Project Virgin (11 page)

He was here, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that meant something too.

“My ex wasn’t wrong,” he told me, his voice low. Traffic slid by on the street, headlights and horns and the song of San Francisco all around us. I saw only him. “My family is cold and I only ever knew one way
to warm up. I had a lot of sex and it felt a lot better than being around my family ever did and that was fine with me for a long time.”

I sighed. “This is pretty much the exact opposite of anything I’d want to hear, in case you wondered.”

His mouth curved and he straightened from the side of his car. He didn’t let go of that little silken chunk of hair.

“But too much of anything is boring,
Scottie. You’re still so fresh and new. You look around this tottery old firm the way I used to. I can see it in you. You love the whole game. The hierarchy and the dues. The golden handcuffs. Everything the firm has to offer.”

“Of course I do.” I frowned at him, not tracking the change of subject. “Or I’d flounce off to some boutique firm and chase ambulances.”

“A fate worse than death.” His
blue gaze moved over my face, as if he was searching for something there. “I’m in a different place. It all bored me. I don’t want to be a senior partner here. I don’t want to do the same thing I’ve been doing for seven years—hell, for my whole life. I want something else. Something different.”

“Then it’s a good thing you started your own firm,” I said, and I meant it.

I almost meant it.

“The
firm, sure.” He tugged on that bit of hair he held and then he sighed a little, then moved forward so he could slide his hand along my jaw. “And you.”

“Me?”

“I never saw you coming,” he said quietly. Intently. “You’re not what I had planned at all. But I don’t want to throw you back, Scottie. I’m not ready.”

I blinked, and pretended my heart wasn’t going a little crazy in my chest.

“Am I a
fish in this metaphor?”

“I’m not a plumber,” he said, firmly. “I don’t know what happened at dinner on Friday. I had no intention of touching you and then I couldn’t stop. This has never happened to me before, Scottie. I don’t know that I like it.”

“That’s encouraging. And better than talking about your innumerable sexual conquests, by the way. Now that I’m one of them, I find they’re a lot
less interesting to me.”

“You gave me something you’ve never given anyone else,” he growled at me, his hand tightening slightly on my cheek, as if he could tell I was talking too much because I was as nervous, as uneven, as he was. “That matters to me. It matters a lot. I don’t particularly want you sharing all of that with anyone else.”

And I grinned at him. It split me wide open, a bright
thing from the inside out, as sweet as those emotions the other night had been dark. I understood they were two sides of the same coin. Big and unwieldy and maybe, in the end, the whole point of this. Sex and everything else that mattered.

“This sounds a lot like attachment,” I said, shaking my head at him, but I thought the grin probably ruined it. “Crazy caveman tactics, no less. Entirely too
possessive and besides, this whole thing is unethical. You’re practically my boss.”

“That’s the point.” His thumb moved over my cheekbone, sweet and hot. “I’m not your boss. I don’t even work at the same firm. The senior partners might not love the idea because I’m pretty sure I’m now on their eternal shit list, but there’s nothing unethical about it.”

“I think you should worry less about what
the senior partners think and a little more about what I think,” I teased him. “Maybe what I really wanted was a plumber. A one night stand, no strings.”

His eyes were so blue. Dark and clear at once, and they saw deep into me. They made me feel full and whole, and I hadn’t had the slightest idea I was empty until now.

“Is that what you want, Scottie?” he asked quietly. “Because I’ll respect
that if you do. I won’t like it, but I’ll respect it.”

I snuck my arms around his waist and I leaned in, and in that moment I didn’t care if all the senior partners of Granger & Knox were lined up behind us. I didn’t care if every last person in San Francisco was watching.

I only cared about this man, this moment. This gift—and all the possibilities that swirled in the air between us. A thousand
different futures, one as bright and beguiling as the next, and all of them ours for the taking.

Together.

“No,” I said. “That’s not what I want. I want you.”

He leaned his head in close. “Follow the rules, baby. Kiss me like you mean it. Then get your ass in the car. We’re going home.”

And that was exactly what I did.

Because I had no intention of letting this man go. And he had no intention
of letting me.

I couldn’t think of a better gift than that.

The End

In Bed With The Bachelor

Scottie Grey’s brother Jesse has his own book, featuring a road trip and a blizzard and a woman he knows better than to touch…

A Bachelor Auction Novella

Megan Crane

‡

J
esse Grey was
the most beautiful man Michaela Townsend had ever seen in real life.

So absurdly, dizzyingly, inarguably gorgeous that it didn’t matter that he was scowling at her—that he’d
been
scowling pretty much nonstop since he’d slouched out onto the makeshift bachelor auction stage in the Montana saloon, in this
pretty little town where Michaela’s mom had grown up and where so many of her aunts and cousins still lived, supposedly to sell himself for a good cause.

She’d realized he was beautiful then, of course, through the din of the relatively polite applause of the assembled, primarily female, crowd who’d gathered for this event. It wasn’t something anyone was likely to miss on that rangy, six-foot-and-then-some
frame of his. All that mussed-up, dirty-blonde hair, as if he couldn’t be bothered to tame it, so busy was he being growly and attractive, even in a situation like this charity auction where
some
of the other gentlemen had opted to spruce themselves up a little bit. The better to kick start the bidding, no doubt.

But not Jesse Grey, who looked as if he’d just swanned in from moving heavy things
with those sculpted arms of his, or had, perhaps, spent his afternoon riding motorcycles hither and yon like the epitome of some testosterone-fueled fantasy man. Then there were those delicious, milk chocolate, melt-in-your-mouth eyes to consider—not that
eyes
could melt in someone’s
mouth
, Michaela chastised herself—and of course, that alarmingly fit
body
of his packed into jeans and a dark t-shirt,
which she hadn’t actually realized could exist in the real world.

