Daisy laughed. “Yep. That’s the one. You can only buy her prints from her gallery on Main Street.”
He watched her for a moment before one of those massive shoulders shrugged. “Okay, so you got that going for you. What else?”
“Ever eaten at one of Tony Itola’s restaurants?” she asked.
Another delicious shrug. She wondered what his shoulders would look like without the flannel covering them.
“Can’t afford to.”
She brought her eyes back to his and clapped her hands together. “Well, Tony’s gourmet restaurant is on Main Street, about a block from Ivy’s gallery. In addition to his flagship restaurant, he has a sandwich shop located right next door to Ivy Taylor’s studio. Most people don’t know that the shop is owned by Tony, but it is and people love it. He also owns the diner right off of the highway, but that’s also not a well-known fact.”
He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “Okay, so the town gets art snobs and foodies coming through occasionally. What’s your point?”
She rolled her eyes. “We don’t just get art snobs and foodies coming through, but those people make special trips out here for the experience. With the help of another foundation, the other shops in town have been refurbished and are filling up with artisans and artists. LowPoint is becoming known as a quaint enclave for artists and dealers. Plus, there’s the warehouse district on the west side of town and the shipping industry is starting to realize that LowPoint is a good midway point for transitioning products.”
Daisy watched the giant man carefully and she realized that the last point really got to him. Rocco Barnes might not understand art and gourmet food, but he grasped the financial implications of easy highway access and storage facilities, distribution hubs and transition points. He dropped his arms and started looking around the house with renewed interest.
“Okay, so LowPoint is going to eventually become a thriving metropolis,” he drawled but she heard the sarcasm in his voice.
“I don’t think anyone in town wants a huge metropolis, Mr. Barnes. The goal is for LowPoint to retain its small town flair. But in order for people to come back and live here, these houses need to be renovated and cleaned up. That’s where you come in.”
“Your company wants me to renovate this house?”
She grinned, suspecting that he was starting to understand her dream. “Not just this house. My company has been hired to renovate all of the houses here in town. There’s a financial team working with the owners of the mortgages on many of the houses. We’ve bought up most of them,” she explained.
His eyes widened slightly as he took in this new piece of information. “How many?” he asked, stopping his tour through the dingy house to stare down at her.
She laughed, almost clapping her hands with excitement now that she could see the interest in his eyes. “Well, my company bought up about two hundred houses. Originally, the idea was to tear them all down and build new ones, but we discovered that these houses were made back in the fifties and are surprisingly solid. They just need to be updated, fixed, cleaned, and…well, decorated.”
He stopped and turned back to her, his hands fisting on his hips. “I don’t decorate.”
She grinned, trying to avoid another chuckle because he seemed to give her an odd look whenever it happened. In a “tough-guy” way, his disdain was charming. “You don’t need to decorate. That’s my job. You and I will work together to make each house unique. The inside and outside have to be as different as possible, while still buying materials and furniture in bulk to cut down on costs.”
There was a long silence as he continued to look down at her. It took all of her self-discipline to not squirm or fidget with those intense, blue eyes looking down at her like that. “Two hundred houses, each looking different?”
“Yep,” she confirmed, smiling again at his astounded expression. “You’d be in charge. You’d have a budget and could hire as many workers as you need. We have an accountant who helps with the budgeting. There’s an admin assistant who orders supplies for you and ensures that the orders arrive on time. Once we have more houses ready for sale, we’ll hire a realtor or a sales team. I don’t know the exact plans for that area, but they will be in charge of finding buyers for the houses, once they are complete.” She paused, wondering what else she could say to convince him to take the job. “One of the downsides to this project is that we need to get several houses, maybe all the houses on a block or a street, fixed up before potential buyers would feel safe enough to consider moving to LowPoint. So it’s a pretty big job.” Daisy recognized the wary look he gave her. “The foundation is well funded. There is funding aplenty, so you don’t need to worry about taking on the project and then having it fold up in just a few months.”
Rocco rubbed the scruff on his jaw, thinking he should have shaved this morning. But he hadn’t really thought that Daisy-Barbie was for real. So he’d fully expected to show up this morning and have a chuckle, then head back to Louisville to search for a job.
But this…looking around at the house that was pretty much in shambles, he started to think through the process. If this was for real, he would really enjoy renovating something like this. It was one thing to build an office building. There were challenges and obstacles that made the work interesting. But the job he’d lost yesterday had been a square building, ten stories high. It would be pretty much the same kind of work he’d been doing on for the past several years. It was a job, paid the bills, but it hadn’t really excited him.
Renovating something like this? Two hundred houses? And all of them needed to be different. Yeah, he could really get into something like this. He reached out and opened the pantry door off the main kitchen area, then jumped back, wrapping an arm around Daisy to make sure she wasn’t hurt as the whole door crashed to the dusty floor.
“Sorry,” he muttered, but he wasn’t really sorry. Slowly, his fingers uncurled and he released her, moving away so that he could get back on track.
