Whoa.
Hot guy alert.
Grace was just as glad she hadn’t looked at the man next to her before telling him to try the special, because she might have stumbled over the words. What in the world was a guy like him doing in Tassamara? He belonged on the cover of a magazine, not on the stool next to her at the local diner.
The pause before he took her hand was noticeable, but not quite rude.
“Noah Blake,” he said. His hand was cool in hers, but his grip was perfect, his fingers lightly rough against the smoothness of her own skin.
“So what brings you to Tassamara, Mr. Blake? Just passing through?” she asked. There was no way he was a local. She would have seen him before. Or heard of him. Hell, every single woman in a five-mile radius would be whispering about him, she thought, entertained by the notion.
His eyelashes were unreal. And seriously unfair. The best mascara on the planet wouldn’t make hers that lush and gorgeous. And then there were the stark cheekbones. The stubborn chin. The long, lean fingers.
“Not exactly,” he replied.
Plus, there was the stubble. What was it about a guy who was twenty-four hours too far away from a shave? Were pheromones connected to facial hair?
“Oh? Visiting someone in town?” Three days earlier and Grace would have been scrambling to remember the names of the guests Akira had invited to the wedding. But if he was here for the wedding, he was very, very late. Besides, he was much too pretty to be a physicist or an academic. He hadn’t gotten those shoulders crouching over a lab table for ten hours a day.
“Sort of.”
She waited, head tilted, a welcoming smile on her face, letting the expectant silence stretch. She wasn’t going to badger him if he didn’t want to talk to her, but the borderline rudeness in his initial hesitation was crossing over into surly asshole territory.
“Looking for a place,” he finally said, sounding reluctant.
“Any place I might know?” Grace pushed her empty coffee cup away. She’d already finished eating and she needed to get to work. The wedding had disrupted her schedule and the emails were piling up. She wouldn’t have minded chatting with him if he wanted to talk — it wasn’t every day that a gorgeous man showed up at Maggie’s — but she wasn’t going to waste her time if he was a jerk. She reached for the strap of her purse where it was slung over the back of the stool and started to stand, adding, “I grew up here and it’s a small town. I know a fair amount about the area.”
“Maybe.” He sighed. It sounded resigned. Pulling a business card out of his back pocket, he showed it to her, asking, “Have you heard of this place?”
It was a generic General Directions card: no employee name, no direct phone line, stained with brown drops that looked like coffee, and worn around the edges, as if he’d been carrying it around for a while.
Grace relaxed back onto her stool. “I have, yes.”
She eyed him with new interest. Gorgeous and now mysterious, too. What was he doing with one of the generic General Directions cards?
He set the card on the counter between them. “What do they do there?”
She raised her eyebrows. “You’re looking for them, but you don’t know what they do?”
His lips tightened and he looked away from her, glancing down at the countertop.
She didn’t wait for him to respond. “It’s primarily a holding company, buying and selling stock in other companies,” she told him. That was true enough that if she were hooked up to a lie detector, it wouldn’t even blip. The vast majority of GD’s value and profits came from its holdings and stock transactions.
But the company had two other divisions: Research and Special Affairs, both based in Tassamara. And only the Special Affairs division used the generic cards. One of GD’s coterie of unusual talents had given Noah Blake a card. But who? And why?
Did he need someone with their specialized sets of skills? GD’s psychics weren’t the kind that took walk-ins. Most of their work came through their government connections. But if he was with the FBI or DEA or even the State Department, why wasn’t he going through the usual channels?
“Stocks? Like Berkshire Hathaway? Warren Buffett?” Noah said.
“Not in the same league, but yes, the same idea.”
He tapped the card with one finger, frowning thoughtfully.
If Grace had to guess… her eyes narrowed, considering him.
Not State Department. He didn’t have the right air of arrogance. And his eyes were too shadowed, like he’d seen too much. Maybe the State Department guys had seen just as much, but it didn’t usually crack their complacency.
Not FBI. He was wearing blue jeans, a plain black t-shirt, and a worn leather jacket that looked like he’d owned it for years. No FBI guy ever showed up in Tassamara wearing anything other than a white shirt and tie. They were as bad as missionaries that way.
That left DEA, but it didn’t feel quite right. Something outdoors, though, and probably in uniform, because his casual t-shirt revealed a line of lighter skin at the base of his neck.
Military? Maybe, although the way his dark hair curled on his nape was decidedly non-regulation.
“Are you looking for someone specific there?” she asked cautiously. That battered card could have been sitting in someone’s wallet for years. Maybe someone outside the company had referred him to GD.
