Sandra Marton - The Merciless Travis Wilde

It would not impress them at all if he explained that he’d done his fair share of damage. More than his fair share, because he surely would manage that.

Dammit, where were a man’s brothers when he needed them?

“The lady’s talkin’ to you.” The Mountain was leaning past Bev. God, his breath stank. “What’s the matter? You got a hearin’ problem or something, pretty boy?”

Conversation died out. People smiled.

Travis felt the first, heady pump of adrenaline.

“My name,” he said carefully, “is not ‘pretty boy.’”

“His name is not pretty boy,” The Mountain mimicked.

Bev, sporting a delighted smile, slid from her stool. Maybe he’d misjudged her purpose. Maybe setting up a fight had been her real job.

Either way, Travis saw his choices narrowing down, and rapidly.

Bev’s defender got to his feet.

“You’re making a mistake,” Travis said quietly.

The Mountain snorted.

Travis nodded, took a last swig of beer, said a mental “goodbye” to Monday’s meeting and stood up.

“Outside,” he said, “in the parking lot? Or right here?”

“Here,” a voice growled.

Three men had joined the Mountain. Travis smiled. The next five minutes might be the end of him.

Yeah, but they’d also be fun, especially considering his weird state of mind tonight.

“Fine,” he said. “Sounds good to me.”

Those words, the commitment to the inevitable, finalized things, sent his adrenaline not just pumping but racing. He hadn’t been in a down-and-dirty bar brawl in a very long time. Not since Manila, or maybe Kandahar.

Yes, Kandahar, his last mission, death all around him …

Suddenly, pounding the Mountain into pulp seemed a fine idea, never mind that deal in Frankfurt.

Besides, nothing short of a miracle could save him now …

The door to the street swung open.

For some reason Travis would never later be able to explain, the enraptured audience watching him and the Mountain turned toward it.

A blast of hot Texas air swept in.

So did a tall, beautiful, sexy-looking, straight-out-of-the-Neiman-Marcus-catalogue blonde.

Silence. Complete silence.

Everybody looked at Neiman Marcus.

Neiman Marcus looked at them.

And blanched.

“Well, lookee there,” somebody said.

Lookee, indeed, Travis thought.

Sanity returned.

There she was. His salvation.

“Finally,” he said, his tone bright and cheerful. “My date.”

Before anyone could say a word, he started toward the blonde and the door with the confidence of a man holding all four aces in a game of high stakes poker.

She tilted her head back as he got closer. She was tall, especially in sexy, nosebleed-high stilettos, but she still had to do that to look up at him.

He liked it.

It was a nice touch.

“Your what?” she said, or would have said, but he couldn’t afford to let things go that far.

“Baby,” he purred, “what took you so long?”

Her eyes widened. “Excuse me?”

Travis grinned.

“Only if you ask real nice,” he said, and before she could react, he drew her into his arms, brought her tightly against him and covered her mouth with his.

AN HOUR BEFORE she walked into Travis Wilde’s life, Jennie Cooper had been sitting in her ancient Civic, having a stern talk with herself.

By then, it had been close to nine o’clock, the evening wasn’t getting any younger, and she still hadn’t put her plan into action.

Ridiculous, of course.

She was a woman with a mission.

She was looking for a bar.

Really, how difficult could it be to find a bar in a city like Dallas?

Very.

Well, “very” if you were searching for just the right kind of bar.

Dallas was a big, sprawling town, and she’d driven through so many parts of it that she’d lost count.

She’d started with Richardson and though there were loads of bars in that area, it would have been foolish, better still, foolhardy to choose one of them.

It was too near the university campus.

So she’d headed for the Arts District, mostly because she knew it, if visiting a couple of galleries on a rainy Sunday qualified as “knowing” a place—after eight months, she was still learning about her new city—but as soon as she got there, she’d realized it, too, was a bad choice.

The Arts District was trendy, which meant she’d feel out of place. A laugh, really, considering that she was going to feel out of place no matter where she went tonight, but it was also a neighborhood that surely would be popular with university faculty.

Running into someone who knew her would be disaster.

That was when Jennie had pulled to the curb, put her wheezing Civic in neutral and told herself to think fast, before her plan fell apart.

What other parts of Dallas were there?

Turtle Creek.

She knew it only by reputation, and that it was home to lots of young, successful, rich professionals.

Well, she’d thought with what might have been a choked laugh, she was young, anyway.

Rich? Not on a teaching assistant’s stipend. Successful? Not in Turtle Creek terms, where the word surely referred to attorneys and doctors, financial gurus and industrialists.

What kind of small talk could she make with a man who was all those things, assuming such a man would look twice at her?

Assuming there’d be any small talk because, really, that wasn’t what tonight was all about.

The realization sent a bolt of terror zinging along her nerve endings.

Jennie fought against it.

She wasn’t scared.

Certainly not.

She was—she was anxious, and who wouldn’t be? She’d spent weeks and weeks, planning this—this event.

She wasn’t going to add to that anxiety by going to a bar in a place like Turtle Creek on a Friday night when—when singles mingled.

When singles hook up, Genevieve baby , her always-until-now-oh-so-logical alter ego had suddenly whispered.

“They mingle,” Jennie had muttered. “And my name is not—”

Except, it was. For tonight. She’d decided that the same time she’d hatched this plan.

Good. You remembered. You’re Genevieve. And you’re trying to pretty things up. Tonight is not about mingling, it is about—

Jennie had stopped listening.

Still, there was truth to it.

Nobody could pretty this up.

Her plan was basic.

Find a bar. Go inside. Order a drink. Find a man she liked, flirt with him …

Forget the metaphors .

What she wanted was to find a man she liked enough to take home to bed.

Her teeth chattered.

“Stop it,” she said sharply.

She was a grown woman. Twenty-four years old just last Sunday. That she had never slept with a man was disgraceful. It was worse than that.

It was unbelievable.

And the old Stones song lied.

Time wasn’t on her side, which was why she was going to remedy that failing tonight.

“Happy birthday to me,” she said, under her breath, and her teeth did the castanet thing again, which was ridiculous.

She had thought about this for a long time, examined the concept from every possible angle.

This was right. It was logical. It was appropriate.

It was how things had to be done.

No romance. This wasn’t about romance.

No attachment. That part wasn’t even worth analyzing.

She didn’t have time for attachment, or emotion, or anything but the experience.

That was what this was all about.

It was research. It was learning something you’d only read about.

It was no different from what she’d done in the past, driving from New Hampshire to New York before she wrote her senior paper so that she could experience what had once been the narrow streets where Stanton Coit had established a settlement house for immigrants long before there were such things as social workers, or the trip she’d planned to see the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago …