by Alison Kent
What this chick in the lemon-colored dress needed was one of those four guys who’d been gawking at her legs to get off his lazy ass and help her away from the overeager Romeo. Whether she was involved in Castine’s business or not, she didn’t deserve the manhandling. But it seemed every last one of the gawkers just watched in salacious envy as the creep wearing Gucci shades in a dark bar continued to grope her.
“Shit.” Tension coiled inside him. Tighter.
Enrique turned. A waitress tried to intervene. And then Damon was on his feet, not caring if he blew his anonymity in front of a guy his group was investigating. People who took advantage of women were on his personal list of World’s Biggest Jerk-offs.
Ten strides brought him tableside with Castine and the woman.
He lowered himself to eye level with the prick’s sunglasses as the guy leaned back to laugh at his companion’s Twister maneuvers.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you that ‘no’ means ‘no’?” Damon counted on a surprise tactic and created a path for the lady to clear out of the booth.
He held his hand out to help her up as Castine loosened his hold.
“We were just getting better acquainted, weren’t we, Lacey?” The reputed drug runner straightened his suit jacket and smoothed a pink silk tie as he looked to his reluctant date for confirmation.
She stood quickly, tugging her purse and her laptop case out from under the table.
“Actually, you were just demonstrating what a lowlife you are.” She spoke English with a distinctively American accent and gave a cold nod to the jackass who’d tried to maul her. Then she spun toward Damon. “Thank you.”
With a fluff of her short blond curls, she pivoted on her heel and swished past him, her yellow skirt brushing his knee as she went.
Half the heads in the bar turned in unison to watch her go, and he knew he couldn’t let her wander around this deserted stretch of Aquadilla on her own when she was so obviously out of her element. She could spend half the night trying to talk a cab driver into taking her back to the more tourist-friendly part of town. If the cabbies on duty around here were half as interested in her legs as the bar patrons had been, she’d be fighting an uphill battle.
“Looks like she’s already gotten acquainted enough,” Damon observed as he walked away from Castine’s table.
He’d already hit the bottom of the evening downward spiral by making his quarry aware of his presence. Not even a hot chick with a bad attitude could make this night worse.
“CAN YOU TAKE ME to this hotel?”
Lacey Sutherland handed the address to a cab driver who was leaning on his trunk, desperate to get out of the seedy bar scene and back to her luxury hotel for the night.
She liked Puerto Rico, but she hadn’t found her bearings yet and had somehow misjudged the bar’s proximity to the resort. Staying out on the northwestern shore was nothing like metropolitan San Juan, where she’d spent the first night after her plane touched down.
She didn’t even want to think about how horribly she’d misjudged her date. That was a problem on so many more levels than it would be for a normal woman, since Lacey was a matchmaker by trade. And had, God help her, set herself up with the octopus in the three-piece suit back there. Her new compatibility prediction system must suck rotten eggs to have been so very wrong about this guy being suited for her.
“No habla inglés.” The cab driver shook his head at her while staring unrepentantly at her breasts.
“You don’t need to speak English.” She pointed to the address again, a series of numbers and a street name that should be easily recognizable for a guy in his profession.
The bar wasn’t exactly in a busy part of town, so walking was out of the question. This was a crappy way to begin her working vacation, a vacation she’d ultimately convinced herself was for her own good. Not just because Laura had said so, but also because Lacey feared her matchmaking site’s problems could be traced back to her losing touch with how the dating world worked.
How many dates had she been on since college? She could count them on one hand. And the number of guys she’d dated more than once…exactly two. Neither of them had lasted more than a few months before Lacey had gone back to her work and her isolated island. She’d decided that her Puerto Rico trip needed to be about more than meeting her ninety-six-percent match. She would do some serious dating research down here. Check out the singles world as the locals knew it and blog about it in detail for her Web site to drive up her visitor numbers during this one last push to beat her sister.
She sighed at the driver’s comfortable sprawl where he sipped a Coke and listened to Spanish talk radio. The only illumination came from the bar, casting the street in shadow except for the occasional set of headlights cruising in or out of the parking lot.
“Are you okay?” A voice from behind her—and, praise God, an English-speaking voice—distracted her from waving the paper in the cabbie’s face again.
Turning, she discovered the man who’d saved her in the bar. A clean-cut, square-jawed type who looked so all-American he could have strolled off a Ralph Lauren ad. The dimple in his chin only added to the impression. Sure, he wore a wife-beater shirt and Bermuda shorts like most of the rest of the guys in the surfer hangout, but something about his earnest expression communicated that he was a stand-up guy.
Assuming she had any judgment where men were concerned. A major leap of faith in light of the bozo she’d just walked away from.
“I’m fine.” Straightening, she stepped away from the driver to introduce herself. “I’m sorry I didn’t take more time to thank you properly back there. I’m Lacey Sutherland.”
He glanced from her face to her hand and back again before he took her fingers and squeezed. Gently. Warmly. Definitely a nice touch.
