And the Winner Gets...Married!

by Metsy Hingle

  “Tomorrow?”

  Justin grimaced. “Already have plans, huh? I should have realized that. All right, we’ll just pick another day.”

  “I don’t have plans,” she told him. “It’s just that I thought…I assumed since you’ve been out of town, you’d be going to the office tomorrow.”

  “The office will still be there on Monday, won’t it?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Then, it’s settled. Tomorrow you and I are going sailing. All right?”

  “All right,” she told him, more pleased than he could imagine.

  “But seeing how the night’s still young, what do you say we take advantage of the music?” He stood and held out his hands to her. “Dance with me?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not a very good dancer,” she told him as the band segued into a cha-cha. She noted the couples on the floor beginning to move in unison. Suddenly she wished she had gone to one of those tony schools that taught young ladies how to ballroom dance.

  “I find that hard to believe,” Justin told her as he drew her to her feet and led her to the dance floor. “I’ve yet to discover anything that you don’t do well. Besides, I distinctly remember watching you doing those stretching movements not very long ago. The way you moved, I could have sworn you heard music in your head.”

  “I did. Well sort of,” she said, in explanation. “I exercise to a CD at home, so whenever I do stretches, the music plays in my head. I guess it’s a reflex action,” she continued, only to think what an idiot she must sound like rambling on this way.

  But then she couldn’t think at all as Justin pulled her into his arms. They were so close she could feel the heat of his body, the warmth of his hand at her back, the way his other palm engulfed her own. She could smell that woods and outdoor scent that she always associated with him. And she could see the flecks of gold in his eyes as he looked down at her.

  “Relax and listen to the music,” he told her.

  But as he began to move them about the floor, she couldn’t relax. She could barely hear anything, either, save for the frantic beat of her own heart that echoed in her ears.

  As though sensing her feelings, Justin pressed her hand against his chest and asked, “Feel that? Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “The music has the same beat. Just like my heart. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.”

  And suddenly she felt it. That same thump-thump sound. Or maybe it was Justin’s heartbeat she felt, heard in her head. She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that when he slid his hand to her hip and began to lead her into the dance, her body moved in tandem with his. His eyes never left hers, nor did her eyes leave his. Even when the tempo increased, when thigh brushed against thigh, when his hand tightened on her hip, when he spun her around. Each time, she stayed with him, followed his lead, felt the beat of the music, the beat of Justin’s heart.

  By the time the song finally ended and Justin pulled her against him, her own heart was beating in tune with his. It was as if there was no one else in the world but the two of them.

  His eyes flashed with heat, and anticipation shot through her like a rocket as his head began to lower. “Kim.” He whispered her name.

  “Justin, my man, I’ve been looking for you.”

  Kim jolted at the sound of Robert Marsh’s voice. Instinctively she took a step back and crossed her arms.

  “Marsh.” Justin acknowledged the other man with a curt greeting.

  “I was wondering how your meeting with Schaeffer went?”

  “My meeting went fine.”

  “Great, did he—”

  “We’ll discuss it on Monday,” Justin said, his voice and expression hard. “Now if you’ll excuse us, I want to tell Jennifer what a great job she did on the fund-raiser.”

  “I’m glad things went well in New York. I meant to ask you about it,” Kim told him. “But with the excitement of the auction I guess I forgot.”

  He smiled at her, and Kim’s stomach quivered. “You’re not the only one. I was just as eager to tell you how well the meeting went, but I’m afraid business has been the last thing on my mind tonight.”

  Kim tried not to read anything into what he said, but she was finding it more and more difficult not to do so. “Yes, well. I’ll look forward to hearing all about it on Monday.”

  The music started up again, this time a slow, haunting love song. “Shall we?”

  Kim hesitated. “I really should go.”

  “Don’t,” he said, stroking her cheek with the back of his hand. “Stay.”

  She stayed.

  And by the time Justin had insisted on accompanying her home, Kim had to pinch herself to be sure she wasn’t dreaming. Suddenly the back of the limo that had seemed so large en route to the gala seemed small with Justin seated beside her. In the dim interior, there was something so intimate in the sight of his leg next to hers, of his shoulder just grazing hers, of his arm draped along the back of the seat. Lost in thought, she didn’t even realize the car had stopped until the driver was opening her door.

  “I’ll only be a few minutes,” Justin informed the chauffeur as he led Kim to her apartment building.

  “Justin, you don’t have to walk me up. I’ll be fine.”

  He leveled a reproachful look at her. “And risk my mother’s wrath for not seeing a young lady to her door? Never.”

  “Your mother would never know unless you told her,” Kim informed him even as they started up the stairs.

  “I’d know.”

  “This is it,” she said, standing outside her apartment.

  Justin took the key from her, unlocked the door. “I had a great time tonight,” he told her.

  “So did I,” she murmured, and wished the night didn’t have to end. Feeling awkward, unsure what to do, she pasted a bright smile on her face. “Well, I guess I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”

  “Kim, aren’t you forgetting something?”

  Confused, Kim squinched her brows together, looked at Justin’s face, then down at her apartment key in his outstretched hand. “Oh,” she said, feeling like an idiot and reached for the key.

