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“You were the other night when I was—”
“Smashed,” he finished for her. “One-time thing. Everyone lives by their own set of rules. One of mine is to maximize whatever gets thrown at you. I’m a bastard.”
Amelia digested that. He was an odd mix. He seemed laid-back. And not. She couldn’t tell if he was a con man or a mooch. “Does that mean I shouldn’t count on you if I drink too many hurricanes again?”
“I would get you home, but we might take a side-trip first,” he said in a breezy voice with just a hint of sexy undertone.
Her stomach tightened at the warning. She looked at his large hands, one on the steering wheel, the other on the gear shift. The wind ruffled his dark hair and whipped at his shirt. His shoulders were broad and his pecs and biceps bulged from some kind of exercise. His abdomen was flat, his legs long. His thighs looked strong. Her gaze strayed higher and she looked away, embarrassed at the direction of her thoughts.
He was a hottie, so why had he approached her? She couldn’t squelch her curiosity.
“There were at least a half-dozen females at that tiki bar who looked available and very attractive,” she said. “I still don’t understand why you didn’t approach them.” She paused. “Or maybe you did, and I just didn’t notice.”
He laughed. “No. I told you before that I approached you because you were the most interesting looking woman in the room.”
Interesting looking. She narrowed her eyes. That could be a compliment. Or not. “Is that like ‘quite a woman’?”
“No. You didn’t look like the rest of the women there.”
“They were tanned, beautiful and very thin,” she said stiffly.
“You looked real and pretty. And I wondered what you were writing on that napkin.”
“Well, now you know. The list,” she said.
He nodded. “Have you added to it?”
“No,” she said, feeling guilty and wimpy.
“Maybe you need a jump-start.”
Amelia adjusted her sunglasses and felt another little leap of nerves in her belly. She suspected Jack wasn’t the kind of man to provide just a little jump-start. He seemed more like a walking detonator. “Maybe,” she said tentatively.
“I could make a lot of suggestions,” he said in a wry, sexy tone. “But this is more about what you want. So, what do you want, Magnolia?”
Magnolia? She paused for a long moment and sighed. “That’s part of the problem. I don’t know.”
“That’s okay. The list is about experimentation.”
“I don’t really like to experiment unless it’s connected with my job.”
“So you want to just keep doing what you’ve always done? You don’t need a list for that.”
The prospect of being stuck in her current position forever made her want to scream. “No. You’re right. I need to experiment. But I don’t know how to start.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to sky dive?”
Her stomach clenched. “That’s a little drastic, but parasailing looks interesting.”
“Put it on your list. What else?”
“I’ve always wanted to sit in the front row at a concert,” she admitted.
“Any group in particular?” he asked.
“I’m flexible.”
“Write it down. Want to climb a mountain?”
“No, that’s a guy thing. But I always wondered what it would be like to be someone totally different than me.”
“So you’d like to switch identities,” he said.
“Not forever.”
“For a day.” He grinned. “Write it down.”
“But how could I do that?”
“Make up a person you’d like to be. Dress like her, talk like her, eat like her. Do whatever she would do that day. It’s just an expanded version of Halloween.”
“You probably think I’m nuts,” she said.
“Nah. It’s fun being part of your evolution.”
“What about your own evolution?”
“I’m way past you. I know what I want.”
“And that is?”
“To limit my commitments, always be ready to take the next step and not waste time looking back.”
“That sounds a little cold. You never look back?”
“Only when it’s profitable,” he said with that razor grin. “I heard a football analogy that you can only make one play at a time. If you’re thinking about an earlier play or a future play, then you’re not focusing on what you need to do now.”
“Hmm. Did you play football?”
He shook his head. “Not enough money as a kid for me to do anything but work after school. My mother wasn’t exactly a wise financial planner.”
“And your dad?”
“Wasn’t around,” he said. “Let me guess your family situation. Mom and Dad sat down with the kids for dinner every night. You took a family vacation in the summer, visited grandparents at Christmas and you lived in the same house growing up.”
His accuracy irritated her. Was she that transparent? That predictable? “My father wasn’t at dinner every night because he worked out of town sometimes. Sometimes my grandparents would visit us. We moved once,” she said.
“Bet you had some kind of music lessons, too,” he said.
“Piano,” she admitted. “What about you?”
“Air guitar,” he said with a chuckle. “No money for that, either. Trust me, Magnolia, I didn’t have the Norman Rockwell family experience. Let me guess again. You’re not an only child.”
“Right, I have—”
“No. Don’t tell me. Sisters,” he said.
A little spooked, she did a double-take. “Yes, three. I’m second out of four. How did you know I had sisters?”
“You’re a girly girl and you don’t seem comfortable with men.”
She dropped her jaw at his assessment. “You don’t know that I’m not comfortable with men.”
“You’re not that comfortable with me,” he pointed out.
“Well, that’s because you’re—” She broke off because saying the next thought that came to mind would have made her sound ridiculous.
“I’m what?”
“Nothing,” she said. “You’re right. I’m a girly girl with sisters. My mother taught us to bake and sew and sent us to charm school so we could walk and talk like ladies.”
“Did it work?”
“Mostly,” she said. “My older sister is married with children. My younger sister is married. And I wouldn’t be surprised if my youngest sister gets engaged soon.”
“So you’re the maverick,” he said.
