“I’m sorry,” he said. “None of this is your fault, and I’m a grade-A dickwad. Pardon the Greek.”
“‘Dickwad’ isn’t Greek, is it?”
“No, but Zeus is, isn’t it?”
Omigod. He knew his Greek gods? Her knees weakened further.
“Y’okay?”
“Um…maybe the heat,” she lied. She couldn’t tell him that her female parts had just had a seizure.
“Should I get you some of that apple juice from your car?”
“Backseat. Brown paper bag.”
“Come on.” He politely helped her to the curb, holding her hand while she lowered herself to sit on the concrete—holding her hand—omigod, his hand was so big!—ignoring the police cruiser that pulled up, lights flashing.
And then…and then he walked away, with those long legs, to her car, and bent over! Bent over in those faded jeans. Right in front of her. She couldn’t have been closer to swooning if Keith Urban had invited her to sit on his lap and sing a duet.
“Damn.”
Kellie looked up to see a policewoman standing next to her, admiring the view as well. “I know, right?” she said and stood up. He was her Zeus, after all.
And then he was coming back to her with two apple juice boxes. When he saw the cop, of course, he offered her one, which she declined.
After the officer was assured that neither Kellie nor Quinn was injured, she took their IDs and went to her cruiser to call their information in, and Quinn borrowed Kellie’s phone to call someone about a tow.
She was finishing her apple juice when he ended his call and came back over to her.
“Sorry for this. I hope you’re not late for something.” He really did have a sexy voice.
She took her cell from him and felt the heat from his skin on the case. Hotter than the weather. The kind of hot that made her shiver.
“Not really. I’m supposed to meet an old friend and her new fiancé for dinner, and I’d hoped to get checked in to the conference hotel and spiffed up before I have to face them, but”—she shrugged, feeling fatalistic—“it’s not like I’m going to wow them with my big-time glamour, no matter how long I spend in front of the mirror.”
Zeus—er, Quinn stepped back and tilted his head at Kellie, eyed her up and down. He opened his mouth, then shut it, then was just about to try again when the cop opened her car door. Just as well. If you can’t say something nice and all that.
“Looks like neither of you is wanted for anything, so I’ll just keep my lights flashing until your tow comes,” she told Quinn. She handed both of them her card, lingering when she handed one to Quinn. “If you need a copy of the report, the number to call is on here.”
Kellie tried not to look disgusted. At least she managed to face the other direction while she grimaced.
A pickup truck pulling a trailer arrived, honking, with two men hanging out of the windows. They hooted and hollered like high school seniors on spring break.
“Just what my day needs,” Quinn muttered. “Darryl and Darryl without Larry.”
Kellie barked out a goose-squawking laugh, but she couldn’t help herself. She had loved watching Newhart reruns with her dad as a kid, and those three characters had been the best part. The sideways smile Quinn sent her made the indignity worthwhile.
“Hey, man, we heard it, but we didn’t believe it, so we had to come see for ourselves,” said the shorter guy as they tumbled from the truck.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get Betty home safe and sound,” the larger guy told Quinn.
The first guy walked up to Kellie and said, “Are you the perpetrator who hurt Betty? I mean, the boss can ride Betty’s sister Sue until Betty feels up to having him back in the saddle, but—”
“Shut the fuck up, Darryl.” The big guy, who was enormous, with a shaved head and full beard, smacked Darryl in the back of the head.
“Watch it! I just polished my metal plate!” He rubbed his head.
“Do you guys mind giving me a hand here?” Quinn lifted the bike gently. It looked mostly okay, from Kellie’s completely nonprofessional perspective, but the way he was looking the thing over, she half expected him to start mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions on it. She stood watching as the men—okay, mostly watching Quinn, his muscles barely straining as he lifted the bike onto the trailer and tied it down with nylon straps.
She should probably just leave. She didn’t need a tow, and there was no damage to her car…
Quinn walked back over to her. “So, I guess we’re all set here.”
