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One thing was sure…sweat wouldn’t wash any better out of her Chanel suit now than it had out of Dior then.
“Tabby?”
Her sister finally met her stare, appearing almost defiant. “It’s simple, really.”
The twitching intensified. The moisture on her palms could water the office plants for a week. “Oh?”
“Yes. She can’t cheat on our father with the guy if somebody outbids her.” With a smile that showed off the twenty-thousanddollar smile their father had bestowed upon his oldest daughter, Tabitha continued.
“You buy the gigolo.”
PARAMEDIC JAKE WALLACE had faced death dozens of times since he’d started working with Chicago FD’s 4th Battalion five years ago. He’d responded to fires and shootings, to brawls and domestic abuse calls. To riots and hostage standoffs. He’d treated heart attacks, drowning victims and people two steps past death who’d miraculously taken three steps back into existence.
He’d once talked a whacked-out druggie into letting him take his injured girlfriend—whom said druggie had stabbed—out of their house for emergency treatment. And he’d then gotten chewed out by his lieutenant for not following protocol by waiting for the Chicago P.D. to handle it. Right—as if he was going to let her die.
None of those situations had intimidated him.
But this? This scared the hell out of him.
“Why did I ever agree to get involved with this?” he muttered.
One reason. Because he owed his lieutenant big and his lieutenant owed the chief big and the chief’s wife loved this particular pet charity. End of story. Which was why two of his buddies from the battalion had already taken their turns under the spotlight.
“I’ve been asking myself the same thing,” a stranger’s voice replied.
Jake tugged helplessly at the bow tie that was choking him and glanced at Bachelor Number Eighteen, the one right before him. The other man looked just about as happy to be here as Jake, which was saying a lot. Because Jake would just as soon give CPR to a toothless octogenarian with halitosis than stand up on stage and be bid on by a bunch of rich, horny women with way too much time on their hands and too little self-respect. Or self-control.
“I should feel better about it,” he said, trying to convince himself more than the other final few “bachelors” waiting for their turn on the block. “It is for a good cause, right? So I suffer a few minutes’ embarrassment and a bad date. It’s worth it.”
Number Twenty offered a jaded smile as he leaned indolently against a column in the backstage area that had been set up for this evening’s event. The guy looked almost bored, and Jake envied him his calm. “What, you don’t enjoy having women ‘paying’ for your services?” The voice held amusement, and a hint of a foreign accent, possibly Irish.
Maybe European dudes were more at ease playing meat-onparade. But this all-American rescue worker most definitely was not. “You do?”
Number twenty smiled as he checked his sleeves, the gold sheen of expensive cuff links flashing beneath the obviously pricey, tailored tux. Jake would lay money it was not rented.
“It can be…entertaining.” This guy’s suit and demeanor said he had money enough to donate to worthy causes on his own. But the longish hair scooped back into a black ponytail said he also liked to live dangerously.
So did Jake. But he got quite enough thrills out of putting his ass on the line at emergency scenes, thank you very much. He didn’t particularly want to put it out there to be appraised, pinched, ogled or catcalled over by a bunch of strange women with itches between their legs and enough dollar bills to scratch them.
The other man continued. “Besides, as you said, it’s for a good cause.”
Right. Good cause. Kids. I like kids. Don’t have any, don’t really want any for a few more years, but they’re cute in a longdistance way. As long as they’re not sticking raisins up their noses or falling down into sewer drains or following the family cat up a tree.
Okay, so maybe he didn’t like kids so much. Not enough to go through this humiliation.
Then he thought about his own baby niece and twin nephews. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to make sure they remained the safe, healthy munchkins they were.
Damn. He was going to have to go through with it.
Tugging again at the too-tight collar of his own rent-a-tux, Jake peered through a crease in the black cloth curtains, eyeing the audience. The elegant ballroom was packed with round, white-draped tables, around which sat dozens of women in gowns and shimmery cocktail dresses. Laughter and gossip reigned supreme as they tossed back fruity Cosmos or sparkling champagne. They all watched hungrily, calling out bawdy suggestions as the raucous bidding continued for Bachelor Seventeen, who was currently center stage.
Well, all except one. A brunette who stood about ten feet away from the curtain he was peeking through. She drew his eye as he scanned the crowd…then drew it again. And this time, he let his gaze linger.
She was almost shadowed by one of the giant standing spotlights, which cast gaudy, unforgiving pools of light on the spectacle occurring on the stage. But what he saw of her was definitely enough to pique his interest.
First because she had some wicked curves. She wasn’t a tall stick figure in a little black dress like half the women here. Instead she was petite, very rounded with the kind of full curves—generous hips and lush breasts revealed in a low-cut, silky blue dress—that weren’t currently fashionable but made his heart pick up its pace and his recently dormant cock come awake in his pants.
