recalled his conversation with Garner. Hadn’t he heard the stamp of Simon’s own resolve in that young man’s strong, confident voice? Yes. And he’d heard more. A fierceness of spirit that reminded him of who he himself, Jake King, had once been. Plus, that love of cars, passed to Garner straight from Simon.
Jessie’s love of cars remained, too, under all that intellectual frou-frou.
Jessie and Simon’s grandson. Was it possible? Could Jake repair his mistakes of the past and manipulate his daughter’s future in one fell swoop? A shiver traveled the length of his spine.
Perhaps the gods would take pity on a man with so much to do, and so little time left. He snorted. This kind of thought had to be contained, or next he would be consulting his daily horoscope and reading crystals to find direction.
Of course, where he was going, who was to say where the direction would come from? Perhaps hunch and instinct and all those nebulous things came from heaven’s door. Meanwhile, he had a lot of homework to do on Mr. Garner Blake before Jake would cross the young man’s path with that of his beloved Jessie.
Reluctantly, he passed the baby back to Sarah. “Tell James I need to talk to Cameron McPherson, at once.”
Did she color at the mention of that name? Ah, yes, he recalled. She had danced with Cameron at the wedding. He saw the longing flash through her eyes. Too bad it wouldn’t be so easy with Jessie.
Three days later, with a thick folder in front of him, Jake redialed that number in Farewell, Virginia. He knew everything there was to know about Garner Blake. And he liked what he had found out. Garner was tough, but innately decent. What was best about his grandfather had survived in him. He had been nominated Citizen of the Year by the town of Farewell, and Jake’s sources told him Blake would win.
He let none of what he was feeling—excitement and hope—show in his voice. Instead, Jake King informed Garner Blake, coldly, that his daughter would be coming to work at K & B Auto for the summer, to fill the long-vacant position of office manager.
“Have you been spying on me?” Garner asked, his voice hard and incredulous.
Jake chose not to answer. Instead, he reminded Garner that he owned half the business and was, according to the legal documents he was looking at, entitled to hire and fire employees.
There was the faintest veiled threat in his statement. He knew from the dossier in front of him that Garner Blake hired good men to work for him and he was intensely loyal to each of them. Jake also knew one of those men had just had a baby, another had just bought a home. They were men who needed their jobs.
There was a long silence on the other end of the line.
Then Garner said, “Is this about the car?”
“If it was, would you change your mind?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Jake hung up the phone thoughtfully. He hadn’t broken it to Jessie that he’d found her a summer job. He had a feeling she wasn’t going to be any happier about the arrangement than Garner Blake was.
She had just completed a master’s degree in science and she was contemplating beginning her Ph.D. She was brilliant and academically successful and she wasn’t going to want to work the front counter of an auto repair shop.
She could refuse. But he doubted she would. If he was dealing with her younger sister, Chelsea, he would have to threaten the trust fund, the allowance, the car and the credit cards. But Jessie was not Chelsea. She had always wanted to please him. He recalled, affectionately, the soft worry in her green eyes when she looked at him, even as a child.
Despite his treachery in playing with his unsuspecting daughter’s well-ordered life, he decided to call her immediately and smiled when he heard her voice on the other end of the phone. It was all for the greater good, after all.
Chapter One
The wedding gown was designed by Dior. The bride was slender and radiant. Her bouquet held pure white French Lace floribunda roses, flown in from Oregon.
The groom waited at the end of the aisle. He was turning toward her—
The daydream ended with a bang. Literally.
Jessica King’s head flew forward and hit the steering wheel. After a stunned moment, she stared at the crumpled hood of the car she had rented earlier this morning after flying into Harrisonburg, Virginia. Beyond the damaged front of the car was the parking meter she had hit, and beyond that was the rather dingy cream stucco storefront of K & B Auto.
Steam hissed out of the hood of her damaged Cadillac, and a small crowd began to gather.
“That’s what dreaming will get you,” Jessie admonished herself.
Embarrassed rather than hurt, Jessie took a deep breath and stepped from the car. Emerging from the air-conditioning into the steamy heat of an early-summer morning took her by surprise. But not as much as being watched by half a dozen or so people, their interest in her unabashed. There was really nothing she hated quite so much as being the center of attention.
Odd then that she had been imagining her wedding day instead of paying attention to what she was doing. Was there a day where a person was more the center of attention than that one? Of the King girls, she was the practical one, the pragmatic one, the nondreamer.
“For good reason,” she muttered, surveying the damage to the car. It had been a beautiful car, undeserving of her carelessness.
She was not a careless person! Not the least ditzy! And yet, after overcoming her initial surprise at Mitch’s announcement of their engagement at her sister’s wedding only two weeks ago, she was astonished to find a romantic hidden within herself, a romantic who simply could not get enough of daydreaming about every detail of her big day.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled to the onlookers. “I just didn’t see the meter. Over the hood. I don’t usually drive a car with such a large hood…”
Her voice trailed off as the front door of K & B Auto swung open and a man emerged.
The last residue of her wedding fantasy faded.
Her entire former life faded.
The man had huge and undeniable presence. He was big, six feet or better, and every inch of that frame was muscular and spare. She could see power in every line of him, from the way his faded jeans clung to the large muscles in his thigh to the way the short-sleeved white T-shirt hugged the hard curve of a bicep and the washboard smoothness of his stomach. His hair was as dark as devil’s food cake, a little too long at the collar. His facial features were clean and chiseled, but the hardness in the line of his body was repeated in the stamp of his face—in the faint whisker-roughness of cheekbones and chin, in dark slashes of brows arrowing downward, in the line of lips that appeared stern and forbidding. How was it that the fullness of those lips made him sensual in a way that overrode his obvious ill temper? His eyes were animal dark, brown bordering on black, and a light snapped in them that was fierce, frightening, compelling.
He pushed through the small gathering and stood before her.
“Are