“Yeah. Um, I’m glad you’re okay. Sorry about your bike.”
He shrugged. “I can fix it.”
“You can fix it? Yourself?”
“Yeah, it’s what I do. I design and build bikes.” He waved at the truck, which she now saw was painted with a motorcycle logo and the words “Quinn’s Customs.”
“Hey, boss,” the big guy called. “See you back at the shop.”
“Hey!” Quinn called as the truck began to roll away. “What about me?”
“No room. See you later, boss.”
“What the hell…” he said with a good-humored shake of his head. “Maybe if I paid them more often, they’d treat me with more respect.”
Kellie probably shouldn’t have been quite so pleased to see a complete stranger abandoned on the side of the road. A complete stranger biker, in Sin City. She did know, thanks to Las Vegas’s finest, that he didn’t have any restraining orders and wasn’t wanted for ax-murdering. And she wasn’t in such a hurry to get to the hotel to meet Brae and Toby for dinner.
“So, Quinn-Zeus Anderson. Do you need a ride somewhere?”
…
“I don’t want to keep you from your dinner plans,” Quinn told her as he folded himself into the micro-mobile.
“Honestly, I’m kind of hoping to miss dinner. Like, ‘maybe it would be cool if a hurricane blew up’ kind of hope.”
Okaaay then. “What hotel are you staying at?” Quinn asked when the naughty librarian—or bookstore lady, or kindergarten teacher, or whatever—shot him a raised eyebrow. “So I know whether you should drop me at my shop or my apartment.”
She relaxed, but Quinn didn’t. His knees were in his sinus cavity. Which was a blessing, really, because he’d been hit with a subtle but powerful wave of fruit and flowers and other female scents when he’d gotten in the little car, and his libido liked the way nice little Miss Kellie smelled.
He was avoiding nice girls. Even nice girls who looked like they belonged on a motorcycle calendar. Nice girls wanted nice boys who had stable, respectable jobs.
“My conference is at the Masquerade.”
“What kind of conference?”
She gave him an appraising look—searching for what? Then, looking through the windshield as she put the car in gear, said almost faster than his brain could process, “I write erotic paranormal romance, and I’m going to a romance reader/writer convention this weekend.”
“Turn right here,” he said. An erotic romance writer? Damn. She didn’t seem at all comfortable about her announcement, but his sex drive was doing a happy dance. “And you’re embarrassed about this romance thing because…?”
Now she was looking at him.
“I’m not embarrassed,” she shot out, stomping on the brake when the light turned yellow. “Darn.”
The car behind them honked, but at least it didn’t hit the back end.
“Okay.”
“It’s just that some people…like maybe some people at home who hold the lease to my bookstore…might think that I’m already a problem for the neighborhood, because I’m bringing in the wrong kind of clientele unfit for their children, if they knew that I write sex things.”
“Sex things, huh?” He needed to shift in his seat, because the discussion was taking a turn that was making him uncomfortable—not in a bad way, necessarily. But the vision of sweet little Kellie, sitting at a computer typing…sex things…made him wonder what she had under that snug
little skirt. He already knew her bra was lacy from when she’d leaned over him on the street.
Down, boy. The lady’s doing you a favor, and you’ve already been a total ass to her, he reminded himself, thinking of how he’d snapped at her earlier. “Tell me more about these sex things.”
She sighed. “Do you keep your mind in the gutter, or does it just fall out now and then and crawl around down there?”
He laughed. Crap. He didn’t need to find her funny as well as sexy as hell. “You brought it up,” he protested.
“True. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. I think this will probably be my last conference. I can’t seem to finish my current manuscript, and the competition is so fierce, I just don’t see risking my day job…which I don’t hate, but…”
So maybe she was a nice girl who understood what it was like to want to live on the edge between respectability and creativity.
