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She began to hum to the tune on the radio, doing her best to silence the tune her body was humming as she remembered that kiss.
Chapter Nine
There was a pizza between them on the back room desk. Because they’d badly needed a break after three hours of painting, Gloria had ordered a pepperoni pie from the pizzeria at the other end of the mall. Large, half-finished containers of soda stood like frosty sentries on either side of the opened box, standing guard over the more than half-consumed pie.
There was a great deal more than dough, cheese, sauce and pepperoni shimmering in the air between them, though.
Tasting a bit of sauce along her mouth, Gloria wiped her lips before continuing to work on her slice. She still didn’t know what to make of Jack, or even if she should try.
But Jack Fortune wasn’t the kind of man you could just write off or walk away from.
Especially after he’d kissed her in a manner that would have burned off a woman’s socks.
Better just to go on eating and not say anything, Gloria told herself, even though the aftereffects of his kiss were lingering a lot longer than she’d thought they would.
That was only because she’d been celibate so long. Even plain tap water tasted like sparkling wine if your thirst had gone unquenched for two years.
Trouble was, she thought, watching Jack beneath hooded eyes, she hadn’t realized she even was thirsty until she’d taken a sip.
Annoyed that she couldn’t stop her mind from wandering down a path she didn’t want it to go, she took a healthy swig of her diet soda and then leaned forward to take another slice of pizza.
At the same time that he did.
Both reaching into the box, their hands brushed against one another. It took effort not to pull back her hand. When he raised his eyes to hers, she said the first thing that popped into her head. “You lasted longer than I thought you would.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean? Was she talking about his staying here after he’d kissed her? “Come again?”
“Painting,” she explained, picking up her slice. “I half expected you to make a U-turn at the door when I suggested you put on the coveralls and pitch in.” And I would have stayed feeling a whole lot safer if you had, she thought. “Thanks to you, we’re almost done.” She flashed a grin, pausing to take a bite of what amounted to her fourth slice. “At this rate, I’ll be ready to open in another week. The man who does the lettering is coming tomorrow.” She watched as he took another slice himself.
Jack raised a brow in mock surprise. “You mean, you’re not going to do that yourself, too?” Where was she putting all this food? he wondered. So far, the woman had consumed more than his last three dates put together and she looked fantastic doing it.
Careful, buddy, he warned himself. You’re on dangerous ground here. You start admiring the way a woman eats, you’re lost.
Gloria shook her head and laughed. “No way. I’ve got terrible handwriting. No one would know what the name of the store was.”
He was vaguely aware of nodding in response, hardly hearing what she was saying. His attention was riveted to the way her mouth moved as she spoke. To the way she breathed. Because it was warm inside, she’d unzipped her coveralls down to her waist when she’d sat at the desk. Beneath the bland garment with its paint splatters she was wearing a tank top that adhered to her like a hot-pink skin. It molded itself to her breasts, softly hinting at cleavage while it brought out the deep black of her hair.
She’d loosened her hair, as well. It was skimming along her back now like a black velvet cape.
One hand holding his slice, the other wrapped around the soda container, Jack could still feel an itch working itself across his palms.
He wanted to touch her. To run his palms along her body. He wanted to see for himself if it was as soft, as firm, as it appeared.
In a desperate attempt to mentally backpedal before he found himself in too deep, he searched for something to use as a barricade between them. Something official. “What kind of insurance are you going to be carrying?”
It took her a moment to absorb the question. He’d been looking at her with a gaze hot enough to burn away her coveralls and everything else, as well. She was grateful to talk about something as bland as insurance. Even so, she took a sip of the cold soda to quench a thirst that only partially resulted from the spicy slice of pizza she was consuming.
“Same as before,” she told him. Then, in case he hadn’t come across that when he was conducting his intrusive research into her life, she added, “I went with Gibraltar Insurance when I opened up my store in Denver.” Before he could ask, she gave him the reasons behind her choice, enumerating them on her fingers. “Reasonable rates, accessible agents. They were right there for me after the robbery.”
“Robbery?” The slice halfway to his lips, Jack stopped and looked at her incredulously. “You were robbed?”
Gloria bit her tongue, but it was too late. She should have done that before she’d said anything.
Big mistake, her mind taunted.
She shrugged as carelessly as she could, dismissing the incident, and then smiled at him prettily as she held up her thumb and forefinger barely three inches apart. “It was just a small robber.”
“Bullets are the same size no matter how tall or short the shooter,” he pointed out.
Damn, she wished she’d kept her mouth shut. “Yes,” she said patiently, “I suppose they are. But no one was hurt,” she was quick to add. “The guy who robbed us looked more scared than anything.”
