Unfortunately, the dratted man wasn’t going to let her hide. As soon as he saw her, he walked to her table. Not even waiting for an invitation, he picked up the chair on the opposite side of her table and sat down in it backwards, leaning his arms across the back. “So we meet again,” he said smoothly.
“Hey Jack!” someone from the bar called out. “The usual?”
“Sure!” he called back, not moving his eyes away from Rachel’s now-burning face.
“Were you able to accomplish your mission today?” he asked softly, his eyes surveying her pink features in the dim light of the bar.
She couldn’t hide her grimace. “No. I couldn’t find him anywhere,” she said, looking down at her wine glass. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”
Jack’s heart lurched with her words. Had she somehow found out about his identity? Who would have told her? “What do you mean?” he asked, playing along just to hear what she might say.
“The man is a ghost,” Rachel said with a frustrated sigh. “I can’t imagine where he’s gone, but he hasn’t appeared in any of the places the locals said he might be.”
He smothered a chuckle and watched her pretty green eyes, fascinated by all the emotions that were surging in them for him to see. “Is that why you’re here?”
Rachel nodded, lifting her glass to her lips and taking a sip, then cringing as the foul tasting wine hit her taste buds. With him sitting in front of her, the flannel shirt pulled taught against those broad, muscular shoulders and his long, jeans-clad legs stretched out on either side of her own legs, she was flustered and trying to regroup so he wouldn’t know how powerfully he impacted her.
So with all of that hot, studly masculinity turning her mind to mush, it was no wonder she’d forgotten how bad the wine was. She’d made the decision after the first two or three sips that nothing could make this foul concoction taste better. Pushing the wine glass away, she tried to school her features into something less revealing, trying to hide both her reaction to the wine as well as to the man.
“Bad stuff, isn’t it?” Emerson laughed, seeing how she was trying to hide her reaction to the cheap wine. “Dennis focuses more on the local beers. Wines just aren’t his specialty.”
Dennis brought over a bottle of Emerson’s regular preference, a dark beer called Allagash Dubbel. “Dennis, could you bring over one of the Allagash Whites?” he suggested.
Dennis didn’t respond but simply turned around and headed back to the bar.
Since Jack took a long sip of the beer the bartender had just placed in front of him, Rachel was concerned that, whatever an ‘Allagash White’ was, it was intended for her. “What’s an Allagash White?” she asked, instantly on alert and wary. “I don’t do well with most beers,” she explained, trying very hard not to sound like a prissy woman, but she really didn’t like beer.
“You’ll like this one,” he argued. “Besides, it’s made by one of the local brewing companies in Portland. You should always support the locals, right?”
When Dennis plunked a beer bottle along with a frosted glass in front of her, Emerson almost chuckled. A frosted glass? No one else in the bar rated a frosted glass. Hell, Emerson hadn’t even known that Dennis had glasses, much less cold ones. Ignoring Dennis’ grunt of greeting that sounded more like a grizzly bear, he handed the beer to Rachel. “Try this,” he coaxed.
Rachel looked around and noticed that no one else in the bar was using a frosted glass so she lifted the bottle to her lips and took a brave sip. When she realized that it wasn’t horrible, her eyes widened. “Wow!” she said softly, amazed that there was a beer that was actually palatable.
“You’re first lesson today,” Emerson said as he took a long draw from his own beer. “Always try local.”
She wasn’t sure if she should roll her eyes or laugh and agree with him. Instead, she took another sip of the beer. The second and third sips were actually quite good. “I guess beer isn’t as horrible as I’d originally thought.”
“So tell me what you did and where you went to hunt down you’re mysterious and hard-to-find Mr. Watson.”
Rachel sighed and took another sip of the beer, enjoying the taste as well as the coolness as it slipped down her throat. “Well, I went to several of the local restaurants and, when I couldn’t resist the temptation any longer, had a lobster roll over by one of the lighthouses.”
Emerson suspected that she’d grabbed a bite over at the Two Lights Lobster Shack. It had a spectacular view and all the tourists seemed to stop by for a bite, but it wasn’t his favorite place to eat. “And how was it?”
She shrugged her shoulders, trying to be polite but not wanting to lie so she went with a politically acceptable answer. “It needed something.”
He chuckled at her lukewarm reaction to one of Maine’s most famous delicacies. “A lobster roll is just a bunch of lobster meat on a roll. What more could a person want?” He actually loved the stuff, but he also knew the best places to grab one.
She took another sip of the beer and contemplated the possibilities. “Lobster is delicious, but if they had included some sort of a spicy garlic sauce or some other topping that could go on the bread, that would enhance the flavor a great deal.”
He agreed. “Hmmm…a Maine native would be horrified.”
She laughed and nodded her head. “I suppose that’s true.”
Once again he was struck by how sexy her laugh was. He liked it. A lot! “Where else did you go?”
“Someone else suggested The Dogfish Grill. I went there and had a burger.”
Emerson laughed, picturing the horror on her face when she caught sight of their burgers. “And how was that?”
She grinned, laughing herself at the enormous burger. “I’d only ordered something easy so I could wait for the man in question. But that thing was….” She wasn’t really sure how to describe that burger.
“Huge,” he supplied with another chuckle.
She nodded, laughing at herself. “I couldn’t think of any other place the man might be. No one knows anything about him so the only place someone thought to mention, his housekeeper by the way, was to come here. So I’ve been here for most of the evening. Although I did tour through the art museum. That was an impressive collection! I loved the….” She was about to say the statues but stopped herself, thinking back to the nude statues done in the white marble.