The charmer, p.3
The Charmer, page 3
“When necessary, yes.”
And she looked like a regular human being. Sure, her jeans were rolled up at least three times at the ankles and her T-shirt was so loose he—again—had almost no clue what was underneath, but there was no hint that underneath her french braid lay the brain of a gross-out queen. What else were people missing when they saw her? There had to be more. No one knew the art of the con quite like him. She was good, but not good enough to fool him. Matches was hiding something, and he needed to know what.
“And you study these things voluntarily?” he asked, moving on to look at the glassed-in colony, thankfully with no engorged ants visible to the naked eye.
“I’ve even gone out to Arizona and done field research, counting the colony’s foragers, nest maintenance, and protector ants before excavating the nest and taking the ants back to a research facility.”
He took a long look at the colony; it took up a good chunk of the wall. “How do you excavate an entire colony?”
Her blue eyes gleamed. “With a backhoe.”
Turning back to her, he tried to imagine her in the hot desert sun, sweaty in an almost see-through tank top and short shorts (what could he say, he was a dude) digging up an entire colony of unsuspecting ants. Part of him zoomed in on the picture of her in those shorts, but the rest of him couldn’t help but picture the unmitigated joy of being in her element that would show on her face. It would be hell to get it just right on a canvas, but if he could, it would stop a gallery walker in their tracks—a real only-a-Hughston-painting moment.
“So, you’re like an alien who lands on a foreign planet, studies the creatures, and then destroys their home before taking them back onto your spaceship for further study?”
Her narrow shoulders tensed, and the pointed chin of her heart-shaped face went up a notch. “That’s one way to look at it.”
“How do you look at it?” he asked, loving how easy it was—despite her quiet voice and deep blushes—to get her all sparked up for a fight.
“As though I am obtaining evidence about ant colonies so we can better understand them and their place in the world. So perhaps one day we don’t take them for granted and lose another species important to our planet’s ecosystem.”
Okay, it made sense even to him. “We’re all in it together.”
“Yeah, we are.” She gave him a considering look, her eyes narrowing behind her glasses. “I didn’t expect that coming from someone like you.”
The words were no more out of her mouth when she shoved up her glasses with a shaky finger, and a mottled red creeped up from the crew neck of her T-shirt. Obviously, she hadn’t meant for those words to exit out her sweet mouth. He wanted to give himself a little pat on the back for guessing correctly that she was a tell-it-like-it-is kind of woman, but her words stung a little.
How many times had he heard it before? It had to be at least a billion. “Like me?” It wasn’t that he didn’t encourage everyone to think there was nothing going on behind his pretty mug, but coming from her, it settled uncomfortably across his shoulders. “Oh, I see,” he said, closing the distance between them in two long strides. “Is it the deep pockets or the hot bod that throws you off?”
The red went all the way up to her chin with one giant splotch on each cheek. “I…I…”
“Let me let you in on a secret,” he said, stopping just out of arm’s reach because all he wanted to do was touch her. “I never had a choice about the money or the looks. I’ve had them both since I was born. You know what I also have? A fully functioning brain.” Fuck it. Another step, and he was close enough to brush the silk of an escaped strand of hair behind her ear. “I would have thought that someone who believes in evidence-based science would have waited to make some more observations before developing a hypothesis, but what do I know?” He pulled back from the edge before he cupped the back of her head, threaded his fingers through her braid, and held her where he wanted her. “I’m just the handsome, rich dilettante.”
Where in the hell had that come from? He was usually cooler than that—especially when he was the one who wanted people to think there wasn’t anything more to him than a cocky grin and a well-earned reputation for debauchery. He didn’t know what it was about the diminutive ant researcher, but she got him right in the soft underbelly that he hadn’t even realized was unguarded. He didn’t like it. Fuck that. He hated it, but he couldn’t ignore it any more than he could pretend not to see there was more to Felicia Hartigan than she let the world see, too.
His words hung between them as the ants went about their business not giving a shit about how the museum air suddenly smelled like it did before a summer storm—electric and full of possibilities. Inches of open space, that was all that stood between his mouth and hers. Her lips parted, and the tip of her pink tongue wet the bottom one. The pulse point at the base of her neck thrummed, drawing his gaze to the long, creamy column.
“All right, children, stay together,” a chipper female voice called out. “Don’t get separated from your buddy.”
Hudson and Felicia both turned as if in a trance. A group of about twenty kindergartners in blue blazers and plaid skirts, walking two by two, wandered into the ant lab, heading straight toward the man-made ant mound big enough to crawl through. They didn’t even look at Hudson and Felicia, but it didn’t matter. By the time he’d turned to look at her again, her eyes had cleared, her pulse had slowed, and the moment was gone. He shifted his stance to accommodate for the fact that his pants were tighter than they’d been when he’d left his apartment this morning.
“You’re right,” Felicia said, straightening her glasses with hands that no longer trembled, her low voice steady. “I made up my mind about you before we’d even spoken.” She exhaled a deep breath and met his gaze head on, her cheeks still pink. “It was wrong. I’m sorry.”
