Hot Wheels and High Heels (16 page)

“That’s right. A buck goes a whole lot further here than it does at the Galleria.”

“How about a compromise? Collin Creek Mall is right down the street.”

“Yeah? And how far would a hundred bucks go there?”

Further than at the Galleria, but not by much.
Damn.

John got out of the car, circled around, and opened her door. Putting his forearm on the roof, he leaned in.

“Time to get real, sweetheart. You’re broke, you have no clothes, and I was serious about the swimsuit thing.”

“I am
not
shopping in that place.”

“Fine. Maybe Neiman Marcus is having a shoe sale. You can buy one for your left foot.”

“What if somebody I know sees me in there?”

“Then they’re as broke as you are. Now, come on.”

She rolled her eyes and got out of the car. John took her by the arm and led her into the store, as if he expected her to bolt at any moment.

“Why is there a cop at the front door?” she asked.

“Because they’re expecting you to shoplift.”

Once they were inside, Darcy’s nose was hit with a bizarre combination of aromas: Popcorn. Garden chemicals. Big Macs. Something was very wrong when all three of those could be inhaled in the same breath. And children were everywhere—running down the aisles, sitting in strollers and screaming, or playing games of whiney emotional blackmail to score supersized boxes of Milk Duds.

John led her past the costume jewelry and the vinyl handbags to the women’s clothing department. It was even more horrifying than she’d anticipated. She’d never seen so much cheap polyester in her life. And flowers. The bigger the clothes, the bolder the print. What was
that
all about?

She picked delicately through a rack of cotton shirts. At $4.99 apiece, she could take ten of them and blow only half her budget. Unfortunately,
one
was one too many.

“Nope,” John said. “If I’m buying, I get to pick.”

“So that’s why you offered to foot the bill? So you can tell me what to buy?”

“So I can show you how to get the most for your money. It’s a lesson you need to learn.”

Okay. Darcy had two choices here. She could throw herself on the mercy of a man to pick out her clothes, a man who wouldn’t know haute couture if Versace himself waved it around in front of him.

Or she could have nothing.

“What size do you wear?” John asked.

Darcy sighed with resignation. “Six.”

“Hmm,” he said as he flipped through the rack. “I’m not seeing many of those.”

“No kidding.”

He pulled a shirt off the rack and held it up. “Here you go.”

“That’s hideous.”

“It’s a perfectly good shirt.”

“For my great-grandmother.”

“What? You don’t like my taste?”

She let her gaze slither down his body and back up again, turning her nose up as if she’d gotten a whiff of dog poop. “Well, you’re not exactly GQ material.”

“Well, there’s that lifelong dream shot to hell.” He worked his way through a rack of Capri pants. “Well, now. Aren’t these nice?”

He grabbed a pair and held them up. They were pink. No,
pink
didn’t begin to describe the color of those pants.

“I can’t buy those,” Darcy said. “Somebody spilled Pepto-Bismol on them.”

“They’ll fade in the wash.”

“The stitching is crooked.”

“I’m not paying enough for it to be straight.”

“I hate pink. How about the white ones instead?”

“How about you try on what I give you?”

He shoved the Capris at her. He grabbed two more shirts and a pair of pants, then something off another rack that made Darcy cringe. Had broomstick skirts
ever
been in style?

“Would it be possible,” she said, “for you to place that lovely garment back on the rack? I don’t want to show up at the soup kitchen wearing the same clothes as another street person, now, do I?”

“Do I need to remind you who’s footing the bill?”

With a roll of her eyes, she took the clothes and headed for the dressing room.

“I want to see everything you try on,” he called out.

Oh,
God.
Not only did she have to put these awful clothes on, but she had to model them, too?

The counter in the dressing room was serviced by a woman approximately the size and shape of a troll doll, with fiercely frizzed red hair straight from a bottle of Nice ’n Easy. She wore a blue smock and a name badge that read “Twyla.”

“How many you got, honey?” she said.

