By Appointment Only Read Free

swath of land into a usable, even attractive, piece of property.
    The unique Florida soil presented some problems that other parts of the country rarely had to deal with, but it helped that he was a native and knew what he was facing. He’d never yet met a project he couldn’t tackle with success.
    Which wasn’t to say that his personal life was as easy or as smooth. After that first day in the church, he’d had a hell of a time locating the elusive Hannah. Fortunately the minister was amenable to swapping some nonsensitive info for Morgan’s sizeable donation. Hannah worked as a personal shopper for the residents of a trio of retirement communities, and as it turned out, she had a neat condo not far from Morgan’s apartment.
    The spark he’d experienced during their initial, emotionally fraught wedding encounter was still there when he showed up on her doorstep a couple of weeks later and asked her out. They flirted, they dated, they kissed . . . they ended up in bed. Repeatedly. And the sex was phenomenal, even from the beginning.
    But Hannah was not easily won over, at least not when it came to things like commitment and permanence.
    When Morgan first hinted at marriage, she had dragged him to six weeks of counseling with a priest who had to be pushing a hundred. The old guy kept nodding off in the midst of their sessions.
    And although Morgan was fairly certain that Hannah was a nominal Catholic at best, she gave every semblance of being an earnest, well-intentioned bride-to-be. Which she wasn’t. At least not then. Because she refused to actually talk about marriage in any but the most ephemeral of contexts.
    It was understandable in a way. Her parents had married only long enough to make Hannah’s birth legitimate. Hannah’s mom was a new-age version of a hippie love child, and from what Morgan had gleaned, flitted happily from one partner to the next. She didn’t believe in marriage, but at least she had spared a thought for her daughter’s situation and had tried to make things somewhat conventional.
    Hannah’s father had never been in the picture after that, though he was apparently still alive and kicking somewhere not far away. Pulling personal information from the reticent Hannah was as difficult as finding an unbroken seashell on the crowded beaches. Despite her outgoing personality and the flashing smile that lit up a room, she had a deep vein of reserve that she wore like a protective cloak.
    But Morgan was no stranger to challenges, and he’d been confident in his ability to win her trust. Finally, as of last night, Hannah Quarles wore his engagement ring, a large, square-cut diamond that seemed to weigh down her slender finger.
    He should be feeling on top of the world. He should be crowing about snagging a woman who was everything he had ever wanted and more. He should be happy. Ecstatic. Justifiably proud.
    Even for a man unaccustomed to spending much time on self-reflection, he was damn sure that something as simple as happiness was not even in the ballpark of what he was feeling at the moment.
    The fact that he was having trouble concentrating at work was a red flag. His guts were twisted in a knot, and he felt like a jittery adolescent. He might have put a ring on Hannah’s finger, but he’d be a fool if he thought the race was won. In a sick little corner of his psyche, a place he almost refused to acknowledge even existed, he was afraid that she had accepted his proposal because she was too softhearted to say no.
    And that made him feel like shit. If it was simply her aversion to the whole marriage thing, he could be patient. But it made him flinch inwardly to think that he might be head over heels in love with a woman whose emotions were not nearly as involved.
    With one last oath that expressed a wide range of frustrations both professional and personal, he jerked his cell phone out of his pocket and proceeded to raise hell with the cinder block supplier. He needed to strip a layer off