He knew what he was going to see when he turned his head toward Kellie. He was going to see himself just a few years ago, standing on the brink of a decision between a job that he did hate, and the possibility of throwing it all off a cliff and diving over after it, not knowing if he would land in calm water, rough surf, or sharp rocks… Quinn shouldn’t have looked. But he looked anyway.
And yep. Her pretty green eyes were troubled, a little bleak, and brimming with tears. Jeez. She wanted to trash her dreams. Was going to trash her dreams. A little wave of sympathetic heartbreak washed through him.
“And to top it all off…” She looked back at him and her face squinched up in a frighteningly cute way—scary because it made him want to fix everything. “To top it all off, my critique partner, who hit the New York Times list for her first book last year—which I spent more time working on than my own, by the way—and who is having a movie made of that same book—wants to meet for dinner and drinks to celebrate her new three-book deal with Broderick-Walker books. And so I can meet her new fiancé. Toby Wagner. The Toby Wagner. So I can sit there and be the adoring fan-loser-wannabe with the incomplete manuscript with no book deal and certainly no movie deal or movie star fiancé. Heck, I couldn’t even convince my gay sidekick from home to come play the part of my badass tattooed romance-hero-cover-model boyfriend for the weekend.”
“Do you really have a gay sidekick at home?”
“He’s more of an assistant, rather than a sidekick, and I can’t really blame him for not wanting to come be my beard.”
“I can’t imagine why not.” He rolled his eyes. “Most of the gay guys I know are dying to pretend to be straight for the right woman.”
She grinned. “I know, right? Who wouldn’t love to hear their boss say, ‘Hey, you must be longing to fly to Vegas to be my loyal sidekick and fake boyfriend for the weekend,’ right?”
The car behind them honked, and Kellie hit the gas with a little more oomph than was necessary. They made it around the corner, only to be stopped behind a van with a sign that promised to deliver women directly to their hotel room. She slammed on the brakes, and Quinn was saved from a windshield face-plant by the fact that his shins were braced against the dashboard.
“Anyway. I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to spill my guts. Too much information, right?”
“Eh. No worries. I work with the Brothers Gross. They have an open-door policy with the bathroom. Emotional vomit is a breath of fresh air.”
She laughed, light and husky. When she turned to look at him, their gazes held.
Something passed through Quinn that felt…good. Warm. Ah, hell. So which one was she? Sex-on-the-brain romance writer or nice girl from a small Georgia town? He had to find out. “And you need a badass boyfriend for…?”
She shrugged, embarrassed. “I don’t need a boyfriend at all. But if I had one, I wouldn’t feel like such a loser, sitting there with the great and powerful Brae and the wonderful Toby at dinner tonight. God, that’s shallow, isn’t it?”
Knowing he was making a mistake, he opened his mouth anyway. “I can’t get you a book deal, or the movie thing, or the fiancé. Especially not the fiancé.” He looked down at his right arm, which had a partial sleeve tattoo. “But I don’t have dinner plans tonight. And since I wrecked your afternoon plans for a hairdo and makeup marathon, the least I can do is come and glower and flex my ink and pretend to be your boyfriend for a while. If you want. I’m not above shallow.”
He found himself holding his breath. Why on earth should this sweet woman want him to hang out with her? Why on earth did it matter so much to him?
Her smile lit up the interior of the little car, and he had his answer.
Chapter Three
Wow. Kellie reminded herself that she was breaking out of the Responsible and Respectable mold while she was here. Picking up a biker on the side of the road and taking him to her hotel to be her temporary boyfriend counted, didn’t it?
It sounded skeevier in her head than it felt in her gut, though, so she told her head to be quiet for a while and see how things went.
“You sound like you’re from the Southeast, but I guess you live around here?” Quinn asked.
“No, I just flew in a little while ago,” Kellie told him. Was he wondering because he was thinking, maybe, he’d ask her out again after he pretended to be her boyfriend for a couple of hours?
“A little while, like a couple of weeks? And you’re just moving to this hotel for the conference?”
