f-f-fine,” she managed to stammer.
“Jessica King?” His gravel-edged voice scraped across the delicate skin at the back of her neck like a physical touch.
“How did you know?”
“Lucky guess,” he said. Did she detect a certain dryness to his tone? Then his scowl deepened. Without warning he reached out and touched the corner of her lip.
Intellectually, Jessica King supposed she had known life could change—completely, irrevocably, permanently—in a split second. She supposed she had always had a peripheral awareness that fate and the most well-planned lives were sometimes on a collision course. She had heard about such things: the decision to fly instead of to drive, a right-hand turn instead of a left one, and poof, a life changed for all time. What she had not believed was that something as innocuous as a chance meeting, a rough finger laid on the delicate skin of her upper lip, could bring on this sensation, not unlike drowning, that everything about her reasonable and well-ordered world had just changed.
What she had not believed was that such a thing could ever happen to her.
Lives forever altered by chance, by the whimsy of the gods, happened to other people, perhaps to people more spontaneous than she was or those more willing to take chances. She had lived with the happy illusion that fate had a much better chance of toying with people less organized, less in control, less dedicated to routine and precision than Jessica King.
His finger left her lip, and she returned to her well-ordered world with a pop, though she could not quite shake the sensation that there might remain a scorch mark where he had touched.
The devil will do that, she told herself. And the man was a devil, so at ease in his body, radiating self-assuredness. He had a roguish, untamed quality that was damnably sexy.
And he was no doubt exactly like every other man who was damnably sexy. He would know it and play it.
Jessica King would not be like her deceased, and rather infamous, mother. Not ever. She despised women who were helpless against the raw power that radiated from certain kinds of men.
This kind of man.
“Keep your mucky fingers to yourself,” she said, bristling with annoyance. He had come out of K & B Auto, likely a mechanic. His fingers would, of course, be mucky. Her eyes trailed to his hand. A big hand, the knuckles grazed, the back corded with a powerful network of vein and sinew. No ring. No muck.
He seemed unmoved by her annoyance, if he’d even had the good manners to notice it. Instead, he was studying the finger that had touched her lip. She noted, stiffly, it appeared to have muck on it.
“I thought it was blood on your lip,” he said. “But it’s not, is it?”
His eyes met hers, and a hint of laughter overrode his bad temper. Then he grinned, a small gesture, a tilting of firm lips. The grin changed everything. It was the sun glimpsed in the midst of a storm. The warrior cast of the face was momentarily transformed and he looked young and boyish and even more irresistible than he had before.
She shook her head. Now that was the real world. Men like this laughed at girls like her, girls who wore glasses and never got their hair quite right and were a teensy bit overweight. Never mind that the brief spark of laughter lighting the darkness of his eyes was more seductive than…
“Chocolate,” he said, and a small ripple of laughter went through the crowd, which was beginning to drift away now that the car was evidently just going to sit there hissing and not blow up.
He didn’t join in the laughter, and she was sorry he wasn’t having a laugh at her expense. A good defense against a man like him would be pure, unadulterated hatred.
“And you are?” she demanded. She resisted an impulse to tug at her skirt, which suddenly seemed binding around her hips.
How much weight had she gained since her sister’s wedding? Seven and a half pounds, as if she didn’t know exactly. You would think a person would have to work at gaining that much weight in such a short period of time, but she had no idea how—
“Garner Blake.”
She closed her eyes, just briefly, praying for strength. This was the man she was going to be working for?
“Oh, no.” It slipped out.
“My sentiments exactly,” he said.
She opened her eyes and glared at him. “Then why am I here?”
“Because your father wanted you to be. And for the most part, it would seem that what Jake King wants, Jake King gets.”
That for the most part seemed loaded with satisfaction.
Her father had told her that he was part owner in an obscure little business called K & B Auto that needed an office manager for the summer. He had told her he wanted her to get a taste of the real world.
Of course, she’d been briefly offended that he didn’t think her world was real and that he did not understand she was rather overqualified to be an office manager. She would have said so, too, except she had heard something in his voice that had troubled her. His voice had lacked strength, and the tone of his words had been faintly pleading.
Her father had never asked anything of her. So many times she had wished he would. When her father had asked this of her, she had sensed there was history here, a story, perhaps even a secret, that went beyond the fact that this humble little garage in nowhere Virginia was where it had all started for him. Her logical mind had known she needed more details, but for once logic had fled her. Looking at the predicament she was in now, it had probably been an omen.
When she should have been asking important questions, all she had been thinking was finally her father had recognized her. Finally he was seeing, even in the smallest way, that she was an educated woman of sound business skill, not one of his little princesses. She had assumed he was trusting her with a business assignment for Auto Kingdom!
“You do need an office manager, don’t you?” she asked, and was annoyed to hear a little tremor of uncertainty in her voice.
He must have heard it, too, because he sighed, pushed a large, impatient hand through tousled locks and made an obvious effort to restrain his impatience.
“Lady, I am absolutely desperate for an office manager. It’s just that the job requires a little know-how. The type of training you don’t get at the debutante ball or out fox hunting with the hounds.”
She felt herself stiffen. As if she hadn’t been up against this kind of prejudice her whole life.
“You might be interested to know I’ve never attended a debutante ball,” she said sharply, “and I don’t ride horses.” Terrified of them, actually, though she was reluctant to admit weakness to this man.
Chelsea did the balls. Brandy did the horses. Had he mixed her up with one of her sisters?
“You get my drift,” he said.
Oh, yes, she did. Useless. Rich. Frivolous.
“I happen to have a master’s degree,” she said tightly.
She
