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lunch?”
    “Why don’t you pick up a couple of sandwiches for us,” she said, shrugging his arm off and turning to her own car, parked three slots over. “I’ll meet you at the office and we can eat while we talk about business.”
    Clearly, if he suddenly found Marian enchanting, she found him less so. She didn’t even want his arm around her shoulders, though it had been there a hundred times before.
    Right, he thought, getting into his car. That was the way it should be. Businesslike. Cool. Controlled. Because not only was Marian his employee, she was an old family friend and a smart guy didn’t mess around with a relationship like that. Especially a smart guy who wanted some permanence in his life. The last thing he needed to be attracted to was a top-drawer, well-bred, first-class … hobo.
    “You’ve been contracting out interior design on the refit jobs, haven’t you?” asked Marian, brushing bread crumbs from her lap and flipping through several pages of material before her. This was their tenth working lunch in two weeks. True to his promise, Rolph had bought her meal for her every day.
    Rolph looked up from a report he was writing. “Yes, but since we’re a brokerage business, not a shipyard, I contract out the entire refit. It only makes sense. Why have someone on staff who can do interior design?”
    “But you do have. Me.”
    He gave her a startled look that switched to good-humored scathing. “Come on. I’ve seen your apartment, remember? All zebra strips and spears, with boars’ heads sticking out of the walls.”
    Marian shuddered at the memory. “That was when I was in college, for goodness’ sake! I was nineteen years old and going through an African phase. Besides, the interior of a yacht takes a whole different technique than the interior of a home. When I was in New Zealand a couple of years ago I worked for a company that did the interiors of ocean-going yachts for several different builders. Did you know that blues and greens are avoided in upholstery and other fixtures, that the preferred shades are taken from the earth-tones of the spectrum?”
    “I didn’t know, but now that you mention it, I’ve noticed a lot of browns and reds and yellows in boat interiors.”
    “That’s because when a crew spends months at sea, the eye grows weary of the blues and greens of ocean and sky. The sailor needs a rest for his eyes, a change from the ordinary, just as people do in all walks of life.”
    “Uh-huh.” He grinned. “Like boars’ heads and spears.”
    Marian laughed tolerantly. “My tastes have changed.” She crossed one leg over the other, swinging her neatly shod foot. “Haven’t yours over the years? Didn’t you like things ten years ago that you think now are outrageous, and vice versa?”
    He thought about it. “Yeah, I suppose so.” Then, with a grin, he said, “Yes. Definitely. Ten years ago I was in love with a woman whose only expression of emotion, be it satisfaction or disgust or pleasure or pain was a faint, weak little ‘wow’ … I thought she was fantastic because of all she could convey with that one little word. That was before I figured out that it constituted nearly her entire vocabulary.”
    This was not an opportunity to be missed. Apart from that day of the interview, when he’d confessed that he didn’t think he knew what women wanted, or how to treat them, he’d kept their conversations strictly on business. She hadn’t minded for the most part. There was so much to learn and she was an eager student. She thought, sometimes, that she had surprised him with her greed for knowledge. But if he were willing to move into a more personal mode now, she was all for it.
    “Hmm,” she said. “And what are your tastes in women today?”
    He shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s hard to put something like that into words.”
    “Pretend you’re writing a companions ad.”
    He stared at her. Did she know he’d done just that on two occasions? No. Of