“You saw his face?”
“His eyes,” Gloria corrected. “And he was terrified.” She just knew he’d had to have been driven to do what he had by awful circumstances. “If my customer hadn’t started hyperventilating just then, I think I might have had a shot at talking the robber out of what he was doing.”
Just what kind of a nutcase was his father backing? The woman was certifiably insane. “Or a chance at getting shot—”
She finished off her piece and picked up a fresh napkin, wiping her fingers. “You know, Jack, you really have to do something about that upbeat outlook of yours.”
There was nothing funny about the situation she was telling him. “I’m a realist.”
Collecting a handful of used napkins from the desk, she dumped them into the garbage can, then cocked her head, studying him. “Maybe that’s your problem.”
He resented what she was implying. “I don’t have a problem.” Other than dealing with you and these weird feelings.
Gloria looked him in the eye, sensing that he was a soul in turmoil. More or less just the way she was right now.
“Are you happy?” she suddenly challenged.
Where the hell had that come from? “Ecstatic,” he told her through clenched teeth.
Gloria laughed, the sound rippling through him like rings in a lake marking a disturbance. Which was exactly what the sound of her laughter created inside of him. One hell of a disturbance.
“All right, then maybe you don’t have a problem,” she allowed glibly.
“Thank you,” he replied icily before getting back to the topic they were both pretending to discuss with interest. “What are you paying for insurance?”
One corner of her mouth rose in a teasing, provocative smile. “That’s a little personal, don’t you think?”
“A kiss is personal.” Now why the hell had he said that? He’d promised himself not to think about or make reference to what had transpired earlier. The less time spent on that, the better. It was almost as if he was doomed to repeat it.
Jack quickly tried to distract her from his error. “This is business.”
She gazed at him, all wide-eyed innocence. “Then you didn’t mean business before?”
His eyes narrowed. “When?”
“When you kissed me?”
He stood by his original reason, no matter how flimsy and paper-thin it seemed. “I was just trying to get it out of the way.”
“Oh. Yeah. Right,” she murmured, the words emerging one at a time in slow motion. “Okay, then.”
She quoted him the price she was paying. He looked at her in surprise.
“And that covers it?”
“Two million dollars’ worth of coverage. I don’t expect to have more than that on hand at any one time. Less, most likely. I provide a service,” she explained. “Creating something to match the customer’s personality rather than selling them something out of my inventory because I over-ordered sapphires last month.”
It was an interesting philosophy, but he doubted its validity. “How can jewelry reflect a person’s personality?” he scoffed.
She studied him for a long moment, then said, “Yours would be reflected in a gold ring. With a panther carved out of black onyx embossed on it. And maybe one small eye that seemed to watch you no matter where you moved. An emerald.”
“Is that how you see me?” He wanted to know. “Flashy gold with embossed onyx?”
He was trying to throw her off. “Nothing flashy about gold,” she informed him. “All the kings wanted it. And the ring would be in the image of a panther,” she said pointedly. “That’s how I see you. A panther. Sleek, deadly. Showing your opponents no mercy.” That was the way she saw him, she insisted silently. Cold, removed.
Nothing cold about the way he kisses.
She banked down the stray thought. It had no place here.
Gloria forced a smile to her lips. “I’ve done a little homework on you, too.” He looked surprised. And not pleased. “In the age of the Internet, no one’s safe.”
He dropped the last slice he’d been nursing back into the box. It was there alone. Between them they’d polished off almost an entire large pizza. “Apparently.”
For some reason the space around her felt as if it was getting smaller, she realized. She could feel her claustrophobia kicking in. But for once, she almost embraced it. It allowed her to block out the other sensations that were swirling through her, the ones that worried her a great deal more than an attack of claustrophobia did. She knew how to deal with that: get out in the open again as fast as possible. Dealing with this attraction to Jack Fortune was another matter. And she wasn’t going to be free of it until he went back to New York.
Rising, she brushed off her hands. “I’m going to go finish up,” she announced.
Jack nodded, then looked back at the slice he’d just dropped. He picked it up again, using it as an excuse. He needed to regroup. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
She gave him a meaningful look. “Don’t hurry.”
Jack sat back in the straight-backed chair she’d rustled up, watching her walk out of the small office. Watching the way her hips moved from side to side like a lyrical song.
More like a prophecy of doom, he told himself. And he would do well to heed it.
Gloria knew she needed help.
If she hadn’t been aware of it before, that kiss she’d allowed to happen—that kiss she’d more than welcomed—had shown her just how vulnerable she was.
