Project Virgin (12 page)

The room fell away again.
As if it had never existed. As if the pack of her relatives, stuffed into two gleeful booths on the other side of the saloon, was little more than a memory. As if he was the only thing in the whole of Montana and the great, wide world beyond it.

“So,” he said, his voice even, in a way that made her insides feel shaken loose from their moorings. “You won me. Or more specifically, a date in Seattle.
Let me know the dates that work for you and I’ll fly you out. We’ll have fun.”

The way he said the word
fun
seemed to dance down the length of her spine like the obvious lie it was. Or maybe it was that his definition of fun wasn’t quite the same as hers. His, she was quite certain, included all manner of dark and tangled and needy things she didn’t know anything about. She could see that as
easily as she could see that ridiculously beautiful face of his.

“Oh, well.” She almost let out a horrible, inappropriate giggle, but somehow kept herself from it. She’d felt this way once as a little girl, when she’d come face-to-face with a coyote on a hiking trail in the hills of southern Oregon where she’d grown up. Her parents had gone on ahead, around the next curve in the switchbacked
trail, and she’d been briefly and terrifyingly alone. Just like back then, it was as if everything inside of her stilled, yet went on high alert. As if this absurd specimen of beautiful male was as dangerous, as predatory, as a wild animal. But that was ridiculous. “I actually live in Seattle.”

That considering gleam in his gaze became more intent. “Do you now.”

Nervous,
she thought. A little
bit wildly.
He makes me nervous.
She cleared her throat and told herself that was absolutely the right word to describe the sensations dancing inside of her. She was
nervous,
nothing more.

“Yes, and in fact, I think that’s why my aunts and cousins pitched in to buy you,” she told him. With perhaps a bit too much
nervous
in her voice. “They know who you are, of course, because so many of them
are from here, and they really thought it would be a great idea to spend some time with you.”

“For five thousand dollars.” His voice had gone flat again.

Cool. Though his silky chocolate eyes were anything but.

“You probably could have just asked, sweetheart. I wouldn’t say I’m a nice man, necessarily, but I don’t bite.” He didn’t smile. She wasn’t sure he could, despite the hard gleam in his
dark gaze that felt like acrobatics deep in her gut, like a wicked grin from a different man. “Much.”

There was a loud, buzzing sound. It took Michaela a breathless moment, then another to realize it was a kind of white noise and it was filling up her head. Her body’s defense mechanism against imagining this man and his…
bite.
She thought maybe she was coming down with something, suddenly. She
was hot, then cold. She could hear Terrence’s reproving voice in her head then, warning her for the nine millionth time that if she insisted on reading those filthy romances in what little spare time she ever had, her mind would turn to mush. She always agreed with him that she should stop, that she should read Worthy and Important Works That Would Expand Her Mind and Impress Others, and then she
went ahead and downloaded more of the books she actually liked onto her e-reader anyway.

Jesse Grey made her feel… mushy. Like a really good romance novel, in fact. The kind that took her breath away and kept her up half the night, desperate to see how it ended.

But it was the thought of Terrence that finally penetrated the haze she’d been in since her cousin Missy had shoved her toward this
man to “collect her prize.”

“It’s not for me,” she assured Jesse. Or maybe herself. “It’s for Terrence.”

He eyed her. “Terrence?”

“My fiancé,” she supplied. Helpfully, she thought.

His gaze then seemed to pry off the top of her head and rummage around inside, and Michaela would have had to have been half-dead or an idiot not to recognize the danger in that, something far more precarious than
nerves—
but she didn’t do a thing. She didn’t look away, step back, run from him the way she should have. It was as if she couldn’t. As if her body was going to do exactly as it pleased, and what it pleased was to stand right there in front of this beautiful, lethal man and… wait.

“You in the habit of setting up your fiancé on dates with other men?” Jesse asked, and there was a different note
in his voice. Lazy, maybe, with an edge. It colored his gaze, too, making his eyes seem shot through with whiskey—

Or maybe Michaela had had too many of those slushy drinks her cousin Missy had insisted upon ordering by the table-load earlier.

“Only when it might help him out,” she said, feeling something much too close to drunk. It was definitely the slushy stuff, she assured herself. Nothing
else. Not that
focus
of his, turned on her like that, as if she was somehow as fascinating as he was.
Certainly not.
“Terrence has had a run of bad luck, you see. It could happen to anyone these days, with the economy being what it is.”

“Is Terrence an economist?”

Michaela thought the question was on the dry and pointed side, which was only one of the many reasons she needed to ignore all the
stuff
going on inside of her. She pushed on.

“My aunts seem to think you might be able to point him in a better direction, since you’re the construction guru of Seattle. Their words, not mine.” She laughed nervously. Definitely, that was nerves. “Do you prefer ‘tycoon?’ Is that pejorative? I know successful men sometimes prefer to pretend they’re not all that successful, for various privacy reasons.
Terrence was involved in this kind of weird hotel situation but it fell apart about ten months ago and he—”

“Please tell me you’re not talking about Terrence Polk,” Jesse said, his voice back to flat and a different, assessing light in his chocolate liqueur gaze. A light that made her think yes, this lazy, dangerous, coyote of a man could indeed be the successful businessman her relatives seemed
to think he was, despite all that natural beauty of his, which had made her doubt it.

“Oh, do you know him?” Michaela asked in a rush of… something. Something she knew had to do with that cool, crisp knowledge in Jesse’s eyes that she very much wanted to avoid examining any more closely. With every last particle of her being. Because maybe the truth was, despite what she’d told Terrence and herself
a thousand times, she wasn’t actually
that
mature after all. “We’re getting married in June.”

