by Meg Tilly
“Right. Fancy a road trip?”
She grinned back at him. “I’d love one.”
29
The farther the I-15 North took them from Los Angeles, the lighter Sarah felt, as if there was no way her worries could run fast enough to keep up with Mick’s Porsche. The mood as they sped down the highway had almost a holiday feel. She nestled deeper into the low-slung, natural leather espresso seats that hugged her body. She enjoyed the deft way Mick drove, how he handled the car, took the curves, changed lanes. He seemed effortlessly aware of the vehicles around them, as if he knew what they were going to do before they made their move and he responded accordingly. They had fallen into a comfortable silence, watching scenery pass and the sun slowly sink in the sky. The whir of the tires on asphalt added a peaceful continuity that reminded her of Charlie’s purr. Sarah had contemplated bringing him, but Charlie hated riding in cars. A road trip with Charlie meant cleaning up cat vomit and listening to him yowl 24/7. That was asking a lot from a cat person, which Mick was not. So she had filled a casserole dish with cat food and another one with water. It was overkill, probably would take Charlie two weeks to munch his way through all that food, but just in case there was a delay, Charlie would be okay.
As she’d left the apartment, Sarah had given Charlie a snuggle and a scratch behind his ears. Then, with Charlie draped over her shoulder impersonating a fox stole and purring like a tractor, Sarah had switched on the TV to the cats channel and set the volume on low. “There you go. Your favorite show, Charlie, and I’ll be back before you know it.”
Sarah gazed at the flat landscape whizzing past. Part of her was already in Vegas sorting out her marital status. The other half of her was missing her makeshift apartment and her temperamental cat already. Hopefully they would return tomorrow, but even if they got delayed, they would certainly be back in LA by Thursday night, or Friday morning at the latest. And then Mick would be flying to New York for a press junket and the premiere, as his new movie was opening that following Thursday.
Sarah liked watching Mick’s hands on the wheel, tanned, sure, and strong. His fingers were blunt-tipped with fingernails cropped short and clean. A beam of sunshine forced its way through the tinted glass and caused the sprinkling of hair on his forearms to turn golden, like Rumpelstiltskin turning mundane everyday straw into pure spun gold.
Mick glanced over, as if he had felt her eyes on him. “What were you thinking just then?”
“Why do you want to know?”
Mick shrugged, a rueful smile on his face. “Curious, I guess. The director in me.” He shrugged again, the tips of his ears flushing as if he regretted the question the moment it escaped his mouth. And there was something about his sudden vulnerability that had her answering honestly, even though she had honed her skill at keeping people at bay.
“The sunshine on”—she smoothed her fingertips along her own forearm so she wouldn’t be tempted to reach out and skim them lightly along his—“on your forearms makes the hair look almost golden.” She smiled. “Reminded me of an old fairy tale my mother used to read to me when I was a little girl. Rumpelstiltskin.”
When Mick laughed, the low sound rumbled through her like a fast-passing train, filling her belly with warmth. “Rumpelstiltskin, am I?” He shook his head, still laughing. “Slick move, Rainsforth. Way to polish my ego. Isn’t he a malevolent, tiny, hunched-over creature with a big belly and large bugging-out eyes who spun straw into gold?”
“Yes, but that’s not”—it was hard to get her explanation out because her own laughter was bubbling forth—“what I meant.”
“Woooooweee. I’m coming up in the world!” Mick grinned happily as he shook his hand in the universal sign for hot. “Keep with the flattery and my swelled head will suck up the remaining oxygen in this car.”
Still giggling, she waved her hands toward his arm. “I was talking about the hair on your arms—”
“My hairy arms now?” he said with mock indignance. “So I’m a Rumpelstiltskin and a great hairy beast. Wonderful. That’s just swell.”
“Never mind,” Sarah said, wiping moisture from her eyes. “Just forget I said anything.”
“I think,” he said, in a wounded tone of crushed dignity, “that would be”—he paused and tipped his face heroically heavenward with the slightest quiver of his lower lip—“for the best.” Which started her laughter all over again.
