The Thrill of It All

by Christie Ridgway

  “Oh, really?” Her cousin’s lip curled. “Because in my experience some of them have been overly enthusiastic. No matter what the product is, they just have to have it.”

  Oh, yeah, Felicity was trying to blame him, all right.

  “Ashley, I don’t think your cousin understands men at all,” Magee said through his teeth. “It’s true that under certain circumstances a man might not refuse a free sample—who would, especially when the salesgirl insists by pressing it into his hand!—but that doesn’t mean he wants a second taste, let alone the whole enchilada. It isn’t that good.”

  “Salesgirl insists! Are you claiming you were forced to…to…”

  “Is GetTV selling a line of Mexican food now?” Ashley asked, her eyebrows drawing together.

  Felicity answered her cousin, but her gaze was narrowed at him. “As a matter of fact, we’ve had great success with our food products. We’ve never had to beg anyone to take a sample because everything at GetTV is top-quality.”

  “Is that so?” Something new on a nearby countertop snagged his attention and he reached over to snatch up a mangled piece of statuary. “Well, if you bought this from GetTV, dollface, you got taken.”

  In a flash, she rushed over to grab it from him. “That’s a Joanie. My Joanie. I won it last night for being voted Host of the Year.”

  “Sorry, but it looks like the booby prize to me. Couldn’t they have polished it up for you?”

  She glared at him. “It was polished. It was perfect. But then it was tossed around in the trunk during the accident.”

  “Accident?”

  At Ashley’s voice, both Magee and Felicity whipped their heads toward her. Magee had almost forgotten the other woman was in the room.

  “Mom didn’t tell me you were in an accident,” Ashley said.

  “Oh. Uh. Uh, it’s really not worth mentioning,” Felicity stuttered out. “No harm done, except I’m stuck here until Uncle Billy makes some repairs. Which, at his usual snail’s pace, means I won’t be heading back to L.A. until tomorrow morning, I suppose.”

  She was just passing through! Magee breathed out a silent sigh of relief. Once he made it through the next few minutes, then he’d never have to see the pain-in-the-tail chick again. Ashley would agree to a quickie Vegas wedding, he was sure, so he wouldn’t even have to endure a reception line that included her cousin’s congratulatory kiss.

  “Tomorrow?” Ashley shifted Anna P., her eyes widening. “But Felicity, what…what about Ben?”

  Ben? “What about your brother, Ash?”

  Her cousin spoke right over him, gripping that ridiculous statue in both hands as if it was a talisman. “Come on. So he hasn’t called or come home for a week. Maybe if it was another twenty-one-year-old we should worry. But it’s Ben, Ash. Ben.”

  Magee relaxed, because he wasn’t too worried about week-gone Ben, either. The kid had a good heart but a soft head, and at twenty-one he had likely gone off with a girlfriend or gone on a camping trip and merely forgotten to let anyone know.

  But if Ash was anxious…“Is there something I can do?”

  “No, Magee,” she said, darting him a guilty look.

  Felicity shot him a suspicious one. “We have a passel of relatives around here with nothing better to do than be on the lookout for Ben. Why involve me, Ashley?”

  When her cousin gazed back without a word, Felicity closed her eyes and sighed. “Okay, fine. Don’t answer that.”

  Apparently Magee had missed something in that last exchange. “I don’t get it. Why should it be you?”

  “Because being irresponsible is what the Charms do,” Felicity answered. “Meaning they’re high on plans and low on results.”

  Ashley shifted Anna P. so that the angelic face of the snoozing little girl was facing her cousin. “But you’re the different one, Felicity,” she said softly. “Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?”

  Felicity’s gaze was on her cousin’s daughter, and she didn’t look like the same woman who’d been spitting nails at Magee a few minutes before.

  “I’m the one who doesn’t belong,” she said softly. Then she shook herself and focused on Ashley again. “Okay, okay. I’ll do what I can, but only until Uncle Billy makes my car drivable.”

  Magee’s instincts, the ones that had earned him the Lucky Bastard nickname, were jabbed awake when Ashley turned to him. “And you can do something, Magee. You’ll help my cousin, won’t you?”

