If You Dare (4 page)

Six hours. How the hell was he going to get her to lose now that she’d unmasked him? Maybe he could annoy her into giving up. His presence alone seemed enough to send her running for her car again.

“Since you insist on stealing Hawaii from me”—he paused to appreciate her flared nostrils—“you really should throw me a bone for the annual design dinner.”

She blinked. “Is that a sex joke?”

“What?” He thought back to what he’d said and chuckled. “No. That’s funny, though.”

Lily didn’t smile.

“What would it hurt if you went with me?” he asked. “You go every year anyway. You’re obviously not bringing Andrew.”

Hurt briefly crossed her features. “How do you know?”

“Are you?” The answer had better be no. If Marcus ever saw that dick again, he’d flatten him.

She examined her nails. “No.” She tossed her wavy strawberry hair and met his eyes. “Who are you bringing? Barbie or Bambi?”

Ah. Back on the clock. “Neither,” he answered truthfully.

“Why do you want to take me, anyway? It’s your big night. The last thing you need is me butting in while you’re bragging about how wonderful you are.”

The barb bounced off him. He’d like to take her because it’d be nice to share the spotlight with someone who knew what she was talking about. Schmoozing with his peers wasn’t on the very short list of things he was good at. “Believe me, after my speech—” Even the word made him start to sweat. He tugged his flannel off of his arms before grumbling, “I’ll gladly hide behind you.”

Lily watched him like she was working something out in her head. Crap. That head tilt made him nervous. He didn’t like being carefully examined by highly intelligent women.

“Marcus Black,” she finally said, her voice edged in mock sympathy.

He leaned away from her as if that might help him escape whatever she might say next.

She opened her mouth, her pretty lips bowing into a smile. “Are you…nervous?”

Chapter 6

Lily had intended to tease him with that question, but Marcus didn’t laugh it off or shoot another insult in her direction. Instead, he reached for her iPad and tapped the screen.

She watched his head-in-the-sand reaction with surprise. There was simply no way this confident, talented, alluring man was battling a case of nerves over an acceptance speech. All he had to do was say “thank you” and talk for a few minutes about how he became retail design’s golden boy. She’d have thought he’d lap up that kind of centered attention like a fat cat to cream. She couldn’t quite wrap her head around the idea of him insecure about addressing his colleagues. Addressing anyone.

Maybe his worry was due to lack of preparedness. “Do you have your speech memorized?”

He looked up from the tablet, eyebrows drawn, clearly offended. “Of course.”

“Well, let’s hear it.” Practicing aloud always helped her before a big presentation.

The corners of his mouth turned down for a second. He dropped the iPad on the mattress between them and licked his lips.

She thought he was going to turn her down until he said, “Okay. Fine.” He rolled his shoulders, cracked his knuckles, and wiped his brow.

“It’s a speech, Marcus. You’re not signaling me to throw a fastball.”

“I’m getting to it,” he grumbled, scratching the back of his neck. He scrubbed his chin and cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Cameron Design and my fellow colleagues, I’d like to—” He stopped. “What?”

“You’re frowning.”

His brow marred. “No, I’m not.”

“Are to.” She made a peace sign and separated where his eyebrows met over the center of his nose. The moment the pads of her fingers touched his skin, the air changed. She became aware of the heat rolling off him and seeping through her fingertips, of his whiskey-colored gaze meeting her wide-eyed stare. Of the supercharged air between them zapping like a live electric wire.

She snatched her hand away, hoping her shaking voice wouldn’t clue him in to her now-stuttering heart. “And speak slower. It might sound odd to your ears, but speaking calmly will put your audience at ease.” She intentionally slowed and softened her words. “And you’ll be more relaxed, too.”

She waited for him to argue or make fun, but he only blinked and watched her in the yellowish lantern light. “Thanks. That’s helpful.”

Being the recipient of his gratitude was new territory. She shook off the urge to blush…and decided to lighten the mood with a subject change. “What are you worried about, anyway? We’re not going anywhere if we don’t find my car keys.”

