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“Help yourself,” she mocked with a severe frown.

“Still have a sweet disposition in the morning, I see,” he remarked before lifting his cup. “Join me?”

“Don’t you have anything better to do than a bad impression of a cat burglar?”

He raised his hands in protest. “I haven’t stolen a thing—”

“Yet.” She took a chair opposite him at the table and accepted the coffee he had already poured for her. It was laced with sugar and cream. Just the way she liked it. “I drink it black—”

“Since when?”

“Since I got a little older and have to watch my weight.”

Again his blue eyes sparked with humor. He cocked his head in the direction of her cup. “Go ahead,” he suggested, “indulge yourself. Sin a little.”

Her dark brows raised fractionally but she managed a smile.

“By the way, I did knock,” Trevor announced, “but no one answered.”

“I must have been—”

“In the shower,” Trevor finished for her. Ashley nodded and smiled into her cup. “When you didn’t answer, I got worried. After I came into the cabin, I realized you were in the bathroom, but it didn’t seem to make much sense to go back outside and wait in the cold while you took your sweet time upstairs. I think we know each other well enough not to worry about formalities.”

She was forced to smile, but the familiar caress of his eyes encouraged her to shift her gaze out the window to stare at the soft accumulation of snow. “How did you get in?”

He reached into his pocket, withdrew a dull piece of metal, and tossed it onto the table.

Ashley’s heart missed a beat as she turned her attention to the object and touched the cold metal. “The key—how?” she began to ask, but her voice caught an

d faded. She had given the key to Trevor eight years ago, during Indian summer when they had met in secret tryst at the cabin. Tears, unwanted and filled with silent agony, stung the backs of her eyelids. Silently she dropped the key back onto the table.

“I never threw it away,” he said solemnly. There was a wistful sadness in his gaze.

“You kept it all these years?” Her voice had grown husky.

He nodded and frowned thoughtfully into the black depths of his coffee.

The telephone rang shrilly and disrupted the intimate atmosphere which had surrounded them. Ashley was glad for an excuse to leave the table and avoid the unasked questions in Trevor’s bold eyes.

“Hello?” she called into the receiver as she brushed the hot tears aside.

“Ashley. It’s John.”

Ashley managed a smile at the familiar voice. “Good morning.”

“If you say so,” he replied. “Look, I’ve got a start on the Portland records and I’ll send them to Bend. I called Eileen Hanna at the Bend office so she’ll be expecting them. She didn’t ask any questions when I said they were just some financial projections that you asked for.”

“Good.”

“However, she might get a little suspicious when she sees the volume of paper involved,” John warned.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m sure Eileen won’t question anything that I want.” Eileen was one of the few employees in the vast timber empire who didn’t begrudge Ashley her inheritance. The quiet, fiftyish woman was a feminist to the end and perceived that any advance of women in the timber industry was a major step in the right direction.

“I’m still working on the rest of it. I’m afraid it will take a couple of weeks to pull all the records together.”

“That’s fine. I’m not as concerned with how long it takes as much as I am that we do a thorough job.” When she replaced the receiver, she found that Trevor had entered the room and was leaning against the arch separating the kitchen from the den. He studied her lazily, sipping his coffee.

The thought that he was listening in on her telephone conversation with John made her bristle. “Are you trying to add eavesdropping to your skills of crime, Senator?” she asked scathingly. Her ragged emotions took hold of her in an uncharacteristic burst of anger. “First we have breaking and entering and now we can add eavesdropping. If you don’t watch out, I might be inclined to believe that last summer’s bribery charge wasn’t phony after all.”

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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