Loe raamatut: «Chasing Dreams»

Chapter One

The wedding gown was designed by Dior. The bride was slender and radiant. Her bouquet held pure white French Lace floribunda roses, flown in from Oregon.

The groom waited at the end of the aisle. He was turning toward her—

The daydream ended with a bang. Literally.

Jessica King’s head flew forward and hit the steering wheel. After a stunned moment, she stared at the crumpled hood of the car she had rented earlier this morning after flying into Harrisonburg, Virginia. Beyond the damaged front of the car was the parking meter she had hit, and beyond that was the rather dingy cream stucco storefront of K & B Auto.

Steam hissed out of the hood of her damaged Cadillac, and a small crowd began to gather.

“That’s what dreaming will get you,” Jessie admonished herself.

Embarrassed rather than hurt, Jessie took a deep breath and stepped from the car. Emerging from the air-conditioning into the steamy heat of an early-summer morning took her by surprise. But not as much as being watched by half a dozen or so people, their interest in her unabashed. There was really nothing she hated quite so much as being the center of attention.

Odd then that she had been imagining her wedding day instead of paying attention to what she was doing. Was there a day where a person was more the center of attention than that one? Of the King girls, she was the practical one, the pragmatic one, the nondreamer.

“For good reason,” she muttered, surveying the damage to the car. It had been a beautiful car, undeserving of her carelessness.

She was not a careless person! Not the least ditzy! And yet, after overcoming her initial surprise at Mitch’s announcement of their engagement at her sister’s wedding only two weeks ago, she was astonished to find a romantic hidden within herself, a romantic who simply could not get enough of daydreaming about every detail of her big day.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled to the onlookers. “I just didn’t see the meter. Over the hood. I don’t usually drive a car with such a large hood…”

Her voice trailed off as the front door of K & B Auto swung open and a man emerged.

The last residue of her wedding fantasy faded.

Her entire former life faded.

The man had huge and undeniable presence. He was big, six feet or better, and every inch of that frame was muscular and spare. She could see power in every line of him, from the way his faded jeans clung to the large muscles in his thigh to the way the short-sleeved white T-shirt hugged the hard curve of a bicep and the washboard smoothness of his stomach. His hair was as dark as devil’s food cake, a little too long at the collar. His facial features were clean and chiseled, but the hardness in the line of his body was repeated in the stamp of his face—in the faint whisker-roughness of cheekbones and chin, in dark slashes of brows arrowing downward, in the line of lips that appeared stern and forbidding. How was it that the fullness of those lips made him sensual in a way that overrode his obvious ill temper? His eyes were animal dark, brown bordering on black, and a light snapped in them that was fierce, frightening, compelling.

He pushed through the small gathering and stood before her.

“Are you all right?”

She must have bumped her head harder than she originally thought. It was only four small words grouped together to form a question, and there was no sincere compassion in that question, either. In fact, the man seemed to be bristling with impatience. And yet she felt suddenly paralyzed, as if she couldn’t breathe.

“I’m f-f-fine,” she managed to stammer.

“Jessica King?” His gravel-edged voice scraped across the delicate skin at the back of her neck like a physical touch.

“How did you know?”

“Lucky guess,” he said. Did she detect a certain dryness to his tone? Then his scowl deepened. Without warning he reached out and touched the corner of her lip.

Intellectually, Jessica King supposed she had known life could change—completely, irrevocably, permanently—in a split second. She supposed she had always had a peripheral awareness that fate and the most well-planned lives were sometimes on a collision course. She had heard about such things: the decision to fly instead of to drive, a right-hand turn instead of a left one, and poof, a life changed for all time. What she had not believed was that something as innocuous as a chance meeting, a rough finger laid on the delicate skin of her upper lip, could bring on this sensation, not unlike drowning, that everything about her reasonable and well-ordered world had just changed.

What she had not believed was that such a thing could ever happen to her.