  “No!” He glanced over at Felicity, who’d yelled the same word at the same time. Anna P. squirmed, crying out in her sleep, and Magee quieted his voice.

  “Listen, Ashley, I would, you know I would, but Felicity and I don’t really know each other—”

  “Just for today,” Ashley said. “Simon would want you to.”

  That ended the discussion. At least for Magee.

  But it didn’t stop him from muttering at Felicity once Ashley left the kitchen to put Anna P. down for her nap. “You can still say something. Tell her the same thing I did. Tell her that we don’t really know each other.”

  If looks could kill, she’d just shoved him off the summit of Yosemite’s El Capitan. “But I do know you, Michael Magee. I remember that Simon told me plenty about his climbing partner…including the nickname you were given for your many amorous adventures.”

  Oh, hell.

  She crossed her arms, tapped one toe. “Let’s see. It went like this, I think. The more difficult the location, the more chance you might be discovered, the better you like doing it, isn’t that right…”

  He sighed, waiting for it.

  “…Thrillbanger?”

  Felicity grabbed a baseball cap from her old closet, then jammed it over her hair as she followed Magee down the crumbling cement walkway. Over her shoulder, she waved at Aunt Vi, who was standing in the doorway and smiling at them through a curling rip in the screen.

  At the end of the walk, he held open the door of his beater-mobile for her, and Felicity stopped short, surprised by the passenger seat that hadn’t been there the night before.

  “For Anna P.’s car seat,” he explained, apparently reading her thoughts.

  She spied the padded contraption now stowed in the cargo area, where last night—Hastily diverting her thoughts, she slid onto the seat and let Magee shut the door behind her.

  Okay, he could display good manners. And perhaps he’d been kind to Ashley and Anna P. But didn’t Felicity know for a fact that he possessed some dangerous Pied Piper qualities? Look at what happened last night! She’d acted completely out of character, and the culprit wasn’t his so-called “survival rush” or even that out-of-body weirdness that she wasn’t going to think about.

  No, now that she knew Magee was the infamous Thrillbanger, she could squarely place the blame for that near-sexscapade on him.

  She scrutinized the man as he walked around the car to the other side. Same wide-shouldered, lean build. Same who-needs-a-stylist inky-colored hair. He was dressed even more casually today, in another pair of jeans, beat-up hiking boots, and a faded T-shirt that said—oh, sheesh!

  I’m

  Unreliable

  Irresponsible

  Immature

  Undisciplined

  Inefficient

  Disorganized

  Inconsistent and

  Unmotivated but

  I’m Fun!

  She was willing to bet that meant he didn’t have a job, let alone a whiff of ambition. While that might make him fit right in with the Charms, she’d make darn sure he wasn’t planning on leading the family down some thorn-filled primrose path. Though she doubted she had a prayer of finding Ben by morning, her good deed, she decided, would be to instead discover enough about Magee to warn Ashley and the rest that they should steer clear of him.

  Magee ducked into his seat and glanced over to catch her looking at him. She quickly transferred her gaze, pretending an avid interest in Aunt Vi’s house.

  His head followed hers. “How long since you’ve b
een back to the ancestral home?” he asked.

  Ancestral home? Felicity looked up at the ram-shackle farmhouse. It was shaded by two sparse California pepper trees, their branches of thin leaves and clusters of pinkish berries brushing against the second-floor windows that had been boarded up as long as she could remember.

  The first Charms had come to the area in the late 1800s, taken in by the advertising of a Palm Springs hustler who’d stuck oranges and grapefruits on the spines of the Joshua trees, then photographed them. Lured by the get-rich-quick promises, her great-great-grandfather had rushed from the Midwest to buy some acres of his very own sand, without considering whether arid dunes could truly support flourishing citrus groves.

  “I’m not ‘back,’” Felicity corrected, shaking her head. “I’m visiting.”

  Though she hadn’t intended visiting, either. She’d intended on breezing through and permanently locking the door to her past even as she continued speeding out of town.

