“My word, Mackenzie,” her mother had said, snapping Mackenzie out of her nightmare. “You might as well just douse yourself with gasoline and go up in flames now, because you’ll surely get burned if you set your sights on a man who has a fleet of pretty flight attendants constantly at his disposal.”
“Fine,” Mackenzie had said right back. “I’ll get a five gallon can of gasoline, Mother. In case you need some for yourself in a month or two.”
“Now, Mackenzie. I understand why you think I might be making a mistake…”
“At least you’ll know when to cringe this time,” Mackenzie had mumbled absently.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, you still haven’t told me what happened to that nice microbiologist. The one with…”
“The PhD?” Mackenzie had finished for her. “Sorry, Mother, but he lost his head over a fake set of boobs.”
Her mother had frowned on that one. “That’s such a vulgar word, Mackenzie.”
“Apparently he didn’t think so,” Mackenzie had replied, and then she’d breathed a huge sigh of relief when a Delta ticket agent finally announced that her mother could board the plane.
“You forget about that pilot,” had been her mother’s last warning.
It was probably a blessing in disguise that her mother had shown up and totally erased Alec from her mind for a few hours. And at the moment, she was too mentally drained to even wonder where he was, much less overload her mind any further by trying to decide if she should or shouldn’t show a little interest if he tried to get her attention again.
“Just because my mother has gone temporarily brain-dead, doesn’t mean I have to follow in her footsteps,” Mackenzie told the full moon staring down at her from its lofty perch above.
She then killed the motor, but switched the ignition to accessory so she wouldn’t interrupt her favorite oldies radio station. While Elvis belted out “A Hunka, Hunka Burning Love,” she reached into the paper sack sitting on the seat beside her and pulled out a bottle of beer from the carton holder she’d bought at a convenience store only two blocks from the airport. Twisting off the cap, she glanced idly at the vacant space where her own personal hunka burning love’s car should have been sitting, and then she took a long, slow gulp from her bottle.
Unfortunately, the minute the gold liquid slid down her throat, Mackenzie remembered why she’d never liked beer.
So why had she chosen beer in the first place? Simple. She figured she could drink a couple of bottles to take the edge off her mounting hysteria, yet the task would keep her from drinking enough to leave her smashed. In fact, Mackenzie was just congratulating herself for being such a sensible, levelheaded and responsible woman when Alec’s jade-green Jaguar slid silently into the parking space right beside her.
Mackenzie’s first instinct was to duck like a car thief, but a toot from Alec’s horn told her it was too late. She could always run, she decided, but at the moment she simply didn’t have the strength. Instead, she remained sitting behind the wheel of her Mercedes, still looking straight ahead. She didn’t even turn her head when his car door slammed.
He walked up to her car door and tapped on her window, prompting her to take another quick sip from the bottle. Still looking straight ahead, she reluctantly pushed the appropriate button allowing her only protection to magically slide out of sight.
“Are you okay?”
Mackenzie took another swig, still refusing to look at him. “Sure, I’m great. Why do you ask?”
He leaned down and rested his arms on her open window, much too close for comfort as far as Mackenzie was concerned, but she finally turned her head and looked at him. It was the wrong thing to do. Alec looked so good in his flight uniform, and with his captain’s hat pulled down on his forehead just enough to look incredibly sexy, Coffee, tea, or me? immediately popped into Mackenzie’s head.
“Why did I think something was wrong?” Alec asked, pushing his hat back a bit. “Well, let’s see. It’s after midnight. I come home to find you sitting out here in your car alone. Drinking. But yeah, you’re right. Why would I suspect something might be wrong?”
Mackenzie shrugged, then took another short drink. “If you must know, I’m celebrating,” she said, and then she burst out laughing in spite of herself.
Alec sent her a wary look. “Do I dare ask why?”
She reached into the sack and pulled out another bottle, then handed it to Alec. “Here. Why don’t you celebrate with me?”
