Читать книгу Risky Business - Jane Sullivan - Страница 12

AFTER LEAVING RACHEL’S office, Jack headed back to the Fairfax Hotel, where he met with the manager and got a tour of the place. Everything was as he’d expected it to be, and more. He called Tom, gave him some specifics, and told him to start working up a bid. Then he dropped the news that he wouldn’t be back to the work site for a couple of days. Tom had gone a little nuts over that, but this trip wasn’t negotiable. Business would keep.

Rachel wouldn’t.

He certainly hadn’t planned for things to go the way they had today, and he could hardly believe his luck. A four-day retreat? Sharing a room? And Rachel had to pretend he was her husband?

Did it get any better than that?

Okay. She clearly didn’t want him around. Or she thought she didn’t, anyway. But now he had four days to convince her otherwise. To put her into the same kind of atmosphere they’d experienced in San Antonio and see what might happen between them. If he could bring back just a glimmer of the connection he’d felt with her, it would all be worth it.

At the Fairfax, he begged for the use of a computer from the hotel manager’s secretary. He researched the Web sites of humanitarian groups who flew to other countries to offer medical assistance, committing buzz words to memory that he could use if necessary. Rachel would undoubtedly fill him in on information concerning what she’d told the people she worked with. Then he’d mesh the two together and come up with a profile he could use so he wouldn’t get tripped up. Even without the preparation, though, he wouldn’t have anticipated any problems in that regard.

After spending his entire childhood as the son of a petroleum engineer who was transferred every year or two, Jack had lived all over the United States and in several foreign countries. He’d been forced to give up friends, then turn right around and make new ones so many times that he’d become a master of the game.

At first it had been painful. Then he discovered the secret. If he made the other kids laugh, pretty soon he had them eating out of his hand. Life could be pretty dull, and the person who spiced things up was the person who had a list of friends as long as his arm. He sometimes felt that he could parachute into anyplace on the planet, and within two days he could have a party and invite twenty people who’d be happy to come. Consequently, he’d never met a situation in his life that he couldn’t talk himself into or out of, and this one would be no different.

After he finished his research, he went by a couple of downtown stores and picked up a few things. Ski equipment he could rent at the resort, but he needed enough clothes and other items to last him four days. He hadn’t planned on going on a buying spree, but as an independently wealthy doctor, shouldn’t he really look his best?

Then, at the appointed hour, he returned to Rachel’s office. Her attitude toward him hadn’t changed a bit. In fact, she acted so coldly toward him as they drove to her condominium that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see icicles forming on the inside of her car. Once they got there, she parked her car, strode inside and didn’t even bother to look back to see if he was following her or not. Jack just smiled. She couldn’t hold out forever. Sooner or later, the sweet, congenial, sexually insatiable woman he’d known in San Antonio would rise to the surface, and when she did, he’d be waiting.

Then he went inside her condo, and he wondered if maybe locating her wild side again would be a taller task than he’d imagined.

Her decor consisted of off-white carpet and off-white walls. Generic art that matched the drapes that matched the sofa that matched the chairs. Not a speck of dust anywhere or a statuette out of place. Dreary traditional furniture that looked as if nobody had ever sat on it. Her home looked like a place where a person twice her age might live—a person twice her age with a desire to freeze the pants off anyone who stepped foot inside it. It reminded him of the decor he’d seen at her office today—modern, efficient, practical, heartless. If he’d found just one cracked wall, a mismatched pillow, or even a family picture or two, he might have been able to feel comfortable.

No chance of that.

Did the same woman live here whom he’d shared the room with in the historic San Antonio hotel? The one with the leaky clawfoot tub and the four-poster bed? The one with the cracks in the walls? The one she said she loved the very smell of?

Impossible.

Rachel hung her coat in the front closet, then did the same with his.

“Have you eaten?” she asked him.

“No, but I’d be happy to take you out.”

She gave him a yeah, I’ll just bet you would look, then strode toward the kitchen. “I’ll order something.”

“Order?”

“I don’t cook. Not very often, anyway.”

“Then what do you eat?”

“Yogurt and granola for breakfast. A salad for lunch. Anything ready to microwave for dinner. Low fat, low cal.”

“How about a pizza?” he asked.

She winced. “I guess one without meat would be okay.”

“I was thinking pepperoni.”

Her lip curled, clearly showing her distaste. “Do you ever think of your arteries?”

“As little as possible.”

“I don’t blame you. They’re probably a real mess.”

“If you’ll remember, we ordered room service in San Antonio.”

She looked away. “So?”

“Steak and potatoes. Chocolate cheesecake for dessert. Extra whipped cream. In fact, as I remember, we talked the room service waiter into bringing us an entire can of whipped cream.” He grinned. “Amazing what you can do with one of those, isn’t it?”