The man exuded sexuality with every breath he took. As they finished painting the showroom, she caught herself staring at Jack’s coveralls a half a dozen times, wanting to take them off him using just her teeth.
Instead of getting better, this attraction was getting worse.
If she wasn’t careful, she was going to wind up exactly where she had that time she’d come off a three-day bender after she’d had that awful falling out with Christina. When the fog had left from her brain, leaving behind one killer of a hangover, she’d discovered herself in bed with a man she hadn’t recognized no matter how hard she’d tried to activate her brain.
She’d made a promise to herself then, a promise never to wind up beside a man she had no intention of being with again.
Gloria had an uneasy feeling that promise was going to ring hollow if she didn’t do something to reinforce it, and fast.
She needed backup. She needed to touch base with someone sensible, someone who was grounded, who’d keep her grounded.
Until Jack had kissed her, she would have said that person was her. But after feeling lightning flashing wildly through her veins, she knew that she had just been kidding herself.
Just like alcoholics never really fully recover but remain one for the rest of their lives, the same could be said for a woman who made bad choices. She was doomed to remain in that mode, to continue making bad choices because she was constantly being drawn to men who were bad for her.
And in his own way, Jack Fortune was bad for her. He certainly didn’t come with the promise of a happily-ever-after attached to him. Jack was clearly a man who wanted no attachments. Any sort of physical relationship she shared with him would be just that, physical, nothing more. It wouldn’t lead anywhere. Besides, she’d had her share of hurt feelings and wasn’t eager to go through that again.
To give the man his due, he hadn’t pushed his advantage—and he’d definitely had one—when he’d kissed her. God knew she wasn’t a pushover any longer, but with the right man—or the wrong one, depending on which side of the situation you were on—she had absolutely no willpower to speak of. Until he’d blown her resolve to pieces, she’d thought she had, but now she knew she didn’t.
Which meant that she was going to have to be more vigilant, she told herself as she dipped her roller into an all but empty paint tray.
She could swear she felt him watching her.
That made her reinforce her promise to herself: no more being caught alone with him, even with paint buckets between them. If she was going to have any further dealings with Mr. Jack Fortune, there was going to have to be someone, anyone, present at the time.
But for now she needed to talk to someone rational, someone more cold-blooded and tougher than herself. Her sister Christina was the perfect choice.
Gloria put on the last finishing strokes, then retired her roller. Jack, she noticed, was still busy. She moved to the far end of the showroom—as far from Jack as she could get.
She knew she could turn to Sierra just as easily, but secretly she’d always admired her cool, calm, collected older sister. Even during the height of her rebellion and her awful period of acting out, a part of her had longed to be exactly like Christina.
The second she came home, Gloria shed her coat, purse and shoes and made a beeline for the telephone. Her body was still humming from this afternoon, from an onslaught of desire that almost had her kissing Jack as he took his leave. That had to stop.
Gloria reached for the phone and just as her fingers came in contact with the receiver, it rang beneath her hand. She hesitated, looking at her Caller ID. The number identified the call as coming from Fortune-Rockwell Bank. Jack?
The second she thought of him, her pulse rate escalated. God, this had to stop, she thought again.
She couldn’t talk to him, she told herself. She’d let her answering machine pick up, then call Christina.
Gloria made her way to the kitchen, trying to ignore the phone, listening for the sound of a male voice anyway. What she needed, she decided, was a cup of coffee. Strong, black coffee. And maybe a lobotomy.
The machine beeped. She held her breath even as she told herself not to.
“Glory? It’s just me, Tina, calling to see how you were doing. I’ll try you again la—”
Pivoting on her stockinged heel, Gloria made a dive for the phone on the coffee table. She managed to lift the receiver just as her sister was about to hang up. “Tina? Are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here.” Relieved, Gloria sank onto the sofa. Her legs felt as if they had all the structural integrity of thin rubber bands. “You sound breathless. What’s up?”
If she was going to have a serious conversation with Christina, she wanted it to be face-to-face, not over the phone. So for now, she just went with the obvious excuse. “Just dashing across the room to get to the phone before you hung up.”
“Didn’t realize you were that eager to talk to me,” Christina teased, then her voice grew tight with emotion. “I’ve missed you, Glory. Why did we waste so much time getting back together?”
“My fault.” She was willing to take all the blame for the schism. She’d been the stubborn one, the one whose brain had been pickled more than half the time. “But it’s over now. We’re back in the same area and we’re friends again. That’s all that counts.” She made herself comfortable, just as she had in the old days when she’d spend hours on the phone with nothing serious pressing on her conscience. “So, what’s up?”
“That was what I was going to ask you,” Christina responded, her voice warm, interested. “How’s the place coming along?”
