looked like herself. On the contrary, she’d looked…pretty. Sexy.
Approachable. For once.
His mistake.
He’d felt foolish for not realizing who she was, but he’d got past it and had attempted to redeem himself by asking her to dance.
“Dance?” She’d stared at him, sounding incredulous. “With you?”
“I don’t normally ask women to dance with someone else,” he’d said stiffly.
She’d laughed, but it had been a forced laugh. And then she’d shaken her head. “Well, thanks, but no thanks. Don’t put yourself out.” And she’d turned away to talk to someone else!
Cheeky brat.
And the only woman who had ever turned him down.
Not that he gave a damn. There were far more fish in the sea. He hadn’t spared her another thought. And he’d barely seen her since he’d been back. Oh, maybe they’d been in the same social gathering a handful of times because he was Lachlan’s friend and she was Lachlan’s sister.
But she was usually far too preoccupied with her engines even to deign to speak to him. And he had no desire to talk to her. He considered ignoring her now. And he might have, but at the moment even grubby tomboy Molly McGillivray was more welcome than his own dark thoughts.
“What are you doing over there?” he asked her.
“Suzette asked me to put some flowers in the room.”
Lachlan’s office manager and second in command, was all spit-and-polish efficiency. Joaquin couldn’t imagine she’d let Molly—wearing her grimy work shorts, faded orange T-shirt, and oil-streaked bandanna wrapped around her forehead to tame a riot of coppery curls—anywhere near one of the Moonstone’s pristine guest rooms. “Good thing she didn’t ask you to bring clean towels.” He grinned at the flash of green fire in Molly’s eyes, then when something else seemed to flicker in them, he added, “Lo siento. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t see Suzette sending you like—” he waved a hand in the direction of her grease-stained clothes “—that.”
“I was coming up, anyway,” Molly said stiffly.
“Oh.” He expected she’d do whatever it was she’d come up for and leave, but she didn’t. She stood there, so deep in thought she was making faces as she stared at him.
He frowned. “What?”
“Nothing.” She hesitated, then glanced toward the door that led from his balcony into his room. “Is she gone?”
“Is who gone?”
“The flavor of the night. Whoever you brought back with you last night.”
Joaquin stared at her. “What do you know about who I brought back with me last night?” he asked.
In point of fact he hadn’t brought anyone back. He’d considered it. He’d even gone so far as to leave the Grouper with a pretty blonde tourist from Germany. But she’d giggled too much. He’d walked on the beach with her, then remembered a “pressing phone call” he needed to wait for. She’d offered to wait with him, “to keep him busy while he was waiting,” she’d said with several more giggles. But he’d declined.
“I don’t know anything about her,” Molly said. “I just didn’t want her to come waltzing out in the middle of—” she broke off.
Joaquin lifted a brow. “In the middle of…?” He gave her an expectant look.
She made more faces. Then she shifted from one foot to the other and seemed to almost balance on her toes. She reminded him of Lachlan poised in goal, anticipating, ready.
For what?
No clue. She seemed to be poised on the brink of some great statement which she somehow couldn’t manage to get out. Well, if it had anything to do with disapproval of how he lived his life, she could take her opinions and stuff them!
“I need to talk to you,” she blurted at last. Her face was red, and not entirely from the sun, Joaquin didn’t think. Curious.
“Talk to me? About what?”
More faces. She balled her fingers into fists. “It’s complicated,” she said at last. She didn’t look at him.
“Complicated how?”
“Look,” she said fiercely with another suspicious glance at the door. “Is she in there or not?”
“There’s no one in my room,” Joaquin told her. He rose lazily and stood looking at her. “So if you’d like to go in…” he added, his voice laced with a lazy teasing innuendo.
If she could make innuendoes about his love life, he could do the same about hers.
“No!” She gulped air. “I don’t. I need—” She stopped again and looked almost anguished.
He’d never seen Molly McGillivray anguished. She’d always been cheerful and blunt and basically a sort of no-nonsense girl. “Is something wrong?” he asked her.
“No.” She took a breath. “I just…have a proposition for you.”
His eyes widened. “A proposition?”
What the hell did that mean?
“A business proposition,” Molly said. Her voice sounded raspy and she licked her lips as if they were parched. She looked hot. The Caribbean sun was baking.
“Why don’t you come over and sit down and tell me what you have in mind,” Joaquin said. Before you faint and fall off the damn balcony.
“I—all right.” She scrambled over the railing to his balcony, leaving a couple of greasy fingerprints on the white paint.
“Sit down,” Joaquin said. If she had engine grease on the seat of her shorts that was Lachlan’s problem. She was his sister, after all. “Do you want something to drink? Beer? A glass of wine? A soda?” There was a small but well-stocked refrigerator in his room.
“A beer,” Molly decided abruptly.
And before he could make a move to get one for her, she darted past him into his room and got one herself! Actually she got two and handed one to him.
“Thank you,” he said, deadpan.
She gave a jerky little nod. “My pleasure. Well, Lachlan’s actually,” she corrected herself. She twisted the cap off the beer as she paced around the small balcony, still not looking his way.
Joaquin watched, not speaking as she stopped with her back to him and stared out across the beach. Then she tipped her head back and took a long gulp of the beer before squaring narrow shoulders and turning to face him.
“I want to hire you,” she said.
“Hire me?” His gaze narrowed. He didn’t know the first thing about engines. Wasn’t
