Though it brought on all manner of headaches, Rachel took her new charge seriously. She could handle the inconvenience, the extra time sliced out of her personal life, Nick’s surly and continued resentment. What gave her the most trouble was the enforced proximity with Zackary Muldoon.

She couldn’t dismiss him and she couldn’t work around him. Having to deal with him on what was essentially a day-to-day basis was sending her stress level through the roof.

If only she could pigeonhole him, she thought as she walked from the subway to her apartment after a Sunday dinner with her family, it would somehow make things easier. But after nearly a week of trying, she hadn’t even come close.

He was rough, impatient, and, she suspected, potentially violent. Yet he was concerned enough about his stepbrother to shell out money and—much more vital—time and energy to set the boy straight. In his off hours, he dressed in clothes more suited to the rag basket than his tall, muscled frame. Yet when she’d walked through his apartment over the bar, she’d found everything neat as a pin. He was always putting his hands on her—her arm, her hair, her shoulder—but he had yet to make the kind of move she was forever braced to repel.

He flirted with his female customers, but as far as Rachel had been able to glean, it stopped at flirtation. He’d never been married, and though he’d left his family for months, even years, at a time, he’d given up the sea and had landlocked himself when his father became too ill to care for himself.

He irritated her on principle. But on some deeper, darker level, the very things about him that irritated her fanned little flames in her gut that Rachel could only describe as pure lust.

She’d tried to cool them by reminding herself that she wasn’t the lusty type. Passionate, yes. When it came to her work, her family and her ambitions. But men, though she enjoyed their companionship and their basic maleness, had never been at the top of her list of priorities.

Sex was even lower than that. And it was very annoying to find herself itchy.

So who was Zackary Muldoon, and would she be better off not knowing?

When he stepped out of the shadows into the glow of a streetlight, she jolted and choked back a scream.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“I— Damn it, you scared me to death.” She brought a trembling hand back out of her purse, where it had shot automatically toward a bottle of Mace. Oh, she hated to be frightened. Detested having to admit she could be vulnerable. “What are you doing lurking out here in front of my building?”

“Looking for you. Don’t you ever stay home?”