Her cheeks flamed red all over again. She started to say something, then clamped her mouth shut, probably figuring that denial was pointless since she was the one who’d emptied most of the can.

She pulled open a kitchen drawer and grabbed a coupon. “Go ahead. Order pepperoni. Extra cheese. Stuffed crust. And why don’t you get a bunch of those bread sticks while you’re at it? The ones that you dip in garlic butter? That ought to really send the old cholesterol through the roof.”

He smiled. “Now you’re talking.”

She rolled her eyes with disgust. Slapping the coupon on the counter, she went into her bedroom and closed the door behind her. Jack sighed and shook his head. He knew at heart she was a pepperoni pizza eater, but now was not the time to push the issue. He grabbed the phone, dialed the number of the pizza place and ordered a vegetarian supreme.

By the time the pizza got there and they ate, it was approaching eight o’clock. No matter how often he tried to start a conversation, Rachel rebuffed him at every turn. If she couldn’t stop him from coming to the resort with her, she clearly intended to make their time together as unpleasant as she possibly could. That was okay. He wasn’t blessed with an excess of virtues, but patience was one he had in spades.

After they finished eating, Rachel sent him to the living room, then cleaned up the kitchen. She then disappeared down the hall, brought back sheets, blankets and a pillow and lay them on the sofa. She returned to her bedroom. A moment later, he heard a shower running.

Well. So much for an evening of pleasant conversation. Or great sex.

Okay, the “great sex” thing had been a real long shot. But a guy could always hope.

Figuring he’d seen the last of her tonight, Jack located a TV behind the doors of an armoire. He pulled out the remote, ran the dial, stopped on a few things that he thought might be interesting only to find he really didn’t give a damn.

Finally he flipped the TV off, then got up and inspected her bookshelves, where he found all the latest titles of the day—Oprah picks, up-to-the-minute nonfiction, a few classics, a pristine coffee-table volume of modern architecture. On a wall next to the bookshelf hung two diplomas, indicating that she had both a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in architecture from an institution he recognized as a prestigious women’s college.

Women’s college. He’d often wondered what kind of people went to a place for four years where they spent all day without ever setting eyes on a member of the opposite sex. He’d had a nightmare like that once. It wasn’t pretty.

Then he glanced down the hall and noticed a second bedroom. Guest room? Probably not, since he was sleeping on the sofa. Then again, she was out to punish him.

He walked quietly down the hall. The door was ajar. He pushed it open and peered inside.

A desk sat along one wall, a drawing board in the corner. More bookshelves. But the books they contained were hardly literary masterpieces or full of contemporary buzz. Most of them were history texts and books on architecture of all periods—ancient, medieval, eighteenth and nineteenth century—mostly used books with ragged covers. And the balance of the titles were fiction, mainly mysteries and romance.

Yes. This was more like it. He had the distinct impression that the books in the living room with the unbroken spines were the ones she showed to the world, while these tattered ones lived in her heart. Then he turned and got another surprise.

That day in San Antonio, they’d browsed through the Alamo gift shop, where he’d bought her a poster of an 1830s map of Texas. Here it was, matted, framed and hanging on the wall.

He remembered so clearly the time they’d spent there, perusing every document, every artifact. To find a woman with that kind of knowledge of the historical periods that fascinated him had pleased him to no end. That he was attracted to her in every other way possible made him feel as if he’d found the perfect woman. A soul mate, and he didn’t even believe in such things.

And then she’d disappeared.

“What are you doing in here?”

He spun around. Rachel was standing behind him, wearing a blue terry-cloth robe that gave a new meaning to the word frumpy. He knew a really hot body lurked under there somewhere, but he sure as hell couldn’t see it right now.

He shrugged. “Just looking around.”

“Well, don’t.”

There it was again. That crimson flush on her ivory cheeks, as if somehow he’d embarrassed her.

“The poster,” he said. “It looks good.”

She turned instantly and left the room. He followed. She started to go into her bedroom, but he caught her arm and pulled her back around.

“Hey, hold on. What’s the matter?”

She looked up at him, her pale blue eyes brimming with annoyance. “It’s bad enough for me to look up and find you standing in my office this afternoon. Then you beg your way into my house. And now you’re snooping around.”

“I wasn’t snooping.”

“Then what do you call it?”

“The door was open.”

“That room is private!”

She looked genuinely angry. “Okay. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone in there.”

“That’s right. You shouldn’t have.”

“But I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want me to. The rest of this place isn’t you. That room is.”

She ducked her head, the color still hot on her cheeks. “You don’t know anything about me.”

