What A Girl Wants (Harlequin Blaze)

by Jamie Sobrato

  “You clean up pretty well,” she said as he pulled out of the parking lot.

  “You don’t look too bad yourself.” It was a friendly enough comment, but Jane knew by the flatness of his voice that he wasn’t happy with her.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t get to say a proper goodbye this morning.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re angry with me.”

  Silence.

  Jane squirmed in her seat. “This is why I never wanted us to have a sexual fling in the first place. I knew we couldn’t end up happier people for it.”

  His gaze remained focused on the road, and for several long minutes, he said nothing. When he finally spoke, the sound was jarring. “Just so you’ll know, I have to leave the reception a little early to catch a flight to Puerto Rico. I wouldn’t want you thinking I’ve gone off to lick my wounds over your rejection.”

  She ignored his sarcasm. “What’s in Puerto Rico?”

  “A client. He vacations there and occasionally has me fly down.”

  “Oh. Well, have fun.” She swallowed the dryness in her mouth and puzzled at the prickly feeling behind her eyes. It shouldn’t have upset her to hear that Luke was leaving on a business trip. Rather, she should have felt relieved, right?

  So why didn’t she?

  They rode in silence the rest of the way to the hotel and still managed not to speak as they made their way into the reception, where the party was already going strong. Luke disappeared from Jane’s side when her aunt Claudia stopped her to ask where Heather was, and for the rest of the night he wouldn’t make eye contact with her whenever they were near.

  Jane ate dinner at the wedding party table that faced out toward the rest of the reception hall. As she watched people laughing and having a great time, she resolved to do the same, and when dinner was over and Heather and Michael danced their first dance, Jane felt a real sense of happiness settle in her belly. She smiled at the obviously happy couple, a little amazed herself for not having a single jaded thought about their troubles the night before.

  Jennifer came back to their table and sat down beside Jane.

  “I just want to thank you for telling me to give up on Eli. I don’t know what I was thinking, letting him come between Lacey and I.”

  Jane looked at her sister and for once didn’t feel a single resentful big sisterly feeling. “So everything’s okay now?”

  “Yep, we both agreed to give him the cold shoulder, which pissed him off, I think, but he’ll get over it. Lacey even let me wear her leather skirt last weekend.”

  Well, then. What could be more harmonious than a shared leather skirt? Jane managed to even feel satisfied that she’d helped her sisters out of a conflict. Maybe she wasn’t totally incompetent after all. Maybe she did occasionally have useful advice to give.

  When Jennifer left, Jane’s gaze fell on her parents, sitting at a table next to the dance floor, smiling and holding hands as they watched Heather and Michael dance. Her parents were clearly as in love now as they had always been, and it struck Jane that she’d never even bothered to be thankful for having two parents who loved each other before. On a whim, full of the wedding spirit in the air, she stood up and went to their table to sit with them.

  “You two are looking awfully googly-eyed.” She leaned over and gave her dad a kiss on the cheek.

  Her mother sighed. “Weddings always remind us of our own wedding. We were so sweet on each other we could hardly make it through the reception without slipping away for a little hanky-panky.”

  Jane winced at the reference to her parents’ sex life, and her mother caught her look.

  “Oh, there’s nothing shameful about two people not being able to keep their hands off each other. That’s the same passion that’s kept our marriage strong for thirty-three years now.”

  Her father grinned at her then. “We want to see you girls as happy as we’ve been.” He took her hand in his then and kissed it, the same gesture he’d always made when Jane was a little girl and he’d called her his princess. “I try not to meddle in you girls’ lives, but I’m going to just this once, okay?”

  “Okay, Daddy,” Jane heard herself say. She hadn’t called her father Daddy since her Barbie-doll days.

  “Don’t waste your whole life writing books about relationships, princess. Go out and find your own true love.”

  Jane felt her eyes well up with tears. Maybe her dad wasn’t such an airhead after all.

