The animal snarled and crawled off Kevin’s chest. It finally hit him. Oh, shit … “You’re, uh, Phoebe’s sister. Are you okay”—he searched for a name—“Miss Somerville?” Since he was the one lying on the slate floor with a bruised hip and puncture wounds in his ankle, he considered the question something of a courtesy.

“This is the second time in two days!” she exclaimed.

“I don’t remember—”

“The second time! Are you demented, you stupid badger? Is that your problem? Or are you just an idiot!”

“As to that, I—Did you just call me a badger?”

She blinked. “A bastard. I called you a bastard.”

“That’s all right then.” Unfortunately, his lame attempt at humor didn’t make her smile.

The pit bull retreated to his mistress’s side. Kevin pushed himself up off the slate and rubbed his ankle, trying to recall what he knew about his employer’s sister, but he remembered only that she was an egghead. He’d seen her a few times at Stars headquarters with her head buried in a book, but her hair sure hadn’t been this color.

It was hard to believe that she and Phoebe were related, because she wasn’t even close to being a fox. Not that she was a dog either. She was just sort of ordinary—flat where Phoebe was curvy, small where Phoebe was large. Unlike her sister’s, this one’s mouth didn’t look as if it had been designed to whisper dirty words under the sheets. Instead, Little Sis’s mouth looked as if it spent its days shushing people in the library.

He didn’t need the evidence of all those scattered books to tell him she was the kind of woman he least liked—brainy and way too serious. She was probably going to be a talker, too, an even bigger strike against her. In the spirit of fairness, though, he had to give Little Sis high marks for eye power. They were an unusual color, somewhere between blue and gray, and they had a sexy slant to them, just like her eyebrows, which he realized were almost meeting in the middle as she scowled at him. Damn it. Phoebe’s sister! And he’d thought this week couldn’t get any worse.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Those blue-gray irises turned the exact color of an Illinois summer afternoon right before the tornado siren went off. He’d now managed to piss off every member of the Stars’ ruling family, except maybe the kids. It was a gift.

He’d better mend his fences, and since charm was his long suit, he flashed a smile. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I thought you were a burglar.”

“What are you doing here?”

Even before her screech, he could see that the charm thing wasn’t working.

He kept an eye on that kung fu leg of hers. “Dan suggested I come up here for a few days, to think things over …” He paused. “Which I didn’t need to do.”

She slapped the switch, and two sets of rustic iron wall sconces came on, filling the far corners with light.