Does anyone have that can of gasoline ready? This chick’s gonna need it! Mackenzie’s psyche yelled out, but she ignored the warning, determined to throw caution to the wind the way her mother had apparently been doing while she had been sitting on her toadstool looking around for a frog instead of a prince like the one that was standing by her window now.
Alec took the beer, then walked around to the passenger’s side of her Mercedes. He opened the door, moved the carton of beer to the floor, and slid into the seat beside her. “You know, we could probably find a more comfortable place to celebrate,” he said, twisting off the cap of his bottle. “I just happen to know two people who live here.”
Mackenzie ignored his pun, then held her bottle out and clinked it against his.
“And what are we celebrating?” he wanted to know.
“My parents are getting married,” Mackenzie said with a laugh, but the laugh ultimately betrayed her and Mackenzie burst into tears instead.
ALEC WAS SPEECHLESS. He quickly uprighted the bottle she’d dropped when she covered her face with her hands, trying not to stare at the now-soaked jersey material of the clingy blue dress she was wearing.
God, I really am a jerk, Alec thought. She’s sitting here crying her eyes out and all I can think about is the way that wet material is clinging to those incredibly long legs of hers.
But he wasn’t such a jerk that he could watch her cry without pulling her toward him so she could sob against his shoulder. “It’s okay,” he kept telling her, hoping for Mackenzie’s sake that what he was saying was true.
Though Mackenzie didn’t realize it, Alec already had a pretty good grasp of the situation that currently had her in tears. His luncheon date with Angie had proved much more enlightening than he’d hoped. Not one to beat around the bush, Angie had told him quite a lot, actually. She’d told him about Mackenzie’s overbearing mother. About Mackenzie’s father, whom Mackenzie adored in spite of the fact that he had a roving eye. About her parents’ nasty divorce, and how hard Mackenzie had taken it.
About why Mackenzie would probably never give a guy like him the time of day.
“I’m sorry, Alec,” she said into his shoulder, then pulled away from him and wiped her eyes with her fingertips. “I’m not drunk, I’ve only had half a beer. I’m just a little overwhelmed and feeling incredibly sorry for myself at the moment.”
“Hey, you don’t have to apologize to me,” Alec said and sent her a sympathetic smile.
She sent him a slight smile back. “I’m sure you think I’m an idiot for slobbering like a two-year-old, but you’d just have to know my crazy parents and what they’ve put me through all these years.”
“I assume your parents getting remarried is a bit of a shock for you?” Alec asked, forcing himself to play dumb.
“Shock?” Mackenzie repeated. “If someone had told me the Pope had resigned from the Vatican so he could devote his time to developing a new birth control pill, I would have believed that. But my parents getting married again? After nineteen years of putting each other, not to mention me, through pure hell?” She shook her head disgustedly as another tear rolled across her magnificent high cheekbone. “Tell me, Alec. Where is the logic in that?”
When Alec only shrugged she added, “Just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, take my college graduation. Here was my mother, trying to impress the dean by tossing around her own degrees like a juggler center ring at the circus, and my father walks up and says, ‘Tell
me, Dean Whitcomb, if a man is talking in the forest, and his ex-wife isn’t there, would he still be wrong?”’
Alec laughed, but Mackenzie’s sharp look made it a short one.
“And so my mother says, ‘You’ll have to excuse my ex-husband, Dean Whitcomb, as you can see David’s intellectual pursuits make professional wrestling look like a think tank.”’
Alec grinned. “And what was your dad’s comeback to that one?”
Mackenzie sighed. “He didn’t need one. It turned out Dean Whitcomb was a huge professional wrestling fan himself. My mother stomped off when the dean and Daddy started discussing how Hulk Hogan was and always would be the greatest professional wrestler of all time.”
She leaned her head against the steering wheel and let out another shaky sigh.
“And it’s not that I’m not happy for them, because in a way I really am,” she said, wiping at her nose. “I mean, I should really be ecstatic when I think about it,” she added, still trying to talk herself through her anxiety. “At least, now I won’t have to spend every holiday rushing around so I can spend the morning with Mother and the evening with Daddy.”