He inched closer to her and placed his palm on the wall beside her head, dropping his voice. “Yes, I do. Maybe a whole lot more than most people do. That day in San Antonio, and then that night, I found out all kinds of things about you.”

“You have to stop this.”

“What?”

She closed her eyes. “Reminding me.”

“You don’t want to be reminded?”

“I did a very dumb thing that night, something I’d just as soon forget.”

“So that’s the way you remember it? As something you want to forget?”

“Yes.”

“You even want to forget how we met? The time we spent together that afternoon?”

He saw the indecision on her face. Was she going to acknowledge the truth, or continue to act as if their entire encounter had been the biggest mistake of her life?

“No,” she said finally. “That was nice.”

“Ah. Finally something we agree on.”

“But I wasn’t looking for a relationship then, and I’m still not looking.”

“I didn’t know we were talking about lifetime commitments here.”

“I don’t even want a four-day commitment from you. I don’t want anything from you. In fact, if you’d just go back to San Antonio and leave me alone, I’d be the happiest woman alive.”

“No, Rachel. I know what would make you the happiest woman alive, and it has nothing to do with me going back to San Antonio.” Slowly he dropped his head and placed a gentle kiss against her neck, then brought his lips up to brush against her ear. She was tense—so tense—and he wanted nothing more than to kiss all that tension away, for her to melt in his arms again.

“Let her out,” he whispered. “Right now. Show me that woman I knew in San Antonio.”

“Jack—”

“She’s in there,” he said. “I know she is. A beautiful, sexy woman I can’t wait to touch. We can be together again the way we were before, just the two of us, for hours on end—”

“No!”

She twisted to the left, then ducked beneath his arm and strode back down the hall.

Damn.

He thought about stopping her, then thought again. More than anything, he wanted to follow her into her bedroom, slip that frumpy robe off her shoulders, kick it aside, then make love to her until daybreak. But even if he managed to accomplish that tonight, he had the feeling she’d only wake up tomorrow morning as wary as she’d been in San Antonio, and he definitely didn’t want that. If he pushed her too hard right now, he could end up odd man out for the next four days, and there was no way he was going to let that happen.

As she reached her bedroom door, he called out to her. “Don’t you want to know what I was doing in Denver?”

She stopped, then slowly turned, eyeing him suspiciously.

“There’s a hotel not too far from where you work,” he said. “The Fairfax. They’re tearing it down.”

Her eyebrows flew up. “They’re what?”

“Tearing it down. Every brick, every chandelier, every doorknob, every strip of oak flooring—”

“But I love that hotel! I have lunch there at least once a week. Why don’t they just renovate it?”

“Because a new high-rise is going up in its place.”

She stepped back toward him. “But how can they tear down such a wonderful old building?”

“With a few well-placed explosives.”

“But all that history will be gone!”

“Not all of it. I’m bidding for the right to salvage the interior of the hotel.”

Rachel’s eyes lit up. “Oh! That’s right! You do restoration! Can you use all those fixtures somewhere else?”

“Absolutely. I’ve got one project I’m working on now in San Antonio of the same vintage, and another one is coming up. I’ll do something with all of the salvaged items eventually, or piece them out to other renovators who can put them to good use.”

“I guess it’s not the same as leaving the hotel standing, but at least you’ll be saving parts of it, right?”

There it was. That smile. That animated expression. That look of sheer radiance when she talked about anything connected to history. For the first time since he’d walked into her office this afternoon, he saw a glimmer of the woman he’d met that warm, sunny afternoon in San Antonio.

“That’s better,” he said.

“What?”

“You’re smiling. I was beginning to think you’d forgotten how.”

She looked flustered and turned away.

“Don’t stop now,” he said.

“Jack—”

“History. You love it. We talked nonstop about it that day, remember? And the hotel we stayed in. That was a piece of history all by itself, wasn’t it?”

“I—I have to go to bed.”

He nodded. “Okay. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She looked at him suspiciously.

“Don’t worry, Rachel. As much as I’d like to join you, I’m not going to force my way into your bedroom.”

She seemed totally unconvinced of that. “You’re not?”

“No. Tonight I’ll just settle for the smile.”

She looked flustered all over again. She turned and disappeared into her bedroom, clicking the door shut behind her.

He found it amazing that a woman of her obvious professional capability could be so rattled by a tiny compliment. There was so much contradiction in her that he could probably take a year out of his life and still not figure it all out. Still, he had a feeling that it would be a year well spent.

She could try to fool him. She could wrap herself in that god-awful robe, or in wool from head to toe, put every hair in place and surround herself with hideous decor, but still he knew the truth. A passionate woman lurked beneath that cool surface, and he had exactly four days to get her to come out. And once she did, he’d never let her hide herself away again.