“Damon Craig. And you’re welcome.” He pointed up the street. “You want a ride back to your hotel before your admirer gets out here? My car is just up there.”
It was a nice offer. A gentlemanly offer. The kind of white-knight suggestion she would have expected from an all-American male with a dimple in his chin that could make him Tom Brady’s younger brother.
But something shifted in the air between them as he asked it. Some boy-girl dynamic that made her heart beat a little faster.
“Um—” She knew better than to trust something as unreliable as physical chemistry as an indicator for compatibility. On any given day the Connections message board received a post about a relationship based on lust that went awry. “I’d better not.”
From behind Damon, the door of the bar swung open with a squeak and a bang. Three guys piled out onto the steps of Café Rosita, two in silk shirts and dress pants and one in a banker’s suit with a pastel-pink tie. Nick Castine.
Before she had time for dismay, Captain All-America spun her around, tucking her close to his side as he wrapped his arm about her waist. With his free hand, he cradled her head to his chest as if to hide her from the world. All at once, he was steering her away from the street, down a sandy path through palm trees, her heels sinking in the soft terrain.
Oddly, she could hardly protest when her cheek rubbed against his chest, her nose picking up the sudden tantalizing scent of man and aftershave. The warmth of his body plastered against hers, making her keenly aware that Damon Craig wasn’t just a do-gooder “guy next door” giving her a hand. He was a major, muscle-bound stud.
Who happened to smell good enough to eat.
“What are you doing?” She tripped on a piece of driftwood and realized the ocean must be nearby. She could hear the roll of waves in one ear while the beat of Damon’s heart thumped against the other.
“You don’t want to run into that touch-happy jackass again.” Damon peered back up the hill and steered her to the right along a line of palm trees, relinquishing his hold on her. “We can wait down here until he takes off.”
She felt adrift suddenly, her skin cooling in the aftermath of those moments tucked up against him. Even her legs
felt a little more unsteady. She dropped her laptop bag to the ground and took in the sights—a fat full moon reflecting white light on frothy waves rolling with a swish to her feet.
“You seemed to handle him just fine back in the bar.” Not that she expected him to fight all her battles for her. But he sure hadn’t looked intimidated by Nicholas earlier.
“Yeah, and he’s probably had just enough time to feel the full sting to his ego, so I wouldn’t count on handling him so easily the next time.”
“I don’t know how I could have ended up with such a loser.” She was tempted to crack open her laptop and pore over the data again to see what she might have missed. She hadn’t spent months working on the new compatibility software to end up making mistakes like this.
“You’re not the first person to misjudge a date.” He picked up a piece of driftwood and whipped it into the ocean, boomerang-style.
“You don’t understand. It’s my job to craft an intelligent matchmaking profile system for my company and this is the ninety-six-percent-compatibility match I got paired up with.” The reality of it still blew her away. This could mean the whole system she’d spent months on was worthless. She didn’t mourn the loss of a dating prospect, since she wasn’t looking for romance anyhow. But she sure as heck regretted that her system could be so deeply flawed. “I mean it when I say this should not have happened.”
He went still—silent—for so long that she noticed it in spite of her preoccupation with the glitch in her program.
“What?” She suspected a guy who looked like Damon Craig had never felt the need to try out matchmaking online.
Women probably threw themselves at him on a regular basis.
“You work for one of those online dating places?”
“Why?” She couldn’t help a little defensiveness. “Are you a nonbeliever?”
“To each his own.” He didn’t elaborate, but then, she’d run into most every type of resistance to her line of work.
“You’re absolutely right. Some people don’t mind venturing off blindly into the dating world, while others of us prefer to up the odds of success.” It was a standard defense of her work, although she found it tough to stand behind it tonight when her projected match had been a grabber. He’d seemed nice enough at first, but his manners had disappeared after his second drink.
Slipping out of her heels, Lacey let her bare feet sink into the sand. The sensation felt amazing, reminding her that the years she’d kept delaying a vacation had added up. What was wrong with her that she couldn’t ever give herself a break to soak up some sun? Feel the sand in her toes? Just because she lived on an island of her own didn’t mean she had a beach like this that felt like a deluxe spa treatment on her skin. She had stiff, squishy St. Augustine grass and a view she usually only enjoyed from a window. Maybe she’d do a better job on her software revamp this week if she did it with a tequila sunrise in hand.
“Yeah?” Damon stalked closer and her heart did that fast-forward thing again. “I find it hard to believe a woman like you would need the help of some high-tech program to get a date.”
Did he think that only a woman wearing tortoiseshell eyeglasses and her hair in a bun needed help with finding an appropriate man? She wanted to feel defensive, except that she caught another hint of his aftershave scent and experienced a sharp pang of inexplicable awareness.
“Who are you?” She couldn’t help the question. She told herself it was in the name of research. “I mean—are you a traveler or a local? I don’t know anything about you.”
