Enlisted by Love by Jenny Jacobs Read Free Book Online

nothing disrupted a good brainstorming session so much as other people talking — but the creative surge seemed to have passed, so she said, “That’s why you bought this monstrosity. It impressed you. I’m just designing a setting for it.” She got to her feet — she’d been crouched with her notebook balanced on her knee the entire time, which she now regretted because her knee was reminding her that they’d had surgery not very long ago. Wincing, she rubbed the joint, then glanced over her notes, adding a word here and there to clarify her thoughts.
    â€œI still think — ”
    â€œStop. You hired me to design. Let me design.”
    â€œSure,” he said, with another shrug. This one did not enrage her because it meant he was agreeing with her. “I trust you, Greta.”
    She tried not to let that matter more than it should. She said, “I have never been more sure of a design. Now you need to write a nice big check for a retainer and I’ll get to work.”
    â€¢ • •
    Ian unbuttoned his jacket and pulled his checkbook out of the inner pocket. He was an Army man and he always came prepared, but he was pretty sure Greta didn’t normally demand a huge retainer before she’d even provided preliminary design ideas. Unless she considered the stream of consciousness that she’d just delivered to qualify as a preliminary design. He’d expected something in a nice folder with sketches and fabric swatches, but what did he know?
    She was looking around the storage room, taking in the other fabulous pieces he’d collected, not paying any attention to him. Her gaze kept going back to the table and he could tell she was developing a love-hate relationship with it.
    He opened the checkbook and wrote out the amount she stated, thinking it sounded more like a ransom demand than a retainer. Fortunately he had an expense account. It was telling that even if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have minded forking over cold hard cash to the woman. He knew — could tell — that she’d gotten it, much as she disliked admitting it. She’d seen the appeal of the monstrosity and she was going to make the perfect setting for it. Though the whole hiring-an-ironmonger thing made him a little nervous.
    He handed over the check. She put it away, barely glancing at it, though he suspected if he hadn’t added enough zeroes, she would have spotted that right off.
    â€œUh,” he said, clearing his throat. She slanted him a look over her shoulder that would have silenced a lesser man. Making sure her clients didn’t dare question her was probably an extremely effective business strategy on her part. But he wasn’t going to let her intimidate him. Besides, he knew she was intrigued now, hooked into solving his design problems, and that meant she wouldn’t drop the project even if he did rub her the wrong way. Which he was going to stop doing as soon as he figured out how.
    â€œI can’t quite visualize what you’re going to do with all that cast iron,” he ventured.
    â€œYou don’t need to,” she said briefly. She had her tape measure out now, and was noting the dimensions of the table in her book. While he watched, she pulled out a small swatch of stain samples and started comparing them to the finish on the table, a big frown marring her usually calm features.
    He had seen the interest flash in her eyes as she stared down at the table and the focus with which she planned and recorded the details she saw in her mind’s eye, the attentiveness with which she was now making measurements and devising design strategies.
    What if she paid that kind of attention to
him
? The thought came out of nowhere. What if her attention could be made to stay on him for more than three seconds, and what if she didn’t look annoyed when he did get her attention?
    â€œI just forked over the price of a small car,” he