* * *
* * *
“It’s Rainsford, by the way,” Sarah said, biting into a double burger with all the fixings. Night had fallen, glossy black beyond the window, creating a cocoon-like atmosphere. As if the world beyond Daisy’s Diner had ceased to exist. Mick watched Sarah take another bite. He didn’t know why it made him so damned happy to feed her, but it did. He liked watching her eyes go hazy as she savored her food. Her eyelids fluttered shut, and he noticed that her eyelashes didn’t match her newly dyed hair. Her lashes were pale, almost invisible toward the tips, and there was something so beautiful, so vulnerable about seeing them like that. Made him want to reach across the table and run the tip of his finger in a barely there touch along the delicate hairs, as if gently caressing the wings of a butterfly. A soft moan escaped from between her lips, as if she wanted him to touch her, too. His logical mind knew her moan was one of enjoyment for the meal she was eating. Nevertheless, the breathy sound of it had his cock swelling.
“What is?” His voice had caused her eyelids to open. He tugged his gaze away from the spell of her gorgeous violet-blue eyes, picked up his burger, and took a bite. It was as good as he remembered. Big, flavorful, and sloppy, everything you could want in a burger.
“My last name. Earlier, you called me ‘Rainsforth.’ It’s Rainsford.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Rainsford. Got it.” He watched her take another bite. A trickle of juices escaped and moved down her wrist. The tip of Sarah’s pink tongue darted out and lapped it up, and he needed to lay his burger on his plate so he could discreetly readjust himself.
“Sooo good,” she moaned, taking another bite. He felt sometimes almost as if she were a starving, stray kitten he had coaxed out of a dumpster with a saucer of cream. Terrified and pretending to be fierce, back arched, tail bushed out and sticking straight in the air, claws extended, lips drawn back, hissing ferociously, as if attempting to pass for a tough Halloween tomcat. Sarah smiled at him as if slightly drunk from the combination of delicious flavors.
“Try the chocolate shake.” He nudged it toward her. Yes, he wanted her to taste it because the milkshakes at Daisy’s were a revelation, but he’d be lying if he didn’t admit that a part of him wanted to watch her suck the thick shake through that red-and-white-striped paper straw.
She obliged, and it was everything he imagined and more.
“Rainsford,” he repeated thoughtfully, as if the blood hadn’t rushed to his nether regions.
Sarah looked at him, her elegant eyebrow arching. “Yes?” So perhaps he wasn’t pulling the wool over her eyes.
“I’m just repeating the correct pronunciation of your name so it will be stuck in my—” He broke off because the repetition of her surname had tugged forth a faint memory from his brain. “Wait a minute.” He felt his eyes narrow as he tugged a little harder. “Four years back . . . It was all over the news.” His mind was dropping Tetris pieces into place. “There was a missing heiress . . .”
“Everyone presumed was dead? No body found.” Sarah shrugged and took another slurp of the milkshake. “Yeah. That’s me.” She said it as if she were talking about the color of her socks.
Mick shot to his feet, needing to move, jammed his hands in his pockets. “You’re that Rainsford? The missing Rainsford heiress?!”
“The one and only,” she replied, calmly dunking a French fry in the ketchup and stirring it so two-thirds of the fry was coated in the sauce before eating it.
“Holy crap.” He shook his he
ad, trying to clear it. “I was obsessed with that case. Kept hoping she would be found, safe and sound.”
“And here I am.”
Mick was finding it difficult to wrap his mind around this latest revelation. Hell, the entire day had been pretty bizarre. He cast his mind back, flipping through magazine and news images. He could see similarities in her profile. Sarah had the same color eyes, and her hair was obviously dyed. However, the woman could be running an extremely sophisticated con on him, or perhaps she was mentally unstable and suffered from delusions. “So you’re actually blond?”
She smiled ruefully and tugged at her dark hacked-up hair. “Yeah.” She studied him across the table. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“I’m not sure.” Mick knew he was being surly, because her being the Sarah Rainsford actually made a weird sort of sense. From the second he’d laid his eyes on her, he’d had the feeling that he knew her from somewhere. Had initially attributed the odd sense of deja vu to the erroneous supposition that she was a scheming actress or an undercover reporter.
