Carolina Girl (34 page)

They were business partners. It wasn’t as if
they’d spoken words of love or commitment. A date. She could handle a
date. If that was what it was. Not a business meeting or a farewell. A date.

Clay was waiting for her in the front room. She’d seen
him in here a thousand times, but this time he was a different creature
entirely. He’d attempted to force his thick hair into a slicked-back
style that any movie star would envy. His blue raw-silk blazer whispered of
understated elegance, the stylish uncollared shirt with tiny pleats bespoke
Rodeo Drive, and the draping of his linen slacks shouted expensive tailoring.
He looked fabulous.

And stunned. He watched her enter with such awe and delight
that Rory thought her head might swell to twice its size. His smile was a
wonder to behold.

“You just walked out of my favorite fantasy,” he
murmured as she approached.

When he held out a small florist’s box containing a
tiny blue orchid, Rory forgot her fears and indulged in teenage delight.

“This is absolutely perfect. I think I love
you,” she cried, tucking the orchid into her hair, and swirling around to
check her image in a mirror.

“Partridge Family. That’s a great song,”
he murmured insensibly, touching her hair and not the orchid.
“That’s exactly how I pictured that flower. Better than I pictured
it.”

So many butterflies fluttered in Rory’s stomach that
she was walking on air by the time Clay led her into the soft evening light.
She had to pinch herself and remember they were just going dancing.

And then he opened the door to a sleek, black, antique
Jaguar convertible and flipped all her switches.

On his best day Clay couldn’t put together the kind of
sweet words women wanted to hear. Under pressure to do the right thing so
Aurora wouldn’t walk out on him, he couldn’t find any words at all.

He’d entertained the fanciful notion some time ago
that the immense commitment the old Jag represented would show her that he
wasn’t a fly-by-night kind of guy, but he’d dragged his feet about
bringing it out for fear he’d be disillusioned by her reaction. And
he’d desperately not wanted to be disillusioned this time.

Aurora’s astonished silence was worth every bit of the
extortionate fees he’d paid to get the car out of storage and transported
here. He opened the door for her, and she caressed the exquisitely painted and
waxed exterior as if it were a precious antique. Standing close behind her, he
inhaled a whiff of gardenia. She’d worn perfume for him.

She was treating this as a real date, not a business
function.

“The top isn’t automatic,” he warned,
testing to be certain she understood this was an old wreck and not a fancy new
car. “So if it rains, we’ll get wet.”

“I could drown in this and die happy.” Climbing
in, she ran her fingers lovingly over the polished wood of the dash.
“Where did you find it? Doesn’t it belong in a museum?”

Feeling as if he were on pins and needles, he climbed behind
the wheel and started the engine. “It’s not that old. I’ve
had offers from collectors, but I put it together practically from scrap. I
couldn’t give it up.” He could talk about machines, but what he
really wanted to understand was the mechanics of relationships. From her
responses, he thought maybe he’d passed the first step.

“You
rebuilt
this? I knew you tinkered, but I
had no idea....”

Clay didn’t dare tear his gaze from the road to see
her expression. Diane had been turned off by the mechanical aspect of his
hobby. She thought he should have spent his millions
buying
cars, not
building them. She hadn’t understood the thrill of knowing a machine from
the inside out.

“I like tinkering,” he said defensively when
Aurora didn’t complete her comment.

“This is way more than tinkering.” She
reverently stroked the butter-soft leather, and there seemed to be awe in her
voice. “Sitting on the courthouse roof playing with the clock is
tinkering. This is genius and dedication.”

Clay relaxed his painful grip on the wheel. He should have
known not to let his prior experience color his opinion of Aurora. She had a
mind of her own and wasn’t afraid to use it. Or speak it.
“It’s going to take genius and dedication to make the courthouse
clock work, too. It’s an old-fashioned balance mechanism and someone has
replaced one of the balances with an inadequate weight. I’ll have to
figure out the mathematics to make it work.”

“Can you do that?” Awe still tinged her voice,
but she was returning to practicality. “I mean, it hardly seems worth
your time.”

