The Misconception (3 page)

He much preferred driving, but, unfortunately, that wasn’t an option. Not only would it take too long, but it would look bad. Very bad. And one thing Jax Jackson hated to look was bad.

The plane finally skidded to a stop, causing everything he had drunk that day to slosh against the wall of his stomach before settling into an uneasy peace.

When he was certain the nausea-inducing flying machine was motionless, he got unsteadily to his feet. He made sure nobody was watching before he pinched his cheeks to restore his color. Then he smoothed down his suit pants with hands he wouldn’t allow to shake and got into the stream of passengers deboarding Flight 707.

“I hope your flight was enjoyable.” A pretty blond flight attendant caught and held his eyes when he reached the cockpit. He summoned a grin. She had legs like a dancer, and she’d found reasons to bend over in front of him often enough during the flight to make sure he noticed.

“It about made me want to sprout wings and take off myself,” Jax said, automatically reaching for her hand when she held it out. She pressed something into his palm.

“That’s not necessary.” Her eye contact never wavered. “We’re the ones who can make you soar.”

Somebody toting an overstuffed carry-on bag bumped into him, propelling Jax out the door and down the loading tunnel leading to the terminal. He breathed deeply, grateful he didn’t have to take another lungful of the recirculated stuff that passed for oxygen on the plane. He felt immediately better, but still wished he could stick his head outside a window for some fresh air.

A girl in her late teens wearing a fur jacket and a tight skirt her mama should have outlawed gave him a come-hither look over her shoulder. Not wanting to be rude, he inclined his head in a brief nod.

The piece of paper the blonde flight attendant slipped him was still in his hand. He unfolded it, revealing her name and telephone number. He stuffed it into his pocket along with the number the brunette working the flight had given him. Their names were Bunny and Loralei, which would work just fine had they been porno stars.

Considering the possibilities the names brought up, he figured he just might call one of them later. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t. Jax tried to separate business from pleasure, and this was a business trip.

He didn’t have to work until much later tonight, but he hadn’t gotten where he was by goofing off. He’d check into his hotel, load up on carbs during a quick lunch and hit the weight machines for a couple of hours.

By the time he had his itinerary planned, he was inside the terminal. He bypassed the airline employee dispensing information on connecting flights and was heading for baggage claim when a name on a sign stopped him.

Harold McGinty
.

He’d forgotten all about breaking the news to Mac’s mystery woman that Mac was standing her up. Why had he said he’d do it anyway? It wasn’t possible to be thought of as one of the good guys while delivering bad news.

He took a few steps toward the sign, figuring he might as well get it over with. The woman holding it shifted positions, giving him a clear view of her.

The first thing he noticed was her dress, if you could call it that. It hung off her like a muted-plaid sack, stretching nearly to the floor and covering all but her ankles. Her hair, which was some shade between blond and brown, was secured in a loose bun at the back of her head, as though she couldn’t be bothered with it.

Her face was in profile, revealing a longish nose, a small chin and full, unpainted lips that told him she didn’t have much use for makeup. She turned to look at him with eyes of an indeterminate color — Were they hazel? Gray? Brown? — and her jaw dropped. Then those kaleidoscopic eyes rolled.

She wasn’t what you’d call pretty. Despite that fabulous mouth, her face was too stern, and perhaps a little too narrow. She was also too pale, as though she didn’t spend any time in the sun, and she was neither model tall nor pixie short. He couldn’t really tell because of the dress, but her curves seemed neither particularly lacking nor especially rounded.

“You must be Rhea.” He walked toward her, surprised at the direction his mind was taking. He wondered what her body looked like under that sack, how her hair would appear if she let it down, what color her eyes turned when she was turned on.

A long moment passed before she nodded, and it seemed as though she had to force her head into the motion. Surprise, tinged by dejection, gripped Jax. It had been a long time since a woman looked at him as though she didn’t like what she saw.

“Don’t tell me
you’re
Harold McGinty.”Her voice wasn’t throaty. She didn’t purr or linger sexily over the words. If anything, she sounded disappointed. And more than a little nervous.

“Actually, people call me Jax.” He gave a half bow, hoping to put her at ease, hoping to make her like him. “At your service.”

She muttered something that sounded like, “You got that part right,” but he couldn’t be sure because her heavy sigh distracted him. She crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head, making him think he’d misread her and she wasn’t nervous at all.

“Oh, well.” She heaved another sigh. “I suppose you’ll have to suffice, Harold.”

“Jax,” he corrected automatically. “And, what do you mean, I’ll have to suffice? What’s wrong with me?”

Her eyes dropped to his size-fourteen feet, lifted to somewhere in the vicinity of his trouser front and widened. She closed her eyes briefly before bringing them back to his face. “You’re substantially, uh,
bigger
than I imagined you’d be, Harold.”

“Jax,” he corrected again. He had the fleeting impression she was sizing up his penis, but surely that wasn’t correct. She must be referring to his considerable height, making it clear that she preferred short men. Like the real Harold McGinty. “I’ve never found how big I am to be a problem.”

“Here’s hoping it’s not this time, either,” she said, and again he got the fleeting impression that she was nervous. Then she squared her shoulders and gave the sign an authoritative toss into a garbage can before picking up a long, dark coat from a nearby chair. She barely glanced in his direction. “Shall we go?”

He stared at her, puzzled by her attitude. She thought they were going on a blind date, for cripe’s sake. She should at least want to impress him just a little. But, so far, all she’d done is make it clear that
he
didn’t impress
her
.

It was downright insulting, is what it was.

“Harold? Are you coming?”

