Black-Tie Seduction Read online

  Her bidding paddle shot up in the air. Whoa. What have we here? he wondered when she lifted it above her head. Straight up. No hesitation. As high as she could raise her arm.

  Seemed the lady aimed to buy something. Judging by her body language, she meant to have it at any cost.

  He watched both Chrissie and the bidding with interest. She cast a flurry of darting looks around her, those big hazel eyes warning off anyone who even looked as if they wanted to raise their paddle. Interesting. The bidding was slow and it looked as though she was going to get the box of, hell, box of rocks for all he knew, for a song.

  Or is she? he asked himself and felt the beginnings of an ornery grin. Just as the auctioneer was about to start a “Going, going, gone,” with Chrissie as the high bidder, Jake’s paddle seemed to sort of pop up in the air, all of its own accord.

  Hmm. Looked as though he was in the bidding now, too.

  Chrissie’s head whipped around, her fine blond hair flying around her face, her big hazel eyes snapping with smoke and hellfire as she searched the room for the culprit who dared to enter the bidding at this late hour.

  When her gaze finally landed on him and he acknowledged with a grin and a friendly wave of his paddle that, yeah, he was the one who’d jumped in and spoiled her party, he swore to God lightning zapped out of her ears and shot twin puffs of smoke in its wake.

  And when after a fierce flurry of bidding action between them ended with a gavel rap and a resounding, “Sold!” and Jake was the lucky owner of a cardboard box containing he had no idea what, the look she sent him could have set a forest ablaze.

  He touched his fingertips to the brim of his tan Resistol, smiled sweetly and swore he heard a word come out of her mouth that he figured prissy Miss Chrissie had never even heard before, let alone used.

  Oh, boy. We’re gonna have some fun now.

  Christine glared at the man sauntering toward her. Jacob Thorne was wearing what he probably thought was an aren’t-I-just-as-sexy-as-sin rogue grin that tugged up one corner of his full, mobile lips and dented his incredible dimples. He thought he was something—looking at her as if he was God’s greatest gift. As if her heart ought to go pit-a-pat and she ought to get hot all over basking in the glow of his company, as half the women in town did every time he sliced one of his poster-boy smiles their way.

  Well, she was hot all right. Bonfire hot. And her heart was pounding. Not some loopy, goofy stutter step but a jackhammer, piston-pumping, so-mad-she-could-hear-each-staccato-beat-in-her-ears-and-feel-it-pulse-all-the-way-to-her-toes pounding. And in that moment she understood why it sometimes became part of the human condition to react to anger with physical violence.

  Not that she’d ever stoop that low. She’d experienced enough physical violence in her life. But it didn’t hurt to think about exactly how deep she could bury the tip of her boot into Jacob Thorne-in-her-side’s shin. And to imagine his grunt of pain, the swelling and the black-and-blue marks when she did.

  “Hey, Chrissie,” he said, all sweet and sugary, with that sexy, sandpapery voice of his. “You’re looking mighty fine tonight. Got a little color in your cheeks for a change. Did you finally take some time for yourself and get out in the sun a bit?”

  She tilted her head to the side and glared at him. And he had the nerve to try to be cute. Again.

  “Oh. Not sun.” He made a big show of acting surprised. “You’re miffed at me, right? That’s what put that pretty pink in your cheeks.”

  For whatever reason, ever since she’d been his respiratory therapist, he seemed to make it his personal mission to tease her unmercifully. Like a big, overgrown bully. He needed to grow up, that’s what he needed to do. In the meantime she’d treat him like the kid he was.

  “You are so not funny. And you are so not charming.”

  She reached out and grabbed Alison’s arm, holding her still when she sensed that her friend was about to slink away and avoid certain fireworks.

  “Now, how much do you want for it?” she asked with a clipped nod toward the box he’d tucked under his arm. The box that contained Jessamine Golden’s saddlebag and its treasure trove of goodies. The box that had almost been hers for fifty-five bucks until he’d chimed in with his big money and stolen it from her.

  He glanced from her to the box. “What’s in here that’s got you so excited?”

  She blinked. Then, outraged, blinked again. “You didn’t even know what you were bidding on?”

  “Well, no,” he said, lifting a shoulder. “I was just trying to make some extra money for the benefit.”

  “You know what?” Alison said, squirming uneasily and apparently sensing a major showdown. “I think I’ll just be going now.”

  Christine wrapped her fingers tighter around Alison’s upper arm and held her where she was. “So why didn’t you bid against Ralph Schindler when he was bidding on an antique typewriter? Or Mel Grazier when he bid on a boom box? They’ve got buckets of moldy money. Why did you have to bid against me?”

  “Well,” he said, then paused and absently scratched his jaw. “Maybe I figured if you wanted it, it must be something worth having.”

  She snorted. “Try again.”

  “No, really. I’ve always known you to have excellent taste.”

  “So…that’s supposed to be an explanation?”

  “More like a compliment.”

  “More like a crock. You did it just to tick me off.”

  “Well—” his dark eyes danced in a tan, handsome face “—there is that.”