This was beyond humiliating. Darcy was used to a saleswoman escorting her to a private fitting room, where she brought in the latest fashions for her scrutiny, along with a glass of Chardonnay and a deliciously subservient attitude. But here was this woman sorting through the clothes, counting every item to ensure Darcy didn’t shoplift.

Shoplift. Good God. If she were inclined to steal, wouldn’t she do it from a better place than this?

“You’ll like the Capri pants,” the old lady said. “Bought some of them myself.”

Darcy shuddered.
This is just a bad dream,
she told herself.
You’ll wake up in a moment and it’ll all be over.

She put on the pink Capris and the blouse. They fit. Sort of. A puckered seam here, a crooked collar there. She walked out of the dressing room to find John leaning against a wall, his arms folded. He pushed away from the wall and took a step or two toward her, eyeing her critically, then held up his index finger and spun it around. She rolled her eyes and turned in a circle. He put his hand on his chin, narrowing his eyes.

“Not bad.”

“Yes, bad.”

“Those pants are definitely your color.”

“This isn’t anybody’s color. If you put a chameleon on them, the poor thing would commit suicide.”

“They should hold up pretty well in the wash.”

“I don’t wash. I dry clean.”

“Not on your salary, you don’t. We’ll take it. Go try on some more.”

She glared at him. “Doesn’t it embarrass you to hang around in a women’s clothing department?”

“I grew up with Amy in the house. Nothing embarrasses me where women are concerned.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Shall I go buy some tampons to prove it?”

Darcy had never met a more infuriatingly uncontrollable man in her life.

She headed back to the dressing room and put on another shirt and a pair of pants, which were wrong in every way possible, and trudged back out to where John stood.

“Looks good,” he said.

“As long as I’m heading to prison.”

“It’s perfect for work. Very utilitarian.”

With yet another roll of her eyes, she turned back to the dressing room. She went in and out several more times, adding whatever clothes to the pile John directed her to until she had approached the hundred-dollar mark.

“Hold on,” John said. “One more thing.”

He reached to a nearby rack in an adjoining department and held up one of the most hideous garments Darcy had ever seen: a hot-pink nightgown with feathers around the hem. It looked like a bad Valentine’s Day joke.

She stared at him dumbly. “You expect me to try that on?”

“It’s pink. Your favorite color. And it’s on sale. Seven ninety-nine. Hell of a bargain.”

“What happened to utilitarian?”

He gave her a provocative smile. “Some clothes are just for fun.”

She yanked it out of his hand and headed for the dressing room again.

“Now you be sure to let me know how it fits,” John said. “And details are appreciated.”

His smirk of amusement said he was getting a bang out of knocking her exquisite taste in clothing down a peg or two. And he was so smug about shopping in the women’s department that she couldn’t even embarrass him about that.

Darcy went into the dressing room, tossed the nightgown aside, and started to put her own clothes back on, only to stop short and stare at it again.

Maybe there was a way to knock that smug expression off his face after all.

She put on the nightgown. The hem came to the middle of her thighs, its feathers tickling her legs. It was cut low, but not criminally so, and she showed less skin wearing this than she did wearing a swimsuit. The only law enforcement entity that could legitimately arrest her for wearing this in public was the fashion police.

She opened the door to the dressing room and came slinking out. Fortunately Twyla had left her station to return clothes to racks, so there was nobody around to suggest to her that modeling this particular garment might be a bad idea. She caught sight of John in the electronics department across the aisle. He clearly thought their shopping expedition was over.

Not yet it wasn’t.

With a sway of her hips, she moved toward him. Along the way she caught the attention of a thirtysomething man carrying a garden hose and another one pushing a shopping cart containing two giant-sized bags of dog food. They stopped and stared openmouthed. As she drew closer to the electronics counter, the clerk behind it, a gangly young man with braces, looked up. When his eyes widened, John saw his expression and turned around. His jaw dropped.

“Darcy! What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly to the other men. “I don’t mean to be such an exhibitionist.” She nodded toward John. “It’s my boyfriend. He told me if I didn’t model the clothes I wanted to buy for him, I couldn’t have them.” She pouted pitifully. “And I really,
really
want this pretty nightie.”