But the mention of their predicament made the smile on her face turn sickly. She had searched the bedding and bags surrounding them while Marcus chowed down on her food, but she’d found no sign of her missing keychain. It was like it had vanished into thin air.

“Just picture the audience in their underwear,” she said as she riffled again through her purse she’d hurriedly retrieved from outside.

“Will you be in the audience, Lil?” She snapped her head up to find Marcus leaning an elbow on one knee, a wry and damn sexy smile on his face. “Because if you’re in your underwear, I don’t think that’s going to help me focus on my speech.”

Her pulse raced against her throat and she had to work extra hard to be offended. “I mean…” She had to shut her eyes to recalibrate her brain. “What I meant was it’s easier to give a speech if you focus on talking to the people you know. Joanie or Clive…or me.” She returned to digging through her bag, reconsidering. “Or
not
me. Someone you like.”

“I like you.”

She twisted her lips to one side in a show of doubt.

“What?” He gave her a bemused smile. “I do.”

“Oh, okay.” She tossed her handbag aside. “That explains the plastic spiders you’ve been hiding in my desk since we made this bet. Let’s see, one in my paperclips, one on top of my monitor…one on the glass of my scanner.”

“I heard you scream from the other side of the building.” He grinned, still inordinately pleased with himself.

She shook her head. Always the prankster, he was a lot like having a bratty brother around. He dragged a hand through his cropped hair and chuckled, the flash of his white teeth offsetting the dark shadow of his jaw. Heat flushed her neck.

Maybe “brother” was a poor choice of word.

“I’m not exactly on your top-ten list, either,” he mumbled, leaning back on his forearms. The air-filled bed shifted, and Lily steadied herself with her hands. “Can’t even get you to act like my date at a company dinner without adding it to the stakes of a bet.”

Despite the easy smile on his face, he sounded almost hurt.

“I— It’s not that.” What was his angle, anyway? Why would he care if the stuffy redhead from work turned him down? His black book was likely thicker than both testaments of the King James Bible. “You’re the one who made it part of the bet rather than ask me outright.”

He pushed himself up and studied her intently. For a half second, she forgot to breathe. She wasn’t sure what gave him the sudden allure. The casual way he wore his hair, the mischievous spark in his dark eyes, or the way the lantern lit his face, making him look like a boy and a man at the same time.

“I asked you out before. You said you didn’t date your coworkers.”

True. “I don’t…but that was before…before I knew you.”

He watched her for a few long, sweaty seconds.

She tried not to fidget.

“Would you have said yes if I had asked you?”

“You mean if you asked…” She licked her dry lips. “Just…asked?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

He blew out a laugh.

“I respect our working relationship too much to risk it,” she blurted. She did respect him, but that wasn’t the full truth. The truth was she’d never considered that Marcus liked her, let alone
liked her
liked her. Sure, he’d asked her out when she’d first started working for Joanie and Clive, but she knew a player when she saw one. He’d been all cocky confidence and smooth charm…and yeah, drop-dead gorgeous. But she’d made the mistake before of being bagged by the guy at work who dated any and every female with two legs. And she’d been the brunt of the workplace rumors that’d come with the relationship. One look at Marcus and she knew that the dark-haired, sexy beast asked out every girl within earshot. Lily had guessed they all said yes. Every last one of them.

She chewed on the side of her lip, wondering if she’d made too many assumptions about him. Assumptions that had stuck despite evidence that refuted them. Like the fact that he hung out with Clive more than a girlfriend, or the fact that the women he’d brought to the RSD dinners didn’t seem like more than casual acquaintances. Huh. She hadn’t really thought about that before.

“You respect me. That’s a new one.” Marcus’s downturned eyes threw her off. Had she ever seen this man with anything less than 110 percent confidence?

“You don’t need me to get through the dinner anyway,” she said, almost laughing aloud at the idea of him “needing” her for anything at all. The man was talent squared. “Everyone attending knows you’re ten times the designer they are.” That was the truth, and so was the next thing she said. “And you’re twenty times the designer I am on my best day.”

