Heated Rush - Leslie Kelly [33]
He was still shaking his head over it when the waiter brought the wine he’d ordered. As he sampled it, doing the typical wine-opening dance with the tuxedoed waiter, he realized Annie was watching closely, wearing a tiny frown.
“What’s wrong?” he asked when they were again alone.
“Nothing.” She shook her head slowly, then admitted, “It’s just…I don’t know how this weekend is going to go over.”
“Because we’re practically strangers and have to pretend to be intimately involved?”
Her cheeks colored a little, and he knew she was thinking of the intimacies they’d shared at her apartment.
“Okay. So we are intimately involved,” he conceded. Though not intimately enough. “But we haven’t known each other long.”
“And you’re very different.”
Since he’d just been thinking about her background, he knew where she was heading. “You mean from your family.”
She nodded.
“Are you saying I’m not exactly the ‘bring him home to meet the parents’ type of bloke?”
She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have said anything. You’ll be fine. Even if you aren’t what I’d expected.”
“What were you expecting?”
She lifted her glass of wine, sipped, raised an appreciative brow, then replied. “Not an Irishman, for one thing. From the bio, I thought I’d be getting some nice boy from a blue-collar neighborhood who grew up watching E.R. and decided to become a paramedic.”
“A what?”
She eyed him quizzically. “A paramedic. That’s what you are, right? Or, do I have the terminology wrong? Are you an EMT?”
“Annie, I haven’t got any idea what you’re talking about.”
Hesitating for one moment, as if making sure his shock was genuine, she reached for her purse and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “I grabbed this earlier. I had the feeling something was a little strange. Read it for yourself,” she said, shoving the page at him. “It says nothing about you being an Irishman…just about you being a rescue worker.”
Sean grabbed the page, read it intently, and shook his head in utter bewilderment. Because the words beneath his picture made absolutely no sense. “That’s not me.”
“It’s you,” she insisted.
“I meant the description. I’m not that man.” Unable to figure out what the hell was going on, he frowned, “I know I sent the correct information, that I’m a…” How had he worded it? “An international, traveling businessman.”
Annie’s eyes widened and she grabbed the sheet out of his hands. She flipped it over, scanned the words beneath the photo of Bachelor Number Nineteen, and said, “Aha! Is this what you wrote?”
Sean read the bio. European businessman. Worldly. Loves travel, women and playing. Yeah, that sounded like what he’d said. After all, putting “paid escort for rich women” hadn’t sounded right. “Consultant making difficult deals for international companies” hadn’t either. So he’d gone a little overboard with the adjectives that might appeal to the bachelor-auction type.
“Yes, it is. Somebody obviously mixed up the biographies.” A small smile widened his lips as he caught sight of the picture above his bio. “I wonder how that Jake guy liked being mistaken for a…for me.”
“Let’s just hope the woman who shelled out twenty-five grand wasn’t dying for a guy with an accent.”
He was silent for a moment, considering, then suddenly laughed out loud. Good God, the women who’d bid in such a frenzy over the laid-back paramedic…Was it possible they had been tipped off about what to look for in Sean’s bio, and that’s what had driven the amount up to such an extreme figure?
If so, he really felt bad for the other man. Boy, was he going to have some explaining to do to the woman who’d shelled out that much money to be with him.
Sean, however, had no such worries. Annie had bid on him for no reason other than the ones she’d already shared. Which was pretty damned honest and refreshing, considering the dealings he’d had with women for the