Melting the Millionaire's Heart (4 page)

“And he had a hard time in the public schools?”

“In a rural area like this, the schools didn’t accommodate special needs that well. By the third grade, Jake struggled just to make it through a day. Mom gave up and pulled him out to homeschool him. She decided if she was going to teach him, she’d do the same to me. She did a great job with both of us. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized how hard it must have been on her.”

“You were homeschooled?”

“After the age of ten, yeah. Never went to college, either. I started my own business when I was eighteen. It was the only way I could make a good living without having to explain to some suit why I hadn’t gone to college.”

“You seem to have done all right for yourself,” she said, looking around the room. “You have a lovely home.”

“Thanks. And yeah, my business has done okay. It allows me to pay for support services for my brother now, which is important to me.”

“You sound like a good brother. And I admire you for doing your own thing. I would never have had the nerve to start a business that young.”

“When you’re eighteen, you think you can do anything.” He pulled her hot dog off of the skewer and wrapped it in bread, handing it to her with a flourish. “Your dinner, madam.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The first bite burst on her tongue in an explosion of smoky, greasy flavor.

“Oh, my God, this is so good,” she said around a bite of bread and meat.

He laughed. “All that rapture for a hot dog? You’re easily impressed. My favorite quality in a girl.”

She swatted him on the shoulder. “Lucky for you.”

He readied his own hot dog and took a bite. He savored the morsel and then swallowed it down. The muscles of his throat worked, stubbled skin gleaming in the firelight. Damn, but it was so erotic. She nearly dropped her own hot dog when he wiped his gleaming lip. Her body melted at the sight. “Oh, God, that was good,” he said. The sight of an Adam’s apple had never particularly turned her crank before. She wanted to reach out and stroke it where it bobbed in his throat when he swallowed. Would that be weird?

Yeah, probably so. She’d try a subtler approach. “See, I’m not easily impressed. I’m just an excellent judge of a good wiener.”

He nearly choked with laughter.

Okay, so that hadn’t been subtle either. She’d never been good at flirtation, but he didn’t seem to mind. Every laugh they shared, every glance, every touch, made her want him more and more.

As much as she wanted him, she couldn’t completely shake her doubts. She didn’t want a boyfriend right now. Boyfriends lied to you, and left you, and made you cry when they loved someone else the way they said they’d never love anyone. Maybe Carolyn was right. Maybe she just had to make up her mind that she could do this, and presto.

She took another bite. “Mmm.” She let her tongue slip out to catch a stray crumb from her upper lip.

“Are you flirting with me?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

A dimple appeared in his left cheek. Whoa, he was adorable. If her mother hadn’t raised her right, she’d be tempted to lean forward right now and explore that cute little indentation with the tip of her tongue. Maybe she would, later—she couldn’t rule it out.

She finished off her hot dog. Should she have another? No, the s’mores beckoned. “I’ll do the honors for dessert. I’ll have you know I’m a s’mores expert.” She stuck a couple of big marshmallows on the end of her skewer and held them over the fire. The sonorous tones of the grandfather clock announced eleven o’clock.

“Really?” He leaned back on the hearth rug, propping himself up on his hands. The position showed off his long, leanly muscled thighs. “And where did you come by this expertise?”

“Years of relentless training in the Brownies and Girl Scouts.”

“Ah. Sounds grueling.”

“It was,” she said. “I made sacrifices and suffered a lot. In the end, it was worth it because I became a Jedi master of marshmallow toasting.”

“Do tell,” he said, his white teeth flashing in the firelight. The sight gave her a pang somewhere very near her heart. God, she really liked this guy.

She shook off the thought.
Keep things light
. “You see, the trick is to heat them until they’re soft and melty, but not burned.”

“Some people like to light their marshmallows on fire.”

She gasped, splaying her hand across her chest in a gesture of horror. “That’s terrible! It turns them all black and bitter. Promise me you’ll never do that!”

“Hey, I’m just reporting what I’ve seen.” He put his hands up. “I’m not the s’mores expert that you are, so I’ll leave the important decisions to you.”

She pulled the skewer away from the fire and pinched the marshmallow, testing it for doneness. “Perfect. Hand me a graham cracker and the chocolate, will you?”