For once, he didn’t have a quip or a sly remark. In the world he’d grown up in, direct confrontation was frowned upon. And admitting you were wrong? Practically unheard of. He didn’t know how to process it, so he fell back on what he knew best.
“Are you saying that just because I could fund your entire lab?” He kept his tone light and teasing but couldn’t miss the way Felicia’s intent, observant expression didn’t falter.
“No. When I’m wrong, I admit it, and I was wrong.” She held out her hand with its clear, close-clipped nails and delicate, tiny tattoo of a honeypot—not the ant, an actual yellow pot that said honey—inside her wrist. “Will you accept my apology?”
He took her smaller hand in his. Her handshake was firm and professional, but that didn’t stop a sizzle of awareness from making him wonder once again what she was hiding under all of those baggy clothes. Yellow underwear to match her tattoo? Soft rose that matched how he imagined her nipples? His cock thickened against his thigh. Shit. He needed to stop thinking like this in a crowded lab with a bevy of kindergartners nearby.
“Apology accepted,” he said.
She smiled up at him, and his dick did more than twitch in his pants. Fuuuck.
Abruptly, he released her hand, stretched out his fingers to get rid of the tingling sensation in them, and mentally marched on with the real reason he was here and not the whatever that was snapping between them. “So, show me something less disgusting, and then let’s talk about how I’m going to get you what we both want.”
She cocked her head to the side. “What’s that?”
“Tyler Jacobson, of course.”
Her eyebrows went up high enough to be seen over the top of her glasses, and she honest-to-God laughed at him. “No offense, but while I’m sure there are a lot of people who think you’re devastatingly attractive, I doubt Tyler is one of them.”
“You think I’m hot, huh?” he asked, latching on to the one part of her declaration that made his pulse quicken.
He counted. One. Two. Three. And there it was. The color in her cheeks that suddenly appeared made him think of pink lemonade and cotton candy. Judging by the way her jaw tightened, she wasn’t as much of a fan of her body’s reaction.
“And that brings our tour to an end.” She started walking back toward the door marked Staff Only.
“While you’ve been studying ants and observing their behavior, I’ve been doing the same with people,” he called out, his voice easily carrying over the chatter of the school kids’ giggles. “I can help you.”
Her step faltered, then slowed. That’s it. Turn it over in that big brain of yours. Finally, she stopped and pivoted to face him.
“How?” she asked.
“We’d start with the hair.” It was a silky dark brown, almost black color that naturally caught the light. “You should wear it loose more.”
“A makeover?” she scoffed. “What is this, some dumb movie where the girl takes off her glasses and then everyone falls at her feet?”
He took another look at the worn sneakers, baggy jeans, and loose-fitting T-shirt. “No, we have more work than that ahead of us. This is more of a My Fair Lady project.”
“You’ve seen that movie?”
“It’s my mom’s favorite, and I’ve been forced to sit through it a time or two hundred.” And he’d sat through it every time she wanted to watch it after his dad died unexpectedly. It had been a rough three years of mourning for his mom, and he had done anything he could think of to make Helene smile—or at least not look quite so lost.
“Does that make you the professor?” Felicia asked.
“Exactly.”
“No way.” She shook her head. “I don’t believe in changing myself for a man. I’m a scientist. A girl from across the harbor in Waterbury. I don’t do false lashes, fake boobs, or a knock-off personality.”
“Good.” The mental image of her like that put a foul taste in his mouth. “You wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if you did. What I’m talking about is”—he searched for the right word to pull her in—“an experiment. You don’t like my hypothesis that with a little visual tweaking you could catch Tyler’s attention so that the real you could reel him in for good? Fine. But you see it all the time in the animal kingdom. I bet even your ants do things a certain way to attract a mate. It doesn’t make them bad or shallow or any less genuine. But if you want to make Tyler really wonder what he’s been missing all these years, you need to shake things up a bit—not change, but tweak. So, what do you say?”
She crossed her arms and pursed her mouth, the move making her nose scrunch up, and he held his breath. He’d made his case. All she had to do was say yes, and everyone would win. Felicia would land Tyler, he had no doubt about it, and she’d be happy. Or, even better, she’d realize when she actually had a choice of Tyler or no-Tyler, she was definitely better off no-Tyler—the guy was way too much of an idiot for someone like Felicia, who, let’s face it, probably only wanted Tyler because she couldn’t have him. So he’d help get her the thing she wanted most, and he’d hope like hell that at the end, she’d want someone else—him, at least for the moment. He wanted her on his canvas and in his bed until he figured out what it was about her that was so damn captivating. He wouldn’t deny it. Not to himself anyway.
Felicia would be happy he set her free of her childhood crush to find a man who was better than either himself or Tyler to share her life with. Then, Captain Clueless could find himself a woman. Any woman but Felicia.
He couldn’t stop the grin overtaking his features. Sometimes, he was just too fucking brilliant.
“Nice try.” She lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “But not in this lifetime, which means this is the end of your tour.”