  Justin closed his fingers around her hand and pulled her toward him. “I wasn’t talking about the key. I was talking about this,” he told her just before his mouth touched hers.

  His lips moved over hers tentatively at first, as though he were testing, tasting, coaxing. His gentleness disarmed her. And when his tongue traced the seam of her mouth, Kim’s lips parted instinctively. He made some sound deep in his throat, part groan, part moan that sent a trill of excitement skating up her spine.

  He still held her hand between them, but with his free arm he pulled her against him, and the feel of his arousal pressed against her unleashed a wave of longing inside her. His tongue thrust into her mouth, parried with her tongue, engaged in a mating dance as old as time. Heat arrowed through her belly, between her thighs. And when Kim was sure that she would die if he didn’t make love to her in the next five minutes, Justin pulled back.

  It took her a moment to register his hot and thunderous expression. “Justin?”

  “I’ll see you in the morning. Nine o’clock okay?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Great.”

  He bolted and was halfway down the stairs before she’d had a chance to ask him what was wrong.

  Six

  So they’d both had a little too much wine to drink last night and had kissed. It was no big deal, Justin reassured himself the next morning as he exited the Loop and headed for Kim’s apartment. Given the circumstances and the tenor of the evening, kissing her good-night had been the natural thing to do.

  And if the feel of Kim in his arms, the taste of her mouth beneath his own, had shaken him with the force of an earthquake and kept him awake half the night, then it was to be expected. After all, he was a healthy, red-blooded male whose lack of a social life of late had resulted in a long bout
of celibacy. Besides, the sight of Kim in that strapless number with those skinny high heels and all that blond hair tumbling down her back would have tempted even a saint.

  He’d never claimed to be a saint.

  But he did consider himself honorable. Which was why he’d hightailed it out of there last night before he’d followed through on his instinct to make wild, passionate love to her. Kim was his assistant and his friend, Justin reminded himself as he wheeled his Jeep onto Kim’s street. He’d use the sailing outing today to reestablish those boundaries of friendship and squash any lingering lustful thoughts he’d been harboring about his assistant.

  Feeling better, he pulled his Jeep up to the curb in front of Kim’s building, then hopped out and climbed the stairs to her apartment. He rapped on her door and she answered almost at once.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  The smile she gave him hit him square in the solar plexus, and all he could do was stand there and stare.

  She glanced down at her clothes, then back up at him. “Am I dressed wrong?” she asked, her smile dimming.

  “No. You look perfect.” She looked better than perfect. She looked downright delectable, he admitted. The navy-and-white-striped T-shirt emphasized the curves that he’d glimpsed last night and had tried his best to forget. The white shorts revealed a pair of long, slender legs that her sedate suits and slacks had only hinted at, and triggered his most erotic fantasies. So much for his notion of seeing Kim as only his assistant and friend. It simply wasn’t going to happen. The only question was what did Kim want? Had he read more into Kim’s response to his kiss last night than had been there?

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” he assured her. “You all set for your first sailing lesson?”

  “All set,” she said with a grin, and reached for the tote bag sitting next to the door.

  “I’ll take that.” His hand brushed hers as they both reached for the bag. There was no mistaking the spark that shot through him at the innocent touch. And judging by the way those blue-green eyes of hers had widened, he wasn’t the only one who’d felt it.

  “I wasn’t quite sure what I should bring,” she informed him as she locked the door.

  “Sunscreen?” he asked, lifting the tote bag.

  “Yes. Plus a visor, towel and swimsuit.”

  “Then we’re in business,” he told her, and followed her down the stairs and out to the street. “All set?” he asked after he’d stowed her tote bag and they’d both buckled their seat belts.

  “All set.”

  He started the Jeep’s engine. “Then sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.”

  They both enjoyed the ride, Justin admitted ninety minutes later as he and Kim set off from the docks of the yacht harbor and headed for the open waters of Lake Geneva. The conversation during the drive had been spirited and fun, with an edge of excitement that he could only attribute to the sexual tension that hummed between them. With an eagerness that he dared not examine too closely, he’d wasted no time loading Kim’s tote bag and the picnic-basket lunch he’d picked up at a gourmet deli en route to the lake.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help?” Kim asked him from her position at the bow.

  “Don’t worry, I intend to make you work for your lunch, sailor. But not until we get past the bend in the harbor and away from the docks.”

  “All right,” she told him, a smile spreading across her lips before she turned away and looked out to the open water.

  Mindful to keep his attention on the operation of the sailboat and not Kim’s long legs, Justin maneuvered the thirty-five-foot beauty around the final bend and into the mouth of the lake. “Okay, sailor,” he said as he cut the engine. “Ready for your first lesson?”

  “Aye, aye, captain,” she said, and gave him a sassy salute. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Now, that’s a loaded question if I ever heard one,” he teased.

  She gave him a reproachful look. “I meant what do you want me to do to help with the boat.”

  “How about coming over here and manning the wheel while I hoist the sails?”

  “You want me to drive the boat?”

  “Actually, I want you to keep her steady while I run up the jib and mainsail.” After a brief explanation, during which time he did his best not to notice just how silky her skin felt or how her hair smelled of apples and sunshine, he asked, “Got it?”