  JANE DANCED with her father, then fast-danced with her sisters until she had blisters on both of her little toes, but she hadn’t seen Luke anywhere in the crowd of merrymakers on the dance floor.

  As the reception wound down, she wandered around the reception hall and out into the hotel lobby, not realizing until she spotted the front doors of the hotel that she was looking for Luke, hoping he hadn’t left yet. Her father’s words replayed themselves again and again in her head, along with the comment her mother had made about their passionate marriage.

  When she tried to picture herself having that kind of passionate, long-lasting love, only one image came to mind—one of herself and Luke. Why had she been so sure that their relationship couldn’t grow into something deeper?

  Maybe she hadn’t thought she was good enough, maybe she had been too afraid of getting hurt, maybe she’d been terrified of being wrong about relationships…there were lots of maybes. But only one thing she knew for sure.

  She wanted Luke. Not just in her bed, but in her life. She wanted to give them a chance, to see if maybe they could have what her parents had. To see if the stirring she felt deep down in her soul whenever she thought of a future with Luke really was true love.

  Someone placed a hand on the small of her back, and she jumped. Jane turned to see that it was Eli, the former object of Jennifer and Lacey’s affection. She had to admit, he did look handsome in his black tux, but his attractiveness was marred by his eternal arrogant smirk. He had the air of a guy who was used to getting what he wanted with women.

  “I’ve got a surprise for the bride and groom. I was hoping you could help me with it.”

  “Um, sure. What do you need?”

  “Could you help me carry it down and present it to Heather and Michael before they leave? It’s in my hotel room on the second floor—it was a little too big to keep concealed, so I had to hide it up there.”

  Jane frowned. “Sure. You’ve got my curiosity piqued.”

  He smiled. “Follow me. You’re gonna die when you see it.”

  She followed Eli to the elevator, which they stood waiting for in awkward silence. Once inside it, Jane flashed a strained smile at him.

  “So,” she said, “great wedding, huh?”

  “Yeah, I can’t believe Michael finally tied the knot.”

  The elevator stopped and they got out. As she followed Eli down the hallway to his room, Jane got the feeling something wasn’t quite right, but she decided it was probably just her awkwardness at being alone with the same guy she’d urged her sisters to get rid of.

  Eli stopped at a doorway and inserted a key card. He opened the door and stepped aside for her to enter.

  Jane stepped into the darkened room and flipped a light switch on the wall. “So where’s the big surprise?” she asked as she went farther into the room.

  She heard the lock on the door click. A strange, hollow feeling filled her gut.

  Eli turned from the door to face her, and his friendly expression was gone, replaced by a menacing glare.

  “I’m the surprise, you stupid bitch.”

  Jane’s breath caught in her throat. Eli’s voice had dropped several octaves. She recognized it as the voice from the late-night phone calls and the creepy answering machine messages.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want you to stop giving out your idiotic advice to all the stupid women in the world. You ruined my chances with Lacey and Jennifer and just about every other dumb bitch I’ve met lately.”

  Her mouth wen
t dry. She took a few steps backward, but that only got her closer to a king-size bed and Eli’s suitcase resting on top of it.

  “I’m sorry you’re having a bad-luck streak, but women make their own decisions. I don’t decide for them who they should date.”

  “Do you realize how close I came to nailing your sisters? You owe me big time.”

  Looking around for a weapon, Jane spotted a bottle of cologne on the nightstand, along with a lamp and an alarm clock. Great, she could perfume Eli to death. She decided to go for the lamp if he made a move toward her, figuring she could at least get away if she swung hard enough at his head with the base of it.

  He dove toward her, and before she could react, she found herself pinned to the bed, Eli’s large body pressed against her, his hands holding hers at her sides.

  “Did you like the little gift I left for you in your car?”

  “What gift?”

  “The book, you stupid bitch. I thought you might like my customized copy.”

