All That Glitters. Mary Brady

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      What did men like? Couldn’t resist?

      She looked at the bags of groceries on the island counter.

      Food. Even swindlers had to eat.

      She couldn’t cook at all—not even boil a decent pot of water, but maybe she could manage something. She grabbed the nearest bag and started poking around.

      Fusilli? Other than being pasta—she knew because she could see its curly shape through the window in the box—she hadn’t known anything about it, hadn’t needed to know what it was named to eat it. Nope. Just stick a fork in it.

      Cans of plain tomato sauce. What the heck was she supposed to do with that?

      The door across the room popped open and Hale entered with his arms bulging with firewood. He turned his back to her as he unloaded and stacked wood in the bin near the fireplace.

      Then he walked out again.

      A fire, of course. She was probably much better at fire-starting than cooking. Actually, she once tried to combine the two. Unfortunately, the smell of burned pizza stuck around her condo, and to be fair, the hall of her building, for a week.

      She hustled over to the fireplace and searched for fire-starter logs or those cute pinecones stuffed with candle wax or something to make fires start easier.

      There wasn’t so much as a fireplace match, just a book of matches with the name of the bar in town. Braven’s. She could have, should have stayed there in the bar. Too late.

      She poked around for fire-starting aids and gave up.

      She wasn’t any better at fire-starting than she was at cooking, so when she heard the footsteps on the stairs, she fled back to the kitchen area where she could keep the center island between them, duck behind it if she had to.

      He unloaded the wood and knelt on the floor in front of the fireplace. Then he reached inside and opened the flue. Oh, she would not have remembered that. With wood chips and bits of flimsy bark, he started a small fire, feeding it twigs and shards of wood, and of course, he had used the stubby matches.

      Just like now, she always managed to have someone around to start her fires and usually to cook. She wondered if he expected her to do it, to cook. Good luck with that one, buddy.

      The fire grew tall and she was a bit envious. She’d have to research fire-starting when she had time.

      When the fire blazed, he stood and headed in her direction.

      His sandy blond brows drew together in fierce concentration. There was clearly a side of this man she knew nothing about, possibly a deeply dark and sinister side. She should be running away. She should go back to the house, push the four-poster bed up against the door and tie the sheets together to let herself out the window in case she needed to flee into the storm.

      He paused and dropped his keys into a dish on the long table behind the couch.

      His expression did not challenge nor welcome as he continued toward the kitchen.

      Nonreactive. Ego-sheltered.

      Serial killer? Chain-saw murderer? At least the two of them weren’t in a basement alone. A basement? Did the place have a basement? Yes, the lift up doors in the breezeway would lead to a cellar of some kind. Maybe that’s where she’d be buried.

      She was crazy, the chatter in her head crazier.

      Maybe it was he who should be afraid.

      As he drew closer, he seemed to grow in size and his expression in intensity. She stiffened, searching for the best exit if she had to run.

      And then she relaxed.

      Yeah.

      She could run away, go back to a world where she would cover stories for microfame and a couple of dollars.

      Then she could go live under a bridge in a refrigerator box and wear newspapers on her feet and stuffed into the sleeves of her lightweight coat as she had done when she investigated and had written the series Life Without a Cause to critical acclaim only four short years ago.

      Hale came around the counter and stopped a mere two feet from her. He placed one hand, deliberately it seemed, on the counter beside her, and she inhaled.

      By being here in his living space, she had made her move, set out her pawn. The next move was his.

      A second later he stepped around her to the freezer, from which he took two glass bowls filled with something green. He took off the lids, popped them into the microwave and covered them with a sheet of crinkly sounding paper he’d taken from a box in the drawer under the microwave.

      Eat? His move was to feed her. Or maybe he was hungry and planned to eat both...in front of her...while she salivated.

      Addy watched the bowls spin on the microwave’s carousel and then realized he was heating pea soup.

      Food was a good move on his part. She hadn’t eaten since early this morning. If she accepted food from him, she would be in his debt.

      Yeah, as if she wasn’t already—deeply.

      He pulled two plates from the cupboard.

      He was dreadful at portraying himself as a bad guy, or he was as “diabolically clever” as the tabloids had called him when they alluded to his making off with a few billion dollars.

      If she didn’t have an absolutely reliable source, she would begin to doubt the veracity of her facts. The SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, a U.S. government agency set up to prevent investment fraud, had come down hard on Hale and Blankenstock.

      More importantly, according to her younger sister, Savanna, this guy was worse than a robber or a thief who stole once and disappeared into the night, Hale was heartless. He had repeatedly taken from Savanna—trusting, single mother Savanna—and many others.

      He went back to the fire, hunkered down and carefully placed a pair of logs on the flaming pile. He stayed squatted, silhouetted in the soft light until the fire roared.

      He looked handsome. And fit. She wondered how fit—she couldn’t help it, picturing him naked and... It was easy to see, this man lifted heavy things, not just fountain pens and martini glasses.

      She shook her head at the silliness of her thoughts.

      He had set out a pea soup pawn. Now she was going to have to sit down and eat with him or give up the game without trying and walk back to town beaten down by the storm and failure.

      Lunch it was, and so be it.

      She pulled open a drawer in the butcher-block island and found place mats and napkins that most likely had never been used. Carefully she set them on the table in strategic places. At right angles so she could better watch him when she wanted and ignore him if it seemed necessary.

      She took the plates he had placed on the counter, where they would have sat side by side on the bar stools, and moved them to the table.

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