“Why would I lie?”
There were a million words hovering on the tip of his tongue, but what came out was “Why in the hell are you scrubbing my toilets if you’re so filthy rich?” His words sounded harsh, angry to his ears, which didn’t make sense. What did he care? “You can buy and sell me a million times over.”
“You say that like you’re accusing me of a crime.”
“You should have told me.”
“I just did.” She dunked another French fry. “Sit down and eat your food. It’s going to get cold.”
Mick sat down. Not because she was the boss of him. He sat because he was drawing attention by looming over their table, and the last thing Sarah needed was more eyes turned her way.
“Look,” she said. “If it’s bothering you how I’ve nickeled-and-dimed you, I had to. I don’t have access to my funds at present. But if it will make you feel better, I’ll pay you back plus five percent interest once I get everything sorted out.”
“It’s not that,” he growled. “I don’t want the damned money back.” He could feel his ears and the back of his neck heat up. He’d known she was a class act, but it had never crossed his mind that she had grown up in a super-wealthy rarefied household. There wasn’t the slightest stench of a spoiled, pampered rich kid about her. “You worked hard. Earned every cent.”
She looked at him, the intelligence shining out of her deep blue eyes. “Then why are you angry?”
“I’m not ang—” He snapped his mouth shut. Sarah tilted her head, a small, barely discernable movement that suddenly made him ashamed of the lie that hovered along the inside wall of his lips. “I guess,” he said slowly, feeling his way to the truth, “I feel as if I’ve been sucked up in a tornado and have been set down in an entirely different locale, different customs, language. I don’t know how to navigate it. The status quo is all screwed up.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’m not . . .” He shrugged as if it were no big deal. “I’m not . . .”
“In charge?” Her voice was gentle, her face, too. “I’m still your employee . . .”
“Yeah, about that—”
She cut him off as if she knew what he was about to say. “And you’re still the big man, bossing me around. I’m strapped for cash. No joke.” He could see compassion in her eyes, and humor was there as well, in her gaze and at the slightly tilted-up corners of her lips. “And I want you to know how very grateful I am. You gave me a job. Took time out of your busy schedule to travel with me to Vegas. All these things you did—for no ulterior motive—but because that’s who you are. I don’t know how you got the reputation of a degenerate, dissipated playboy. You are such an honorable, decent, kind human being.”
“I’m not,” he growled. He felt naked.
“You can say what you like.” She wagged a finger at him. “But your actions prove otherwise. Want an example? That abundance of food you bought me at The Palm. It was the first good meal I’d had in a very long time. I was literally dizzy with hunger when you insisted on taking me out. The leftovers sustained me until Friday when I got paid. Your random act of kindness meant a lot to me.”
“Woman, you better take off those rose-tinted glasses. I was being the big man, Mr. Moneybags, patting myself on the back for helping out the poor unfortunate peasant. Hell, I bet you ate food like that all the time. There I was sitting in that booth opposite you secretly congratulating myself on my largesse. I was so pleased, so full of my own consequence, proud that I wasn’t a starving kid anymore and had the means to help out. And if I’m being totally truthful, I wanted to impress you.”
Her hand covered his. He could feel the scrape of calluses. Had scrubbing his house put them there? Did her strong, slender hands used to be unmarred, manicured, and soft as silk? Perversely, he found a beauty in the slightly rough texture. It was a tribute to her strength of character—her willingness to buckle down, work hard, and do whatever it took to ensure her safety and independence. “You did impress me,” she said softly.
She was gazing at him like he was some kind of saint, when the truth was, he would have gladly given up his worldly goods to bend her over the diner table and take her eight ways to Sunday. “Don’t look at me like that.” His voice sounded like it was being filtered through gravel. He shook her hand off and picked up his burger to keep himself from reaching for her. “I’m not to be trusted. Fair warning, I’m an unprincipled bastard, through and through.”
“Good to know.” Sarah moved to the chair next to him, her thick, lush lashes obscuring his view of her summer-sky eyes.