She’d wanted to ask what he did for a living since the information was one of the most telling details on a matchmaking profile. Her gut told her he was all wrong for her, but she wanted the data to back that up, if only to reaffirm her instincts. Because aside from her misstep with Nicholas Castine, she still had faith in the compatibility program she’d designed that was based on tried-and-true personality profiling.
“I’m a hell of a lot better than the punk who just tried to grope you in full view of fifty bar patrons, that’s for sure.” He didn’t look anything like the guy next door right now. Not even the dimple in his chin could erase her impression that this man could be dangerous.
The change in his demeanor didn’t frighten her. And that was saying something, because she was a woman who’d never felt at ease around men, after one of her stepfathers had tried to touch her inappropriately.
In theory, Damon Craig’s chest-thumping declaration ought to put her on guard. In reality, she found it oddly comforting that he could be so incensed on her behalf. She knew the full-body tingle humming over her skin right now had more to do with an unwise attraction than any inkling of impending harm.
“I’m sure you are a much nicer man than Nicholas—”
“But you’re not in the market for nice, right?” He sounded vaguely irritated about that and she wondered why.
“I’m in the market for understanding the laws of physical attraction and how we respond to them.” Somehow just uttering the phrase “physical attraction” around him made her knees weak.
A warm breeze blew off the ocean and sent her skirt tickling around her thighs. She’d shopped for something pretty and feminine to wear tonight, throwing herself into the idea of her date so much that she’d actually been disappointed on a personal level when Nicholas had turned out to be all wrong for her. But the pent-up romantic hopes—so totally unexpected—had left her feeling restless and edgy. Her gaze lingered on Damon’s broad shoulders as he blocked her view of the water, his big, athletic body communicating in its own language to hers.
His teeth flashed white in the moonlight as he hovered over her.
“That’s where you’re looking at it all wrong. There are no laws when it comes to attraction.” He leaned closer, his gaze dropping to her mouth. “It just drop-kicks you when you least expect it.”
His stance on the subject made no sense. The sultry heat rolling off him in waves, however, made one hell of a case to a woman who hadn’t indulged herself in far too long.
2
DAMON HADN’T MEANT to tangle with the woman from the bar.
From what he’d gathered from seeing her in action, she was uptight, tied to her technology and had piss-poor street smarts, if she blindly agreed to a computer’s choice for a date. Lacey Sutherland seemed more concerned with some bogus scientific research than her personal safety, given that she’d made no arrangements for transportation home tonight. Unless, of course, she was lying about everything and was somehow connected to the drug runner in ways she wouldn’t admit.
If she was covering up a more illicit tie to Castine, she was doing a damn good job of it. The last woman he’d known with ties to a drug dealer—his former girlfriend—hadn’t hidden the signs of her addiction well. Kelly had run off with her supplier while Damon was on duty, claiming she couldn’t take Damon’s dangerous and unpredictable job anymore.
Damon had vented his anger about the whole thing through his job over the last year, taking a new, special interest in his drug-interdiction flights. They’d been following small leads to the highest guy in the food chain for months, finally discovering Castine’s import-export business at the root of a complex network. His unit didn’t want to haul him in until they caught him in the act, and that meant being ready for the next big shipment.
Now his unofficial surveillance was a bust, since he’d made himself conspicuous in the bar tonight. He didn’t have anything else to do right now besides prove his point about attraction, especially since he wanted to keep tabs on anyone with a connection to Castine.
Lacey sighed and tapped her foot. At first Damon thought she was being impatient with him, but then she looked up at him and shook her head, blond curls flying.
“I don’t agree.” She didn’t back away from him even though he’d come to rest mere inches from her on the beach below Café Rosita’s. Above them the sounds of laughter and reggaeton drifted on the breeze.
“You don’t?” He�
�d half forgotten what they’d been talking about and he rewound their conversation in his mind. He’d been too busy weighing the merits of getting close to her to recall how her words fit.
“No. There are some predictable rules of…attraction.” She licked her lips, a small, nervous gesture at odds with her matter-of-fact tone. “Any unexpected feelings that—as you say—drop-kick you unexpectedly, you’ve got to chalk up to lust. Those are superficial feelings that have little to do with a true emotional and mental chemistry.”
“That’s rich.” He would have laughed if he hadn’t been wound tight as a drum from the potent combination of her nearness and the distinct sexual draw of her tongue moistening the soft fullness of her lip. “You’re telling me that if you meet someone and they make you all hot inside, that’s superficial?”
She twitched at the mention of heat, one hand reaching up to run through her cropped blond curls before she fisted her fingers at her side.
“That’s right.”
He locked gazes with her for a long moment, breathing in the sultry air between them and growing more sure of himself with every rapid rise and fall of her breasts under the skimpy yellow triangles of fabric that made up the top of her dress.
“And if you can’t catch your breath because your thoughts have turned to pleasure, that doesn’t matter, either?”
The pink tip of her tongue darted out once more.
“I really don’t think—”
“What about if your mouth goes dry just thinking about being touched by a stranger?” He closed the last inch of space between them, his thighs bumping hers, their hips grazing.