  “Yeah? How long ago was your last visit, then?”

  “I haven’t actually lived in the house—in Half Palm, for that matter—since I started boarding school in Palm Springs. I was eleven years old.”

  “That explains your wardrobe.”

  “What? No.” She tugged on the hem of the too-short T-shirt. “I was even smaller at eleven than when I wore this.” Which had made her the designated fall guy in any con gone awry. To most, she’d looked too young and too innocent to bear the blame.

  The sound of his car starting reminded her she was supposed to be grilling him. “So…what about you?”

  He glanced in the sideview mirror as he maneuvered onto the road, then down at his own T-shirt. “I think I found this last week in the freebie box at the Wild Side.”

  “I wasn’t asking about—The wild side?” See, this was exactly what she was talking about. Wild side, freebie boxes. The man was a derelict, and it was her duty as the only discriminating member of her family, not to mention the member who wanted to run away from Half Palm with a free conscience, to discover just how much trouble he could cause the Charms.

  “The Wild Side is where I’m taking you, dollface.”

  She made a strangled noise and he grinned.

  “Not to worry,” he said. “It’s a climbing store. We can ask about Ben there.”

  That grin of his was displaying a bunch of white teeth and deepening the brackets around his mouth and the sun lines at the corners of his eyes. She crowded the car door, keeping clear of the thrillbanger rays it was beaming out.

  “Where’s this climbing store?” she grumbled. Not far, she guessed, given that the national park known as Southern California’s uber-destination for rock climbing wasn’t far from Half Palm.

  With her nose glued to the window, she catalogued the scenery outside. Barren lunar landscape: check. The occasional home, cobbled together with scrap wood and aluminum: check. A far cry from the luxury, prestige, and well-watered beauty of other desert communities: check, check, and check.

  But as they neared the entrance to the national park, she spied signs of actual, civilized civilization. “Bed and breakfasts?” she wondered aloud. “A day spa?”

  “Climbing’s attracting a well-heeled clientele these days. Very in with the high-tech set.” Magee glanced over, grinning at her again. “Or should I say ‘cool’?”

  She pretended to ignore that stupid, lethal smile. “High-tech set?”

  “You know, the digitheads and the geeks. It’s the angles they’re attracted to. The angles and the independence.”

  The angles and the independence? She thought rock climbing was about throwing up a rope and then winching yourself to the top of something. “What attracts you?” she asked, curious.

  There was a long pause, then he reached over and caressed her knee. “C’mon, dollface,” he said, his voice amused. “I don’t have to tell you, do I?”

  She pushed his hand away. “You know what I’m talking about. Which is it you like about climbing, the angles or the independence?”

  His face hardened as he pulled into a tidy little strip mall. “Neither. I don’t climb anymore.”

  He didn’t say another word as they climbed out of the car and she trailed him toward a store that proclaimed itself in neon tubing as the Wild Side. She might have let the silence stand, but a worry nagged at her, despite the old clothes and the ball cap she was wearing. Before his hand clasped the metal handle of the plate-glass door, she grabbed his wrist.

  He twitched. She kept her eyes on his sinewy forearm instead of looking at him. “Look, will you do me a favor?”

  “Does it involve my clothes on or off this time?”

  She wished she could ignore that, but thinking of him naked made her twitch. So she let out a long sigh and then looked up.

  His face revealed nothing.

  So, fine, she wouldn’t let him know that he was working his thrillbanger trickery again and that there was a needy little urge bubbling through her bloodstream. Letting out another breath, she let go of him.

  “Would you please, uh, not mention me by name in there?” She nodded toward the shop.

  He just looked at her.

  “Because, well, believe it or not, I get stopped on the street. People recognize me. Probably not dressed like this.” She pulled the hat lower over her eyes. “Especially if you don’t use my name. But you see, Felicity Charm, she…she…”

  Felicity Charm couldn’t afford to let anyone find out about her real relatives. The public loved and approved of the fictionalized Charm family, which was part of their love and approval of her.