He thought frantically, listing out all of the issues that would need to be fixed, glancing down at the beautiful woman with the gorgeous smile and mind-blowing curves. He was thinking about her soft figure pressed perfectly against his own. With a grunt, he moved away. Far away. The opposite-side-of-the-room-away. And still, that wasn’t far enough to stop his mind from replaying how good it felt when his hand curved around her tiny waist.
Focus on the job! “What exactly do you want this place to look like when it is all finished?”
The slender beauty’s smile widened and he almost groaned out loud. She really needed to stop doing that if they were going to work together. Maybe he’d make that a part of his contract. No smiles. No grins. And definitely no giggles. Oh – and no jeans. That woman’s butt was amazing! Firm and round, filling out those jeans better than any woman’s he’d ever seen! Unfortunately, that wasn’t even her best feature!
He glanced at her ring finger, just to make sure. Empty, he thought. Not that it mattered. He wasn’t into women that looked like Barbies. He liked his women a bit more down to earth. More real.
So why the hell was his body reacting to the scent of her strawberry shampoo?
“Here’s my plan for this house,” she turned, pulling out a rolled up sheet of paper from a leather bag he hadn’t noticed before.
As she leaned over, spreading it out over the dusty kitchen island, he had trouble focusing on the details because the scent of her shampoo was even stronger this close up. And she smelled incredibly good…all over. He tried to concentrate on what she was explaining, but her finger was pointing towards something on the paper and all he could think about now was what it would be like to be touched by those soft, pretty hands. Her nails were smooth and the bubblegum pink manicure wasn’t chipped in any way. Rocco could easily picture those pink nails sliding down his chest. Or…other places.
“So, what do you think?” she asked eagerly, turning to look up at him. The gesture caused his eyes to focus on her lips
. Her full lips. With pink, strawberry flavored lip gloss. This close up, he realized that she had freckles. Very slight freckles. And she didn’t wear a lot of makeup. In fact, her eye lashes were the same color as her hair. He hadn’t noticed that before because those chocolate eyes just…overwhelmed the rest of her face. But this close…yeah, he noticed. He noticed everything.
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Excerpt from “Rescued” – Coming May 18, 2018
Ivy’s story in The Lottery Winners Series
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(There are a few things that happen before this scene – but I loved this one so I’m offering it to you as a sample of what’s to come in Ivy’s story.)
Ivy wiped the sweat from her forehead, looking at the compound. This wasn’t good, she thought.
After losing the bandits in the jungle, she’d eventually circled back, finally finding the area where the truck had been parked. Because of the wet ground, it was an easy task to follow the tire tracks back to the compound.
In an ideal world, she would have found civilization, reported the bandits to the authorities, and gone home. Unfortunately, this wasn’t an ideal world. Not by a long shot. After running for about five miles, she’d turned and circled back. Thankfully, the truck hadn’t gone far, maybe only another three miles. So in total, she’d barely traveled a total of more than thirteen miles today. On a slow morning, she ran that before breakfast.
But this wasn’t Kentucky and her jungle boots weren’t the best for long distance running, although they’d done an excellent job of protecting her feet. If she could have walked out of the jungle, she would have done so. No pathway to civilization appeared, so Plan C…or was she on Plan D now? She wasn’t sure …but her current plan was to steal one of the small trucks and drive out of the jungle.
That had been her plan, at least. But as soon as she’d arrived, she’d seen others prisoners. In good conscience, she couldn’t leave them. Not when it appeared that these people had been held here for a while. Their clothes were tattered, filthy and, even from a distance, she could tell that the people hadn’t been treated well.
She needed to go back, find help. But she had no idea where she was. Her camera bag contained her compass, emergency satellite phone, and the smaller emergency supplies she always carried on her when she traveled.
On the upside, she’d gotten away from her would-be captors. On the downside, there were others in the compound and she was determined to help them while she figured out how to get everyone out of this area.
Leave, she thought. Go find help. She wasn’t trained to save these people. Unlike…
No! Gunner was thousands of miles away and he made her crazy anyway! Besides, she’d never had to rely on another person for help in her life. Emotional support? Yeah, absolutely! Ivy considered Marilee, Daisy, and Tony her family and loved them as much.
But she wasn’t the type to wait around and wait for someone else to fix a situation.
If she could sneak her bag away, she might be able to call Gunner’s commanding officer, or someone else, to let them know that there were Americans being held captive here, but she wasn’t sure they would come. Ivy wasn’t even sure if the Indonesian authorities would step in to help. She suspected it was a way of life here. In some parts of the world, ransoming off tourists was a steady income. There were some areas of Indonesia one didn’t go into for that reason. It was a bit like New York City or Chicago. Or any big city. There were some places one didn’t go because they were too dangerous.
Ivy fully acknowledged that she shouldn’t be here either. But the flower!
No, Ivy knew that not even pictures of that stupid flower were worth what she was dealing with now.
Biting her lip, she looked around, wondering if she could hot wire one of the vehicles, use it to get out of here to find help. Hot wiring was one thing she hadn’t needed Gunner to teach her. She’d learned that skill from one of her teenage boyfriends and was an expert on how to hotwire cars. Of course, he was in prison now due to his youthful enthusiasm for his trade. In fact, that little journey into the criminal world had convinced her to take the waitressing job at Janice’s years ago. It had been a horrible job because Janice, the owner, was one of the most unethical people she’d ever met. But working as a waitress had kept her out of prison. And it wasn’t as if she’d had a whole lot of options back then. Now, she had millions of dollars in a bank, earning interest. Now, she had options.