Chapter 7

Marcus waited for the punch line, but nothing came.

Lily tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She had cute ears.

“Like on the London store,” she continued. “I sketched the interior of that building at least eighteen times, and I never once thought to position the POS stations throughout the store.”

He chuffed. “Yeah, innovative.”

“Exactly. It was.” She punctuated his knee with one finger.

The third time she’d touched him tonight. Interesting.

“I was being sarcastic.” Feeling uncharacteristically humble, he added, “Clive helped.”

She shook her head. “With the final layout. But he argued
for
the traditional placement of the cash registers lined up near the exit. You were the one who insisted that the customer would be more likely to make impulse purchases if he or she didn’t have to traipse to the front of the store to check out.”

He vaguely recalled the conversation she referenced. The discussion with Clive hadn’t been a heated one, and not one Lily should remember so vividly. Which meant she’d been paying attention to him, and he hadn’t even known. How about that? And here he thought all they had in common was that they disagreed on everything.

“You sound like you agree,” he said, intrigued by the new idea of them on the same side of an argument.

“I do.” She looked at her hands like she was embarrassed. Or maybe she wasn’t sure how to handle them on even ground. He could relate. Compliments weren’t their usual fare.

“While I praise you on your good taste,” he said, “I can’t take all the credit. The London account was won in the boardroom.” He could picture her standing there, her royal blue suit skimming over her curves, her hair pinned at the back of her head. She’d addressed Reginald with confidence, while maintaining a smile and including him in the presentation rather than talking at him. “You were amazing in there, Lil.”

“Oh. Um, thanks.” She tipped her chin and blinked, her long, sloping lashes hiding her light blue eyes ever so briefly. “That’s nice.”

“It’s true.”

Her eyes averted to his mouth, and she licked those soft pink lips. The look she pinned him with next absolutely stunned him. He took in her pursed lips, upturned chin, the way she was leaning toward him the slightest bit… He couldn’t believe it.

Lily McIntire wanted him to kiss her.

Since Marcus had wanted to kiss her since the day he met her, he was surprised to find his initial reaction was panic. Instead of closing his mouth over hers, he reacted like a kid with a grade school crush…and play-punched her in the shoulder.

“Hey, I have an idea.”
I’ll abruptly change the subject so I don’t maul you where you sit.
“You can, uh”—he scratched his neck and averted his eyes—“do my speech for me.” He shrugged and gave her a cocky smile. “You’ll be like a ghostwriter. Only you’ll be a ghost
speaker
.”

Wow. What a freaking reach. What was he so nervous about, anyway?
How about because the girl of your dreams is coming on to you?

Yeah, that’d do it.

The look of longing receded from her expression, and he could see her heart wasn’t in the smile she offered him. He was hit with the strongest twinge of regret.

She focused on winding the end of the blanket around her fingers. “Well, you earned the award, Marcus. I’m sure everyone there will be—”

A crash from the kitchen interrupted whatever good-intentioned compliment she’d been about to pay him. She scrambled away from the sound behind her and across the mattress, practically landing in his lap. Her grip on his left forearm was so tight, he’d begun to lose the feeling in his wrist.

She turned those wide eyes up to him. “What was that?” she asked in a hurried whisper.

What it
sounded like
was someone overturning a china cabinet and emptying teacups, dinner plates, and various place settings onto the worn wooden floor.

Marcus studied the dark doorway in front of them, now silent in the gloom. “I don’t know.” He rested a hand over both of hers and stood. “But I’m going to find out.”

She stood with him, releasing his arm and moving to hide behind him. He reached around and held her against him, keeping her at his back as he listened, his every sense on high alert. He could hear the wind blowing outside, the propane heater humming quietly at his feet, and Lily’s sharp, short breaths over his shoulder. Other than that, the house was still.

Lily’s phone chirped and she yipped, clutching the sides of his shirt with her fists. “Sorry.” She let go.

