American Diva (17 page)

Jack started. “She’s not—”

“Don’t worry, hon,” the woman said, putting her hand on Jack’s shoulder. “It won’t be much longer. I think your wife has found what she was looking for,” she said with a wink.

Of course the saleswoman was speaking of the shoes, but nevertheless, as she bustled off to divest Audrey of her money, Jack’s stomach did a weird little flip.

 

 

Audrey lost the bet, though she argued that she shouldn’t have been held to the terms of the bet because she’d stumbled onto such a great sale, and no one in their right mind would have passed up 50 to 75 percent off designer shoes. But Jack held up her packages as proof that she had shopped, and therefore, lost.

Audrey gave in. She called Lucas’s cell and, thankfully, got his voice mail. “I’m going to dinner,” she said. “A steak place, the Brasa Grill or something.” She glanced at Jack. “With, ah . . . with Jack. I owe him,” she added hastily, as if she needed to explain. “Ah . . . see you later.”

She was relieved Lucas wasn’t around. The last thing she wanted was for him to show up at dinner. Frankly, she was looking forward to dinner with someone other than Lucas for a change. Every time she and Lucas went to a restaurant, he spent the whole meal watching to see who noticed Audrey, or pushed his latest plan to make them fabulously rich.

It would be nice to have dinner with someone who wasn’t worried about who she was or what important press person was in the area or her career. Fortunately, so far, no one in Cleveland seemed to know or care who she was.

Audrey was in such a good mood that she removed her ball cap. “I’m not going into a restaurant looking like I just ran the bases,” she said to Jack, and then reached into one of her many bags. She withdrew a sheer blouse to dress up the linen skirt and pulled that over her head. Then she dug through another bag, withdrew a shoebox, opened it up, and took out a pair of gold beaded sandals.

When she had finished, she turned to Jack and smiled. “How do you like me now?”

His gaze turned sultry. “I like you,” he said low. “And you look fantastic.”

If there was one thing Audrey had learned in her life, it was that there were two ways a man could tell a woman she looked nice. One was to say, “You look nice,” with a quick smile and a pat on the hand or the shoulder. The other was to say, “You look fantastic,” with a gaze full of the promise of fabulous sex. That was exactly the way Jack was looking at her, and a shiver shot down her spine and landed squarely in her groin.

She knew she should look away, shouldn’t encourage that look any more than she already had, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. She couldn’t even speak, and just held his gaze, believing with everything she had that he was feeling the desire flow between them as acutely as she was.

It wasn’t until the cab had pulled up in front of the Brasa Grill that she could finally draw a breath. A helpful salesclerk had directed them to the restaurant, and it was, as promised, a happening place. At the entrance was a patio lounge; the tables were already full at seven o’clock.

“Oh God,” she said when she saw the crowd. She felt defeated, trumped in her illicit outing before it had begun.

“What’s wrong?” Jack asked, peering over her shoulder.

“There are too many people.” As if in agreement, Bruno whimpered.

Jack looked at the crowd, then at her. “I have an idea,” he said. “Are you up for it?”

“Anything.”

He asked the cabbie, “Is there a park nearby?”

“Yep. Just a mile or so from here.”

“What about a Wal-Mart?” Jack asked.

“A
Wal-Mart
?” Audrey echoed laughingly.

He took her hand, wrapped his fingers securely around hers. “Trust me,” he said.

She did trust him. Remarkably, she
did
.

Jack directed the cabbie to a Wal-Mart, where they picked up a blanket and some wineglasses. Then they stopped at a liquor store, where Jack went in alone and emerged with two bottles of very nice wine. The last stop was a barbeque joint. He bought chicken and the accoutrements for everyone, including the cabbie and Bruno. After that, they headed for a park. Any park. And Jack paid the cabbie to wait.

For the first time in a long time, Audrey felt like a normal, regular person, the sort of person she used to be when she would drive to gigs in her Honda with an amp in the trunk and the trunk roped shut around it. She was sitting under the stars with Jack, drinking excellent wine and eating moist, tender chicken, with Bruno chewing happily on a rawhide bone (“You
do
like him,” Audrey had accused Jack when he picked it up at Wal-Mart. “Do not,” he’d said with a smile. “He’s just a rat.”). It didn’t get any better than this.