  “I think so,” she told him. “But promise you’ll teach me how to work the sails, too?”

  “I promise,” he told her.

  More than two hours later, when they anchored the boat in a relatively quiet spot on the lake, he taught her the difference between the mainsail and the jib, explained the workings of the boom and masthead, the keel and rudder while they feasted on lunch.

  Justin shaved off a chunk of pepper-jack cheese with his knife, and as he ate it he studied Kim. Stretched out on the foredeck, with the breeze from the lake fingering the hair that she’d pulled up into a ponytail, Kim looked even more tempting now than she had last night in that knockout black dress. If she’d been wearing any makeup other than lip gloss and sunscreen, he hadn’t been able to tell it. The few hours they’d spent in the sun had put a healthy shot of color in her cheeks. He grinned as he noted a tiny sprinkling of freckles across her nose. She bit into a grape, and Justin’s mouth watered as she licked the juice from her lips. He couldn’t help remembering how sweet those lips had tasted last night when he’d kissed her.

  “How old were you when you first started sailing?” Kim asked, breaking into his none-too-appropriate thoughts.

  “Probably right around the time I got potty trained,” Justin admitted. “At least that’s when my dad started taking me out with him. When I was growing up, my family spent a lot of time at the lake cottage, especially during the summers. Anyway, my dad used to like to go out on the sailboat in the mornings just when the sun was coming up. I’ve always been an early riser, so he’d let me tag along.”

  “I’ll bet he enjoyed your company.”

  “Maybe some of the time,” Justin conceded, even though he had always considered those mornings a special bonding time between him and his father. “My dad claimed the lake was a good place for a man to go when he needed to think or when life seemed to be too much. He said being on the lake helped a body to remember that there are more important things in life than making money or building empires.”

  “I can see why your father is so successful. He’s a very wise man.”

  “Yes, he is.” Reminiscing about those quiet mornings he’d spent with his father, Justin realized just how wise a man Grant Connelly had been—even back then. He himself, on the other hand, had not been nearly as wise, Justin decided, as he thought of how consumed with work he’d been these past six months.

  “Why the name Calypso?” Kim asked, referring to the sailboat’s name.

  Justin smiled and shook off his deep thoughts. “It’s after the sea nymph.”

  “The one who detained Odysseus on the island of Ogygia for seven years?”

  “One and the same,” Justin said, impressed that she remembered the tale. “The minute I saw her, I fell under her spell and knew I had to have her. I didn’t even haggle about the price. I just wrote out the check.”

  “Somehow I don’t think you have any regrets.”

  “I don’t,” he admitted. “At least not about buying the boat. I do, however, regret that it took my very wise assistant putting together a date package for a bachelor auction to get me to come out on her again.”

  She shrugged and the smile she gave him was filled with sass. “We very wise assistants do what we have to, to keep our bosses from working themselves to death.”

  “Have I really been that bad?”

  “Worse,” she told him, and burst into laughter.

  “You should do that more often,” Justin said.

  “What? Book sailing dates with you to be auctioned off fo
r charity?”

  “Funny,” he said, and pitched a grape at her, which she caught and promptly popped into her mouth. “I meant you should laugh more often. You have a beautiful laugh, Kim.”

  “Thanks,” she murmured and lowered her eyes. She began to toy with the bunch of grapes.

  Justin reached over, tipped up her chin. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “You didn’t,” she said, then sighed. “I guess I’m just not used to all this.”

  “What? Eating lunch?”

  She made a face at him. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  “No? Then you must be talking about sailing. Wait, now I remember. You did mention something about being a land lover, didn’t you?” he teased.

  “I said that I loved the water, and this is the first time I’ve ever been sailing.”

  “Then what is it you’re not used to, Kimberly Lindgren? You can’t make me believe that before now you haven’t had men telling you how beautiful you are.”

  “I haven’t,” she whispered so softly that Justin wasn’t sure if he heard the words or read the movement of her lips.

  “Then the men in Chicago must be blind or mute or both, because you are beautiful, Kim. Incredibly beautiful,” he told her. Unable to resist, he pressed his mouth against hers.

  He took his time. First he kissed the corner of her mouth, slowly savoring the feel of her lips. He lost his fingers in her hair, held her head in his hands while he tested, shaped, explored her mouth. All the while desire burned inside him, spreading like fire, making him hard, making him ache to lose himself in her softness.

  Kim’s fingers dug into his shoulders, and the sharp bite of her nails served only to feed the fierce hunger churning inside him. But he held himself in check, determined to let Kim set the pace. “Justin,” she sighed against his lips.

  When she opened her mouth to him, his control slipped a notch. He wanted to drink her in and because he did, he forced himself to slow down. She tasted of grapes and lemonade. Of sunshine and sweetness. Of innocence and seduction. She tasted of everything he’d ever wanted and needed in this world, Justin thought. Suddenly he forgot all about the fact that they were anchored in Lake Geneva. That it was the middle of the day and the sun was still shining in the sky. That they were out in the open where anyone and everyone could see them. He forgot about everything but the taste and the feel of the woman in his arms.