*

This day had
started fairly uncomfortably on the couch in his uncle’s back office right here in the saloon and was now bordering on some kind of practical joke, and Jesse Grey was not in the mood.

First, there was the fact he was in Marietta, Montana, the place his
extended family considered its historic seat, since various booze-slinging Greys had been in the area since before the actual official founding of the town in the late 1800s. Jesse had missed the traditional Christmas with the extended Grey family this past December the way he’d been doing for three years now, ever since his own father had found it necessary to seduce Jesse’s girlfriend, marry
her, then impregnate her—with twins, no less, and maybe not precisely in that order.

Jesse had decided he didn’t need to be in the same room with his father or his father’s blushing bride ever again, and no matter that his much-married and more-divorced father claimed it was True Love for him this time. Jesse had steadfastly stuck to his Zero Contact position—no matter how many whiny, accusatory
voicemail messages his old man liked to leave on his phone, especially around the holidays when Jesse’s pointed absence was likely to cause the very commentary his father most wanted to do without.

But missing the big Grey family Christmas meant he felt compelled to come out to visit his grandparents around Valentine’s Day each year. Not because he was filled with the joy of the manufactured
holiday or brimming with the need for bright, red cut-out hearts or any of that crap, but because a single man of his inarguable means was basically a walking target at this time of year back home in Seattle. Jesse liked to take a break from the voracious women who were forever trying to tie him down to more than one night, all of whom seemed to lose their collective minds every February.

Or
he usually got to take this time as a break, anyway. This year, he’d come out a week early to spend more time with his grandparents, like a dutiful grandson. And his jackass uncle Jason had decided it would be entertaining to mess with him, and had not only signed Jesse up for this auction, but had flat-out
dared
him to go through with it.

A man could walk away from many things, as Jesse knew
from personal experience. But a direct challenge was not one of them—not when the challenger in question was a family member who would, quite literally, gleefully throw it in his face for the rest of his goddamned life.

“Why can’t I write a check to whatever charity this is like a normal person?” Jesse had demanded when his Uncle Jason had sprung this on him. Today. After lunch. “Why do I have
to channel Channing Tatum to support this thing?”

“One, because I think it’s funny,” Jason had retorted in his usual gruff way, the only hint he’d ever laughed about anything in his entire life in the faint creases around his eyes, but it was only the faintest hint. It could also have been the weather. “And two, because I think you’re too goddamned comfortable writing your freaking checks.” He’d
only shrugged when Jesse had glared at him. “Maybe you need to see if your body can cash one of them, for a change.”

Jesse hadn’t known what the hell that meant. But he had known better than to push his uncle on that or any other topic. His own father, Billy Grey, was a punk at best. He owned a regional sporting goods chain based out of Billings, Montana, where he made enemies and cheated on
his various wives and never, ever suffered any consequences for his actions. Jason, on the other hand, was Billy’s older brother and he was definitely not a punk. He was the current owner of Grey’s and the custodian of the family’s Marietta legacy. Jason didn’t play games, pull punches, or suffer fools.

In the comfort of his life as one of Seattle’s young millionaires, though his wealth had nothing
to do with the tech industry that ruled the city and everything to do with his own sweat and labor and desire not to be his father, Jesse liked to think he was more like his uncle than not. But he doubted Jason would agree with that assessment.

This, of course, was how Jesse had found himself succumbing to the indignity of this evening, an auction to benefit a little kid he’d never met with medical
issues he didn’t know anything about. It was that or punk out in front of his uncle, which was what his father would have done and was therefore unacceptable.

So Jesse had stood on that so-called stage. He’d listened to the auctioneer discuss him as if he was little more than a glorified cow. He’d been half-asleep, busy pretending he wasn’t actually there, until the bidding had climbed above
a thousand dollars. When it had hit five thousand, he’d been astonished. Who the hell had that kind of money to throw around in a sleepy little place like this?

He’d had an unpleasant sort of jolt when he’d seen the woman who was steered in his direction when he exited the stage. He’d hardly noticed the loudmouthed one acting like her usher. He’d zeroed in on Michaela immediately, as if she was
brighter than everyone else in the room, and Jesse didn’t like that at all.

She was delicate and gorgeous in the kind of fresh-faced, approachable way that made every part of his body lock up tight and hard. She looked like the kind of girl who should have freckles, the kind that danced across her cheekbones and made her taste like some kind of sweet summer crumble, though she didn’t. She wore
her dark brown hair swept back in an easy, friendly sort of ponytail he doubted she understood made her prettiness that much more pointed and difficult to ignore, and a long-sleeved magenta t-shirt that looked like a micro wool over a pair of casual jeans and winter boots. As if she was wholly unaware of her effect on every man in the room, with that mouth and that sweet ass.

And it took all
of three sentences out of her mouth for him to realize that she must have no idea what she looked like, that she definitely had no idea that those lips of hers could start a riot, and that it was very unlikely that she possessed the kind of hardened, licentious casualness that he preferred in his disposable women these days. Not this one.

She was
earnest.
And possibly nervous, which should not
have charmed him. She was intriguing. He didn’t have to ask her if she liked casual sex and anonymous encounters, because he could tell by that particular look in her bright, hazel eyes that she had little to no experience with either one. Just like he could tell from his body’s over-the-top reaction to her that he’d like to introduce her to the joys of each, if she’d let him.

Jesse doubted very
much she’d let him.

He hated that he even wanted her to let him.