He lifted one shoulder casually. He liked that she
recognized his time as valuable, even if he spent it sitting on beaches.
“Tinkering gives me time to think. I could just test weights until I get
it right.”

“And where did your thinking get you today?”

Hearing laughter and skepticism in that question, Clay
braved a quick look. Aurora was so stunning with that long glowing braid over
creamy shoulders and cleavage that—

He abruptly returned to watching the road. “It has me
thinking that maybe some of my hobbies are a little unsociable.”

Laughter did bubble out at that, but Aurora was always laughing.
That was one of the things he liked about her. She didn’t nag and
complain and make life miserable for everyone around her when things
didn’t go right. She blew up, she cried; then she got over it and took
matters into her own hands, smiling or cooking her way through it.

“You could always find partners to play your video
games if you want to be sociable,” she suggested. “There are
probably kids out there just as good at them as you are.”

“Most of them want the action games. I grew up on the
Dungeons and Dragons things, and I like role-playing. Not too many people are
interested.” Truth was, he wasn’t as interested as he used to be.
As a kid, imaginary games had given his overactive brain an escape when
he’d needed it, but he’d rather find a real-life role that suited
him better. Beach bum and biker had just been more role-playing on a different
level.

“They have sorcerers in those games, don’t they?
You probably make a great sorcerer, knowing things way beyond the knowledge of
most people.”

A sorcerer. He liked that. Sending her another sideways
look, deciding she wasn’t laughing at him, he began to relax and enjoy
the evening even more. “Men like the mystique of appearing omniscient.
Gives the girls a thrill,” he teased.

She laughed again. “Just fixing our toasters gives us
a thrill. The strong, silent types are highly overrated. Where are we
going?”

“With you looking as hot as that? Probably Las Vegas.
But if you want to get home tonight, maybe we ought to settle for the
Monkey.” She hadn’t hit him yet, so he assumed he hadn’t gone
too far wrong. “Have you eaten?”

“Las Vegas is more tempting than the Monkey, but
I’m hungry and willing to settle for food. Did you have a reason for this
evening out?”

He squirmed a little and didn’t answer as he
maneuvered the narrow town streets. She waited expectantly while he found an
opening and parked. “I don’t know how to do relationships,”
he finally said flat out. He slammed out of the car and walked around to assist
her from the low-slung seat.

“It’s not something you learn in books or find
in Help files,” she agreed sympathetically.

The open wrap side of Aurora’s skirt flashed a
tantalizing glimpse of shapely leg as she took his hand and climbed out. Clay
almost lost track of the conversation until she spoke again.

“I figure relationships must be something you learn by
doing,” she continued.

“And failing,” he said dryly, leading her into
the Saturday-night bedlam of the bar. “That failing part is kind of
rough.”

“You’re a sorcerer, make the magic work for
you,” she murmured beneath the chorus of greetings as they entered.

“I have a feeling you’re not talking about my
magic shirt,” he whispered back, slapping palms with one of the other
patrons while maneuvering Rory toward the booths and away from the slavering
crowd at the bar.

“If you can keep Ed from bearing down on us with more
tales of the mayor’s daddy and German subs, I might believe in magic
shirts.”

“These days Ed’s into believing the German spies
left their treasure buried on the beach. TJ’s been avoiding the bar,
afraid Ed will ask him to dig up the beach again.”

“Hey, Rora!” Terry Talbert called from the bar,
his gaze darting from her to Clay. “Didn’t know the two of you were
hooking up.”

“You belong to the wrong crowd then.” Although
he was getting a kick out of the winks and thumbs-ups he was receiving from his
bar cronies, Clay disliked the way the head of the tourist commission eyed Rora
in her revealing, non-banker attire. He was inclined to do something
Neanderthal like kiss her cheek, wrap his arm around her, and stake his claim.

“Clay and I have mutual interests,” Aurora
replied coolly. “Right now our interest is in dancing. See you around,
Terry.”