Alec nodded.
She smiled. “Hey, I can even save money. From now on, I’ll just buy them one Christmas present. Something for that blasted new house with the indoor swimming pool Daddy’s supposed to be buying for them when they move out to San Francisco.”
Alec nodded again.
“You know,” she said, her face brightening a bit, “now that I really think about it, Christmas in California doesn’t sound bad at all. And I’ve always hated cold weather. That’s why I loved South Carolina so much when I came here to college. Now I’ll never have to spend another cold Christmas in Indianapolis again.”
“See, you can always find good in anything if you look hard enough,” Alec said, taking hold of her hand for a gentle squeeze of support. To his surprise, she sent him a thoughtful look and squeezed back.
Focus on comforting her, dammit, not copulating with her, Alec kept telling himself, but when she rubbed the pad of her thumb up the full length of his index finger, Alec Jr. snapped to attention like a private coming face-to-face with a four-star general.
“So? What about you, Alec?” she asked, holding him captive with those big brown eyes of hers. “Are you close to your parents?”
Alec almost missed the question since most of the blood in his brain had now been diverted south. “Yeah, we’re close,” he finally managed, relieved yet also disappointed when she let go of his hand. “In fact, you could say I grew up in a perfect sitcom family myself.”
“Lucky you.”
Alec shook his head more in an effort to get the blood flowing in the right direction again than he did in disagreement with her statement. “I guess that depends on how you look at it, Mackenzie. You see, in your case, you have at least a 99.9 percent chance of having a better marriage than your parents had. But me? My parents have a perfect marriage. Now, how hard do you think it’s going to be to live up to that standard?”
She thought about his comment for a second, then let out a long sigh and leaned her head back against the headrest, offering up her exquisite throat like a cool drink of water to someone dying of thirst.
Alec licked his own dry lips. He was only seconds away from dragging her to him to satisfy his own thirst. She suddenly shifted in her seat and met his greedy gaze. “Well, when you put it like that, Alec, I guess we all have our own problems, don’t we?”
He managed to say, “Yes, I guess we do. But I wasn’t kidding about there being more comfortable places than your car to solve all the world’s problems. Why don’t you stop by my place for a few minutes? At least until I’m sure you’re going to be okay.”
And just when he expected Mackenzie to say, not a chance, buster, she sent him a rather beguiling look and said, “Why don’t you come home with me instead?”
Alec had to bite his tongue to keep from cheering. “Are you serious? You’re inviting me to come home with you?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
“Well, yes…” Alec began, but Mackenzie broke in and said, “You said just for a minute, didn’t you? And I would go to your place, but my poor cat is probably starving by now.”
“Cat?” Alec echoed as they both left the car. He grabbed what was left of the six-pack and hurried after her.
“Yes, I have a cat,” she called back over her shoulder. “She’s elusive when strangers are around,” she added when Alec caught up with her. “That’s probably why you didn’t see her on the night—”
“What kind of cat is she?” Alec cut Mackenzie short this time. Hell, he wasn’t going to let her dwell on the night he’d hid out in her living room. Not now. Not when he was finally making progress. And certainly not when she’d been the one to invite him to go home with her.
“Oh, she’s just a cat, but you’d think she had pedigree to go along with that attitude of hers,” Mackenzie said with a laugh. “She’s very temperamental. Very independent. Sometimes she won’t even look in my direction. And then the next day she’s all over me, eager for my attention.”
Sounds familiar, Alec thought as he held the back door of the building open for her, then followed Mackenzie up the hallway.
She had been treating him like he had a third eye in the middle of his forehead from the moment he met her. Yet now, what was she doing inviting him home when it was already past midnight? What in the hell could that mean? That she’d finally realized she shouldn’t have listened to her bitter mother all these years?
Or did her motive have a much deeper meaning?
“You know, sometimes I think that cat treats me the way she does out of nothing more than pure spite,” Mackenzie added when they finally stopped in front of her doorway.
