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can’t handle, it’s a personnel problem at one of the companies, or some salesman wanting to interest him in a new tractor, or another rancher trying to sell him a bull, or a newspaper wanting information on a merger.” She glared into space. “Last week it was a magazine wanting to know if Jace was getting married. I told them yes,” she said with ill-concealed irritation, “and I can’t wait until someone shoves the article under his nose!”
    Amanda laughed until tears ran down her cheeks. “Oh, how could you?”
    “How could she what?” Jace asked, returning just in time to catch that last remark.
    Amanda shook her head, dabbing at her eyes with her linen napkin while Marguerite’s thin face seemed to puff up indignantly.
    “Another disaster?” Marguerite asked him as he sat back down. “The world goes to war if you finish one meal?”
    Jace raised an eyebrow at her, sipping his coffee. “Would you like to take over?”
    “I’d simply love it,” she told her son. “I’d sell everything.”
    “And condemn Duncan and me to growing roses?” he teased.
    She relented. “Well if we could just have one whole meal together, Jason…”
    “How would you cope?” he teased. “It’s never happened.”
    “And when your father was still alive, it was worse,” she admitted. She laughed. “I remember throwing his plate at him once when he went to talk to an attorney during dinner on Christmas Day.”
    Jace smiled mockingly. “I remember what happened when he came back,” he reminded her, and Marguerite Whitehall blushed like a schoolgirl.
    “Oh, by the way,” Marguerite began, “I—”
    Before she could get the words out, Maria came in to announce that Tess was on the phone and wanted to speak to Jace.
    Marguerite glared at him as he passed her on his way to the hall phone a second time. “Why don’t you have a special phone invented with a plate attached?” she asked nastily. “Or better, an edible phone, so you could eat and talk at the same time?”
    Amanda’s solemn face dissolved into laughter. It had been this way with the Whitehalls forever. Marguerite had had this same argument with Jude.
    The older woman shook her head, glancing toward Terry with a mischievous smile. “Would you like to explain the advertising business to me, Terry? I can’t give you the account, but I won’t rush off in the middle of your explanation to answer the phone.”
    Terry laughed, lifting a homemade roll to his mouth. “No problem, Mrs. Whitehall. There’s plenty of time. We’ll be here a week, after all.”
    During which, Amanda was thinking, you might get Jace to yourself for ten minutes. But she didn’t say it.
    Later, everyone seemed to vanish. Jace went upstairs, and Marguerite carried Terry off to show him her collection of jade figurines, leaving Amanda alone in the living room.
    She finished her after-dinner cup of coffee and put the saucer gingerly back down on the coffee table. Perhaps, she thought wildly, it might be a good idea to go up to her room. If Jace came downstairs before the others got back, she’d be stuck with him, and she didn’t want that headache. Being alone with Jace was one circumstance she’d never be prepared for.
    She hurried out into the hall, but before she even made it to the staircase, she saw Jace coming down it. He’d added a brown-and-gold tie to the white silk shirt and brown suit, and he looked maddeningly elegant.
    “Running?” he asked pointedly, his eyes narrow and cold as they studied her.

Chapter Four
    S he froze in the center of the entrance, staring at him helplessly. He made her nervous. He always had.
    “I…was just going up to my room for a minute,” she faltered.
    He came the rest of the way down without hesitation, his booted feet making soft thuds on the carpeted steps. He paused in front of her when he got to the bottom, towering over her, close enough that she could smell his woodsy cologne and the clean fragrance of his body.
    “For