“I hadn’t thought of being dumped as being a maverick.”
“I’ve seen people do some crazy things after a breakup,” he said. “Hell, even the courts tend to go lenient on a broken-hearted woman when she goes berserk.”
“I have no intention of going berserk,” she said.
“I’m sure you don’t, but if you did,” he said, “you’ve got a socially acceptable excuse.”
“I’m not going berserk,” she said again, as much for herself as for him. “And for the record, Norman Rockwell was married three times. He was divorced from his first wife, so everything wasn’t warm and fuzzy for him, either.”
“Should have known. If it looks too good on the outside, there’s probably something fishy on the inside.”
“That sounds pretty cynical.”
“Hard lesson that has served me well,” he countered and pulled over to the side of the road. “I think driving a convertible is on your list.”
“It is?” she said as he cut the engine.
“Yep,” he said and got out of the car.
Amelia stared at the gear shift. He opened her car door expectantly. “I haven’t driven anything but an automatic.”
“Another thing to put on your list and mark off. Think of it as a test drive. You said you wanted a different car.”
“But this isn’t even your car. What if I leave the transmission in the middle of the road? This is a Porsche.”
“Ian won’t mind. He owes me a few favors. Scoot out, Magnolia. The secret to driving a straight is the clutch. No big deal.”
Amelia got out and with no small amount of trepidation, she climbed into the driver’s seat and adjusted it to accommodate her shorter legs. He put his hand over hers to familiarize her with the position for changing gears.
She had to force herself to concentrate on his tutorial instead of on the way his hand swallowed hers in a gentle but firm way. The gear shift, stiff with a bulblike head, reminded her of—well, something besides a gear shift.
Jack spoke to her in a low, coaching voice, and her mind took a side-trip. She wondered what his voice sounded like when he got hot and bothered. She wondered what it would take to get him hot and bothered. Her peripheral gaze snagging on the sight of his hard thighs, she was pretty sure she would faint before she could find out if she had what it took to get him hot and bothered.
Feeling hot from more than the sun, she pulled her hand away from the gear shift for a second to push back a strand of her hair. She took a breath, then grasped the shift again. “Okay, this is Neutral, this is Reverse, Neutral, First, Second, Third and Fourth. I press the clutch and ease out when I change gears or stop.”
“When you stop, you hold in the clutch until you’re ready to accelerate again. Otherwise, the engine will die.”
“Okay, but if you need a whiplash collar after this, don’t come crying to me.”
“Go for it,” he said, smiling a little.
She started the engine and after nine attempts, she succeeded in getting the car from Neutral into First gear with only a few sputters and coughs.
Thrilled at her accomplishment, she glanced at Jack. “I did it! I did it.”
“Great. Now go for Second.”
She did, and soon enough they were flying down the highway toward Key West with the radio cranked up to the sound of The Rolling Stones. Jack’s choice, but she couldn’t fault it. With Jack beside her and Mick coaching her from the CD player, Amelia felt like she was headed down the road to perdition. It felt a lot better than it should.
CHAPTER FOUR
USEFUL AND AMUSING. That was Jack’s analysis of Magnolia. While he allowed Lillian Bellagio to wait for his response to her invitation, he wanted to gather as much information as possible about Bellagio’s grande dame. Of course, when his mother was alive, she’d only had bad things to say about Lillian. Although he knew he hadn’t escaped the bitterness she’d carried with her until she died, he’d moved on.
Having a mother addicted to meth had taught him early on that he wanted no part of the drug world. Instead of getting high after school or playing a sport, he’d worked. He’d wanted out of the bad neighborhood, away from the desperation and he would happily work 365 days a year to make it happen.
More than once before he’d graduated and left home, his mother had raided his earnings. It had taken him four years to earn enough money to buy his first business. Eight months later he sold it at a one hundred and twenty-three percent profit. Within a year, he’d caught the attention of Gig Marlin, a low-profile but highly profitable venture capitalist willing to share his knowledge, and Jack had started making money hand over fist.
Along the way, Jack had kept track of Bellagio and educated himself about the shoe business.
Every once in a while, he’d just gotten lucky, but most of his success had come from someone else’s lack of foresight or ineptitude and his ability to buy out of their weakness and sell into someone else’s greed. Fear and greed made the world go round, he’d discovered. Right now, Lillian Bellagio was probably sweating bullets from fear of what he could do to her and the Bellagio name.
Jack glanced over at Amelia as she fiercely gripped the steering wheel at the ten o’clock and four o’clock position, ever ready to reach for the clutch.
Her hair flying all over the place, she was so focused on the road ahead that she probably didn’t know her skirt had ridden above her knees. The wind whipped at it, giving him peeks of her pale thighs. The tops of her knees were pink, probably from exposure to the sun. She had incredibly fair skin. Further down, he caught sight of her painted pastel toenails and flip-flops that sported a pink sunflower.
He could see her hearth-and-home upbringing warring with ambition and desperation now that her marriage plans had fallen through.
Jack could tell exactly what she needed. She needed to untwist her panties and go a little wild, have some fun. Then she wouldn’t feel so sad about her loser fiancé. Jack could help with that in exchange for information about the Bellagios. As long as she didn’t ask too many pointed questions like she had earlier, both of them would enjoy the process.
Noticing that they were nearing Key West, he motioned. “Pull over, Earnhardt. I’ll take it from here.”