That body, she clarified to herself, not the battered, vintage concert t-shirt he wore like a second, expertly distressed skin. It was all… washboard abs and the suggestion of those crazy diagonals dug over his hips and that masculine
hollow
between his pectoral muscles—

“I’m so sorry,” Michaela said, blinking to clear her head,
which was how she realized she’d been gaping at this man in the first place, there near the back wall of the bar in all the post-auction excitement. “I’m babbling. In my own head. I didn’t actually know that was possible.”

His scowl deepened. Improbably, it only made him sexier.

“I’ve never bought anybody before,” Michaela said brightly. That mouth of his flattened, which seemed to have a direct
relationship to that odd tugging sensation, low in her belly. She charged on, not sure what was spurring her along—that strange, new sensation, or the sense of something like panic that went along with it. “Not that I bought you tonight, of course—my family did that! I’ve never attended a bachelor auction in my life! Even for charity! Although, I don’t know, maybe they’re all for charity or they’re
just a Magic Mike strip club thing? My cousin Missy made it sound like she travels the world on a grand and rotating circuit of bachelor auctions wherever they might pop up, but maybe she meant she goes to Chippendale’s a lot? Anyway, it was all her idea. She and all my aunts and cousins and they only each gave a little but that’s why it added up so fast and—”

“Hey,” he said then. Really, it
was more of an order. “Breathe.”

His voice was flat. Casually certain, as if he was used to instant obedience. And yet still a rough kind of velvet as it slid over her, like a caress—

An engaged woman should not have such thoughts,
Michaela reprimanded herself, and then was instantly annoyed she’d had such a dramatic, conservative thought in the first place. Because her fiancé Terrence would
more than understand. Terrence and Michaela were rational, reasonable adults who had long ago agreed that monogamy was silly and possessiveness was unattractive, and Michaela hated that she kept finding these little corners of ugly, outdated ideas inside her own head.

It was because this was her own pseudo-bridal shower, she thought then, and so what if her cousin Missy had somehow commandeered
the initial shower idea involving baked goods and her aunt’s living room and turned it into a bachelor auction at a saloon? That didn’t excuse the weird, old-fashioned things that kept popping up inside of her at the strangest moments. More and more often, the closer they got to the wedding, if she was honest. She shoved that aside.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, trying to focus on Jesse Grey,
supernaturally beautiful human, as if he was a mere mortal. Because he was. Of course he was, despite appearances. That was the point. “I’ve never been given a—uh—contractor? Local-boy-turned-tycoon? Whatever you are?—as a bridal shower gift before. I’m not sure about the appropriate way to handle this situation.”

She was still staring, wasn’t she? It was like the whole crowd around them had
disappeared somehow into the chocolaty goodness of his gaze, more compelling than the most wicked, decadent dessert—

“I’m Michaela,” she said, sticking her hand out, in some parody of a normal person. A normal person who really, really wanted dessert. “Michaela Townsend.”

Jesse Grey, the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen outside of a Hollywood movie, shifted slightly, so he was no longer leaning
there against the back wall of Grey’s Saloon. He looked down at her proffered hand as if it was spiked and potentially poisonous, and that seemed to take a very long time. But then, at last, he took it.

Mistake!
Everything inside Michaela screamed, and she would have been annoyed with herself for that, too, but she was too busy being caught up in what was happening between them.

His hand was
warm. Slightly rough, as if he sandpapered his palms or perhaps actually worked with those hands of his, with the long fingers she was tempted to consider elegant despite their obvious strength. That tugging thing inside of her shifted. Became heat.

He scowled as if she’d given him an electric shock, but he didn’t jerk his hand away the way she was tempted to do. The way she should have done,
she realized, a long beat later, when she only stood there, gripping him as if he was a brilliant burst of light and some kind of savior, too.

He was the one to let go. Eventually.

“Jesse Grey,” he introduced himself, a considering sort of gleam in his dark eyes that made that heat bloom. Spread. “But you probably got that from the auctioneer.”

It was only to be expected, Michaela thought in
a slight daze, that a man who looked the way he did should also
sound
the way he did. All dark, sinful things and that rough edge besides.

“Like the bar!” she said. Idiotically. “The one we’re standing in right now.”

“This is a saloon, Michaela,” Jesse said in a voice that was not quite a drawl, but wasn’t quite so surly, either.

She opted not to reflect on what her name sounded like, coming
out of that mouth. Like a month of desserts, all of them too decadent to be believed.

“This is the Wild West. And if you look behind the bar, you’ll see an old man I vaguely resemble, also named Grey. It’s the family curse.”

Michaela pivoted obediently and blinked in the direction of the figures behind the bar. All good looking men in that rugged, Montana way, and none what she’d consider particularly
old—but only one man was standing still, half in shadow, his arms folded over his chest while he glared out at the crowd as if they were
doing something
to him by drinking his liquor.

“The surliness is the curse?” she asked. “Or the family resemblance? Oh, or maybe the saloon is the curse? Though I guess all those things could be connected.”

She regretted that the minute she said it. It took
a moment or two to look back at Jesse, though she could
feel
the way he looked at her, as if he’d set that whole side of her body on fire. Obviously, she told herself, this was what men like him
did.
That was why normal people didn’t have much to do with such creatures, with all that fire and brimstone and drama, to say nothing of the intent way he gazed at her, then.