He muttered an oath, grabbed Maggie’s hand and pulled her into the men’s store.
“Good decision,” she said as he turned to see the woman glance in his direction. “They have very nice things in here.”
What was she doing home from college? Nick wondered, his gaze fixed on the huge plate-glass window, on the young woman and her searching eyes.
He dropped to the floor behind a rack of pants.
“What on earth are you doing down there, Nick?” Maggie asked as she peeked around the rack and looked down at him.
“Looking for the lowest prices,” he muttered, pulling apart several pairs of pants to get a better view. She was still there.
Maggie stared at him, questions behind her eyes, then she began to laugh. “I had no idea you had a sense of humor, Nick,” she said, hunkering down on the ground next to him. “That’s going to be a big plus with the ladies.”
Yeah, right. He was a regular Jim Carrey, he mused as his gaze flickered to the store’s entrance. The woman was gone. Relief swept over him.
“We can get up…” His words petered out and he stayed where he was. Maggie was close, inches away, her sweet scent impaling his senses.
Under the soft lights, beside a mess of pressed pants, she smiled at him again, her eyes still glowing with laughter. At that moment he would’ve worn a sweater vest if she’d asked him to.
And for Nick Kaplan—a man who hadn’t worn a sweater since the third grade—that realization meant he was headed for trouble.
Three
Look No Further. The Girl Of Your Dreams Could Be Right Under Your Nose.
Rock music blared throughout the fashionable salon, making it hard for Maggie to concentrate on her continuing struggles with slogan writing. She glanced around the lobby with its bottles of expensive shampoo and styling gels, wondering if anyone else felt that the music was just a bit too loud. Behind the front desk, the cherry-tinted receptionist was practically shouting into the phone, and the older woman sitting next to Maggie was ripping up a tissue and stuffing the pieces into her ears.
Oh, good. I’m not going crazy.
She’d certainly wondered at that possibility after Nick’s spur-of-the-moment price check on the floor of the store. But at least in all the craziness she’d gotten him to buy three pairs of nice pants and a couple of shirts.
His playfulness had surprised her. The big, bad biker had a silly streak, and she found it immensely attractive.
Maggie glanced at the clock on the salon wall. Nick had been in with Domingo for more than an hour and a half. The two men were probably at war behind those double doors. It wouldn’t be much of a shocker after the touch-me-again-and-you-die glare that Nick had sent the bald hairstylist when he’d taken one look at Nick and exclaimed, “Now, aren’t you a handsome one.”
Laughter bubbled in Maggie’s throat. Mr. Masculinity vs. Mr. Clean. This project was going to be some fun.
“Miss Conner?” Domingo’s assistant stood directly in front of her, but because the music was so loud, she looked as if she was mouthing the query.
Maggie nodded, not willing to shout.
“Domingo is just finishing up with your friend.” The blaring rock song ended abruptly and a soft ballad took its place. “He’ll be out in a minute.” The girl winked. “He’s really something.”
Maggie stared after the girl. What in the world did that mean? He was something? Stashing her pen and pad of paper in her purse, she stood up and hustled to the front to pay.
“Mr. Kaplan already took care of it,” the cherry-haired receptionist informed her.
“He did?”
“Yes, I did,” came his smooth baritone from behind her. “I told you I would.”
She turned sharply, then froze where she stood. Every word of “this project is going to be some fun” melted like a Popsicle on a hot day. Nick Kaplan looked like a sexy rebel out of a men’s fashion magazine. He still wore his faded jeans, but he’d put on one of the white shirts they’d picked out that afternoon. He looked like a different man, yet not quite.
Her pulse pounded like a steel drum, and she wondered if everyone could hear it, even the lady with the tissue in her ears. Surely they could see her face, her eyes, as she took in the transformation of her drop-dead-gorgeous roommate.
Clean shaven, he had a stubborn, confident face that had seen sun and wind, had confronted them head-on. Like he did all challenges, she imagined. His hair had been cut short—but not too short. The chestnut waves licked the edges of his white collar, while the same maple-colored hair on his chest peeked out from the vee. And when her gaze trailed reluctantly upward, she found him staring at her, his green eyes blazing a wild streak, daring her to say something.
No doubt about it, he was still the same bad boy who had walked into her office that morning. He was just a stylized one.
“Satisfied?” he asked.
Her throat went dry as cotton. “What?”
“Well, you did this to me,” he said on a chuckle. “Do I look fine, or what?”
You are about the finest looking man I’ve ever seen, she wanted to say, but the Sahara had replaced the cotton in her throat and she wasn’t doing much talking. She looked around her. Did Nick have any idea that every woman in the salon was staring at him, their eyes filled with longing?
And she had to go home with this Greek god.
Maggie groaned inwardly. What had she done? What in the world had made her believe that she could continue being unaffected by men when someone like Nick Kaplan walked the planet?
He cast her one of those squinty, hooded, James Dean looks. “So this is it, Maggie? No more fixing? No tattoo or scar removals planned?”
“You have a tattoo?” she asked without thinking.
“Yeah.”
She couldn’t help herself. “Where is it?”
He raised an amused brow at her.
Maggie could actually feel every woman in the place lean forward in their chairs, their ears pricking up to hear Nick’s answer to her intimate query. And out of the corner of her eye she saw the older woman she’d sat next to earlier remove the tissue from her ears.
“We should go,” she said. For some reason she didn’t like all the ogling that was going on. And, interestingly enough, she really didn’t want any of these women to know where his tattoo was.
She waited for Nick to give the ladies behind the counter a smile and a quick thank-you before he followed her out of the salon. Covetous stares trailed him as they walked through the mall and out the exit doors, heading for the parking lot.
Nick’s motorcycle was parked on the first
