Having completely forgotten they were in the middle of an important conversation.

After standing there in seething resentment, Taylor had shrugged and moved on. She’d had to. Not every mother was cut out to be a warm, fuzzy type, and she needed to get over it.

Then a few years ago Isabel had done the unthinkable, she’d gotten married again, and had dropped everything for one equally ambitious, equally cold-blooded Dr. Edward Craftsman, brain surgeon. Taylor had gone to the wedding, and if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, she would never have believed it.

Her mother lived for this man, gushing all over him. Constantly. Kissing, hugging, leaning, more kissing.

It burned just thinking about it. So did her mother buying this chandelier from beneath her. “Thank you,” Taylor said into the phone. And as if it were no skin off her nose, she dropped the phone back into her pocket. Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it. She’d wanted that chandelier with a ridiculous passion. Served her right, wanting something so badly. Hadn’t she learned that nothing, nothing at all, was worth the heartache?

She had other things to worry about. Like she had a building in disrepair, and a man was reminding her of things far better forgotten.

Mac had tossed the sledgehammer aside, but he hadn’t been idle. There was now a shovel in his hand and he was loading debris into a wheelbarrow with the same narrow-minded intensity he’d swung his sledgehammer.

Eyes narrowed, she set her hands on her hips and tapped her foot. “We never solved the problem of why you’re here a day early.”

He kept loading until the wheelbarrow was full to bursting. Slowly he straightened, then eyed her with that light brown gaze, completely inscrutable now, without a trace of that intense sexual speculation.