He turned and faced her. “Wait here.”

He meant to walk away, but he couldn’t move. The way her strawberry hair framed her cherubic face, the way her plush lips parted, was too tempting to leave behind just yet.

Marcus gripped her chin between his thumb and forefinger and placed a kiss on the center of her lips. “And calm down.”

…

Earth to Lily.

Marcus disappeared through the doorway of the massive kitchen to confront whomever or whatever was destroying Willow Mansion’s dishware. She knew there wasn’t a single breakable item in there, but she’d heard it too—the creak of the cabinet doors swinging open, the sound of china shattering into a zillion pieces.

It would make sense if she’d been standing there for several seconds, bathed in the low light of the lantern, terrified out of her mind. Either nonexistent breakables had been shattered or she was in need of a psychiatric evaluation.

But “terrified” wasn’t her reigning emotion. The predominant feeling was attraction, and it cloaked her in warmth despite the cobwebs and splintered boards at her back.

Marcus Black was an exceptional kisser. He had firm lips, the bottom one slightly larger than the top. His kiss was no more than a peck, but his mouth had hovered over hers long enough for her to conclude that wine tasted a lot better on his lips than from a red Solo cup.

Or maybe she was simply afraid. Fear and attraction had a lot of the same characteristics. The sweaty palms, the elevated heart rate.

Picturing Marcus naked.

Okay, maybe not that last one.

Marcus—not naked—appeared in the doorway so suddenly she had to blink him into focus. His face was drawn and shadowed, but her heart ratcheted up at the sight of him anyway, her eyes automatically locking onto those talented lips of his.

“Grab the Coleman.” His toneless voice snapped her out of her fantasy of being kissed again. “You’ve got to see this.”

She forced her feet forward, lifting the lantern and taking it with her to the adjoining room. He extinguished the small flashlight in his hand when she stepped over the threshold. Holding the lantern high, she swept the light over every corner of the room before turning it on him.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Right.” He relieved her of the lantern, his fingers brushing her bare skin and sending a trail of fiery awareness licking up her arm. “Don’t you find that strange?”

She started to answer, then realized he was referring more to the lack of broken dishes than the way his touch made her want to purr. Which he couldn’t possibly know about.
Thank God
.

“No,” she answered belatedly. “I find it fantastic.” Somehow the idea she’d hallucinated the sound—that they both had—was more reassuring than the alternative. Ducking her head into the sand wasn’t her normal habit, but this place was far from normal. And if she had a prayer of not losing her marbles while stuck here, she’d do well to pretend everything was a-okay. They both would.

He lapped the large kitchen one final time, his dark brows pinched. His boots stopped with a soft scuffing sound in front of her, then he lowered the lantern. She studied his brown eyes, choked by thick lashes, and his ink-colored hair tousled over his forehead in the yellowish light and remembered their first—and only—kiss. How he’d leaned in and taken her lips so confidently. She’d bet he did everything that way. Confidently.
Thoroughly
.

“Did you hear me?” he asked.

No. I was fantasizing about you.
“Uh, sorry. Zoned out.”

The side of his mouth kicked up, and Lily’s heart hammered into her ribs like machine-gun fire. “I asked if you wanted to go back to bed.” He waggled his eyebrows and tipped his head toward the living room. “With me.” He affected his best bad-boy rogue expression. Teasing her again.

He seemed content to ignore whatever they’d heard. Good. She could work with that.

She shook her head. “You’re impossible.”

“You can’t get enough of me,” he said as he followed her to the living room.

“You can’t get enough of yourself,” she grumbled over her shoulder, barely meaning it. She took her place back on the mattress.

Marcus set the lantern aside and arranged his big body on the bed next to her. He was quiet, studying the boards covering the windows in the living room. “You know,” he said. “There are a lot of old trees out there. I’m thinking the wind caught a big limb and brought it down.” He braced his arms around his knees. “Lucky it didn’t come through the roof and kill us.”