Well, her present predicament sort of negated that statement, she thought as she munched on a protein bar and watched from her hiding place. Janice had stolen their tips, docked their pay for bogus reasons, and denied them overtime pay.
But the diner had also been the place where she’d met her best friends Tony, Daisy, and Marilee. If she hadn’t worked there, they wouldn’t have bought that lottery ticket on Tony’s twenty-first birthday, they wouldn’t have won that enormous jackpot and she wouldn’t have more than two hundred million in the bank and investments. And she wouldn’t have been able to afford traveling to different countries, photographing the most amazing places.
Also, she wouldn’t be in this position, sweating in a stinking jungle after having escaped these idiot rebels.
Okay, so maybe she needed a break from the traveling. This was really getting old, she thought. Ivy frowned, realizing that she’d been having that thought a lot over the past several months. But after years of traveling, she was growing weary of anonymous hotel rooms and dining alone. She’d visited the most amazing places but…Ivy wanted a home. She wanted something more than her one bedroom loft over her gallery in LowPoint, Kentucky. She wanted a real home with kids and a husband. A husband that was NOT Gunner Marks! She munched on her plastic flavored protein bar and contemplated her future husband. He would be kind, sweet, and non-muscular. Probably a runner like her, but that wasn’t a requirement. Sure, it would be nice to have someone who could keep up with her, but…well yeah, Gunner could keep up, but he didn’t count. Not even a little!
Focusing on the task at hand, she considered her options. Her number one priority was to get her bag back. If she could do that, she could figure out where she was, and call for help. Barring that, she wanted to free those hostages. They were held in a hut and guarded by only one guy so far. The guard wasn’t overly attentive; he seemed to be snoozing at the moment.
Getting the hostages out would be a whole lot easier by truck than by foot. Ultimate priority, Ivy had to get out of here, even if she went on her own and sent help back for the hostages.
Maybe she could sneak up to the camp and get that one jeep by the edge of the compound, push it down the dirt road a ways so that the engine wouldn’t alert anyone. Or if they did hear it when she started it up, she’d be too far away for them to catch her.
Yeah, she liked that plan!
Looking up, she estimated that it was only a couple more hours until the sun set. Ivy figured she’d wait until the inevitable drinking and partying began, then sneak in when they passed out. The compound had guards, but she’d watch and learn, figure out which of the guards were lazy. She suspected that most of them would fall asleep at their posts.
Looking around, she carefully searched the area for bugs, reptiles, or other hidden icky things, and found a good spot to observe. Taking out another protein bar, she nibbled on the end, but put it away without finishing it. Since she had no idea where she was, she had no idea how long it would take her to get back to civilization. Ivy knew to eat sparingly; her stomach had given up groaning from hunger yesterday.
Oh, what she would do for a cold shower right about now. Settling in, she thought about what she would do as soon as she reached her hotel. She was staying in the penthouse suite, which had a huge bathtub. She’d shower away the jungle stench that was now clinging to every pore of her body and shampoo her hair three times then slide into the tub and stay there for hours! A bottle of wine, a huge meal, and afterward, Ivy would crawl between the clean, crisp,
white sheets and sleep for days. Weeks!
After she sent a message to Daisy, Marilee, and Tony. Most likely, they would be worried sick by now. She was always careful about sending them daily messages, letting them know she was okay. It was one of the many security features of her daily life, thanks to the big lug whose name will not be spoken of at the moment.
And….that was the end of her Gunner-free moment. Ivy was tired, hungry and itchy, which meant that her self-control was…well, non-existent. So just the thought of the big guy and all of those amazing muscles popped into her mind and they weren’t leaving.
Not that she was trying very hard.
Settling back against the tree, she waited, allowing her mind to drift, entering a fantasy of Gunner walking towards her in…nothing at all. Yeah, if she had her way, the jerk would be naked and…oh, she would love it if he also had tape over his mouth so he couldn’t make fun of her.
As Ivy watched, she thought about all the things she’d love to do to Gunner’s body. And if he was tied down so he couldn’t take over, all the better.
Then again…
The hand covering her mouth startled her out of that particularly nice fantasy. Darn it! How many times had Gunner warned her not to lose her concentration?
Now she was going to learn the hard way what happened when she let her guard down.
The strong arm started to pull her back, but she struggled, digging her nails into the hand covering her mouth. No! She wasn’t going down! Not in this disgusting jungle while watching disgusting men! No way! Thinking back to all the techniques Gunner had taught her, she went slack. It was the hardest thing to do when someone was dragging her. Terror caused adrenaline to flow, increasing the fight response.
But it worked. The arms holding her loosened when she released all the tension in her body and she heard a deep, guttural growl that sounded vaguely familiar, but she didn’t take the time to dissect her reaction. Instead, she jerked upright and…
Hoping for Forever (The Lottery Winners Book 1) Page 12