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space for him to set down the groceries, so she muttered another apology and waved him toward the door that led to the dining room.
    “Just put them on the table in there,” she said as she watched him head that way.
    Where, she recalled belatedly, she had been working on Andrew’s gift, which was still sitting out in the open, where anybody could see it and get her into big, big trouble.
    She started to call him back, then decided that if he was delivering groceries for a living, there was little chance he’d recognize what she was putting together on her laptop. So she let him go, crossing her arms over her midsection as she waited for him to return.
    And waited. And waited. And waited.
    Finally Avery took a few steps toward the other door and called out, “Is there something wrong?”
    When she heard what sounded like the shuffling of paper, she bolted toward the dining room in a panic. She halted at the door, however, when she saw the delivery guy down on all fours, scooping up a sheaf of papers that he’d evidently spilled to the floor when he’d set the groceries down on the table.
    “Oh, man, I’m sorry,” he said as he tried to straighten one piece of paper on top of another. “I knocked this stuff off when I set down one of the sacks. I hope I didn’t mess up anything you were working on.”
    Only when her heart stopped slamming against her rib cage did Avery realize just how hard it had been pounding. Enough to make her light-headed. Though, truth be told, that might have been due to the fact that the delivery guy’s adorable butt was facing her, and bent over the way he was, she had an almost uncontrollable urge to go over there and sink her teeth into it.
    Hoo-boy, she had to get out and meet some flesh-and-blood men. Though that might be a little difficult, since she was overcome with terror every time she even stepped out into the hallway. As it was, she tipped Billy the doorman to bring her mail up to her every day.
    She gave herself a minute to calm down, then joined the delivery guy on the floor, gathering the papers closest to her. “Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “I was finished with that pile.”
    It became clearer to Avery why he was working in the job he was as he tried to help her clean up. For every piece of paper she collected, he seemed to lose three, and although he tried to keep them in order as he gathered them, he kept turning them first one way, then another, as if he couldn’t tell which way they were supposed to go.
    “Here,” she said gently, taking pity on him. “That’s okay. I’ll do it.”
    He threw her a grateful smile and stood up, and within a few moments Avery had taken care of the mess herself. When she stood, the delivery guy was staring at her laptop, frowning at the lines of code that would be incoherent gibberish to anyone who wasn’t familiar with computer programming. He looked over at her and shrugged, smiling an “Oh, well” kind of smile.
    “You must be one ’a them computer programmers,” he said.
    “Kind of,” she told him evasively.
    “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout computers myself. ’Cept how to send e-mail. And even then, a lotta times I’ll screw it up.”
    She tried to smile reassuringly. “Well, that’s true for a lot of people. It can be confusing.”
    He nodded enthusiastically. “Sure can.” He looked at the screen again, then thrust his chin toward it. “Just what’re you doin’ there anyway?” he asked.
    Instinctively Avery moved to the laptop to protect her work, and even though her visitor clearly couldn’t find his megabyte from a hole in the ground, something told her to close the lid and hurry him on his way. Why was he hanging around anyway? she wondered. He’d get his tip from Mohammed when he returned, and she’d be billed for it. That was the way it always worked. Maybe Mohammed hadn’t explained that to him yet. This guy was probably new to the job, since Avery had never seen him before.
    “Uh,