The tension she’d created by kissing Jack at the lagoon was gone. They were comfortable together, like a pair of old friends enjoying a lazy summer evening. She looked at Jack stretched long on the blanket, propped up on one arm, and watching some people at the far end of the park.

“So tell me something about yourself, Rambo.”

He gave her a wary smile. “What do you want to know, starlight?” he asked as he polished off the last of the chicken.

She wanted to know everything—how old he was, where he went to school, if he’d ever been in love. She wanted to know which of her songs he’d heard first, if he ever danced, if he had a family that drove him nuts, like her. “Start with the obvious,” she suggested.

“Like?”

“Like . . . any great love in your life?”

“You don’t beat around the bush, do you?” he asked with a winsome smile. “Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

He sighed. “Yeah . . . I’ve had the same great love most of my adult life.”

A wave of disappointment swept through Audrey, which she immediately dismissed as asinine. Good for him! He’d found that one great love, the thing that eluded most people. “What’s her name?” she asked breezily, stabbing a little too hard at a piece of chicken.

“She doesn’t have a name.”

Audrey glanced up. “What do you mean, she doesn’t have a name?”

He grinned. “The great love is flying.” At Audrey’s look of confusion, he casually moved her sleeve away from the chicken it was about to touch and said, “You know. Planes. Helicopters. Dirigibles.”

“You can fly?” she asked, happily surprised and curious.

“Yes.”

“
Dirigibles?”

He laughed. “Okay, I was kidding about the dirigibles. But just about anything else with wings,” he said.

“Ooh, tell me,” she begged him.

Jack had flown everything—big planes, small planes, propeller planes and jets. He told her about his years in the service where he’d learned how to fly. And then he mentioned his desire to teach others his love of flying.

Impressed, she smiled broadly. “You have a
flight
school?”

“Not yet,” he said with a proud grin. “But I’m working on it. It’s why I took this job, to be honest.” He told her about the hangar he’d rented in Orange County, the plane he was rebuilding (
rebuilding
, she noted, as if that were an everyday task, like changing a flat tire), and how he hoped to be up and operational in two years’ time. She watched him as he spoke of his dream, could see the excitement in his blue eyes, the pride he took in his work. She understood it, too—she felt that same pride with her songwriting, knew the sort of thrill of having achieved something special when one song out of one hundred turned out to be really good.

What she envied about Jack was his ability to pursue his dream on his own terms—to pursue what
he
wanted as opposed to what the world wanted from him.

“But . . . I thought you were part of a stunt group,” she said, when he’d finished telling about the work he’d put in on his flight school.

“Thrillseekers Anonymous,” he said, and laughed a little as he poured more wine for them. “Yeah, that’s another little venture I’m into.”

“Stunts?”

“Stunts, yes . . . but we’re really all about the sports.” He told her more about TA, how he’d grown up with his partners Eli McCain and Cooper Jessup in West Texas. He laughed as he talked about how, as boys, they’d developed a love for sports—football, baseball, basketball, rodeo—whatever sport they could play. He told her that when regular sports got to be too easy, they began to create their own.

“How do you create your own sports?” she asked with a laugh.

“Well, you start by diving into old mines that have been filled with water. Or creating dirt-bike trails through the canyons. Or you make a game out of breaking horses without a bit. And when you get tired of that, you build things that look a little like cars and a little like trouble and race them across fallow wheat fields.”

Audrey could imagine three boys racing across empty fields. “How exactly did you parlay that into a business?”

