The Millionaire's Club: Jacob, Logan and Marc

Chapter Three

Okay. Jake had surprised himself again. He simply had been going to give Chrissie the box. End of story. So what had happened to the plan?

Why was he sitting across from her in a booth at the Royal Diner happy as a damn clam because little Chrissie looked all pouty and put out?

As usual the diner was packed. It never seemed to matter that the greasy spoon, with its smoke-stained walls, cracked bar stools and chipped countertops, had seen better days. The place stayed popular with the locals for two basic reasons: nobody knew their way around a grill like Manny Hernandez and nobody gave lip like the mainstay waitress, Sheila Foster. A lot of guys came in just to let Sheila rag on them. Himself included.

Montgomery and Gentry belted out a song from the beat-up jukebox as Jake watched Chrissie pick at one of Manny’s burger baskets with all the enthusiasm of a Fear Factor competitor contemplating eating a box of scorpions.

“You don’t like the burger?”

“Do you know how much fat is in one of these things?” she grumbled.

“So why did you order it?”

“I didn’t. You did. I wanted a salad and you said I was too thin and why didn’t I eat something with some substance. So I said fine, I’ll have what you’re having.”

“Oh, yeah.” He grinned. “I forgot.”

Actually he hadn’t forgotten anything. He’d wanted to see her eat something that he figured she would consider sinful. And then he wanted to watch the lady enjoy sinning. Wait until she saw the pecan pie with ice cream that followed his standing lunch order.

He didn’t know why but he was suddenly determined to loosen her up and make her enjoy herself in spite of her determination not to. Not, he told himself, because he particularly cared, but because sometime during the course of this day—okay, if he were being honest, it was long before today—she had started to become a personal challenge to him.

People liked him. Pretty much without exception. Chrissie Travers was the major dissenter. For whatever reason, he wanted to change that.

As a rule, folks liked his teasing. They liked his sense of humor. They liked that he thought life should be lived to the fullest whenever possible because so much in these times was tough to deal with. And they liked that he knew about tough from the trenches. Just as he knew what it was like to face down death and come out on top.

A near-death experience like he’d had five years ago had a tendency to change a man’s outlook on life—it had sure as the world prompted him to want to live the rest of it on terms of his own making. Terms that included squeezing out as much pleasure as possible. Unlike the super-duper-serious Christine Travers, who was his polar opposite when it came to pursuing fun.

So he’d pulled a squeeze play on Chrissie, who really wasn’t too thin or all that difficult to squeeze. He’d said she was thin to get her riled again and see the color rise in her cheeks because she looked so pretty in pink. In fact, despite her spinster-slash-warden suits, which ranged in color from navy blue to black to—God save her—dirt brown, she looked kinda cute just the way she was. Well, cute except for the sourpuss attitude that was going to give her wrinkles before she turned thirty.

The woman was a puzzle. Flat out. And he did love a puzzle. Which probably explained why he kept trying to fit the pieces together.

“So. Tell me,” he said, digging into his own burger, “what do you do for fun?”

She blinked at him as if she didn’t understand the question. “Fun?”

He shook his head, swallowed and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “I’m sensing a severe shortfall in your basic vocabulary here. Lunch. Fun. Do I dare introduce the word play?”

The woman had some expressions. Most of them pinched—as if she was sitting on something prickly and was too polite to take care of the problem in public. What would people think?

He wondered what it was going to take to make her smile. He’d given it a halfhearted effort for five years now and so far he hadn’t hit the magic word, number or combination. Maybe it was time he got serious.

“I thought we were going to talk about your new conditions.”

“Fine. Right. We are.” He bit into his burger and chewed thoughtfully. “First tell me why—no smoke screen this time—that stuff is so important to you.”

She considered him across her uneaten burger and fries. Instead of answering, she asked a question. “You’re a Texas Cattleman’s Club member, right?”

“Right,” he said, popping a fry into his mouth and letting her play this out.

“And Cattleman’s Club members are sworn to certain values. Like loyalty and trust and honor and all that, right?”

He nodded and leaned back on the faded gray vinyl booth, wondering where this was going.

“Then if I tell you something in confidence—some thing that could affect Royal’s future—you’re sworn to secrecy, correct?”

He matched her pinched-brow scowl. “Absolutely. Of course, to make certain there’s no breach in that confidence, we’re both going to have to swear it in blood. You got a pocketknife on ya?”

She let out a disgusted little huff. “Do you take anything seriously?”

“Not if I can help it. Now, for Pete’s sake, spit it out. If you want me to keep it on the QT, all you have to do is ask.”