  She tried to force the tears from her voice as she spoke. “Listen, this isn’t necessary. I could talk to Jennifer and Lacey for you, convince them that I was wrong about you before. I’m sure they’d give you another chance.”

  “I’ll get my chance. If I can’t have them, I’ll have you.”

  Jane found herself wondering if her bridesmaid dress would survive this ordeal, and she realized with a start that she was practicing avoidance thinking, ignoring the fact that the real question was whether she would survive.

  All Luke’s self-defense lessons got rolled up in a jumble of nonsense in her head, until she recalled his most frequent words, to stay calm and to always fight back.

  She drew back her head and then thrust it forward as hard as she could, making contact with Eli’s mouth. He grunted, then spit on her, and after he’d trapped one of her hands between their bodies, he grabbed a roll of duct tape from the open suitcase beside them.

  “Nice try. Did your hired ape teach you how to do that, or was he too busy sticking it to you to teach you any self-defense?”

  Jane felt the rage that had been gathering inside her come to a head, and she used all her strength to buck against him as he tried to bite off a piece of the duct tape. In the scuffle, his ear ended up next to her mouth, and she bit down hard until he got his hands around her throat.

  Gasping for air, she realized her own hands were free now, and she reached for his little finger, just as Luke had taught her, and once she’d gotten her hand around it, she gave it a sharp tug down, until she heard and felt the sickening sound of cracking bone.

  Eli cried out at the pain and fell to the side, giving Jane her freedom to climb off the bed.

  “You bitch, you broke my finger!”

  She remembered one more lesson Luke had taught her—not to stick around and see if her attacker was going to get up. She ran for the door, unlocked it, and ran down the hallway yelling for help as loud as she could.

  HAVING GIVEN her statement to the police, explained everything to her family, wished the newlyweds a happy honeymoon, and shrugged off all suggestions of a trip to the emergency room, Jane went back out to the hotel lobby and asked the man at the concierge desk to call her a cab, then wandered through the dwindling crowd. With each step she took, her path became more clear, her resolve more determined. She wasn’t sure if she had time—maybe his flight was already on its way to Puerto Rico—but she had to try. What she wanted to say to Luke couldn’t wait.

  When the cab arrived, she let the driver know she was in a big hurry, and they sped to the airport, with Jane praying the whole way that she could somehow catch Luke.

  Once inside the terminal, Jane ran. She took off the midnight-blue satin heels that had been dyed to match the bridesmaid dress she was still wearing, and she ran as fast as she could through the airport. If the mere fact of running through an airport in her bridesmaid dress wasn’t enough to convince Luke that she loved him, then nothing would.

  She halted in front of a monitor with a scrolling list of departing flights. San Antonio, San Francisco, San Juan…Gate B-17, departing on time at 8:30 p.m.…in thirty minutes. She had time to find him, but she had no idea how she’d get past airport security.

  Unless she was a ticketed passenger on the flight.

  Did she really want to fly to San Juan, Puerto Rico in a bridesmaid dress, with nothing but her dainty little bridesmaid purse and an uncomfortable pair of satin shoes as baggage? And then she thought of Luke, of what he’d done for her, of how empty her life would be without him, and she knew the answer without a doubt.

  If it hadn’t been for Luke, she wouldn’t have been able to fight off Eli, and more importantly, if it hadn’t been for Luke, Jane would still be a lonely, repressed thirty-year-old woman without a clue what she wanted out of life.

  She picked up her skirt again and took off, following the signs to the airport check-in area. Luckily, there weren’t any hordes of people flying on a Saturday evening, so ten minutes later she had an unbelievably over-priced ticket in hand and she was running for the departure gate.

  By the time she made it through the security checkpoint and to the gate, her hair had fallen all the way out of its sophisticated French twist, her stockings had an undetermined number of runs, and she was sweating like a woman who’d just run a marathon. She’d given up feeling embarrassed about all the people who’d stopped to stare at her along the way. The security guards at the gate eyed her warily but waved her through, by some miracle.

