they certainly didn’t have sexual fantasies about a woman who could take apart a carburetor and put it back together with no pieces left over. They didn’t want to take her to bed and make hot sweet love to her. They didn’t want to set a wedding date.
It didn’t even occur to them. To him. To Carson.
So she needed help. She needed to get his attention. To appeal to him on the same basic elemental level that Syd had appealed to Hugh. She needed to become a sexy, alluring woman.
Something of a stretch, she thought grimly, when she was generally covered in motor oil and wearing her brother Hugh’s T-shirts and steel-toed boots.
But she was willing to work. She just didn’t know where to start.
Or she hadn’t.
Until last night.
Last night she’d gone to the Grouper, the island’s most “happening” watering hole and had sat at one of the tables by the wall, watching the “happenings”—all the flirting and teasing and male-female innuendo stuff—trying to get an idea of how to do it. From a distance she didn’t have a clue.
All she’d seen was who was at the center of it all—Joaquin Santiago.
Of course.
Molly grappled with the carburetor a little more fiercely than was absolutely necessary, her jaw bunching as she remembered the moment the idea had entered her head.
She’d been sipping a beer and watching God’s gift to women, until recently one of Spain’s most important exports to the soccer world, Joaquin Santiago, assessing the females who were attempting to charm him. An accident had ended his career just months ago, and according to her other brother, Lachlan, he was still feeling the effects of it. Molly, watching him, couldn’t see it had left any lasting effects at all.
It certainly hadn’t done anything to dim his legendary appeal—or charm.
He smiled at this one, chatted with that one, flirted with them, one and all. And then something happened. One woman appeared to catch his attention. Molly saw him straighten, zero in. His wicked grin flashed. The devil-may-care glint in his eye was evident clear across the room as he focused on that one woman and cut her out of the crowd.
Like a cutting horse with a cow, Molly thought, having seen some Texans doing exactly that last weekend on the television.
As Molly watched, Joaquin’s gaze locked with the woman’s. They’d smiled. Flirted. They’d moved closer together as they talked. The others didn’t leave, but it became clear they were a couple. Joaquin’s hand lifted as he gestured. The grin flashed again, and when his hand came down it was on the woman’s arm. She moved in closer.
Molly watched intently. Two tourists moved between her and the unfolding drama. She leaned sideways, practically tipping off the bar stool to get a better look. But it wasn’t fifteen minutes until Joaquin and that night’s conquest—or had she conquered him? Molly wondered—left the bar together.
Back to the Moonstone, undoubtedly, where she would share his bed.
Molly gave the wrench a vicious twist, and the nut came off and clanked to the floor. “Damn it!”
She scrabbled after it. Got it. Then pulled back and came up too soon, banged her head. She saw stars—and a vision of Joaquin with last night’s blonde in his arms.
The night before that it had been a brunette. In the last week, Molly could recall half a dozen women she’d seen him with. Obviously, the man was a sex god.
But just as obviously, the women had something, too. What?
What caused a man to single one out? Hone in on her?
Want her?
Ask him, her idiot brain had suggested. Right there in the middle of the Grouper the notion had come to her, and had almost knocked her on her butt.
Yeah, right, she’d countered her own idiocy. Just walk up to the playboy of the Western World and ask him what he finds appealing about any given woman.
For him they only had to be breathing.
But even as she thought it, she knew it wasn’t true. Joaquin had standards. He had his pick of women, and he only chose certain ones.
“I’d take his leftovers,” Hugh had said once in his pre-Syd days.
Ask him, the voice persisted.
Molly snorted again, just thinking about it. Joaquin Santiago didn’t even know she was alive.
Well, he knew. He was one of her brother Lachlan’s best friends in the world. He’d been in and out of her life ever since he and Lachlan had played soccer together in Italy when he was nineteen. Years later he’d come to Lachlan’s wedding and to Hugh’s, bringing a different, equally gorgeous, French model to each. He’d been charming to everyone, even Molly, giving her a taste of the Santiago charm as he’d asked to be introduced.
“Introduced?” Hugh had goggled. “That’s Molly! In a dress.”
It had been almost funny to see the unflappably debonair Santiago looking momentarily nonplussed as he’d had to admit he hadn’t recognized Lachlan’s sister wearing one of her friend Carin Campbell’s outfits.
“Dab a little engine grease on your nose, Mol’,” Hugh had suggested cheerfully. “Then he’ll know you.”
“Shut up.” She’d laughed because she hadn’t cared what the likes of a playboy like Joaquin Santiago thought of her. Still didn’t.
She’d refused to dance with him then. She didn’t want to talk to him now. But clearly he knew what men found sexy and alluring in a woman. He knew what made a man sit up and take notice. He knew what made him sit up and take notice.
Ask him, that irritating little voice in her head plagued her again.
But still she resisted. It would be too awful, too humiliating. How girly was it to admit you didn’t even know how to act like a girl? Molly shuddered at the thought. She hated admitting any weakness. She’d spent her life determined to keep up with her two older brothers, and damn it, she had. Anything they could do, she could do better.
Almost.
There were some things, she was beginning to realize, that they would never have to do, blast their miserable hides.
She finished disassembling the carburetor and plunked the pieces in a pan of cleaner to soak. Surely she could come up with a better idea before Carson came home again.
It wasn’t like he would be here anytime soon. She had assumed he would come to the Pelican Cay Homecoming Festival this month. It was going to be a big deal. It had been Syd’s idea almost from the start. Working with Lachlan and Lord David Grantham, she had come up with a way of bringing ex-islanders home and enticing tourists to the island for a weekend of fun and revelry. Everyone on the island had got behind the plan, and Molly had thought Carson’s return would be a given. But when she’d mentioned it, he’d shaken his head.
“Can’t. Got to go to Ireland.”
She’d