“Well, I’m asking,” she said, so sober it was all he could do not to laugh.

“Okay. Consider it done. Now give.”

“You know the Jessamine Golden legend?”

“Some of it,” he said. If you grew up in Royal, you’d heard about Jessamine Golden. It was as staple a part of the town’s history as the feud between two prominent families, the Windcrofts and the Devlins. “She was an outlaw, right? Killed the mayor and the sheriff. Stole some gold. Let’s see…disappeared somewhere around the early 1900s.”

“Right. Okay. Well…the saddlebags?” She leaned in close and lowered her voice.

“Yes?” he said, doing the same. Mostly because it got him a little closer to her and he’d been wondering if that really was gold shot through her pretty hazel eyes. Not only gold but silver, he realized. So that’s what gives them that iridescent color.

And didn’t she have the longest, most lush eyelashes he’d ever seen? Soft as sable, thick as a paintbrush. Why hadn’t he ever noticed that before?

Or her freckles. Cute little angel kisses lightly dusted the rise of her cheekbones and skimmed the bridge of her pixie nose. He was surprised he’d never noticed them before, either. Of course, he’d never been this close. Kissing close, if he were of a notion to steal one, which he might be if he didn’t have a pretty good idea of how she’d react. Those even pearly whites of hers would probably rip into his lip like tiger teeth.

“I’m sure,” she said, and he was mesmerized by the mobility of her full lips, “that those saddlebags belonged to Jess Golden.”

“Where did you get that?” he asked, frowning suddenly when he noticed a very fine, very faint crescent line of a scar at the bottommost edge of her pointed chin. It was about an inch long, and of course he’d never noticed it before, either. That close factor again.

She pulled back, looking exasperated. “Where did I get what?”

“That scar,” he said, reaching across the battered gray Formica tabletop and gently pinching her chin between his thumb and index finger so he could angle her head for a better look. And on second look, it wasn’t so fine and it wasn’t so faint. “Man. That had to have hurt like blazes.”

“We were talking about the saddlebags,” she said, pulling away from his hold and touching her fingers to her chin in a gesture that was both self-conscious and embarrassed.

Okay. The scar was a sore subject. So he let it drop. For now. But after five years of dancing around the edge of her fire, he seriously wanted to know what fueled her flames. He could be patient when the need arose. “What about the saddlebags?”

“I said I’m certain they belonged to Jess Golden.”

He sat back. Shrugged. “What makes you think so?”

She went into an excited diatribe about Jess Golden once living in Jonathan Devlin’s house, about the purse and the rose petals and the six-shooters and the map coming from Jonathan’s attic. And there was that pink blush on her cheeks again. So. Anger and excitement were two of her triggers. He wondered what else got her going and flashed on an image of her face flushed with the heat of great sex.

Whoa.

That was interesting. And the picture was a little too vivid.

“The roses are a dead giveaway,” she finished.

“Hmm. Roses, huh? An outlaw who liked roses?”

“I have always figured there was more to Jess Golden than what was written in the local newspapers at the time and recorded in local history books.”

He considered her and realized she’d finally revealed a chink in that airtight armor. “Well, well, well, Chrissie. You’ve got a romantic streak.”

She blinked several times in rapid succession, clearly flustered. “I am not a romantic.”

“You’ve romanticized an outlaw,” he pointed out.

“Romanticized? That’s ridiculous.” She blushed again, as if the notion that he might think that she—Christine Travers of the straitlaced, all work, no play variety—would have any thought on the subject of romance was too absurd to consider. Or because he was right and she really was a closet romantic.

Huh. Who’da thunk it? And on the heels of that discovery, possibilities abounded. How hard would it be to romance this standoffish little blonde? How soft would she be when she let some of the starch out of her spine?

“The point is,” she pressed on, “if I’m right and those are Jess Golden’s things, the map could lead to the stolen gold.”

“Okay. Hold it. If those are her things, what makes you think the gold is still here? Why wouldn’t she have taken it with her?”

She gave him a “duh” look and evidently decided he needed remedial training. “You’re an outlaw,” she began as if she was talking to a five-year-old.

He leaned back, held both hands up, palms out. “Swear to God, I did not steal that gold.”

Nothing. Not even a smirk. And he wanted to pry one out of her so badly.

“I didn’t mean that you are an outlaw literally,” she said, enunciating each word, again as if she were talking to someone who was intellectually challenged. “I meant, you’re an outlaw hypothetically. And you’re on the run because everyone in Texas believes you killed not only the mayor of the town but the sheriff, as well. You stole the gold and don’t have the time or the means to take it with you. It’s heavy and cumbersome. So you hide it. And you draw a map. You hide the map somewhere—like in the house where you live, in the attic or something—and then you run, hoping things will settle down after a time and you can go back and get it.”

