Love by Proxy by Diana Palmer Read Free Book Online Page A

flower garden. It was what she loved most.” She smiled and had to fight tears. It had only been a year, and the hurt was raw sometimes. “My other grandparents, my father’s parents, died years ago. I never knew them. Mom’s parents have been like a second set for me. Dad and I could never talk the way Granddad and I can.”
    “Was it a happy marriage, your grandparents’?” he asked.
    She smiled. “They’d just celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. He took her to a drive-in movie afterward and they came home with the windows fogged up,” she added with a mischievous look. “You always had to knock before you went into the house. They liked variety, and once mama walked in on them in the living room.”
    “My God,” he said with a laugh.
    “They were very modern grandparents.” She walked along beside him, remembering. “Your grandmother is very like mine. I like her.”
    “So do I.” He pulled a package of cigarettes from his pocket and stared at it. The cellophane had never been opened.
    She glanced up. She didn’t remember seeing him with a cigarette. “Do you smoke?” she asked suddenly.
    “Yes and no.” He sighed and repocketed the package. “I’ve been off them for two weeks.”
    “Cold turkey?”
    He nodded. “I need something to do with my hands.”
    “You might take up knitting, I hear it’s very…no!” She dodged as he aimed a swipe at her. “Gentlemen don’t hit ladies!”
    “I’m from Chicago, not the South,” he reminded her.
    “I know,” she replied. “Your accent gives you away every time.”
    “I don’t have an accent.”
    Her eyebrows lifted wildly. “If I took you home with me, people would come from miles around just to listen to you talk.”
    “You’re one to talk about accents,” he chided with a mocking glance.
    “Well, I don’t have one,” she drawled. “Not in Georgia, at least.”
    He shook his head. His eyes were busy, staring around, measuring, calculating.
    “What are we looking for?” she asked.
    “I’ll tell you when I find it. Write this down.”
    He dictated and she scribbled as they walked. He noted locations of grocery stores, bus stops, drugstores, businesses, traffic lights, streets, until Amelia got lost in the tangle. As they got around the block and back to the potential site, he was still throwing out ideas.
    He looked up at the tenement and had her write down names of potential subcontractors, demolition people, city government officials, building inspectors. Then he made notes about the site itself, using terms she had to ask him to spell. It became obvious that he knew his business.
    “I’ll want cost estimates, too,” he murmured to himself. “I’ll send Reynolds out here with the blueprints.”
    “Cost estimates?”
    He looked down at her. “I have to know everything when I start a project. Right down to the cost of each nail I’m going to use.”
    “How do you do that?” she asked, genuinely curious.
    “If you’re really interested, I’ll tell you over lunch.”
    “I’d like that.”
    She expected him to drive her back to the house, but he took her instead to the very elegant French restaurant where she’d been arrested. Chez Pierre.
    “No,” she pleaded as he opened the door for her at the entrance and handed the keys to a parking valet.
    “Yes,” he said firmly. “Come on. They’ll never recognize you.”
    They didn’t, either. Not even the hostess who’d been so startled. They were shown to a cozy table for two by a window overlooking a flowery courtyard.
    “Lovely!” she exclaimed, sighing over the profusion of flowers. “I love flowers!”
    “Yes, I puzzled that out.”
    She looked across the table at him, eyes wide and curious.
    “It was the way you spoke about your grandmother’s flowers,” he explained.
    “I like growing things,” she confessed with a sigh. “Except that I’ve got no place to do it. My apartment is surrounded by green hedges and lush grass, and the Kennedys