The Miami Millionaire (11 page)

“That’s okay, this lovely lady is waiting for me.”  Victoria heard a now all too familiar voice call from behind her and she turned around to see Jake swiftly walking towards her. 

Victoria’s jaw dropped as she watched Jake coming closer - his dark jacket flapped open in the evening breeze and his white linen shirt had a couple of buttons open at his neck exposing a teasingly small amount of golden skin. Her eyes travelled down to the belt buckle around his black jeans as the lights from the restaurant reflected off the silver metal, and then she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the contours of his muscular legs right down to his brown loafers.  Quickly she realised she was staring and pulled her eyes back up to his face but as quickly as she did she almost wished she hadn’t.  If Jake looked handsome in England then he was mind-blowingly gorgeous here in Miami.  She assumed he had spent a bit of time out in the sun since returning to Miami, and his already lightly sun-kissed skin now had a distinct suntan making his clear blue eyes stand out even more, they were amazingly intense.

In just a few large strides Jake caught up with Victoria and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek which took her aback.  Again this was something she had not imagined – she was all ready to shake hands but instead she was thrown off track by his kiss on her cheek!

“Bienvenido a Miami.  I can see you have already been enjoying our sun.”  Jake stood back and looked Victoria over from head to toe and smiled.  Then looking quickly over her shoulder he said, “Look can you just give me a minute, I just need to say hello to someone.  I’ll be back in a minute.”

“No problem.”

“Grab this table here and I’ll be back in a minute.” Jake said as he pulled out a chair for Victoria to sit down and headed up the small set of steps into the bright lights of the restaurant.

“Can I get you a drink while you wait?”  The waiter asked.

“Yes please, a mojito.  I hear you do good ones here.”  Victoria smiled as she looked across at the sun which was now beginning to lower in the sky.

“We certainly do.  One Mojito coming right up.”  He said as he walked away.

True to his word Jake had only been gone a few minutes before Victoria saw him walk back out of the restaurant and down the few steps to their outside table.  He stopped momentarily as he saw someone else he knew.  He went over and shook hands with a man and greeted the man’s wife with a kiss on the cheek.  Victoria couldn’t hear what he said, but she could see Jake pointing her out to his friends and then bid them farewell.  Finally he was walking back to her table and she smiled as she watched him approach looking like someone out of an Armani advertisement!

Jake pulled out the chair across the table from Victoria and quickly whipped off his jacket resting it across the backrest of his chair as he sat down.

“I am really sorry about that.  My friend owns this place and if he knows I am here he would come out to see me, and I know he is really busy so I wanted to just go in and say ‘hi’.”

“Don’t worry.  I am just very grateful you made the time to show me some of Miami.  I’m sure I will find it very useful for whatever campaigns you have coming up over the next few weeks.”  Victoria said trying to sound as professional as she could, because no matter what she had just gone through personally, she still had a job to do and even though she was sitting across a dinner table from a deliciously good-looking man, this was still business and she needed to remain professional.

“Wow, let me stop you right there.”  Jake put up his hand and looked serious.

Victoria could sense the change in him immediately. 

“I work hard and take very little time off.  I didn’t invite you out here tonight for work.  I want to show someone new to Miami my home city and the place I love.  So you can drop the miss-marketing-woman bit for one night and forget I am the boss.   Tonight we are just two people having a bit of fun, and I’m going to show you some of Miami.  Okay?”  He looked at Victoria intently, he wasn’t joking.

When Jake heard Victoria was here in Miami already he couldn’t wait to see her again, if only to see if she still had that amazing sparkle he saw that day at the fete in England.  Since that day in Gloucester he hadn’t stopped thinking about Victoria or her beautiful bright red hair.  She had been wearing tight white jeans which had nearly given him a heart attack by the end of the day, and the touch of her skin had send the nerve endings of his fingers into overdrive.  He knew he had behaved totally inappropriately by keeping hold of her hand for far longer than necessary and for putting his arm around her at every opportunity, and to be honest he had been quite surprised she hadn’t pushed him away and told him to get lost!  But as long as she wasn’t pushing him away then that was just fine with him.  He had been disappointed when she didn’t take up his offer for dinner, but he wasn’t surprised considering she was engaged.   However, when Victoria telephoned him and asked to meet, even though he knew there was no hope of anything more than a business conversation, he couldn’t resist seeing her again.  He’d had so many requests for meetings with advertising and marketing companies he didn’t even want to keep count, but when Victoria asked to speak to him about business he was not about to say “no”.  And an evening spent in Victoria’s company had only served to wet his appetite more!  Her boss sounded like an absolute jerk, like so many other jerks he had met, and considering her excellent job of organising the fete and accommodating his promotional crew at the last minute he decided pretty much straight away that he was going to give his British marketing and advertising business to Churchill, Turnbull and French on a trial basis, just as long as Victoria played a major part in it.  He could see her worth – apart from thinking she was incredibly sexy even before she walked into his hotel suite that morning when he was barely half awake and blew him away in her work suit that looked to him, and any other red-blooded male, like her ample breasts were going to burst out of it at any moment, he knew she had a great business brain and he loved that. 

Victoria broke into his thoughts.

“As much as I would really like that Jake we did agree that I was coming here strictly for business and nothing else.”  She cringed, she didn’t know quite what he was saying and she didn’t want to lead him on, or let him think she was the kind of woman to go for a one night stand or sleep with the boss.    If not for her own sanity alone she needed to make sure they were both on the same page, and Jake ‘the playboy’ didn’t start thinking she was going to fall for his amazing charms!  Her life was far too much of a mess to let the only stable thing in it, her job, get screwed up too!