The sound they’d heard, as clearly as they both heard Marcus’s explanation now, was
not
a tree limb. Lily knew it. Marcus knew it. And she could see that he knew she knew it. But he was explaining it away, possibly for her benefit, and before her imagination could turn tail and run away with her on its heels.

Back at base camp, the sound merely an echo in her memory, it
was
easier to believe a story about felled tree branches. So she let herself believe. Denial was a powerful, powerful tool, and she had no problem using it to her advantage.

There was one thing she couldn’t deny, however. His insistence to return to the air mattress, to wait out the night with her. He was practically handing over what she had come here to win. Why not talk her into leaving? Why not create a panic and drag her from the house “for her own good”? Why would he sit here and…and…
protect
her when he had the most to lose?

Unless…

She gave him a coy smile. “I had no idea.”

He still studied the windows. “What’s that?”

“You’re a nice guy.”

Marcus didn’t move from his seated position, knees pulled up, arms wrapped around them, but he did turn his head and scrunch his brow in contention. “What?”

She nodded. So sure of her observation. “You leapt out of this room and put yourself in potential danger to protect me.”

“Whatever.” His fingers tapped a distressed rhythm against his jeans. “I
walked
into the kitchen to check for an ax murderer for me as much as I did it for you.”

She grinned. Sure he did. “You mean one carrying a plastic ax and wearing a hockey mask?”

He gave her a bland look. “Touché.”

“What was your plan, anyway? Send me running to my car, screaming down the hillside?”

“Basically.”

She shook her head. Maybe he wasn’t all that heroic after all. Yet she was attracted to him. Which could only mean one thing: Marcus didn’t have pheromones like normal men. He emitted something akin to a hallucinogenic drug.

The heater next to them chugged, whined, and died.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Lily hit the top. Hit the side. Switched the dials up then down.

“Is this the way you usually fix things? Just bang on them until they’re operational again?”

“Seems to work for the vending machine in the break room.”

He brushed her hands aside and inspected the heater. “This isn’t a glass box withholding your Mallomars.” The Coleman winked out next, plunging the room into darkness.

He swore.

She felt like swearing, too. “I just bought that!” she said instead.
So
not
the issue
. She flipped open the cover on her iPad and cast light onto Marcus’s face. It died next. Just went dark, when she knew she had 87 percent battery left.

“What the hell?” He snatched the iPad, and she heard him click the button ineffectually three times before blowing out a frustrated breath.

With the heater silent, the room black, there was only the sound of the wind pressing against the boarded windows keeping them company. Cold, howling wind.

“Marcus?” Her voice was a thin thread. She sounded scared. She didn’t care. She
was
scared.

“It’s okay.” His hand found her leg, and she clutched onto him. Marcus’s body shifted, and she heard the clatter of the exhausted Coleman as he slid it aside. He shoved the heater next before leaning to one side and digging in his pocket. He muttered a curse. “My phone’s dead.”

Her phone! Of course. She let go of his hand and felt blindly in the small space until she found her purse. After a few seconds of digging, she found her phone and pressed a button. Light flared between them. She examined the screen. “No signal. But we have light.”

He took her hand and directed the muted light around the bedding. His firm grip warmed her arm, distracting her from everything else but the feel of his skin against hers.

When he located the flashlight, he let her go. “Plenty of light,” he said, flicking it on then off. “Better save it.”

Their eyes met in the pale light emitting from her phone, and she felt the air shift between them, vibrating with a different kind of tension.

The sexy kind.

His throat worked as he swallowed. “We should go to the road,” he said, his voice low. “See if you can get a signal.”

She shook her head. “I have a bet to win. I’m not giving up because it’s dark.”

And she didn’t want to interrupt the heavy tension clinging to the blackness surrounding them. Despite the shadows pressing in on them from every angle, she felt like she was seeing Marcus clearly for the first time. Something told her he wasn’t as selfish and cocky as he pretended to be. It was the way he looked at her…the way his features softened when his eyes met hers.