Naturally Naughty - Leslie Kelly [63]
He raised a brow.
“We’ll open, we’ll cause a lot of chest-clutching, a lot of scandalous whispering, and then, when Cassie’s safe…” She cleared her throat. “I mean, when Cassie’s ready to leave…we’ll close and go away. Cassie will sell this building and everything else she owns here and we’ll never come back. No ties, no bad memories, just a laugh when we think back on our one last hurrah.”
“Cassie’s in trouble?”
“No. Forget it, okay? Cassie’s fine.” She looked at her nails, obviously feigning nonchalance. “Did you like her?”
“Like her? I barely spoke to her.”
“Most men don’t have to speak to her to form an impression.”
Jack shrugged. “She’s beautiful, of course. Flamboyant and probably too sexy for her own good. She’ll drive any man who loves her to the verge of insanity.”
She waited. When he didn’t continue, she prompted, “That’s all? You weren’t…interested?”
He shook his head. “Do you think I’m a total scumbag? What kind of guy would lust after the cousin of the woman he’s involved with?”
“We are not involved.”
“Bullshit. We are very much involved,” he admitted, confirming that not only to her, but to himself.
He waited for her to deny it. She couldn’t. Who could deny the inevitable? They might not have done much about their relationship since they’d been back in town, except for a few hot kisses and that one close encounter yesterday. But there’s no question they would. Sooner or later.
Judging by the look in her eye, and the expectancy in the air, he suspected it was going to be sooner.
He waited for a mental voice to tell him no, waited for his feet to instinctively turn toward the door. Waited to hear from the nice-guy voice of reason who’d been whispering in his ear for weeks.
That voice had been growing weaker as each day passed. He’d been listening to her from the other side of the duplex, seeing her shining, dark hair as she left in the morning, hearing her off-key singing as she showered. Every day another chunk had disappeared out of the wall of willpower he’d tried to erect between them. And after yesterday, it had come down like the last remnants of the Berlin Wall.
Sure he’d had good intentions, but all the good intentions in the world couldn’t stop what was happening between them. No more than a surfer could stop a wave on which he was riding.
Sometimes he had to ride it out to see where it took him.
“So are you going to tell me what’s wrong? Is your cousin in some kind of trouble or not?”
“Jack, let it go, okay?”
He didn’t press her on the Cassie issue, sensing she wouldn’t tell him what was going on, anyway. “So, back to your shop and your revenge plan. Anything else on the agenda?”
“No, I think I’ve summed it up.”
“Not much revenge there. I mean, you’re not having the population paint every building red?”
She chuckled. “You rented High Plains Drifter.”
He nodded.
“Okay, so it’s not the greatest revenge.” Her smile was mischievous and it made her brown eyes sparkle. “Must be that rotten sweetness everybody says is somewhere inside me. I’m great at fantasizing, just not so great at execution.”
Hearing her laugh at herself, Jack found her as captivating as she’d been the day they’d met. As if here, in a shop like the one she owned in Chicago, she was free to be herself. She’d let the negative elements of Pleasantville—her hurts, her misgivings, her sarcasm—disappear.
He found himself doing the same. As if nothing outside the building mattered. They could have been meeting for the first time in Chicago, as far as he was concerned.
She sighed. “Our plan seemed a lot more dramatic and outrageous when we fantasized about it as teenagers.”
“You fantasized about opening a sex shop in Pleasantville?”
“Yep, we even wrote it down in our diaries on prom night.”
His smile faded. “I heard about your prom night.”
“It’s fine. Water under the bridge,” she insisted. But she wouldn’t meet his eye.
“Should I even ask who else was on that revenge list you made that night?”
She pursed her lips. “No, you probably