“Spite, huh?” Alec repeated. Yeah, that’s exactly the word I was looking for myself.
Mackenzie unlocked her door, then stepped inside and flipped on the light. Alec followed behind her and found a large orange and white cat stretched out across the back of Mackenzie’s overstuffed rattan-frame sofa. The cat raised its head slowly, twitched its tail and hissed when Alec took a step in her direction.
“Behave yourself, Marmalade,” Mackenzie warned.
The cat sent another feral look in Alec’s direction, then pulled itself into a crouched, ready-to-pounce position. Great, Alec thought. Mackenzie’s suddenly willing to endure my company, but now her attack cat wants to scratch my eyes out.
The African motif Mackenzie had chosen for her condo certainly enhanced the jungle cat image where the currently stalking feline was concerned. On the first night he’d been there, Alec had been amazed at the small piece of the dark continent Mackenzie had been able to recreate for herself.
Glancing around the room again, he took in the heavy rattan furniture with its overstuffed cushions splashed in brilliant pinks and greens. A huge zebra-print rug covered her polished wood floors. African carvings and artifacts of every description decorated the room. Wild animal prints covered the walls. The place was primitive, yet exotic. And the huge plants and ferns Mackenzie had scattered around the room managed to bring the jungle indoors.
Still thinking about the jungle, Alec glanced at the back of the sofa again and tensed. The cat had vanished. He kept waiting for the miniature tigress to jump out at him from behind one of Mackenzie’s giant elephant-ear ferns. Instead he found the dear kitty politely devouring a bowl of cat food in Mackenzie’s small kitchen.
He glanced up at Mackenzie, who was appraising him so openly, that Alec stopped worrying about the cat and turned his attention to his hostess instead. Run his gut instinct tried to tell him, but another look at those gorgeous long legs of hers intercepted the message.
Holding up the carton of beer he’d brought in from the car Alec smiled and said, “Guess these should go in the fridge.”
She gave him a sultry look, then walked across the room and took the carton from his hand. She then placed it on the glas
s top of the small table in her kitchen, also rattan, Alec noticed as he tried not to notice the determined look in her eyes.
“It was really sweet of you to send me flowers today, Alec,” she said, practically purring like her cat was now doing over the food in its bowl.
“And it was even sweeter of you to worry about me tonight,” she continued, taking a step forward that barely left any space between them.
God, she smells good, Alec thought. “I am a sweet guy, Mackenzie. I’m glad you’ve finally realized that.”
“So am I,” she said, then reached up and removed the captain’s hat from his head.
Heaven help me, Alec prayed when she immediately sent it sailing backward over her shoulder.
The hat slid across the floor, causing the cat to smack at the gold braid running across the brim. Alec brought his eyes back to meet hers and cleared his throat. “Exactly what do you think you’re doing, Miss Malone?”
In answer to his question, she reached up and pushed his coat off his shoulders. “I’m doing exactly what I’ve wanted to do from the first time I saw you, Alec.”
Alec swallowed hard when his coat hit the floor. “Well, you sure could have fooled me, Mackenzie,” he said, ignoring those alarm bells that were now ringing in his head.
What you need to do, his mind kept yelling, is march your ass right out of here. Now!
He never had a chance.
She loosened his tie, then grabbed the front of his shirt and gave it a tug, popping buttons left and right and sending the cat scurrying out of the room to safety. She then slid her arms around his neck and pulled his head down for a kiss so soft and sweet Alec almost relaxed.
Unfortunately, the kiss that charged right in behind the first one made Alec’s head spin faster than a windmill in a hurricane.
Totally out of control now, Alec slid his arms around Mackenzie’s tiny waist and crushed her to him. His traitorous tongue immediately joined in a slow tango with hers, producing a groan of pleasure that erupted from somewhere deep in his throat. In an instant, the wildfire she was igniting in a much lower location picked up speed to the point that all Alec could think about was how he was going to put that fire out.
Driven to Distraction & Winging It Page 22