The Derby Girl

by Tamara Morgan

  She released a strangled laugh. “Enlighten me, Jared. How did it sound in your head?”

  The sound of his breathing filled the phone for a full thirty seconds before he finally spoke. “Okay. I guess it sounds pretty bad in there too.”

  “So, what? Are you going to use big words and wear a tie? Should I bring a notebook so I can learn your superior ways?”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.”

  Gretchen moved the phone to the other side of her neck and waited to hear what came next. Maybe his date idea sucked, but there was a pretty high entertainment value in pointing out this man’s flaws and watching him backtrack in a feeble attempt at recovery.

  “I just thought it was something you might be interested in, that’s all. Forget I mentioned it.”

  “Oh, I’m interested.”

  “But you just said—”

  “And I’m coming to your damn lecture.”

  “I think I’d like to retract the offer.”

  “Unacceptable. You have officially run out of points, my friend. Welcome to rock bottom.”

  He paused again, and Gretchen wished it were easier to read this man over the phone. In person, she had pretty good faith in her ability to gauge his moods—high or low and almost always in need of a swift reality check to the rear. Unfortunately, no matter how much she might pretend to know what she was talking about here, she was still just a grown woman going all swoony over a handsome, complicated man.

  And then he surprised her. “Should I be scared? I feel like I should be scared.”

  This time, Gretchen released a full-throated laughter. He wanted her to punish him for this. It was almost as though he acted like an ass on purpose, just to see how she might respond, what sort of clever retribution she’d demand next.

  “I would be if I were you,” she said. Then, brighter and with a falsely sweet undertone, “I look forward to hearing you speak, Dr. Fine. I’m sure you can teach a rough-and-tumble girl like me a thing or two.”

  “It’s too late to apologize, isn’t it?”

  Oh, yes. Much too late.

  A challenge had been issued, a high brow needed to be brought down to her level. Gretchen was rather looking forward to it.

  * * *

  Gretchen sat in the front row.

  Of course she sat in the front row, and of course she was wearing what had to be the tightest pair of pants known to mankind. They were composed of some kind of shiny vinyl stuff that could have been painted on, matched with what Jared would swear was a tightly tailored men’s vest with nothing on underneath.

  It was skin and tattoos as far as the eye could see—and his eyes were currently experiencing some kind of tunnel vision with Gretchen standing guard. She’d sauntered into the lecture hall alongside the other students, not once letting on she was anything but an interested party—albeit one whose tight, round ass had been poured into the most indecent piece of clothing ever crafted.

  It would have been asking too much for her to slink in somewhere near the back, respectably dressed, her eyes rapt, her mouth shut.

  Is that really what you want?

  As he straightened his spine and approached the podium near the front of the lecture hall, Jared realized the answer was a resounding no. Maybe all pre-Pleasant Park Jared wanted was adoration and a willing embrace, but it was amazing how the dark, teasing looks that peeked up through Gretchen’s heavily made-up eyes made him feel so much more at home in his own skin.

  Gretchen challenged him—to act better, to think more, to become worthy. No one had ever taken the time to do that for him before.

  Of course, he really did wish she’d worn different pants. And why was she pulling a banana out of her bag?

  * * *

  Gretchen heard Jared clear his throat as the moderator, a woman shaped like a barrel but with the best legs she’d ever seen, came forward to make the introductions. The buzzing undertones of people chatting stilled, and the rustling of movement all but stopped. There was no way she could have guessed how crowded this talk would be—though, glancing around at the overwhelmingly female population, she could guess part of the cause.

  Okay, all of it.

  There was no denying that the illustrious Dr. Jared Fine had a magnetic presence where he stood in front of the room. He was shorter than the long-legged barrel woman but dressed casually in well-fitted slacks and a blue V-neck T-shirt that should have looked ridiculous but made her want to lick the spot on his chest where rough hair and skin met the air.

  Damn the man. He literally could have been wearing a burlap sack and looked good. It was the casual sense of command he carried, the arrogant quirk of his lips, the self-assured way he appraised the crowd, making eye contact and nodding as if he was there for each individual attendee alone.

  She squirmed in her seat, grateful she’d opted against Caitlyn’s advice to wear a super-short skirt and no underwear, Basic Instinct style. Gretchen had some mad love for Sharon Stone flashing her undercarriage and wielding an ice pick, but she wasn’t about to risk the chance that her vulva might come in contact with a surface that saw thousands of students come and go every year.

  The pants had seemed a good compromise, if also potentially damaging to her vulva. They’d been part of a Catwoman costume from years ago, so tight she was pretty sure she was cutting off most of her arterial blood flow. If she was going to keep up this charade of bringing Jared over to the dark side, she was going to need to do some serious shopping.

  “Okay, Dr. Fine,” the woman said, her voice rumbling. “I’ll turn the talk over to you, since that’s who everyone really came to see.”

  Applause. Whooping. Even a catcall for good measure. Gretchen felt like she was at some kind of burlesque show. Well, in a way, she was—or rather, she meant to be very, very soon.