Hudson’s grin melted into a frown as he watched her walk away, not exactly sure what had happened to him, the supposed legendary charming Carlyle. Being turned down for the second time within twenty-four hours by the same woman was a new experience for him. He couldn’t remember the last time he was turned down even once. Felicia was anything but usual, though. Fascinating? Stubborn? In desperate need of his help? Yes, to all of the above. Turning the problem over in his head, he lingered in the ant lab trying to understand how such small creatures—or people for that matter—could pack such a big punch.
Chapter Three
The days were still sunny with blue skies, but an early October chill had already rolled up Sixteenth Street along with a biting breeze that sliced through Felicia’s light jacket as soon as she walked out the museum’s side door a few minutes after she’d told Hudson good-bye. Using her taxi app had been a good call and—bonus!—it was already waiting for her. Hustling across the sidewalk before the light changed and the massive stream of people hurrying home from work grew even thicker, she straightened her spine and popped out her elbows a little and tried to make herself seem as big as possible. She felt a little ridiculous, but when you were five feet and one-half inch on a tall day, you had to do what you could to avoid being trampled in the Harbor City crush.
She fought her way through the dense crowd across the wide sidewalk and reached for the door handle of her ride. Before she could wrap her fingers around it, though, a large hand with a few specks of blue paint on it beat her to it. Her jaw tightened. Oh no. No one was snagging her ride home. Ready for battle, she turned and looked up…right into the face of Hudson Carlyle.
He shot her a cocky grin. “What a coincidence.”
That’s what the kids were calling it these days, huh? “Stalk much?”
“Not at all. I was chatting with your boss Eddie and happened to spot the same cab as you. No reason we can’t share, is there?” He opened the door.
“It’s unlikely we’re going the same way.” It was expensive to live anywhere in Harbor City, but the people in his tax bracket lived uptown, not on the East Side where her one-bedroom apartment was.
“There you go assuming again before your facts are in,” he said.
Ugh. She closed her eyes and counted to ten. She hated when he was right—and he was. She was doing it. Again.
“Come on.” She slipped into the cab, her heart beating a little faster than normal—because of annoyance, obviously—and slid across the seat until her hip was against the opposite door.
Hudson got in behind her, his broad shoulders taking up entirely too much space, and closed the door.
“Where to?” the driver asked as he pulled into traffic.
Hudson looked up from the mile of space between them, a grin playing on his lips, and stared at her expectantly. The challenge did not go unnoticed. He wasn’t going to say anything, the manipulative pain in her ass. First, he sabotaged her morning with that so-called tour. Then, she couldn’t stop wondering about the kiss that had almost happened between them—she swore he was going to seal the deal before the real tour group walked in, and she was not excited at that possibility. She. Was. Not. And now, he’d elbowed his way into her ride home.
“I promise I just want to share a cab,” he said. “Ladies first.”
She didn’t believe it, but he didn’t give off a stalker vibe, even though she’d accused him. Oh, Hudson was determined, all right, but her danger alarms stayed quiet, and her gut didn’t rumble. Sometimes a cab ride really was just a cab ride.
The cabbie cleared his throat.
Felicia huffed out a sigh. “Forty-fifth and Havston.”
“You got it.” The driver nodded and cut off two cars in his effort to hurry up and get in the left-hand lane before the traffic congestion bottled them in.
Cars blurring past them, she swiveled in her seat and gave Hudson her best glare—the one that made her six-foot-six redwood tree of a brother, Frankie, shiver in his steel-toed workbooks. It had exactly zero effect on Hudson. Wait. It did have an effect—the glutton for punishment relaxed against the seat, somehow managing to all but eliminate the space between them, and winked at her.
That actually worked on women? What a frightening thought.
Thinking tall thoughts, she straightened her spine and pressed back her shoulders. “Is this where you try to go all Henry Higgins again?”
“Nope.” There went that lazy curl of his lips. “I changed my mind.”
Well, that answer sucked all the wind out of her sails. She slouched back against the seat. “Good.”
It was exactly the answer she wanted. If it wasn’t for the fact that he gave in waaaay too easily. But for someone who’d shown up at the ant lab with some bullshit story about wanting a tour, to a guy who just happened to go for the same cab as her, his giving in didn’t fit. Sitting there, surrounded only by the sound coming from the in-taxi TV as the traffic went from a flowing stream to a plugged-up sink, she turned it around in her mind but couldn’t come up with an explanation. He was up to something, but she couldn’t unwind his logic, and it made the tips of her ears itch.
She couldn’t take not knowing.
“Decided I wasn’t a good makeover candidate, huh?” she asked, breaking first.
“No.” He shook his head and went back to watching the news updates on the tiny screen attached to the back of the front passenger seat.
That’s it? No way. He hadn’t stopped running his mouth since they’d met. Now they were stuck in a cab in the middle of a traffic jam, and he decided to turn into Silent Bob? Nope. That wasn’t happening. There was no way he could outlast her in this game. Satisfied she’d be proven right, she focused all her attention on the TV screen and not the almost hypnotizing way the muscles on his forearms moved, or the mysterious flecks of paint on the back of his hand. All she had to do was wait.
One.
Two.
Three.
Nothing. Not even a twitch. He’d gone as still as the cars around them.
The question burst out before she even realized the words had formed. “Are you going to tell me?”
He slowly turned his gaze to hers. “Do you really want me to?”