“Okay,” he said, marginally intrigued now. “I’m an outlaw—well, not me specifically, because we’re still doing hypothetical, right?”

Only a card-carrying optimist could interpret her sneer as camouflage for a grin.

“What makes you think that I—the hypothetical outlaw—didn’t come back and dig up the gold later?”

“Because there are absolutely no accounts of Jess Golden ever being spotted in or around Royal again. Ever. And the gold was in the form of numbered bars. If they’d been converted to cash, there would be a record. There’s not. I checked.”

She was thorough. He’d give her that. And he’d give her something else. She hid it well, but there was a treasure trove of pent-up passion buried beneath the layers that comprised Chrissie Travers. At least she had passion about this issue. He suspected there might be something else that would fire her up and toyed with the idea of being the man to discover exactly what that something was.

The prospect of peeling those layers and discovering, little by little, the woman hiding behind the steel facade suddenly fascinated him. For years he’d found a certain sophomoric satisfaction in simply pulling her chain, then leaving her stewing in her own juices.

He didn’t feel so much like leaving now. Instead he felt as if maybe he owed it to her to help her come out of her cocoon. Yeah, he thought, warming to the idea. And maybe he owed it to himself to see whether a butterfly or a bug wiggled its way out.

“Tell you what,” he said, putting his money on the butterfly. “Since you’ve made such a compelling argument—” he reached for the ketchup bottle and dumped a generous glob on top of her uneaten French fries “—I think you deserve to have the box.”

“But?”

He smiled at her insight and helped himself to some of her fries. “But there are still conditions.”

He was getting a little addicted to that icy glare. He didn’t know anyone who did it so well. He swiped a few more fries. “Condition number one—you eat at least half of your burger and some of the fries.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“Pretty minor, really.”

She leaned back in the booth, her head tilted with both impatience and irritation. “What do you want from me? Why do you take such pleasure in baiting me?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, I didn’t have a clear answer to that question myself until a few minutes ago.”

“And what happened to clear things up?”

“I think it’s the freckles,” he said happily and watched her eyes shift from irritation to confusion to flat-out exasperation. “They’re cute. And so are you. Now eat your lunch and then we’ll lay out the rest of the terms.”

“And one of the conditions is a dinner date?” Alison asked later that evening. She sounded just a little too cheery to suit Christine.

Actually Jacob never did get around to talking about terms. He’d said they would discuss them over dinner. Which was not a date.

“A dinner meeting,” Christine clarified. “Saturday night.”

She still couldn’t believe she’d agreed to it. Not only that, she didn’t want to believe it. The man was devious and manipulative and…and he thought she was cute. Right. As if she believed that.

“What do you suppose he’s really after?” she asked Alison as they sat side by side on Christine’s sofa, wearing their sweats, a popcorn bowl between them, their stocking feet propped on the coffee table as the opening credits to the movie Alison had chosen for their traditional “Wednesday night at the movies” rolled by.

“What’s he after? Sweetie, I’ve been trying to tell you. He’s after you,” Alison said, grabbing a pillow and hugging it to her chest. “This is a tearjerker,” she added offhandedly as if she hadn’t just made the most ridiculous statement of the year.

“He is not after me,” Christine insisted and dug into the popcorn.

“So why did he fabricate yet another excuse to see you in the guise of leveling conditions on giving you Jess Golden’s things? No man goes to those lengths to tease a woman unless it’s because he’s interested in her.”

There was no convincing Alison otherwise, so Christine let it drop. She watched the movie. And told herself Alison was all wet. Jacob Thorne was not interested in her. It didn’t make any sense that he would be. A man like him. A woman like her. Talk about oil and water.

“So. Where are you two going on your second date?”

“It’s not a date,” Christine insisted. “And where do you get second?”

“Who paid for lunch?”

“Well, he did but—”

“Then it’s a second date. Now, where are you going?”

“Claire’s,” she finally confessed.

“Oh là là! Big-time date.”

Christine only grunted. She’d never been to Royal’s swanky French restaurant. Claire’s wasn’t exactly in her everyday budget. Or even in her special-occasion budget, for that matter. And while she wasn’t looking forward to spending an evening—that was not a date—in Thorne’s company, she couldn’t help but be excited about getting a little taste of how the upper crust lived.

“What are you going to wear?”