Harold
. She thought she was going on a blind date with Harold McGinty, not with Jax Jackson. If Harold had showed up instead of him, would her delectable mouth have curved into the smile of welcome she hadn’t bothered to give Jax?

“Harold?”

He should tell her he wasn’t Harold McGinty right now. He had a hotel to check into, weights to lift, a schedule to keep. He should forget the way his libido had hummed when he’d seen her standing there in her sack cloth. It had probably been a fluke, anyway.

His gaze snagged on her pouty, unpainted mouth. She had the kind of full, wide lips that didn’t need lipstick to look rosy. They got a man to thinking of running his tongue over them before kissing her senseless. Of pressing her down into a mattress and begging her to use that mouth to do erotic things to him.

“Well?” She tapped her foot, drawing his attention to her ankle. Her very nicely shaped ankle.

“I’m coming,” he said, making the snap decision. By the end of the blind date, he bet he could have her looking at him with something more than disappointment. Guilt over his deception bloomed within him, but he squashed it. What possible harm could it do? He deliberately gave Rhea the slow smile he’d been told could charm the habit off a nun. The corners of her mouth didn’t even lift. “But only if you promise to call me Jax.”

“I’ll call you whatever you want,” she muttered, “as long as you deliver.”

Before Jax could figure out what she meant by that, she strode away. His eyes dropped to her rear, but she didn’t call attention to it with the exaggerated hip roll that he was so used to from women.

Wondering why he found that sexy, he picked up his bags and followed her.

Chapter 3

The man named Harold who wanted to be called Jax had been talking non-stop since they’d gotten into her rental car, gaining high marks for verbal acuity and making Marietta wonder when she’d ever met a more talkative man. He launched into a joke about a skeleton who came into a bar and asked for a beer and a mop, and she had her answer: Never.

“You didn’t laugh,” he said, making it sound like an accusation.

“Maybe I didn’t think it was funny,” she replied, which he took as an invitation to tell another joke, this time about a dyslexic devil worshiper who sold his soul to Santa.

“You’re still not laughing,” he said.

Marietta managed to make her lips curve marginally upward. She’d been only half-listening, partly because she was concentrating on navigating the streets of Washington D.C. but mostly to avoid questioning whether she had the nerve to go through with her plan. She had to go through with it, because he was the perfect candidate.

He had an IQ of 145, which put him in the top one percent of the population. He came from such excellent stock that nobody on his family tree had ever been felled by cancer, heart disease or diabetes. He had 20-15 vision in both eyes, not to mention a professional job as a biochemist.

Any mother-to-be would be lucky to have access to his genetic material.

But who would have thought Harold McGinty would be so hot? Especially because, in rebellion to a beauty-obsessed society, she’d stated in her ad that looks didn’t matter? She’d been expecting somebody with a less-than-stellar appearance, not the living reproduction of the Statue of David.

She thought about what Michelangelo’s statue wasn’t wearing, and what Jax wouldn’t be wearing when she got him to the hotel room, and fought off an attack of anxiety. The bad kind.

“. . . and the bartender said,” Jax continued, as though she’d been paying close attention to the first part of his joke, “‘We don’t get many fire-breathing dragons around these parts.’ ‘At these prices,’ the dragon replied, ‘It’s no wonder.’”

Jax laughed at the punch line, telling Marietta she’d missed something. Then again, as bad as his jokes were, maybe she hadn’t. Taking her mind off his naked skin, she pulled her rental car under the impressive awning of what was arguably the fanciest hotel in D.C.

“Geez, you’re like a laugh miser,” Jax said when he stopped chuckling. “Don’t you ever just let loose?”

She turned off the engine and removed the valet key from the ring. “I’m not prone to laughter.”

“This should be interesting,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “because I’m not prone to being serious.”

“Nice place,” he commented, his gaze drinking in the elaborate Tudor facade of the Hotel Grande. “I take it this hotel has a grand restaurant?”

She turned to look at him, and her heart gave an extra ba-boom. Dismaying, but not surprising. From her position as a biology professor at prestigious Kennedy College in Washington D.C., she had carved out a reputation as a national authority on the evolution of sex. She knew, from her vast warehouse of biological facts, that the reason she found his face attractive was because of its outstanding symmetry.

His heavily lashed chocolate-colored eyes, shaded by matching brows that arched at exactly the right degree, were mirror images of each other. The halves of his strong nose and sensuously slanted mouth couldn’t have been more alike. His right cheekbone was at the same, lofty height as his left. The tip of his nose was lined up in the dead center of his square jaw.

Her subconscious, Marietta realized, had concluded those perfectly matched features meant he was a man better able to weather environmental hazards than his asymmetric brothers. That kind of subliminal thinking was a relic from the days man had spent in a hunter/gatherer society, but still packed a powerful punch.

Jax’s equally proportioned brows rose. “Rhea?”

Rhea
. Who was Rhea?

“Rhea,” he repeated, and it belatedly occurred to Marietta that
she
was Rhea. “Does this hotel have a good restaurant?”

“I’m quite sure it does.” Marietta snapped out of the trance his symmetry had caused and got out of the car. A valet rushed to her side, and she handed him her key.

“If you need help with your baggage,” the valet said in clipped, polite tones practiced by hotel staff the world over, “our staff will be happy to assist you.”

Marietta cleared her throat. She was an able woman with vast reserves of strength and intelligence. She needed to stop dwelling on naked skin and symmetrical features and take control of the situation.

“I checked in earlier. Room 414. Please have the gentleman’s bags delivered there,” she told the valet before Jax unfolded his long length, his very long length, from the car. Jax didn’t even turn his head as the valet walked over to the bell captain to deliver her message.