.
As exits go, it wasn’t her best. Heart pounding, she climbed into the old truck Grandpa Ike had willed to her, started the ancient engine, and pulled out onto the two-lane road that skirted the lake. She’d escaped, but the adrenaline rush of making her first sale stayed with her.
Logic, the tool that her lawyer father embraced, told her that Jake buying the wolf carving wasn’t reason enough to change her life. Intuition, the tool that her photographer mother preferred, whispered that she’d reached a major turning point and shouldn’t ignore it. Grandpa Ike, who had been more intuitive than anyone else on her mother’s side of the family, would have told her to listen to her instincts.
Rachel wondered what Jake Hunter would have said if she’d had the courage to admit she’d carved that wolf. Or maybe, judging from the quiet assessment in those green eyes, he already knew.
***
Present day
Jake finished answering e-mails from members of the group he’d founded the previous year, Werewolves Against Random Mating (WARM). Shutting down the laptop, he headed for the kitchen and snagged a cold bottle of spruce tip ale from the refrigerator. Then he twisted off the cap and walked into the living room. As usual, his gaze drifted to the Rachel Miller carving displayed on his mantel.
The soot from the hearth fires of three consecutive winters had darkened the wood. Maybe he should clean and oil it, now that summer had arrived once again. Or not. The soot that had settled into the grooves added character, in his estimation. Reaching out, he traced the distinctive and familiar slant of the wolf’s wide-set eyes.
When he’d bought the piece, he’d had no clue that Rachel would become internationally famous. But he’d suspected that his impulse buy might come back to haunt him, especially after he’d walked up to the counter and she’d turned to look into his eyes.
Leaning against the mantel, he gazed across Polecat Lake toward her property. It was nearly nine in the evening, but it might as well have been midday. Sunlight continued to play on the water, and the metallic whine of her power saw drifted in through his open window. She must be starting another large project, one that required the saw and the extra space provided by the workshop she’d had built about ten yards from her cabin.
Now that she was bringing in the big bucks, he kept expecting her to tear down that cabin and build a McMansion in its place. So far she hadn’t, and he respected her for keeping her operation low-key. Understatement was a Polecat tradition, one of the reasons he loved it here.
She’d bought a new truck, but he couldn’t blame her for replacing the unreliable bucket of bolts she’d inherited from her grandfather. She’d also hired a local kid named Lionel, who was part Native American, to clean her workshop and wrestle the bigger pieces onto her truck. A new truck, a roomy workshop, and a part-time assistant seemed to be the only concessions she’d made to her success, and Ted Haggerty claimed that she was the same down-to-earth person she’d always been.
If so, then props to her, because she’d created quite a stir, the kind that could turn a person’s head. No telling what this hunk of driftwood was worth now that she had commissions coming in from wealthy