“Oh, I didn’t,” he said, shaking his head as he pushed his plate away. “Eli and Cooper did that. By the time we finished college, we were into the extreme side of sports in general. We’d done it all—white-water rafting, rock-climbing, canyon-jumping, kayaking, surfing, skiing—name the sport, and we’d tried it. Except flying.” He grinned and leaned back. “I wanted to fly, but the only way I could afford to learn how was to join the Air Force. Coop and Eli weren’t as interested in flying as they were in jumping off buildings and blowing things up, so they headed out to Hollywood to hire on as stuntmen. They got their start working on some of the biggest action films in Hollywood, and before too long, they were choreographing some big-picture action sequences.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I was in the service. That’s where I met Michael Raney, our fourth partner. He and I met on a couple of classified missions, discovered we both had a love for extreme sports, and started hanging out when we could.” He chuckled low and shook his head. “Raney and I did some crazy shit. But when I came to the end of my tour, Cooper and Eli had come up with the idea to start up Thrillseekers Anonymous. It sounded good. So I came out to Hollywood to work with them.”

“In the sports club,” Audrey said, nodding.

Jack grinned and playfully tweaked her arm. “Woman, have you heard a word I said?

“Of course!”

“Then what is our motto?”

“Aha!” she said. “You didn’t say. I am sure I would have remembered it.”

He leaned forward, his face just inches from hers, and said low, “TA is a members-only club. Our motto is
Name your fantasy, and we’ll make it happen
.”

She laughed at him, but a fantasy popped into her head, one delicious fantasy inspired by Jack Price, and she smiled.

He raised a brow at her smile.

Emboldened by the wine, Audrey asked, “Any real women in your life? Mother? Sister? Girlfriend? Wife?”

“Definitely have a mother and two older sisters. But at the moment . . . no girlfriend and no wife.”

She couldn’t help grinning with delight at that news. “I’m disappointed, Security Guy. A guy who makes fantasies happen and there is no one in your life?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Has there ever been?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘ever.’ I fell in love with Janet Ritchie when I was seventeen—you know, that kind of all-consuming love you think you could die for. But I can’t say I have had that since she dumped me.” He chuckled. “I’ve had a couple of serious relationships, and girlfriends . . .” He looked at Audrey. “But not a love I’d die for.”

She swallowed hard. “What about Courtney?”

“What about her?”

“She’s obviously interested. And she’s cute.”

“Oh my God, are you serious?” he asked, falling to his back with feigned shock.

“Don’t you think she’s cute?”

Jack snorted and came back up on his elbow. “Guy rule number one: In the company of a beautiful woman, never say aloud if you find another woman as beautiful, or, God forbid, more beautiful than your current companion . . . as if that is even possible.”

A smile spread across her face. “You think I’m beautiful?”

“Darlin’, I think
all
women are beautiful. But you? Dangerously so.”

Her belly flipped in a most delicious way. “For what it’s worth,” she said, leaning toward him, “I think you’re pretty cute yourself.”

His smile faded. He wrapped his fingers around her wrist and pulled her hard to him, heedless of the picnic between them. He rolled over, bringing her on top of him. “I warned you about provoking me, sweet cheeks.”

“I didn’t kiss you,” she responded pertly.

“Then I’ll have to kiss you,” he muttered, and pressed his mouth against her cheek, then her eyes, and slid to her lips.

Audrey tasted the wine he’d drunk and the chicken he’d eaten and teasingly bit his lip. She relished the feel of his arms around her, his hands caressing her back. But then he rolled again, so that Audrey was on her back and he on his side, his hand on her belly, moving to her breast as his mouth covered hers. His tongue swept inside hers, feeling her teeth and the flesh of her mouth. His hand drifted up, to the column of her neck, then down again, to her breast, cupping it, feeling the weight of it.

She moaned softly as he squeezed her nipple between his fingers, and pressed against him, feeling his erection hard against her hip bone.

“Do you have any idea what I want to do to you right now?” he growled, and kissed her again.

She knew what she wanted him to do to her, and lifted her hand to his neck, entwining her fingers in his hair, then letting her hand drift down his body, to the taut muscles of his arm, the hard wall of his chest. The more her hand moved, the wilder Jack’s kiss became. She could feel herself becoming wet, could feel her defenses and common sense eroding.

His hand moved from her breast, gliding down her belly, to the top of her skirt, and then to her bare knee. He caressed her knee before slipping his hand beneath the hem of her skirt, between her legs.