Lives forever altered by chance, by the whimsy of the gods, happened to other people, perhaps to people more spontaneous than she was or those more willing to take chances. She had lived with the happy illusion that fate had a much better chance of toying with people less organized, less in control, less dedicated to routine and precision than Jessica King.

His finger left her lip, and she returned to her well-ordered world with a pop, though she could not quite shake the sensation that there might remain a scorch mark where he had touched.

The devil will do that, she told herself. And the man was a devil, so at ease in his body, radiating self-assuredness. He had a roguish, untamed quality that was damnably sexy.

And he was no doubt exactly like every other man who was damnably sexy. He would know it and play it.

Jessica King would not be like her deceased, and rather infamous, mother. Not ever. She despised women who were helpless against the raw power that radiated from certain kinds of men.

This kind of man.

“Keep your mucky fingers to yourself,” she said, bristling with annoyance. He had come out of K & B Auto, likely a mechanic. His fingers would, of course, be mucky. Her eyes trailed to his hand. A big hand, the knuckles grazed, the back corded with a powerful network of vein and sinew. No ring. No muck.

He seemed unmoved by her annoyance, if he’d even had the good manners to notice it. Instead, he was studying the finger that had touched her lip. She noted, stiffly, it appeared to have muck on it.

“I thought it was blood on your lip,” he said. “But it’s not, is it?”

His eyes met hers, and a hint of laughter overrode his bad temper. Then he grinned, a small gesture, a tilting of firm lips. The grin changed everything. It was the sun glimpsed in the midst of a storm. The warrior cast of the face was momentarily transformed and he looked young and boyish and even more irresistible than he had before.

She shook her head. Now that was the real world. Men like this laughed at girls like her, girls who wore glasses and never got their hair quite right and were a teensy bit overweight. Never mind that the brief spark of laughter lighting the darkness of his eyes was more seductive than…

“Chocolate,” he said, and a small ripple of laughter went through the crowd, which was beginning to drift away now that the car was evidently just going to sit there hissing and not blow up.

He didn’t join in the laughter, and she was sorry he wasn’t having a laugh at her expense. A good defense against a man like him would be pure, unadulterated hatred.

“And you are?” she demanded. She resisted an impulse to tug at her skirt, which suddenly seemed binding around her hips.

How much weight had she gained since her sister’s wedding? Seven and a half pounds, as if she didn’t know exactly. You would think a person would have to work at gaining that much weight in such a short period of time, but she had no idea how—

“Garner Blake.”

She closed her eyes, just briefly, praying for strength. This was the man she was going to be working for?

“Oh, no.” It slipped out.

“My sentiments exactly,” he said.

She opened her eyes and glared at him. “Then why am I here?”

“Because your father wanted you to be. And for the most part, it would seem that what Jake King wants, Jake King gets.”

That for the most part seemed loaded with satisfaction.

Her father had told her that he was part owner in an obscure little business called K & B Auto that needed an office manager for the summer. He had told her he wanted her to get a taste of the real world.

Of course, she’d been briefly offended that he didn’t think her world was real and that he did not understand she was rather overqualified to be an office manager. She would have said so, too, except she had heard something in his voice that had troubled her. His voice had lacked strength, and the tone of his words had been faintly pleading.

Her father had never asked anything of her. So many times she had wished he would. When her father had asked this of her, she had sensed there was history here, a story, perhaps even a secret, that went beyond the fact that this humble little garage in nowhere Virginia was where it had all started for him. Her logical mind had known she needed more details, but for once logic had fled her. Looking at the predicament she was in now, it had probably been an omen.

When she should have been asking important questions, all she had been thinking was finally her father had recognized her. Finally he was seeing, even in the smallest way, that she was an educated woman of sound business skill, not one of his little princesses. She had assumed he was trusting her with a business assignment for Auto Kingdom!

“You do need an office manager, don’t you?” she asked, and was annoyed to hear a little tremor of uncertainty in her voice.