  His eyebrows lifted. “Felicity wouldn’t be seen with a man like me?”

  She made an offhand gesture that encompassed everything from his untamed hair to that telling T-shirt. “Well, of course she wouldn’t, but—”

  Hearing what she’d said, she tripped over her own tongue. “No, that didn’t come out right. It wasn’t about you. I meant, I mean…”

  “I get you.” Magee pulled open the door then reached around to shove her through with his palm on her behind. “No real names, right, sweet cheeks?”

  Two minutes later, she realized she might as well have saved her breath. Because not one of the dozen or more young men and women in the store spared her a glance. The best she got was an elbow, as the climbers browsing in the store gathered near Magee.

  She found herself on the outer circle and unable to decipher a word of their conversation. Bemused, she took the opportunity to check out the store. The truth was, she knew little about brick-and-mortar retailing, other than that the merchandise was left to speak for itself. On GetTV, that’s what she did—speak for the merchandise—giving it an image that customers wanted to identify with…and own.

  But there was image at work here, too, she decided, spinning in a slow circle. The bins of metal clips and straps and lethal-looking tools, the stacks of dried food and racks of backpacks, the shelves of color-coordinated clothing, didn’t dominate the store as much as the bigger-than-life color photographs hanging high on the walls—photographs of climbers caught in improbable conditions and positions.

  One of the photos commanded her attention and wouldn’t let go. A golden-skinned, buffed, and bare-backed man was stretched over a rock wall, hanging by nothing but crimped fingers at the end of one bulging arm. His other hand reached impossibly higher.

  It was an image that captured pure, physical strength. It was raw male power.

  It was Magee.

  And it was the female in her that responded to it with such a hot, weakening rush. Her gaze jumped across the room to make sure he hadn’t noticed, but wouldn’t you know, his eyes met hers over the knot of people around him. A shiver burned down her back as that connection she’d felt with him the night before rebuilt, stretched taut. In a rush, her nipples tightened, too, and her inner thigh muscles clenched.

  No, no. She already knew this about him. Those thrillbanger tricks. Her feet shuffled back and then her body bumped a co
untertop, scattering a stack of magazines and papers and cutting the link between them.

  Felicity dropped down to gather up the mess.

  “Can I help you?” a female voice asked. A pair of hiking boots entered her field of vision.

  She shook her head, stacking up flyers for climbing classes, adventure vacations, and the National Outdoor Products Trade Show taking place at the Palm Springs Convention Center the following week. Then she piled up a selection of magazines: Climbing, Climber, Outdoorsman, Rock & Ice.

  When she replaced them on the counter, her fingertips slid across a glossy cover. On a whim she flipped through the pages, noting the colorful clothes, shoes, and gear. “Very in with the high-tech set,” she murmured to herself, and then picked up another magazine.

  This time the merchandise caught her eye, and so did Magee. Not only was he featured in ads for a company named Mountain Logic, but she found him mentioned in an interview with an up-and-coming climber. According to what she was reading, Magee wasn’t just your average guy who liked heights—in his world he was a legend.

  An out-and-out rock god. A rock star.

  Felicity cast him a sidelong look, but found it intercepted by a young woman instead.

  “Did you need something?” she said.

  It was the voice from a moment ago, and it belonged to a sales clerk dressed like Magee in jeans, T-shirt, and boots. Her strawberry blond hair was fashioned into more than a dozen braids, each fastened with a different colored rubber band. There wasn’t a smidgen of mascara on her pale lashes, and though she wore lip gloss, her nose was peeling.

  “Did you need something?” the girl asked again.

  Felicity tugged on the brim of her hat. “Oh, no, thank you. I’m fine.” She nodded toward Magee. “I’m with him.”

  The girl’s eyes rounded. “You’re with the Lucky Bastard?” Her freckles disappeared into a flush on her cheeks. “Magee?”

  Felicity cleared her throat. “Well, uh, yes.”

  “Then you are fine,” the salesgirl muttered. She frowned, and her gaze ran over Felicity, as if seeking out flaws. “He tells me I’m too young for him.”