  The sound that came out of her could only be described as a growl.

  “I’ve really got to go,” Alison said, making another break for it.

  This time Christine let her go. It wasn’t fair to Alison to make her a party to what could in all probability turn out to be a homicide.

  “How much do you want for it?” she repeated only after she was certain she could talk without screeching.

  “You want it bad, don’t you, Chrissie?”

  Oh, he’d just love to see her rise to that bait. She was not going to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging the sexual innuendo he’d managed to thread through his seemingly innocent question punctuated with a wicked smile.

  “How much?”

  “Tell you what,” he said, looking if not smug, at least pleased by whatever idea was brewing in his thick head. “How about we cut us a little deal?”

  Cut a deal? She’d trust any deal he made about as far as she could shot-put his beefy carcass after she killed him but before they hauled her off to jail. Justifiable homicide would be the worst possible charge they could level.

  “I can just about imagine any deal you’d initiate. You haven’t changed a bit, have you?”

  “Aw, Chrissie. You don’t still hold a grudge after all this time, do you?”

  Oh, yeah. She held a grudge all right. He made it easy.

  “Tell you what, just to show you I’m not so awful,” he said, working hard at sounding wounded, “since you want this stuff that badly, I’ll just give it to you.”

  She eyed him with unconcealed suspicion. All six-plus lean feet of him. She couldn’t help but notice the way his long brown hair curled slightly at the edges, giving him a sexy boyish appeal. Couldn’t help but try to read the thoughts going on behind those summer-blue eyes that were always laughing, always teasing, always making her wonder what made him tick.

  Well. Not always because she didn’t spend that much time thinking about him. At least, she didn’t do it intentionally. He sort of sneaked into her thoughts sometimes when she least expected it and caught her off guard.

  Like now. Damn, all those wonder-boy good looks had sidetracked her again. Made her forget—if only for a second there—that she was mad and he was the reason.

  “Okay. What’s the catch?” Skepticism oozed in each word.

  “What makes you think there’s a catch?”

  “Because I wasn’t born yesterday?”

  “There ya go. You’re j
ust as smart as you are pretty.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, save the sugar for someone with a sweet tooth.”

  He considered her for a moment as if he were thinking about how badly he wanted to embarrass her. Then he very coolly said, “You can have the box of stuff on one condition. Be my date for the anniversary ball.”

  It took a moment for Christine to process his words. When she finally realized what he was suggesting, her mouth dropped open. Nothing came out.

  If he’d told her the condition was to strip and then run through the streets proclaiming she was madly in love with him, she would have been less surprised than she was right now.

  And the chances of her agreeing to either condition were exactly the same.

  “Boy, that got you thinking,” he said, his lean cheeks dimpling. “So, what do you say? How about it?”

  He wasn’t serious. He couldn’t be. Never in a million years would Jake Thorne—Texas Cattleman’s Club member and one of the most sought-after bachelors in Royal—waste his time with her, not at something as big as the anniversary ball. Not when all the eligible socialites and darlings of society were lined up like Miss America candidates waiting for him to select one of them as his date for the biggest social event in recent Royal history. Beautiful, wealthy, socially adept women who ran in his circle and would look good on his arm—unlike her, who would look more like a lump of coal than a diamond.

  Even though she didn’t want it to, it stung that he’d play with her this way when they both knew good and well that, unless he thought he could find some perverse pleasure humiliating her, he’d never in a million years include her on his list of possible dates.

  This was just too cruel. And she’d had enough of his goading for one night.

  “How about you take your condition and put it where the sun don’t shine?”

  Then, hating herself for letting him get to her, she turned on her heel and stomped away while his highly amused “Was it something I said?” trailed her across the room.

  Two

  “I don’t get it,” Alison said the night after the auction as they waited at the back of the room for their self-defense class to start. “What’s the problem with going to the anniversary ball with Jake Thorne? It’s not like you already have a date. And good grief, girl, the man is a hottie of the major-flame variety. No pun intended.”

  But it was a pun regardless since Jacob Thorne’s stock-in-trade was fighting oil-well fires. Or at least, it used to be his stock-in-trade to fight them until the accident. Everything had changed for him then. He still ran his own company, but from a desk now instead of on the actual site of the fires.

  Christine sat down on the mat and fussed with the laces of her tennis shoes, shoving thoughts of the trauma he’d gone through from her mind.

  “He’s a hottie all right. Of the inflammatory variety.”

  “Well, he sure seems to have incited a riot in you.”

  “We have a history,” Christine finally admitted in a weak moment as she pulled her straight shoulder-length hair into a ponytail and clipped it at her nape.

  “No. I never would have guessed,” Alison said, clearly having guessed exactly that.

  Christine grinned at her friend’s staged surprise.

  “What did he do, dump you?”

  “No,” she said sobering. “He did not dump me. We’ve never even dated.”

  “Ah. So that’s the problem. You want to date him.”

  “Yeah, right,” Christine said maybe a little too emphatically.

  This time Alison didn’t say a word. She just raised an eyebrow and waited.

