The Single Dad's Second Chance by Brenda Harlen Page B

places.”
    “And you’re so busy looking for the perfect guy that you overlook a lot of really great ones.”
    Rachel frowned, wondering if there might not be some truth in what her friend was saying.
    “Andrew is a prime example,” Holly insisted.
    “A prime example of what?”
    “The prime male. He’s tall, dark and incredibly sexy. His shoulders are broad enough that a woman would feel confident that she could lean on him, his arms are strong enough that she would feel safe in his embrace, and he looks as if he walked off the cover of a men’s magazine. But most importantly—he’s single.”
    “Widowed,” Rachel clarified, not sure if she should be impressed or annoyed at the observation skills that had allowed her friend to so accurately catalog his physical attributes. “And you were the one who warned me not to rush into anything—that a man who still buys flowers for a wife who’s been gone more than three years is probably still in love with her.”
    “I did say that,” Holly acknowledged. “I changed my mind.”
    “On the basis of what?”
    “The way he looked at you.”
    “How did he look at me?”
    “Like he was picturing you naked.”
    “He almost had me naked Saturday night,” Rachel admitted.
    “Seriously?”
    She nodded. “One kiss, and I felt as if my clothes were going to melt off my body.”
    She still didn’t know if Andrew was the right guy, but he certainly knew how to push all the right buttons. It had been more than sixteen months since she’d decided to take a break from dating. And in all that time, she hadn’t thought too much about sex. Certainly she hadn’t lamented the fact that she wasn’t having any.
    One kiss from Andrew Garrett and she was thinking about it a lot. Not sex in general but sex with him in particular. If he was half as good a lover as he was a kisser, he would be spectacular.
    “So why’d you put the brakes on?” her friend wanted to know.
    “Why are you so sure that it was me?”
    “Because I saw the way he looked at you,” Holly said again.
    “Okay, it was me,” she admitted. “Because I couldn’t imagine getting naked with a guy who was still wearing the ring put on his finger by another woman.”
    Holly nodded. “I can understand that. But I saw something else today when he looked at you.”
    “What’s that?”
    “He isn’t wearing his wedding ring anymore.”
    * * *
    Andrew didn’t expect the absence of the gold band on his finger would go completely unnoticed, but he was surprised that his youngest brother was the first to comment on it.
    Shortly after he got back from lunch with Rachel, Daniel stopped by the office in which Andrew felt compelled to spend at least a few hours every day.
    “What brings you into the hallowed halls of Garrett Furniture?” he asked his brother, because it was a well-known fact that Daniel preferred to keep as much distance as possible between himself and the family business.
    “I need a favor.”
    Though there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for either of his brothers, experience cautioned him to ask, “What kind of favor?”
    “I’m going to ask Mom and Dad to release my trust fund.”
    Before their maternal grandfather, Randall Willson, passed away more than a decade earlier, he’d set up trusts for each of his three grandsons. By his own admission, Randall had been a reckless and foolish young man. As a result, he’d decided that instead of the money being released when the beneficiary reached the age of twenty-one or even twenty-five, it should be held until the beneficiary was thirty—or legally married.
    “Okay,” Andrew said cautiously.
    “I’m not asking you to support my request—I’m just asking you not to oppose it.”
    “Why would I oppose it?”
    “I hope you won’t,” Daniel said again. “Because I want to invest in the ownership of a stock-car racing team.”
    The announcement didn’t really surprise Andrew. His brother had always loved racing, and he’d made