  When Jane stepped onto the plane, a flight attendant at the entrance gave her a once-over and produced a strained smile. “I can’t wait to hear your story,” she said, then took Jane’s boarding pass and looked at it. “You can use the left aisle to get to 23C.”

  Jane stopped to catch her breath and then offered up a silent prayer that Luke would forgive her hardheadedness, that he’d be able to overlook all her stupid assumptions and all the times she’d taken him for granted. Most importantly, she prayed for him to take her, flaws and all.

  She made her way down the aisle, looking for his face in the anonymous crowd of passengers. It didn’t take long to spot him. He was sitting in an aisle seat near the middle of the plane, his head reclined against the headrest, his eyes closed. The window seat next to him was empty.

  Jane stopped next to him. “Excuse me, I just need to get into my seat.”

  Luke’s eyes opened and he gazed up at her, completely perplexed. “Jane.”

  She tried hard not to smile. “Didn’t I tell you I was on this flight, too?”

  “What are you doing—”

  Holding up her hand to silence him, she said, “Do you mind if I sit first? I’m looking a little conspicuous here.”

  He seemed to take in her marathon-running-bridesmaid appearance for the first time and raised an eyebrow. But mercifully, he stood up and let her get into the window seat.

  When they were seated side-by-side, Jane turned to Luke. “Could we just back up a little, pretend a few things didn’t happen, maybe sort of…start over?”

  He shrugged, rightfully unwilling to forget the way she’d behaved. A shrug was a start.

  Jane took a deep breath. “So, what takes you to San Juan?”

  “Business,” he said, tossing her a strange look.

  “Ah, what sort of business are you in?”

  He looked at her again, pausing for a long moment before he answered, probably deciding if he was willing to play along. “Security.”

  She continued in her airplane chit-chat voice, “That sounds interesting. I recently had to hire a personal security specialist, myself.”

  Luke was silent. A flight attendant began announcing safety procedures on the intercom as the plane taxied down the runway.

  “You see, I’m an author. Maybe you’ve heard of my book, The Sex Factor? I’ve made quite a few men angry with it, and I had to hire someone to help protect me from them.

  “But I made a huge mistake. I didn’t learn everything he tr
ied to teach me, and I let him go when I shouldn’t have.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got problems.” He pulled an in-flight magazine out of the seat pocket in front of him and began flipping through the pages.

  “I was misguided. I wrote a book that gave some bad advice, and he tried to make me understand that I’d missed the mark. He was right.”

  Luke looked at her then, his dark eyes inscrutable. “Could you say that first part again?”

  “I was misguided?”

  “Yeah, that.” He revealed a half smile then, and Jane’s pent-up emotions released by a tiny degree.

  “I just don’t know how to tell him what I really feel.”

  “Why don’t you try out what you have in mind on me. I’ll tell you if it sounds good.”

  The roar of the plane engines grew louder, and the aircraft slowed to a stop, then accelerated. As they lifted off the runway, Jane looked out and saw Dallas just beginning to light up. To the west, the sun had splashed streaks of orange and pink across the sky as it set.

  She turned back to Luke and took his large hand in hers. Where his was cool, hers were hot and shaking. “I’m sorry, Luke. I never should have let you walk out of my life, even for an hour. When I was listening to those wedding vows today, I realized they were words I’d heard countless times before, without really thinking about their meaning….”

  Jane took a deep breath. Could she really say the next part? Could she really bare it all? Yes, if she was going to be known as a relationship guru, she had to take a chance on true love. She had to give it all if she wanted to have a great romance, a love that would endure.

  Luke watched her silently.

  “Thanks to you, I finally understand what it means to have a love so strong that two lives can be bound into one because of it. I understand that sex and love and intimacy are all intricately intertwined, and that removing one from the mix damages the other parts. You showed me that.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That I’ve fallen in love with you, and I want us to be more than just lovers or friends or business associates.”