Nor did she have bottled blond hair swept up in a complicated hairdo like the other half of the audience. No, hers was dark and thick, with long curls that fell in disarray past her shoulders. The look was wildly seductive, as if she’d just left her bed rather than an exclusive Michigan Avenue beauty salon.
Earthy, sultry, not at all restrained. The woman was sexy in a way that women didn’t seem to allow themselves to be sexy anymore.
Her looks, however, merely started the fire in his gut. Her untouchable, out-of-place demeanor stoked it until it almost engulfed him.
The brunette wasn’t laughing it up with her rich gal pals, or tossing back Manhattans while turning her hand to make sure her diamond rings showed to their greatest flashy advantage. In fact, if he had to guess, he’d say she looked almost disapproving, even tense. He couldn’t see her face very well, though he got a glimpse of a stiff little jaw, lifted up in visible determination. And her back was military straight.
He sensed she was keeping it that way intentionally, as if she didn’t dare let her guard down lest she be distracted from whatever mission she’d set for herself.
As if realizing she was being watched, the woman glanced around, turning her head enough to cast her face in a bit of light spilling off the stage. Enough to highlight the creamy skin, the curve of her cheek, the fullness of her lips and the dark flash of her eyes.
Beautiful.
Jake’s hands clenched into fists at his sides. Though she couldn’t possibly see him and was in no way mirroring his reaction, hers did the same.
She clenched out of visible concentration that seemed to swirl around her, creating a no-fly zone between her and everyone else in the room.
He clenched out of pure lust.
He hadn’t had sex in a while—not since breaking up with a woman he’d been dating last winter. And nobody had as much as given him a quickened pulse rate since. Not the women he met at the station. Not the ones he helped. Not the nurses at the hospital. Not the hot girl who’d moved in upstairs from him, the one who’d already locked herself out three times just so she’d have an excuse to ask for his help.
This stranger? She’d given him a hard-on from ten feet away.
She looked around the room again, watchful, her gaze passing without hesitation over the crease in the drapes behind which he stood.
Buy me.
She couldn’t possibly have heard the mental order, yet she narrowed her eyes, focusing again on the drapes concealing him.
He couldn’t help repeating the silent appeal, trying to remember all the stuff one of his sisters had said about that dumb book she’d been obsessed with lately. About how the universe would grant you what you want if you just visualized it hard enough.
Oh, it was easy to come up with some fast-and-hot visualizations right now.
“You want to know my biggest fear?” said Number Eighteen, a blond-haired surfer-looking guy who said he worked as a stockbroker. “What if whoever wins me pays like fifty bucks? I mean, how frigging humiliating would that be when the richest women in Chicago are all drooling like a pack of stray dogs eyeing a butcher shop window out there?”
Mr. Polished European guy laughed softly at the very thought of that even being a possibility for him. Jake, however, immediately understood the stockbroker’s worries.
Geez. He’d thought being bid on would be a humiliation. But not being bid on? “Get me out of here.”
“Too late,” said a perky voice belonging to the young woman who was stage-managing tonight’s events. She glanced at the blond pretty boy. “You’re on. They’re reading the introduction right now.” Then she pointed the tip of her pencil at Jake. “And you’re right behind him, Nineteen.”
Nineteen. That’s how they’d addressed him from the moment he’d checked in at the event desk and had been whisked to a private dressing room with all the other saps whose bosses, friends, siblings, mothers or coworkers had talked them into doing this.
Jake glanced through the slit in the drapes again, whispering, “Nineteen.”
He could easily envision nineteen things he’d say to the brunette when they met. Nineteen ways to bring about that meeting. The nineteen minutes it would take to run out from behind the curtain, grab her hand and drag her to his place. The number of times he wanted to make love to her and the number of positions he wanted to do it.
“Nineteen? Hello?”
Jake jerked his attention back toward the stage manager who was watching him with an expectant—yet slightly exasperated—look. He’d obviously been visualizing for several minutes. “The guy before you is done.”
“What’d he go for?” Jake couldn’t help asking.
“Thirty-five.”
Thirty-five. Oh, God, thirty-five bucks? He’d whip out his checkbook and pay ten times that if he could get out of this. Then he’d go straight out and introduce himself to the brunette in blue.
“Thirty-five hundred,” the woman added, obviously reading his expression.
“Holy shit.”
He could barely scrape up one times that amount, and if he had ten times it in his checking account, he sure as hell wouldn’t be living in a one-bedroom apartment over a flower shop in Hyde Park.
“They’re reading your bio right now, so we need to move quickly,” Miss Pencil Tapper said, actually reaching out to grasp his arm. She must know he wanted to bolt. He doubted he was the first to feel that way tonight.
“Fine, fine,” he muttered, not even listening to the announcer, whose voice was droning through the hotel sound system. He let go of the black drape curtain, regret making his fingers glide against it for a moment longer than necessary. Then he was being pushed onto the stage, blinded by a spotlight, deafened by the roar of a hundred tipsy women.