  Christine expelled a weary sigh and rose to her feet. “Okay. The problem,” she sputtered, using Alison’s words, “is that he’s just making fun of me by inviting me to the dance. He’s always making fun of me. He taunts and teases and plays on the fact that I had a little crush on him once—a looonnnggg time ago—and he keeps exploiting it. You saw how he was at the auction. He didn’t want that box for any reason other than because I wanted it. And he didn’t ask me to the ball for any other reason than to mock me.”

  She tugged down her T-shirt, then forked her fingers through her ponytail, getting mad all over again just thinking about it. “He just loves to push my buttons. I’m getting tired of it.”

  “I think it’s kind of cute,” Alison said, then laughed when Christine threw her a disbelieving look. “Well, I do. Because it’s all in fun and what it really means is that he has a thing for you.”

  Christine grunted. “It means that he’s childish and sophomoric. And he doesn’t have a thing for me. I mean, look at me—I’m as far from his type as a male stripper is from mine. He’s just…ornery. The man doesn’t have a sincere bone in his body. Everything’s a joke with him.”

  “Everything?”

  She thought for a moment. “Okay. For instance—he got hurt badly in an oil-well fire five years ago. Smoke and fire inhalation did some heavy-duty damage to his lungs and he spent over a month in the hospital. I was the unlucky one on duty the night they brought him in and I ended up spending a lot of time with him over the course of his recovery.”

  When some other class members walked in, Christine lowered her voice because she didn’t want them to overhear her. And she really didn’t want to relive those days in a play-by-play for Alison.

  That didn’t stop her from thinking about it, though. Jacob Thorne had been one sick puppy. She’d been so worried for him, while he’d been brave and determined to recover and joked his way through the pain and the fear of his prognosis. She’d admired him for it…then formed that unfortunate crush.

  She did not admire him for it now. Neither did she have a crush on him. Not anymore.

  “Anyway, a couple of weeks into his treatment his twin brother, Connor, came to visit him. His identical twin,” she added to make sure Alison understood. “Long story short, they pulled a switch on me so Jacob—the evil twin—could sneak out of the hospital and go down to the Cattleman’s Club for a beer. The end result was that I actually gave a respiratory therapy session to the wrong man!”

  She got angry all over again just thinking about it. “He could have caused himself a serious setback pulling a reckless stunt like that.”

  Alison looked at her as if she was waiting for the punch line. Finally she said, “That’s it? That’s why you don’t like him? The poor guy had been stuck in a hospital bed, sick as a dog. A cold beer and some male company sounded good to him so he pulled a fast one on you to indulge in a tiny little creature comfort?”

  “I don’t like him,” Christine restated, not liking that she felt defensive again, “because he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get it that life is not one big lark. Life is serious. Life is real. It’s not a game, and you can’t just play your way through it the way he does.”

  For the first time Alison looked at her with no trace of humor. And it was then that Christine realized tears had pooled in her eyes. Embarrassed, she quickly blinked them back.

  “Oh, sweetie.” Alison reached out, touched her hand. “What happened to you?”

  Instantly on edge, Christine pulled her hand away. She wasn’t comfortable with touching, even though Alison’s touch held compassion and concern—something entirely different than the hard hands that had touched her in anger when she was a child. “I—I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean, what happened to you that made you decide life had to be all about work and duty with no room for fun?” Alison pressed gently.

  Fortunately for Christina, Mark Hartman, Alison’s boss—who was also the self-defense class’s instructor and another Texas Cattleman’s Club member like Jacob—entered the room at that very moment.

  His appearance and the necessity to get down to business saved Christine from opening up like a faucet and spilling out her sordid history to this woman whose insight and empathy had almost broken through defenses she’d kept shored up her entire life.

  Christine was appalled with herself when
she realized her eyes still stung with tears. She blinked them back and, giving Alison an apologetic look, moved away from her and onto her spot on the practice mat. Christine wished she could talk to her friend about her past. But she couldn’t. Not yet.

  For the rest of the class she went through the self-defense positions like an automaton, knowing the moves as well as she knew the secret she’d kept from anyone who had ever gotten too close.

  She had good reason to know that life was not fun and games. Life was a father who had beaten her and her mother and a mother who drank to escape the pain. Christine hadn’t had any escape—only fear—until she’d turned eighteen and finally had been able to run. She’d run as far away as she could from that horrible existence and the memories that sometimes still woke her, trembling, in the night.

  That’s what had happened to her, she thought as she showered in the locker room later. That’s why she sometimes worked double shifts at the hospital, why she took her job as a respiratory therapist so seriously and why she also volunteered to work for the Historical Society. She never wanted to have to depend on anyone but herself. Her work at the hospital gave her that self-sufficiency. Her volunteer work at the Historical Society gave her a sense of community.

  Both also gave her something else—something she hadn’t expected and hadn’t known she’d needed—respectability. Acceptance. A place to belong.

  She protected those hard-earned parts of her life. Held them close—held herself aloof to make sure no one got close enough to discover that inside her, there were still strong echoes of a lost and helpless little girl who had always thought she wasn’t good enough for her own father to love her. For her own mother to protect her.