"Now I am intrigued, Ms. Shann," he told her.

"Please, I think if we're going to work together you should call me Emily," she replied. "May I call you by your first name?"

"My friends call me Mick," he responded. "And I suspect we're going to be friends, Emily." Reaching across the table, he took her small hand in his big one and smiled into her blue eyes. Then he released her fingers as quickly as he had taken them.

God in his heaven! She blushed. She was behaving like one of her heroines. No. She was behaving like one of their friends. Her heroines weren't this sappy. To her relief the desserts came, along with another pot of hot tea.

"What is that?" he wanted to know, staring at the plate the waitress set before her.

"It's a very thin slice of Felicity's Death by Chocolate cake, and a thin slice of her boysenberry pie," Emily said. "I love them both, but I could never make up my mind which to have. So Felicity came up with this solution. Pretty cool, huh?"

He laughed. "It's obvious you don't have a problem with your weight." Then he spooned up some custard. "This is good. She really does use eggs, doesn't she? My gran back in Ballyfer-gus made custard like this. She's gone now, of course."

"I thought you came from Dublin," Emily said.

"I went to school and university in Dublin," he explained. "My parents were killed in an auto accident when I was twelve. Gran Devlin took responsibility for me, but she wasn't up to having a growing lad in her house year-round. I went back to Ballyfergus during my school holidays to stay with her. We only had each other, you see. Very odd for an Irish family, of course. Most of them are big."

"We have something in common then, Mick," she said. She liked the way he spoke of his grandmother. There was warmth and genuine affection in his voice.

"Emily was raised by her two grandmothers," Aaron spoke up. "Right from her birth. I knew them both. Wonderful women!"