This must be what those Chippendales dudes felt like. The thought of doing this dressed in leather cowboy chaps and nothing else was enough to make his stomach heave.
“Who’s going to start the bidding?”
“Five hundred!” someone yelled.
Okay. It was a start. Five hundred…that was a worthy donation. That’d buy a lot of Christmas presents for needy kids. Like, you know, a hundred games of Go Fish or whatever that crap sold for now. But, man, it sounded pathetic considering the pretty boy stockbroker went for seven times that much.
“Six.”
“Seven!”
The numbers started flying at a dizzying speed, and Jake couldn’t keep up with them for a while. Not until a loud, determined female voice cut through the catcalls to shout, “Five thousand dollars!”
Everyone fell silent for an infinitesimal moment. Jake included. He didn’t know what the highest bachelor had sold for, but at least he wasn’t going to be rock bottom.
“We have a bid of five thousand dollars for this excellent cause,” the auctioneer preened. “And I imagine our handsome bachelor will be worth every penny of it.”
Ahh, the joy of being pimped by a fat guy with sweaty jowls and a smarmy smile.
The searing heat of the spotlight suddenly left his face. Jake watched as the large, golden circle washed over the crowd, turning to illuminate the woman who’d ignored auction protocol by upping the ante so dramatically.
Jake held his breath, something in his brain telling him it had been her. The brunette. The one he couldn’t stop thinking about had heard his mental 911 call.
The spotlight finally came to rest on the top of a very blond head.
Shit.
The middle-aged woman trying to look ten years younger sat at one of the exclusive, reserved tables up front, with a few other equally jaded-looking upper crusters. She smiled, well pleased with herself for having silenced the entire room.
But the complacent silence didn’t last for long. Because suddenly, as if they all had one voice, her three companions jumped into the fray.
“Fifty-one hundred.”
“Fifty-two.”
“Fifty-five.”
It went on for at least a minute, until Jake’s head was spinning. These crazy rich females were willing to lay out what amounted to a down payment on a house to go to dinner and a ball game with him? Insane.
It’s for a good cause. True, but damned if he wasn’t getting tired of hearing that refrain in his head.
The figure had hit eight thousand, the blonde and her three friends laughing as they tossed it higher and higher like a volley-ball being lobbed over a net. Jake had hated volleyball ever since he’d been an oversize, clumsy fourth grader who always got picked last for the team in gym. And he especially hated being the ball.
Though the bidding women were laughing, their amusement held a hint of malice and their smiles were tight. They might have started this as a game, but now their competitive spirits were rising.
He didn’t know how long it might have gone on, if he’d continued to be nibbled at in one-hundred dollar bites. Suddenly the whole room froze again. Because another voice—from the other side of the ballroom—shouted, silencing the three bidding crows.
“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”
Jake visualized it, asked the Fates to be kind, then followed the spotlight.
And for once, he realized, his loopy kid sister was right. He’d asked, and the universe had answered. Because the winning bidder was his beautiful brunette.
2
“HOW SHOULD THE CHECK be made out?”
Her pen perched above her open checkbook, Maddy lifted an expectant brow, having finally reached the front of the checkout line for tonight’s auction. It was her bad luck that her bachelor had been second to last in the event. If he’d been one of the earlier “prizes,” she would have been able to pay the fee and escape early, without running the risk that she’d actually have to face her legally purchased slab of beefcake.
That was the last thing she wanted. She’d done what she’d set out to do—what Tabitha had guilted her into doing. She’d stopped her stepmother from hooking up with another man, at least for tonight. And, at least, with that particular man.
Judging by the look on her stepmother’s face, she’d had absolutely no idea any of her husband’s family members had been in the audience. When she’d seen Maddy from across the crowded room, Deborah Turner had paled, her eyes had widened in shocked guilt, and she’d rushed out, her nasty, troublemaking best friend Bitsy close behind her.
Too bad Maddy hadn’t been outbid at that point. She could have saved herself twenty-five thousand dollars. Because, while she hadn’t dated in a while, she most certainly was not desperate enough to actually take advantage of the “prize” she’d just won. If he’d been a regular bachelor? Perhaps. But knowing he was a gigolo who prostituted himself? Never.
It’s for a good cause, she reminded herself, knowing her family’s charitable foundation, which she managed, always supported the worthy children’s program anyway.
“I am in a bit of a hurry,” she prodded, offering the harriedlooking woman running the payment desk a smile to take any sting from her words. “This really is a wonderful program and I’m so glad to be able to support it,” she added, meaning it. “But I do have another engagement.”
That wasn’t exactly untrue. She did have a standing engagement with her remote control and the latest disc from her Grey’s Anatomy Season 2 DVD set. Better that than sticking around and actually having to converse with a man who accepted money from bored, lonely, rich women.
“You won bachelor number…”