He must have heard it, too, because he sighed, pushed a large, impatient hand through tousled locks and made an obvious effort to restrain his impatience.

“Lady, I am absolutely desperate for an office manager. It’s just that the job requires a little know-how. The type of training you don’t get at the debutante ball or out fox hunting with the hounds.”

She felt herself stiffen. As if she hadn’t been up against this kind of prejudice her whole life.

“You might be interested to know I’ve never attended a debutante ball,” she said sharply, “and I don’t ride horses.” Terrified of them, actually, though she was reluctant to admit weakness to this man.

Chelsea did the balls. Brandy did the horses. Had he mixed her up with one of her sisters?

“You get my drift,” he said.

Oh, yes, she did. Useless. Rich. Frivolous.

“I happen to have a master’s degree,” she said tightly.

She decided now might not be the best time to mention it was in science. Still, she was confident that anybody who could spend two years painstakingly researching and documenting the effects of pesticides on the bone structure of prairie dogs, as she had just done, could handle a little office work.

He looked at her narrowly, his gaze so long and so stripping that she had to disguise a tiny tremor of…something.

“A master’s degree,” he repeated slowly. “Okay, that’s a surprise.”

“Didn’t my father tell you anything about me?”

“No. And I didn’t ask.”

She was struck with a sensation that she had been dropped in the middle of a war zone, completely unarmed.

“You might as well come and see what you’ve gotten yourself into.” Again, she heard a hard note of satisfaction in his voice.

He turned and walked away from her, not even waiting to see if she would follow.

Used to having women follow him like puppies?

Not this woman!

“What about my car?” she asked.

He glanced back at her. “You picked a good place to crash it. Kind of like having a heart attack while visiting the hospital. I’ll limp it around to the service bay and have a look at it.”

Feeling somehow chastened by his offhand courtesy, she followed him inside. Going from sunlight to indoors, Jessie tried to get her bearings.

Her eyes adjusted and she saw the shop was as humble inside as it had been outside. There was no decor. The floor was black and white linoleum tile, the white squares long since gone to gray. A glass-fronted counter separated the work area from the customer waiting area. The case contained several models of old cars, a faded placard that announced the oil and filter change special and a sample container of the brand of oil that was presumably on sale. Both areas, waiting and work, contained old kitchen chairs, the gray-vinyl padded seats patched with black swatches of tape. The walls held an assortment of calendars, which featured cars, cars and more cars, but thankfully no nude or near-nude women.

The nicest thing about the entire space was a huge picture window that looked onto the main street of Farewell. The morning mist was lifting, and she could see K & B faced the town square—a lovely little park surrounded by a wrought iron fence. It contained several mature trees, green grass, two benches that faced each other and a fountain. In the near distance the mountains looked cool, green and mysterious.

But by the looks of things, she wasn’t going to be spending much time admiring the view. Every single surface had papers sliding off of them. There were boxes on the floor with yet more papers and what appeared to be stacks of car parts.

“I think there’s been some kind of mistake,” she said. The place was a dump. And depressing. The computer was at least a thousand years old. Somehow, even when confronted with the rather dingy exterior of the place, she had imagined she would be running a sleek, state-of-the-art office. She had talked herself into thinking it might be a tiny bit fun.

The phone, which was ringing incessantly, looked like an antique. Black, rotary dial. The red light of the answering machine was blinking furiously. From a door that connected the office to the service bays she heard clanking.

“A mistake,” she repeated. Jessica King did not do well with chaos.

It was a far cry from the neat little office she had set up in her apartment, from the order of classrooms, from the quiet of fieldwork….

“A mistake,” he agreed with silky satisfaction, folding his arms over the ridiculous breadth of his chest and looking at her, pleased that she had lived up to his every unspoken judgment: rich, useless, frivolous and chased away by the slightest hint of a challenge.

In less than ten seconds, too!

Jessie was compelled to wipe the smirk off his face, even if it meant she closed the escape door. She straightened her shoulders and tilted her chin.