He complied and she scraped the marshmallow onto the cracker, added the chocolate, and then pressed a second cracker on top until the melted marshmallow oozed out the side.

She presented it to him.

“Why don’t you feed it to me?” he said. The gleam in his eye dared her to do it.

She held the s’more up to his lips and he took a bite. He closed his eyes as he chewed and swallowed. A gooey strand of sweet white marshmallow lingered on the fullest part of his bottom lip. With her index finger, she wiped it away and then held it to the seam of his lips. He opened his eyes and met her gaze with laser intensity. His tongue licked the tip of her finger, sucking it briefly inside his mouth to clean it, nibbling at her fingertip.

“Oh, God, that’s good,” he said, and she knew he wasn’t just talking about the sweet.

Heat, thick and molten, stirred between her legs. His words were pure sexuality. Would he be so talkative in bed?

Whoa. She had to ease up on the wine and dial back the flirtation a bit, or they’d be all over each other in a matter of minutes. She wasn’t ready for that yet, emotionally anyway. As far as her body went, all systems were go for launch, but her brain was still running down the pre-ignition checklist, worrying about what could go wrong.

“Can I have a drink of water?” Her abrupt change of subject made him blink, but to his credit, he rose to his feet.

“Sure.”

She tried not to slaver after his retreating backside, but it was difficult. The long, lean lines of his shoulders and back drew her gaze like a lodestone. Asking him to fetch her a glass of water had just been her way of postponing the inevitable.

On a long exhalation, she made a decision. She couldn’t leave this house without making love to RJ. Whether she was the type or not, she was going to make fireworks with this man. After all, tonight was New Year’s Eve, a time of endings and beginnings. She’d worry about the consequences next year, and pretend that it wasn’t just an hour away.

.

“Can I ask you a question?” he asked.

“Sure, ask me anything.” Her voice, soft and languid, was totally without urgency. His heart squeezed.

She lay on the rug, her head pillowed on his lap as he leaned against the sofa. When she’d first stretched out flat on the floor, drowsy from the wine and the heat of the fire, she’d looked so uncomfortable. He’d urged her to put her head in his lap. It made it difficult to hide the hard-on he’d had for the last hour or so, but hell. By now, she surely knew he wanted to make love to her, so what did it matter? She’d downed another glass of wine after their s’mores and grown sleepy, and he hadn’t refilled her glass again. He didn’t want the night to end anytime soon.

“Who is Steve?”

Her eyes, which had drifted half-shut, flew open. “Why do you ask?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I heard you mention his name on the phone. You said you didn’t want to talk about him right now. I thought maybe he was your boyfriend or something.”

Her lids fluttered shut. “Of course I don’t have a boyfriend. You think I’d be lying here with my head on your lap if I had a boyfriend?”

“Some girls would.”

“I’m not some girls.”

“I know that.”

She smiled and opened her eyes. “Thank you for that. Steve is my
ex
-boyfriend,” she said, her tone making it clear she wasn’t a fan.

He stroked her bangs back from her forehead. God, he was glad to hear that this guy was an ex and not a current boyfriend. He hadn’t been really listening to her phone conversation while he built the fire, but the other man’s name had caught his attention and he’d wondered. “Sounds like you and Steve wound up on the wrong foot.”

“Steve had only wrong feet where I was concerned. Like five of them.” He chuckled. “He’s a staffer at Horizons too. We dated a couple of years. I thought we had marriage potential at first, but then he said he never wanted to get married. Of course, he didn’t bother to tell me that until we’d been going out for more than a year.”

“Ah.” Steve sounded like an immature prick that she was better off without, but that kind of comment never made anybody feel better after a break-up, so he kept it to himself. Besides, he couldn’t claim to be the poster child for long-term relationships himself.

He ran one finger down the center of her forehead, between her eyes, and down the slope of her upturned nose. She turned her head and pressed a quick kiss against his knuckle.

The tender gesture made guilt prick at him.

