At Your Service (Silhouette Desire) by Amy Jo Cousins Page A

thought she was hiding from nothing more serious than a bad relationship.
    Another idea gave her pause. A bad relationship? Or an abusive one?
    If Tyler thought a woman was hiding from an abusive boyfriend, his protective instincts might go into overdrive. And, she thought further, with pain, if he was attracted at all to a woman like that, learning that she was trying to escape from a situation like that might be enough to make him want to take care of her. And that might be enough to make him think he was falling for her.
    “Grace?” Sarah was still looking at her as if worried she’d made a mistake.
    “Don’t worry. I was just curious,” Grace reassured her. It’s just that I’m losing my mind over here. I can’t decide if I’m happy or sad, angry or pleased, about any damn thing and your brother seems to be tied up in the middle of it all somehow. Sarah still looked concerned, so she fibbed, “I assumed you’d tell him sooner or later.”
    “What did he do, anyway? You sounded… Hmm…” Sarah chose her word carefully. “Frustrated.”
    “Oh, he just told me he was falling for me.” Annoyed again, Grace grabbed a box of red-and-green cocktail straws and began ruthlessly shoving them into side compartments of a napkin holder. She waited for the shriek of disbelief.
    “Wow.” Sarah’s voice came as a low, awed mutter from somewhere behind her. “Big brother’s in love.” The kitchen doors squeaked on their hinges and then thwapped back and forth against each other. “Hey, Mom, Tyler’s in love with Grace.”
    “He is, is he?”
    “Of course he’s not,” Grace snapped, stomping her foot as she turned around. This was worse than getting caught kissing the man in front of his mother. “He simply said he thought he might be. I told him he was crazy. Then we straightened out some other business and he decided that he wasn’t after all.”
    “Right,” Sarah said decisively. “He’s trying not to scare you off. Good plan.”
    “Good plan? He’s insane,” Grace retorted, then looked apologetically at Tyler’s mother.
    Susannah had carried an enormous bowl of tomatoes from the restaurant-size refrigerator and now began to chop them on the island.
    “My husband Michael told me that he loved me the night we met.”
    Both younger women listened, Sarah smiling as she heard again what was obviously a treasured family story.
    “He was a saxophone player in a blues band playing at a club my girlfriends and I had snuck into. I was seventeen. At the band’s first break, Michael came over to our table and told me I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.” Susannah shook her head. “I looked pretty good that night.”
    “You’re still the most beautiful woman I know, Mom.”
    “Hush. Flattery will not get you a slice of the key lime pie I’m making tonight.” Susannah wrinkled her nose at her daughter. “Let’s just say he was pretty charming and handsome as sin besides. He sat next to me and we started talking. When the band went back onstage after their break, he stayed with me and we just kept talking. We sat there until the bar closed, and my friends were begging me to leave, so he walked me to the door of the club and kissed me for the first time. Then he told me he was in love with me.”
    “What did you say?” Grace asked after five seconds during which she made a vain effort not to be charmed by the story.
    “Say? Nothing.” Susannah laughed. “I smacked him in the face. I thought he was making fun of me. I didn’t believe him until he kept showing up at my house every night for weeks.”
    “That’s my mom. Always the romantic.” Maxie strolled through the kitchen, yanking a baseball hat off her spiky mop of cropped curls, apparently having caught the tail end of the story.
    “Be quiet.” Susannah threw a ripe tomato at her youngest’s head, who caught it one-handed and bit into it like it was an apple. “Someday you’ll fall in love and find out that it’s not