Christine shrugged and feigned interest in the movie. “I hadn’t really thought about it.” Okay. That was a lie. It’s all she’d thought about. “Probably my black pantsuit.”

Alison sat up straight. “Eeewwww. You can’t go to Claire’s in that boxy old thing.”

“What do you mean, old thing? It’s only—” She stopped and thought. Hmm. It had been a long time since she’d bought the suit.

“Tomorrow we’re going shopping during our lunch hour,” Alison said. “And you’re going to buy something sexy.”

“I am not.”

“Are, too.”

“I. Am. Not.”

“We’ll see,” Alison said. “Now let’s watch the movie. I’m due for a good cry.”

The dress was black. And short. And low cut.

The heels were silver. And spiked. And strappy. And they showed off siren-red toenail polish that Alison had insisted was perfect for the total look.

She had a look, all right, Christine thought, hovering just one notch to the left of panicked on Saturday night. A look she’d never in a million years thought she could pull off. Yet as she took it all in—experiencing a mixture of disbelief and shock and a pleasurable womanly confidence—in her full-length bedroom mirror, Christine had to admit Alison was right.

She looked hot.

“Okay. That settles it. I’m changing.”

Alison laughed. “Don’t even think about it,” she said, standing behind her like a drill sergeant.

Right. She’d forgotten about Alison for a minute there. Her friend had insisted she help Christine get ready for her dinner meeting and then informed her she was going to stick around until Jacob arrived just to make sure she didn’t chicken out and ditch the new duds for the black pantsuit.

“Alison, I look ridiculous.”

“You look fabulous.”

“I look obvious.”

“I really like the hair, too,” Alison added, ignoring Christine’s discomfort.

Yeah. Christine had to admit Alison was right about that, too. Her hair did look great. Alison had scooped it up to the crown of her head and wrestled it into a spiky little puff that looked chic and hip and—yeah, she admitted, still amazed—sexy.

It was a word that had never fit her.

Conservative—now, there was a word she wore well. A word that was comfortable, unlike the way she felt wearing this dress. She had to change clothes. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

“Okay. Thank you, thank you, thank you for everything. You’ve transformed the pumpkin into a fancy coach, Fairy Godmother. You must be exhausted. Why don’t you go on home now?”

“Yeah, right,” Alison said. “And give you a chance to change into something less revealing, less sexy and more conservative the minute I walk out the door? Uh-uh. Besides, it’s too late. Mr. Wonderful just pulled up.”

Well, yikes, Christine thought and tugged up the plunging neckline in a vain attempt to cover a little more skin.

“Go,” Alison said and gave her an encouraging squeeze. “Answer the door. And let the begging begin.”

Yeah. As if Jacob Thorne would ever beg for her.

On a deep breath she walked out of the bedroom. Her knees were wobbly as she headed down the hall and regarded the front door to her apartment as if Jack the Ripper were about to make an impromptu appearance.

Not Jack. Jacob. Jacob the Thorne. And his knock was solid and confident.

She wished she could say the same about her knees. This was so ridiculous. The way she looked. The way she’d dressed. The outrageous way her heart was hammering. All because the man on the other side of the door had orchestrated a pretend date to have a little more fun at her expense.

The reminder was all she needed to regain her composure. He wanted to make a joke of her? Fine. At least she was turned out in a way that might give him a twinge of regret.

She wiped her sweaty palms on her skirt and immediately regretted that she may have soiled the delicate silk crepe. Regrouping, she pasted on a smile and opened the door.

“Hi,” she said and had the disarming experience of watching his arrogant hey-baby grin slowly deflate to be replaced by a look of complete and utter shock.

Chapter Four

“Um…hello?” Christine repeated again after several long, uncomfortable seconds had passed.

He hadn’t said a word. He just stood there. Looking her up and down. Slowly. Very slowly.

“Hello,” he said finally, his voice deep and gruff. Very, very gruff. “Hello, hello, hello,” he repeated slowly.

His smile had returned. A pleased, surprised, uniquely charming smile, and if she wasn’t careful, she might start to think he actually was happy to see her. And that he actually liked what he saw.

“You have legs,” he said, standing back to take another long, blatantly appreciative look. “Nice legs.”

“Um. Well.”

Sparkling response, Christine. Just sparkling.

“Nice, Chrissie,” he said, meeting her eyes again. “You look very, very nice.”

“Um. Well.”

Is there a really stupid echo in here? And why are my cheeks so hot?

“I’ll…I’ll, um, just go get my purse.”

“It will be my pleasure to wait here and watch you go get it,” he said, another grin in his voice that made her glance back over her shoulder—and get caught off guard by the heated look in his eye.