Cara Colter - Chasing Dreams

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.