  “Thanks for the introduction, Dr. Bennett, and thank you everyone for taking the time to come out today.” Jared had no need of the microphone—his voice took on a natural boom. Gretchen might have been intimidated, what with all the chest hair and manly arms and the slide that popped up showing Jared kneeling in front of a rapt, beaming child pre-cleft-palate surgery, but she had a plan.

  “I know this lecture series is supposed to be about travel in the Pacific, but to be honest, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time at the beaches or in bars while I was there.”

  Flash of a new slide, this one of a weary father dragging in a catch of fish with a barnacled, twisty net on a gorgeous beach at sunrise. Naturally, Jared was an excellent photographer on top of everything else. His list of accomplishments grew by the hour. How harmful to her self-esteem would it be to commit to this man long-term?

  She leaned over the tabletop, glad when Jared’s eyes skimmed the crowd and came to rest on her. Maybe it was the lineup in front of her—lipstick, lollipop, banana—necessary tools to put this plan in action, or maybe it was the fact that she looked like sex squeezed into tight pants, but that man was taking a profound interest in her sitting there.

  As he should.

  The lipstick began the show. She waited until she was sure his attention was trained on her, right after an ovary-throbbing slide of the same child, post-surgery, being reunited with his sobbing fisherman father. Focus. She needed to focus. With a purse of her lips and slow, exaggerated movements that made her feel more Jessica Rabbit than Sharon Stone, she applied the bright red color to her lips.

  First of all, it kind of hurt to keep her mouth open and taut long enough to make it worth a good show. Years of lipstick application made the process second nature to her, and it was a real struggle to slow things down. Secondly, Firecracker was a very saturated hue. She hoped none of it landed on her teeth.

  Still, any reservations she might have harbored about the feasibility of this plan disappeared when Jared looked over and noticed. He swallowed h
eavily and dropped his little slide button pusher.

  Of course, then he bent over to retrieve it and Gretchen’s lipstick also fell to the floor. It rolled under the table and out of sight, and not a single person in the audience noticed. That man was so lovely from behind, shapely and firm, rendered all the more sexy by the slip of his shirt up a few inches, showcasing lean, bronzed skin.

  Damn. He was still winning, and he didn’t even have to try.

  * * *

  Jared knew he was good at talking in front of a crowd. He never understood people with public speaking phobias. It was easier to talk at people rather than to them—and what could possibly be better than a hundred pairs of rapt eyes turned his way? This slideshow, this selling of the project, this selling of himself, moving hearts and opening wallets—this he was good at.

  Well, he was normally good at it.

  By the time he was back to his slideshow and sharing a story about accidentally landing in an Indonesian village during their annual cardinalfish celebration, Gretchen had finished with her lipstick and moved on to some kind of bulbous sucker. Her oh-so-red mouth parted and the candy went in. Swirled. Licked. Sucked. And back out again.

  Jared swallowed a groan. She wasn’t the only person in the room eating—it was lunchtime, so several students had brought in paper bags and lattes and were honoring him with their time while they ate. But she was the only one whose mouth tormented him with its constant movements, each one calibrated to provide a man with the most fodder for the imagination.

  He could barely concentrate. He, who could spend hours hovering over a table connecting blood vessels no bigger than a pin. He, who had not lost his head over a woman in a dozen years.

  Gretchen sank further in her seat and opened her legs. He allowed himself a quick glance—merely as a precaution—and was happy to find that the slick black material binding her thighs remained intact all the way up her expanse of leg. Of course, that didn’t mean he didn’t burn to feel it under his hands, to pull her to her feet and follow her up and down the stairs to watch her ass moving underneath the taut, straining material.

  A sudden rustling from the crowd indicated he’d been standing there, staring, much longer than he realized, so Jared cleared his throat and thought of England.

  “I could show you slides for hours, but most people tell me they prefer a little one-on-one chat.” He sat on the edge of the table, one leg on the ground to stabilize himself. “Does anyone have any questions?”

  A few hands shot up, and Jared relaxed as he was hit with the familiar words of a curious and eager crowd.

  What was the toughest place he’d ever been assigned? Afghanistan. There weren’t many pictures from there he liked sharing in a public forum, though. Not only were hospitals overrun with desperate cases, but they had almost no medical supplies to speak of.

  Why did he get started with the project? Hunger for experience, mostly, in a world where standing out from the annual crop of highly educated, over-privileged emerging doctors was damn near impossible. Not to mention a desire to make ripples in the world that weren’t attached to his father’s medical connections.

  Of course, he didn’t say that last part out loud.

  Why did he decide to quit? That was, unfortunately, the ten-million-dollar question—one he was so scared to answer he had yet to open the envelope Paula had handed him the other day. The truth, that he’d heard his friends were opening a health spa—their health spa, born of many late collegiate nights, a plan that had once contained so much easy joy—without even telling him, seemed so petty and small.

  So he offered yet another sound bite instead, citing his desire to take on a more active role stateside, helping raise funds and awareness.

  “And to be honest,” he admitted, running a hand along the back of his neck, “I’m still struggling with where I fit in this new life of mine. Here, in Pleasant Park. With all of you.” Even though the words were calculated to move his audience—and move they did—they weren’t a lie. Learning to be a man instead of a martyr was proving much more difficult than he’d expected.