He looked as if he was debating his response, before saying, “A guy named Akira.”
Okay, that was odd. A guy? The Akira she knew — her brand new sister-in-law — was not a guy. Nor was her ability to talk to ghosts public knowledge. Akira had firmly resisted formalizing any professional arrangement that utilized her gift: she was a research scientist and happy to stay that way.
“I can’t say I know a guy named Akira,” Grace said slowly. It wasn’t a lie. Not really. But she doubted he was listening closely enough to hear the emphasis she placed on the word ‘guy.’ Keeping her voice casual, she asked, “So why are you looking for him?”
“I was told he might help me.”
“Help you with what?” Grace asked the obvious.
Noah’s mouth twisted as Emma, the waitress, slid a bright blue mug of coffee in front of him. He blinked down at the steam rising off a milky swirl in the mug, saying, “You put milk in my coffee.”
“Cream, actually.” Emma looked worried. “Isn’t that the way you like it?”
“Yeah, but…” Noah pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes for a second. Then he shut the menu he’d opened and stuck it back into the bin of random restaurant menus that Maggie kept around for the tourists. “I’ll take the special.”
“Good choice.” Emma threw him a cheerful smile, and called over her shoulder into the kitchen behind her, “Another special, Maggie.”
As Emma headed away, Grace asked, “Is that not how you take your coffee?”
“I’m used to drinking it black,” he said. “On deployment, we usually only have powdered creamer. That stuff makes better fireworks than coffee.”
Military. She’d called it right. Grace was on the verge of thanking him for his service, when he shot her a sideways grin.
“I do like it with cream, though. I just didn’t remember saying so.”
Grace felt a flush of heat run through her, head to toe.
Wow.
She’d been admiring him, but in the abstract, amused by stumbling upon such a beautiful man in such an everyday place. But his smile… it crinkled his eyes and softened his features and warmed his face. Suddenly, he was a different guy. Not just attractive, but appealing.
Really appealing.
It felt like every cell in her body sat up and took notice, and every hormone sprang to life and said, “Him. That one.”
Her voice was more breathless than she liked when she said, “So what sort of help are you looking for?”
He picked up the mug. His smile was gone and his voice brusque as he said, “Nothing. It’s not important. It’s…” His voice drifted off into a mumble, as if he were talking mostly to himself. “… a stupid idea, anyway.”
“Well.” Grace stood. “I should get to work.”
He dipped his head, not looking at her. “Have a good day.”
“You, too,” Grace replied cordially, but without warmth.
But then she paused.
He was looking for Akira. He clearly wasn’t going to share his story with her, but someone had sent him to find a person who talked to ghosts. And he was military, or maybe ex-military.
Maybe she owed him more than the quick brush-off she’d been about to give him. Not because of his smile, not because of the rush of attraction she’d felt, but because maybe he did need help, of the kind that she and her family had also once needed.
Would she scare him away if she started talking about dead people?
She leaned forward, reaching across him to grab a guest check pad sitting next to the cash register. Her awareness of him registered as a tingle of sensation along all the nerves closest to him, her arm, her shoulder, her cheek.
She pulled back, faintly flustered by the feeling and inwardly scolding herself for it. He was just a guy. A guy who maybe needed help. A really hot guy who maybe needed help. She pulled her purse around and began to rummage through it, not looking at Noah. “I’m sure I have a pen here somewhere,” she muttered.
He cleared his throat. She looked up. He was holding a pen out to her. He made a tiny motion with his head, gesturing toward a container of pens sitting next to the register and the spare guest check pads. A glimmer of amusement in his eyes made her own lips twitch in response.
Great. Too pretty for his own good, problems in need of solving, and a sense of humor. He might as well be wearing a label with ‘Grace’s catnip’ scrawled on it.
“Thanks.” She bent her head to the pad, drawing a quick map. She wrote in the street names, then, frowning, added mileage in parentheses under the names. She wasn’t as sure about the distances as she should be, but she’d been driving to the GD offices all her life. The route was too familiar for her to need to know exactly how far one turn was from the next. Ripping the map off the pad, she handed it to Noah. “My distances might be off, but after you eat, you should go check it out.”
“Thank you.” He didn’t look at the map but set it on the counter, his eyes on her. The directness of his gaze held a question, and she felt her cheeks getting warm. Who was this guy?
“Enjoy your breakfast, Mr. Blake.” She slid the strap of her purse back over her shoulder. “And welcome to Tassamara.”