Flirting with Disaster by Sherryl Woods Page B

advised cheerfully. “You have me.”
    â€œStay out of it,” Maggie said again. “If I decide there are things I need to know about Josh, I’m perfectly capable of finding them out for myself.”
    â€œIt could be too late. Let me at least do some sort of basic background check.”
    â€œDon’t you think Cord probably did that before he put him in charge in Atlanta?”
    â€œI doubt it,” Dinah said. “Cord goes on gut instinct.”
    â€œHas it failed him yet?”
    â€œI suppose not,” Dinah conceded reluctantly.
    â€œAnd Josh did excellent work for him in Atlanta, right? That is what you told me?”
    â€œYes. But trusting a man to renovate a building is hardly the same as trusting him with your best friend’s heart.”
    â€œI’m not worried, so leave it be, Dinah. I’ll be spending a few hours with the man on Saturdays, surrounded by lots of people. How much trouble can I possibly get into?”
    â€œIt’s not Saturdays I’m worried about,” Dinah argued. “You’ve already come up with one excuse to see him away from that project. I suspect that’s just the beginning. You can be pretty creative when you want to spend more time with a man.”
    â€œI didn’t manufacture an excuse to see Josh. This was an emergency,” Maggie stressed. “Besides, I called you and Cord first.” Tired of the whole debate, she gave Dinah a pointed look. “Don’t you need to go to work or drive your husband crazy or something?”
    Dinah sighed. “Okay, I’ll go. But I’m keeping my eye on the two of you. If I don’t like what I’m seeing, I won’t keep my mouth shut.”
    Maggie laughed. “No surprise there.”
    Dinah grinned. “Yeah, I suppose not. Love you.”
    â€œYou, too.”
    Maggie’s smile faded as Dinah left the gallery. She was not going to fall for Josh in the same headlong, impulsive way that always got her into trouble. She wasn’t.
    She sighed when she recalled her response to his touch. Famous last words.
    Â 
    Josh was shaken by what he’d come close to revealing to Maggie the night before. He never talked about his mother and the steady parade of men through their lives. He’d only told Cord that he was from a single-parent home and they’d moved around a lot. He’d never explained why, never said that Nadine had a tendency to fall for the losers of the universe.
    She’d always done it with such incredible optimism, too. Each man had been the love of her life, the one who was going to turn their lives into a bed of roses. When she discovered those roses were riddled with thorns, she’d packed Josh up and moved on, defeated for a time, but always bouncing back as soon as the next handsome scoundrel gave her a second glance.
    At first Josh had hated her for getting sucked in again and again, but now that he was older he’d almost come to admire her determined ability to ignore history. He’d stuffed down his own considerable emotional baggage from losing a prospective dad again and again.
    He’d come away from all those years of observing his mother’s emotional ups and downs with a grim determination of his own to play fair with the women he met. He never made promises he had no intention of keeping. Hell, most of the time he never made promises at all. And he never, ever dated women with kids who could be hurt when he took off, as he inevitably would.
    In recent months he’d pretty much lost touch with Nadine. She had his cell-phone number and over the years she’d checked in from time to time, usually when she needed money. But when things were going good for her—in other words when there was a new man in her life—he heard nothing. Last he’d heard a few months back, she was getting married in Vegas.
    He wished her well. Maybe she’d finally get what she wanted. Maybe this one