“Hey, I think you gave my ego a big enough bashing back there in London.  I got the message okay, but we can be friends can’t we?  So how about out of office hours we are friends, just friends, and that way we can both enjoy ourselves without the other one getting the wrong idea?”

Victoria nodded.  That sounded good to her.

“So, what’s that you’re drinking?  Mojito?”  And with that Jake’s serious mood had gone and his relaxed smile was back.

She nodded.

“Great, I love mojitos.  Javier!”  Jake called to the waiter nearby, “Bring us a pitcher of mojito and then we will be ready to order.”

Victoria looked down at the menu realising she hadn’t actually decided what she wanted and then out the corner of her eye she spotted a waiter passing by carrying a plate of the biggest and most elegant hamburger she had ever seen.

“Do you know what you want to eat?”  Jake asked.

“That!”  Victoria laughed as Jake followed her line of sight to the plate of lavishly decorated burger and fries.

“I bring you to a restaurant on the sea front and you want a burger and fries?”  he said in mock horror.

“Not just any burger and fries!  Real American burger and fries, and look at it!  You can hardly call that ordinary by any standards.  It’s a work of art!” 

Jake laughed, he was only teasing.  He didn’t care what she wanted, as far as he was concerned she could have anything she wanted as long as it made her smile the way she was now, and he marvelled at her dark brown eyes as they sparkled.

“No problem.”  He said and ordered their food as Javier put down their pitcher of Mojito.

Jake reached across the table to fill up Victoria’s glass and then poured the iced cocktail into his own.

“So what do you think of Miami so far?  What did you do last night and today?”

“Well I haven’t seen much of it yet, but so far so good.  The beach is wonderful, if I lived here I wouldn’t be able to pull myself away from it.  I don’t know how anyone gets any work done here.”

“Well we do have a good work-hard play-hard ethos here in Miami.  Having fun is just as important as anything else, maybe more so.”

“Last night I went for a lovely walk along the promenade near my hotel.”

“Your hotel is by the beach?”

“Of course!  It’s just a little hotel, but I would rather that and be able to take an evening stroll by the beach rather than be further into town.”

Jake nodded, he loved the evenings sitting in a bar by the sea too.  “What beach are you by?”

“Hollywood Beach.”

“Really?  That’s my local beach.”

“No, you’re teasing me.  I thought everyone who is anyone went to South Beach.”

“No I am not teasing you I promise.  South Beach is great but it’s for tourists or night life.  No locals ever swim there, except for the exhibitionists that is.”  He took a sip of his drink and it went down smoothly.  “I live about twenty minutes from here and about five minutes from your beach.”

“Walking or driving?”  Victoria took another sip of her mojito through the long straw.

“Driving!  No one walks here.”

“Why?”  She wondered why anyone would want to drive if they could walk around in the wonderful sunshine.

“One reason is it gets far too hot in the daytime to be walking around, but the other is because things are really spread out here and you need transport to get around.  You’ll see when I take you for a drive.” 

Jake paused as he watched Victoria lift the straw to her clear glossed lips again and he realised something was missing.  He frowned.

“Vicky, where’s your engagement ring?  Please don’t tell me you believe all that rubbish about crime being rife here.  You don’t have to worry, you are perfectly safe here.  If you take any normal precaution like you would in London, or any other city, then it’s just the same here.”

Victoria froze.  She wasn’t ready to talk about her break-up with Mark, not just yet, but she wasn’t going to lie about it either.  It was what it was!  “No it’s not that, but thanks for being so thoughtful to point it out.  I will sleep well tonight knowing that.”  She gently laughed trying to keep the conversation light hearted.

“Then where’s your ring?”  He asked genuinely confused, he could see through Victoria’s light-heartedness and sensed a change in her and wondered why.

“Not here.  I left it back in London with the rest of my stuff sitting packed up in boxes at my friend’s house.”

“I don’t understand.” 

“I really don’t want to talk about it if that’s alright with you, but it’s enough to say the wedding is off.  Mark and I are through.  No more.”

Jake sat back in his chair hard.  He hadn’t expected that - what happened?  She had been so loved up last week, full of marriage plans and enthusiasm for the wedding day soon to come.  “What happened?  Why?”  The words slipped out of his mouth before he realised, and he wished he could take them back because he could see the tiny pools of tears threatening to break free as Victoria tried to swallow hard to stop them from coming.  Yes he wanted to know what happened, but now was obviously not the time or place and he quickly changed the subject.  “Look forget I asked that.  We can talk about it anytime you want, or not for that matter.  But for now you are here in Miami and tonight I am going to make sure you have a fantastic time.  So here is good time number one, the reason why I chose this restaurant for tonight – it has one of the best views of our amazing Miami sunsets.  Look there.”  Jake said as he pointed out to the sea where the sky was now starting to darken and Victoria turned to see the most incredible array of pinks merging into each other overtaking the bright blue sky just before the darkness encroached upon it.

“Wow that is amazing!”  She breathed as she marvelled at the beautiful colours.  She hadn’t seen a sunset like that before and reached for her phone.  “I’ve got to take a photo of this.”

Jake sighed with relief, that seemed to take Victoria’s mind away from her revelation.  He hated to see women cry, he wasn’t one of those touchy feely modern men and he was never sure what to do on the rare occasion he was faced with a tearful woman.  But more importantly he never wanted to see Victoria’s beautiful brown eyes so sad again.

Victoria had only made it half way through her huge plate of food when she put her knife and fork together and pushed it aside, she couldn’t eat anymore. 

“Your eyes were definitely bigger than your stomach?”  Jake laughed as he watched Victoria sit back in her chair and refilled her mojito.