He hadn’t been honest with her. Maybe it made him a bad person, but he had good reason for his deception. He’d feared telling her the truth at first because he didn’t want to spend the night being hounded for his money, a concern that he now knew was totally unfounded. If anything, she’d clearly love to leave fundraising to someone else and just work with kids. Her love for her special-needs kids shone through in her words and on her face every time she spoke about them. Any special needs kid—hell, any kid—would be lucky to have her as a teacher.

He ought to tell her the truth now. She wouldn’t spend the night begging him for a donation to Horizons—trying to “cultivate a donor base” or whatever the PR pros called it. But he hesitated. He’d enjoyed talking to Kayla, getting to know her without having to worry why she was interested. If something did happen between them tonight, he would
know
she didn’t want him for his money—not for Horizons, and not for herself. So many women had pursued him for his bank account, he’d given up on relationships. He’d even mostly given up on dating, settling for random hook-ups that never seemed to last longer than a weekend. Kayla, though, had no idea he had money. She thought he was a regular guy who lived in a reasonably nice house and drove a late-model Honda, not a multimillionaire who employed hundreds of people and was the envy of Silicon Valley. If he told her the truth now, he’d never be sure about her motives.

He’d tell her soon. Really, he would, after he was sure she wanted him for
him
. For now, he just wanted to get to know her.

“So what happened with this Steve guy?” He didn’t even like saying the dolt’s name. He’d made Kayla unhappy. Obviously he sucked. “You got tired of waiting and broke it off?”

She shook her head. “I wish. No, Steve dumped me for Eve, a PR liaison at Horizons.”

He blinked. “Steve ended up dating a woman named Eve? Weird.”

“Yes, it is weird.”

“That must have been difficult, though. You had to see them together at work all the time.”

“It was awful. They were going to be at the event tonight, of course, which is why I wore this stupid skirt and those high-heeled boots. I wanted to look hot,” she confessed, her gaze fleeing his.

“Mission accomplished. You look very hot. And don’t go insulting that skirt. I happen to be a big fan of that skirt,” he said, meaning every word of it. He had a feeling when he was a very old man, mostly past the pleasures of the flesh, he’d still get a charge thinking of the way she’d looked tonight in that skirt and those boots.

She smiled. “Thanks.” She dabbed at her face as her tears trickled down. The sight pained him. He wiped one away.

“Don’t cry. It’s all right.” Not the most original thing he’d ever said, but he couldn’t stand to see her cry.

“God, what am I doing? I’m such an idiot. Here I am with a guy ten times cooler than Steve, the idiot, and I’m talking about him!”

She thought he was that much cooler than her ex? Hey, maybe it was a low bar, but soaring over it pleased him. “Hey, it’s okay. Talk about whatever you want to talk about. You had your heart broken. It happens to everyone.”

“But there’s more. When I was on my way to the event today, Carolyn texted me and told me that Steve and Eve got
married
over break. Six months after he broke up with me, and after he kept telling me he didn’t see marriage in his future! And did I tell you that he broke up with me at the
school
, during the Fitness Fun-a-Thon fundraising event we worked at?” Her face grew reflective. “I was handing out bottled water when he asked me to go behind the hydration station so he could talk to me privately. The whole time, Eve kept staring at us from the finish line of the three-legged race. She knew I was getting dumped before I did.” He didn’t have time to answer because she barreled on relentlessly. “But that isn’t the worst part. The worst part is that they got married in
Jamaica
! On the
beach
!”

He frowned. “Why is that the worst part? What does it matter where they got married?”

“Because
I
always wanted to get married on the beach in Jamaica, and when I told Steve that, he said it was a stupid idea. Not that he wanted to marry me anyway—he made that clear—but he said it didn’t make any sense to get married far from home where none of your family could attend unless they blew a bunch of money on hotels and airfare.” She paused to sniffle, and he handed her a tissue from a nearby box, his heart going out to her. “Thank you,” she said, dabbing her nose.

She jerked up to a sitting position, and this time he didn’t try to stop her. She needed to get it all out, vent about this loser and get him out of her system for once and for all. “He went and married another woman, with
my wedding
! She got to stand on the beach in a white dress, barefoot, with the sunset in the background and the sand squishing up between her toes. That was supposed to be my white dress! My sunset! My toes!”