Why did he think she lived here in Vegas? Maybe he was planning to run some sort of scam on her.
“No, a little while, like about an hour,” she answered. “Why do you ask?”
He shot a surreptitious glance into the backseat. And at the center console of her rental. “Just looks like you’ve been in this car before. Either that, or you need to find a different rental company. One that can afford to clean their cars.”
“Oh. I had a little issue with a box of Cracker Jacks when I got in the car.”
“Ah.” He nodded, as though that explained everything.
“And then my briefcase fell over. And I spilled apple juice on the shirt I wore on the plane, so I had to change in the car…”
He was smiling at her again. The air was sucked out of the vehicle. What was that about? Some sort of weird atmospheric quirk, or his dimples were acting as powerful vacuums.
“Let me guess,” she said. “You’re a clean freak.”
He shrugged. “Not on purpose. My dad was in the navy. We can all travel across the country and live for a week out of one little plastic grocery bag.”
“Wow.” Kellie hazarded a glance at her backseat, which, she realized, looked like Walmart the day after Thanksgiving. And an avalanche. “How many of you have to fit in that one plastic bag?”
The laugh he let loose filled the car and sent good vibrations through the seat and into her thighs. Her thighs. Which reacted by clenching pleasantly.
“I’ve got one brother and a sister. And we each got our own grocery bag.”
“Oh, thank goodness. All of you hanging from one peg in the back of the minivan is an accident waiting to happen.” She said that last part just to see if that thigh vibration thing would happen again, and it did. Squirm.
“So you grew up all over, then?” she asked, moving slowly with the flow of traffic along the street, stopping for other tourists who weren’t watching for cars because they were gaping at the enormous casinos with the giant…everythings…hanging out all over.
“Nope. Right here. My dad spent a few years in the service, but met my mom while he was here on leave, and here we are.”
“And you build motorcycles.”
“Yep.”
That was kind of romantic. Sailor gets out of the service, meets a showgirl, settles down, raises a family. One child is a biker…she wondered what the rest of his siblings did, but before she could ask, the gaudiest hotel and casino of them all came in to view.
“Oh. My. Gosh.”
Quinn snorted. “You’ve never been here before?”
“Holy maloley.”
“I’m guessing that’s a no.”
Kellie had been so focused on not getting them killed in traffic—and the vibrations in her thighs—that she hadn’t really looked at what was coming in the distance. But now that they were right out front, her eyes couldn’t decide where to land. There was a giant fountain with some sort of show going on in the middle, hotel towers that were dripping with Mardi Gras–colored ribbons, each the width of a football field. And ten-foot-diameter “beads” strung everywhere.
“I’m a little scared of the breasts that those beads might inspire to be exposed.”
“I’m not.” He was staring at her chest with a most definitely wolfish grin.
“Umm…”
One side of his mouth tilted up. “Excuse me.”
She snorted and slid her car forward into the valet parking line. “I could be offended, but I probably should have warned you, before I accepted your offer to be my imaginary boyfriend, romance authors and fans aren’t always the most respectful people when it comes to objectifying men.”
“Really.” His dry tone belied the twinkle in his dark eyes. “I’ll consider myself warned.”
“Hey, guy,” she said, poking a very firm bicep. “For the next two or three hours, you’re mine. If I’m buying you dinner, you’re gonna be totally in love with me, right?” Wow. Something must have come over her on the drive from the airport. She was finding herself saying things that she would never say at home in Georgia.
“Am I putting out later?”
Something about the fiery glint in his eye had her imagination going way past dinner. But her sensible side grabbed her back. “I’m not—I would never—”
“I’m just kidding.” Quinn’s hand on her arm was warm. Hot, even.
And made her reconsider her denial.
Finally, before the atmosphere in the car got any more awkward, it was their turn to disembark at the front door of the Masquerade.
Accidentally in Love With the Biker (What Happens in Vegas) Page 2