He could smell the fresh scent of her and longed to lean into it, into her. “Seriously. These noble motivations you are affixing to my persona are incorrect. What you see as acts of kindness were nothing more than me being self-serving and driven by lust.”
“Lust? Oh my.” Her hands rose to his shoulders, a slight smile teasing the corners of her lips.
He edged back. “What are you doing?”
“I’ve been curious about the taste of your lips.” Her lashes lifted, revealing the scalding-hot heat in her eyes. “Any objections?” The tip of her tongue moistened her upper lip, causing what blood was left in his brain to rush downward like a flash flood. She laughed low in her throat, as if something she was seeing on his face delighted her. “You seem nervous. Come on. Let me have a little amuse-bouche of that terrible lust. Just one taste. That’s all. I promise.”
Nervous? She had him breaking out in a hormone-crazed sweat. She leaned closer. “No objections, then?” Her voice was a husky purr that promised untold delights.
“Wait,” he croaked, his cock so hard it was causing him pain.
Her gaze flickered down to his crotch, and she smiled, sultry, like Aphrodite incarnate. “Yes?”
“We can’t . . .” His lungs felt like they were going to burst. “You’re married.”
There was a flicker of uncertainty in her gaze, and then it was gone. Her chin rose a millimeter. “I’m not. You’ll see. But let’s say the information we turn up on this trip doesn’t go my way. The fact of the matter is Kevin and I have been living separately for four years. The actual filing of the paperwork is a mere formality. I am never going back.”
“Okay, makes sense, but there’s an additional”—he sucked in another gulp of air—“line I don’t cross. You’re my employee.” This was dead serious, but he had the sense she was laughing at him. “I have a rule,” he insisted as much for his benefit as for hers.
“And if I weren’t your employee?” Her forefinger rose and gently caressed the swell of his lower lip. “Would you let me kiss you then?”
“No question. One hundred percent.”
“Wonderful.” She slid closer. “I quit,” he heard her murmur, and then her mouth was on his with a moan. The world fell away as liquid heat and
the taste of her roared through him. Her fingers gripped in his hair, as she demanded, insisted on more, and he gave, and he took, his heart thundering in his chest. So effortlessly he tumbled off the cliff of his ironclad rules. And it was worth every second he would spend in hell to be caressed by the scent of her, to luxuriate in the plump softness of her lips. Drowning in sensation as the erotic slick of her tongue danced with his. Another soft moan, he wasn’t sure if it was his or hers, so drunk on the taste of her. Then her fists released their grip on his hair. Her palms gently traversed his face, her fingers trailing in their wake until they came between his mouth and hers. “One. I said one. Oh God, I want more.” She leaned her forehead against his, their breath intermingling, harsh and ragged as if having completed a fifty-meter dash. “I never should have promised just one,” she moaned as her hands traveled down his neck to rest over his beating heart. Then she raised her head, and he saw such longing in her eyes before her eyelids fluttered to half-mast, shielding the naked beauty of her thoughts from him.
“Sarah . . .” He reached for her, but she was already gone. Had rounded the table and was back in her original seat, her face flushed, her lips rosy and swollen. He shut his eyes momentarily, every cell in his body throbbing. Trying to permanently imprint that mind-blowing kiss into his memory bank so he would have it for this lifetime and into the next.
30
“You’re certain the reservation was for two separate rooms, Mr. Talford?” The stout desk clerk stroked his Vandyke beard worriedly. He tapped something else on his keyboard, his head jutted forward as he studied the screen with a pale unblinking gaze.
“Absolutely.” There wasn’t an ounce of give in Mick’s voice. Sarah saw a muscle jump in his jaw.
The desk clerk dragged his glance away from the computer. A slight sheen of sweat had appeared on the man’s forehead and around his nose. “I’m so very sorry, but there appears to have been a miscommunication. Perhaps your secretary made a mis—” The steely, uncompromising look in Mick’s eyes had the desk clerk’s voice petering out. The man flinched, blinked, and then swallowed hard, as if he’d realized he had mistakenly tugged the tail of a tiger.