She walked away from the man who had fired her as if Talbert
were no more than a gnat in her tea. Grinning, Clay followed, admiring the
view.

“Can you dance?” she asked abruptly, hesitating
between the booths and the tables near the dance floor, where a couple was
two-stepping across the floor out of time with the music.

“Never tried,” he conceded, eyeing the dance
floor with wary interest.

Rory wound her way through the booth crowd to the tables.
“You listen to oldies but you’ve never danced?” she asked,
intrigued.

He held out a chair for her, and she was entirely too aware
of Clay’s height, of the way he stood too close, of the seductive scent
of his shaving lotion. She’d always been aware of the real man behind his
many disguises, but she liked that he’d chosen his sophisticated persona
for her.

“Dancing lessons are required education in our
family,” he admitted. “TJ dutifully took them as told. Jared got
thrown out after he used the CDs as Frisbees, then decorated the dance hall
with the teacher’s favorite tapes in an impromptu game of Keep-away.
After that, the teacher was more than willing to accept my deal of cashing my
parents’ check, giving me half, and letting me spend the time at the
arcade next door.”

“Afraid of girl cooties?” she taunted.

“I could apply myself to computers or to girls, not
both. I lost Jared’s help on the script for ‘Mysterious’ when
he got mushy over some female. Since I was skinny, with a nose that covered my
entire face, the girls I knew wouldn’t give me the time of day. After
Jared’s defection, I worked on the program alone. The sale of
‘Mysterious’ gave me my own IPO by the time I left college. By then
I was working on 3-D animation and several business programs. I didn’t
have time for a life.”

“I think you grew into your nose,” she said
dryly. It was a unique nose that kept him from prettiness, giving his face the
character that reflected the depths she had yet to explore.

She was amazed at the amount of information spilling out of
him tonight. Sitting on the courthouse roof must have primed his speech pump.
She was torn between learning more and getting up on the dance floor to work
off some of the sexual tension smoldering between them. Although Clay
didn’t overtly stare at her cleavage, she recognized his awareness in the
way he tried to stay focused on her face when she toyed with the pendant at her
throat. Perversely, she wanted him to stare.

She wanted a whole lot more than that. If she was to survive
the evening without jumping his bones, she needed to dance. “What
they’re doing looks easy.” She nodded at the dance floor, where
couples were rocking to some golden moldie she vaguely recognized.
“Let’s just imitate them.”

She bit back a smile as Clay studiously observed the limited
action on the dance floor while they ordered drinks and chose from the menu.
His fingers were unconsciously tapping to the rhythm of the music, but he
really did seem to think he could study the dancers and discover a pattern to
their movement, as if they were parts of a ticking clock.

“How did you get into listening to classic
rock?” she asked. She knew she was in serious trouble when she really
wanted to know the answer.

Clay switched his intense focus from the dance floor to her,
and she nearly went up in smoke from the heat of it. “Good beat and it
went in one ear and out the other while I was working. It just kind of wormed
its way into my head, and then into the program. Before I knew what was
happening, I started looking for more music my game characters could dance to.
The classic stuff worked best. Paying for sub-rights on the songs made the game
expensive, but fun.”

The beat was ringing her chimes right now. She could feel
the music in her bones. She could feel
him
. She squirmed restlessly.

He turned back to watch the dancers. “They
aren’t all doing the same steps.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” she murmured,
taking his hand and standing up. “This is the kind of dancing you
feel.
”

“What I feel has nothing to do with dance
floors.” With that enigmatic remark, he stood and drew her into the
growing crowd of dancing couples.

As luck would have it, the deejay played a slow song the
instant they stepped onto the dance floor. Despite his protests, Clay knew the
basics of slow dancing. He’d left his jacket on his seat back. His strong
arm wrapped around her waist. His calloused hand held hers. He studied her face
as he shuffled his feet in time to the music.

And they danced as if they’d done this a thousand
times together, instinctively following the rhythm of each other’s
bodies.

Clay’s angular features lifted in a study of delight
upon discovering how the beat poured from the music, through him, to her.