  As if sensing his struggle, her bullshit radar on full alert, Gretchen lifted her banana in a one-sided toast. He almost laughed out loud when she peeled the bright yellow skin and deep-throated the fruit, right there in the middle of the lecture hall. When she bit down, he caught a flash of white teeth and knew he was a goner.

  Nothing she’d done thus far was wholly inappropriate for either the time or the place. She was decently indecent, skirting the edge, pushing just hard enough to spark desire and pump his blood. He’d fallen into the hands of a master.

  “There’s no saying what the future holds,” he added, relying on a smile to make up for the underlying inanity of that statement. They were lucky he was able to talk at all at this point.

  Someone asked about his favorite climate, and he gave himself over to discussing the various drawbacks of wet heat and dry heat when it came to surgical recovery. He might have gotten away with it too, but Gretchen lifted a hand to her neck and started tracing the pattern of the vine, down to where it slipped into the top of the vest. Odd—and agonizing—that no matter what kind of revealing clothing she wore, that vine remained a stubborn mystery. He wasn’t sure if it was the tattoo or the neck it crept over that captivated his interest more.

  “The tropical locations were difficult in medical terms, but the vegetation was...breathtaking,” he said by way of closing, his own breathing a little labored.

  Dr. Bennett came forward and saved him from further embarrassment. “Why don’t we all give Dr. Fine a big round of applause for showing us a slice of medical life in the Pacific?”

  The applause that followed was big and round, but Jared barely heard it above the roaring of blood in his ears, over the concentration required to keep himself from tearing across the room to Gretchen, who remained calm amidst a sea of people standing and gathering their things.

  But he would wait. He would control this feeling of spiraling powerlessness brought on by her proximity.

  At least in public.

  “Our next lecture in the series will be from our very own Anthro 101 professor, who spent the summer in Papua New Guinea.”

  Jared had never been so happy to watch his adoring public depart. Adulation had its uses, but the primary reason he’d agreed to this thing at all was because his partners relied on him to build their company’s reputation in the community. More positive face time meant better sales, better acceptance, better everything—and since Whitney had a tendency to avoid any responsibility that took place outside of her regular nineish-to-two-or-three work schedule, the bulk of it fell to him.

  Which was fine. Work was preferable to sitting home alone. And in a way, Whitney’s obstinate refusal to lighten his load was a bit like Gretchen’s handy punishments. It was much easier to handle physical torture, long and grueling hours, the ignominy of his sins being rubbed all over his face than the possibility that his friends might someday change their minds about letting him in.

  * * *

  “Well.” Gretchen waited until the last student trickled out before she spoke. That was as far ahead as she’d planned. Well had taken the last of her imagination.

  Lucky for her, Jared seemed more than happy to pick up the slack. He sauntered over to the desk she’d managed to hoist her shrink-wrapped body on top of, taking his time with slow, predatory movements that seemed to accentuate his broody deliciousness. As though the tables had been turned, it seemed he was now intent on punishing her.

  “Well, indeed,” he drawled. “I feel like I should offer to take you to lunch or something, but it seems you packed plenty of snacks.”

  She snickered. She’d have smuggled in a hot dog if there had been any feasible way to pull it off. “I’m sorry. I should have offered to share.”

  “I deserved that.”
>
  “You deserve a lot more.”

  He bowed his head in a slight acknowledgment. “I appreciate your restraint.”

  Except he didn’t. If the way he was looking at her—devouring her with his piercing gaze—was any indication, restraint was the last thing he wanted from her. Flustered, Gretchen resorted to the arch, flirtatious version of herself only he seemed able to elicit. “You give quite a lecture, Doc. Very collegiate. Not many of my other professors get such a rapt audience from me.”

  A look of embarrassment softened his rough, sexy edges. “I’m sorry. Was it completely boring?”

  The question caught her off guard—so much so, in fact, that she slid from the desktop and forgot she was supposed to be playing a role. “No. Not boring at all. I’m glad you invited me.”

  She was surprised to find that the words contained only truth. Even though she’d been doing her best to unseat him up there, he was a natural speaker, a born leader. And the life he’d led belonged in some kind of movie, one in which the main character carried a whip and shied away from snakes. How odd that he’d be wasting his time in a place like Pleasant Park.

  How odd that he’d be wasting his time with a woman like her.

  “I could have listened to you for hours,” she added. Odd or not, he was here, and she intended to make the most of it. “But you only ever talk about your past in a professional capacity. Never in regular conversation. Why is that?”

  “Because it’s completely boring.” And like that, he was turned off again—and whatever moment they’d been sharing turned off with him. “I approve, by the way.”

  “You approve of what?”

  “This.” He reached out and touched her hip. A thrill worked through her at the possessiveness of the gesture, at the implied intimacy contained therein. “Not a minute went by that I didn’t wish the entire crowd to disappear.”

  His other hand lifted her chin, forcing her to look up at him. Two light touches, skin barely grazing skin, and the entire room swirled down a giant drain.

  “The crowd isn’t here now,” she said.