Chance Of A Lifetime 1987 Read Free Page A

black. Perhaps he normally kept it cut quite short,
    but it seemed to have gotten a bit long lately, as if he hadn’t wanted to spare the time for a haircut. The combination of
    smoky eyes and dark hair would have been a handsome one in some men, but in this man the overall impression was of
    forbidding darkness.
    Rachel switched her attention to her surroundings and decided Abraham Chance’s house was every bit as
    forbidding as he was. Paint was peeling from the walls, the windows were dingy with years of grime and the wooden
    floors were scuffed and scarred. Old drapes sagged from their rods, the furniture looked as if it belonged in a yard sale
    and the glass lighting fixtures were so dark with dust and dead insects that very little light escaped to illuminate the
    rooms.
    Rachel shuddered as she started up the uncarpeted stairs behind her new employer. She was a fool, she told
    herself once more. If she had any sense she would run while she still could. But the lure of revenge was too strong to
    resist.
    Outside, the first scattered drops of rain began to fall, harbingers of the storm that was to follow.
    Chance was aware of an unexpectedly awkward sensation as he led his new housekeeper down the hall to the room
    that had been so recently vacated by Mrs. Vinson. It took him a while to recognize the uneasy feeling and, when he
    finally identified it as embarrassment, he was annoyed with himself.
    It was dumb, he realized ruefully, but he was actually embarrassed to have Rachel Wilder see the cracked and
    peeling paint on the walls, the scarred hardwood floors and the precariously hanging chandelier at the top of the
    stairs. One of these days it was going to collapse. Rachel Wilder looked like the kind of woman who would complain
    long and loudly if it happened to fall on her toe. She’d probably sue him to hell and back. The woman looked like the
    feisty type. Something within him stirred at the thought. He decided he liked the feisty type. It made a nice change
    from the weak, melodramatic, whining females he always seemed to encounter.
    Abraham Chance had no patience with fools and whining females, and he made no pretense about it.
    This Rachel Wilder looked as though she might be a pleasant change. He had to remind himself that she wasn’t
    exactly a guest in this house. She was a housekeeper, and she was here to help him put Snowball’s Chance back
    together.
    But he sensed it was going to be tough to keep that in mind. When he’d first seen her standing beside her car in
    her polished loafers, expensive slacks and fashionable shirt, he’d wondered if she was a tourist who had accidentally
    wandered off the main road and stopped for directions. Rachel Wilder just did not look like a housekeeper. She looked
    like a woman who was accustomed to giving orders, not taking them.
    Maybe she was right. Perhaps he did have a few preconceived images of housekeepers. Mrs. Vinson had lived up
    to every one of them. Rachel did not.
    She was too slender, for one thing, too delicately put together. He wondered critically how she was going to find
    the strength to clean the windows of the two-story house. What fullness there was to her figure was definitely not in
    her shoulder and arm muscles. As far as he could tell it was around her hips. She had a very nicely rounded rear, he
    decided. It was difficult to gauge the size and shape of her breasts beneath the vest, but Chance had the impression
    she was built on the small side in that department.
    Her hair didn’t fit his image of a housekeeper’s bob, either. The sort of style Rachel Wilder wore came out of a
    salon, not a beauty shop. He was intrigued by the color of that hair, a rich, golden brown that caught the light and
    gleamed. She wore it in a simple style, parted in the center and gently curved in a line that followed her chin on either
    side. Chance wondered what it would feel like to put his fingers beneath that neat curve of hair and find the soft,
    sensitive