“Can’t understand you. You’ve got an arousing pair of…lungs, honey. Why don’t you use them?”

He stalked off through the throng of people waiting for luggage. Anxiety faded in Bree, replaced by a second wind of energy. Furious energy. For two cents, she would have followed him and landed a right hook…but then, she wasn’t the type. She had no temper now and never had. “Bree’s my good one,” her mother used to say. “I can always count on her to stay cool and calm. She never even cried as a baby…”

Good Bree, good Bree, echoed the rollicking headache in her temples. An arousing pair of lungs, was it? Bristling, she stalked toward the luggage pickup. Lungs, schmungs. The first time she’d laid eyes on Hart, she’d guessed he was obsessed with that particular portion of a woman’s anatomy. You could always spot a breast man in a crowd.

Richard, being a decent man, would never have been so crude as to stare at any woman below the neck.

Richard would also have helped her with her luggage, instead of leaving her standing there, the last one in the crowd, to face a moving conveyer with nothing on it. Where were her two pale blue suitcases?

The attendant looked blank. After two phone calls and seven pieces of paper from Bree’s scratch pad, she gathered that her luggage was on some other plane. Apologies and promises were politely delivered…one day, at most two, hand-delivered to her doorstep…

Which was nice. Except that her silk blouse was already wrinkled and damp with perspiration, and her pencil-slim skirt was hardly cabin attire. Glumly, Bree stalked off in search of her rental car, her stomach starting to cramp from hunger and her muscles protesting too many nights of insufficient rest.

She became abruptly alert as she neared the car desk. Hart Manning was there, bent over the long counter as he filled out some forms, his leonine mane unmistakable. He certainly wasn’t delivering sarcastic comments to the clerk as he had to Bree. The blonde was laughing, all dimples and bright blue eyes.