“
What?
” John said.

“I believe those were the instructions you gave me.”

“Regular clothes! Not lingerie!”

Darcy turned to the men and whispered, “Imagine what it’s like when I’m shopping for bras.”

“I can imagine that,” the clerk said.

“Me, too,” said another man.

“Planning on buying any today?” the third one said.

“That’s it!” John grabbed Darcy’s wrist and dragged her back to the dressing room. He shoved her into the first compartment he came to, followed her inside, and closed the door behind them.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She blinked innocently. “You told me you wanted to see everything I tried on.”

“I assumed you had common sense. Clearly that’s not the case.”

“So you don’t like it?” She ran her hands down the sides of the nightgown, then fluffed the feathers with her fingertips. “Personally, I think it’s one of your better selections.”

“You made me sound like some kind of domineering pervert out there!”

“Just as I suspected. Some things
do
embarrass you.” She gave him a sly smile. “Maybe I should put you to the tampon challenge after all.”

“Maybe you should stop acting like a fool. When you’re dressed like this, do you think you can trust men to behave themselves?”

Darcy narrowed her eyes. “You know, I thought you were being generous. Helping me out a little. Then you bring me to this god-awful place and dress me up like Frump Barbie just so you can laugh your head off.”

“And then you come waltzing out in Prostitute Barbie’s nightgown.”

“You picked it out.”

“I picked it out because it was ugly as hell. I wouldn’t want to see that thing in private, much less in public.”

She gave him a sarcastic smile. “So do you want me to take it off?”

John narrowed his eyes. “You really like to flaunt it, don’t you?”

“And you really like to watch me when I do.”

She expected an objection to that. It never came.

Instead, he dropped his gaze to her breasts and let it hover there for several long, tantalizing moments. When he looked up again, something new was stirring in his expression. Just the force of his unspoken message caused her to take an unintentional step back until she felt the coldness of the mirror on her bare shoulders.

“Don’t bait me, Darcy,” John said, his voice low and charged with intensity. “You’re playing with fire.”

“So what are you going to do? We’re not in your office, which of course is the ideal place for illicit sex. We’re at Wal-Mart. That’s where you screwed up, John. At least the dressing rooms at Neiman’s are carpeted.”

“So if we were at Neiman’s, we’d be having sex right now?”

“If we were at Neiman’s, sex would be the
last
thing on my mind.”

“Then maybe I didn’t screw up after all.”

“In your
dreams,
repo man.”

She swiped her hand against his arm to shove him aside, only to have him grab her wrist and pull her back.

“You made a big mistake when you forced me to drag you in here,” John said.

“Oh, yeah? Why is that?”

“Because I’m one of those men you can’t trust to behave himself.”

With that, he slid his other hand around her waist, pulled her up next to him, and smothered her mouth with his. It shocked her so much that her first reaction was to pull away, but she had nowhere to go. John leaned into her, crowding her against the mirror, at the same time he thrust his hand into her hair, crushing it in his fist to hold her in place as his mouth moved over hers. It was a burning, reckless, unrelenting kiss she never would have expected from a man so utterly in control of everything.

But wasn’t that what he was doing right now? Taking complete control of
her?

Anger bubbled up inside her, but she didn’t know if she was mad at him for being a presumptuous, clothes-picking, kiss-stealing tyrant, or mad at herself for being so hot for him whether she liked it or not.

So damned hot.

She couldn’t deny it. She’d had this in the back of her mind almost from the first moment they met. And now that it was happening, she didn’t give a damn about the circumstances.

No. Wrong. Don’t you dare give in to this. Somehow, some way, you’re going to regret it.

But she was too far gone, and there was no stopping now. She skimmed her hands along his chest to his shoulders, then looped her arms around his neck. He felt so good beneath her hands—so hard and solid and powerful—and just touching him made a tiny moan of satisfaction rise in her throat. She’d lied before. He
was
GQ material, as long as they did a spread of ruggedly sexy men wearing designer birthday suits.