Leslie Kelly - Wickedly Hot

“Rented.”

“Well, darling, I hear this man,” she nodded toward the dark-haired, blue-suited stranger, “is exactly who he claims to be. A nationally known, wealthy, professional architect. So if at first you didn’t succeed…try again.”

“No.” Jade ignored the older woman’s hopeful look. “And don’t say a word to my mother about this. It’s not what you think.” She lifted her drink to her lips, murmuring, “It’s a private matter. One I need to clear up with him.”

“A matter of getting naked and between the sheets?”

Rolling her eyes, she ignored Tally’s salacious chuckle. “No. Now go mingle. Be sociable. Rule the world through your glove-covered iron fist. I think I see someone wearing cream-colored shoes with a taupe dress. Go skewer her with that sharp tongue of yours.”

Tally gave a delicate shiver. “Hideous. Money truly is wasted on the color-blind and those one generation out of the trailer park.”

Jade chuckled, knowing Tally herself was only two generations out of the trailer park.

The older woman’s eyes lit up, spying a wealthy older man who’d recently moved to town. Jade recognized the look. Tally was a fund-raiser supreme.

“Right on time,” Tally whispered, greeting the man with a languid little wave of her hand. “That’s Leonard something-or-other from Chicago. He’s here with his wife who wears altogether too much jewelry. I have to make nice with them before somebody tells her only tarts and carpetbaggers’ wives wear so much jewelry to an event like this.”

“Nobody here would say it—except you. Now be nice or I’ll warn your prey to hide his wallet.”

That reminded Jade of her own victim. She began to look around for Ryan Stoddard, target of her search-and-destroy mission. Searching hadn’t been tough—he’d certainly stood out. The destroying part might be more difficult. But he deserved it.

Anyone who broke the heart of her baby sister deserved destroying. He was just lucky Jade was only going to humiliate him, not castrate him like she’d prefer to do.

“There is one other person who could get away with saying such a thing,” Tally said, after probably trying to decide whether or not Jade had been paying her a compliment. “Your mama. I wish she hadn’t chosen this month to go on her cruise. I need her here.”

“It is her honeymoon,” Jade said, not bothering to keep a dry note from her voice.

“What’s one more honeymoon to your mama?”

That sentence, in a nutshell, could probably explain Jade’s entire life. They’d each had their own ways of dealing with Daddy’s death more than a dozen years ago. Jade had grown mature before her time. Jenny had settled firmly into her role of spoiled baby. And Mama had just kept getting married, hoping she’d find someone else to love as much as she’d loved Daddy.

A shrink would probably say their past explained why Jade felt so protective of her sister, Jenny. It had been the two of them, facing the zaniness of their world with a much-married mother and a scandalous family, for a long time. Though only five years older, Jade had become so used to mothering her sister that she sometimes forgot they were just siblings.

It incensed Jade to remember the tears on her sister’s cheeks. Jenny deserved some payback for what Ryan Stoddard had done to her. And Jade was going to see that she got it.

“Jade? Are you listening to me?”

She returned her attention to Tally. “Of course. But I have to say, this time I think Mama’s finally met her match. A man with money who doesn’t let her tell him what to do.”

Tally nodded. “I have high hopes, too. But I do miss her. I needed her tonight. I don’t suppose you…”

Jade narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “Don’t even think about it. I’m not one of your society matrons. Most people in this room have no idea who I am, and I like it that way.”

Tally frowned. The argument was an old one.

“Besides,” Jade added, “if I want somebody to drop dead, I’ll tell them to drop dead. Not, ‘How delightful you look, sugah. Oh, I just love your hair. Why, it’s almost exactly the shade and style of my grandma’s French poodle.”’

Tally chuckled as Jade laid on a heavy Southern accent, which was nearly nonexistent in her everyday speech. “You’re rather good at that.”

“I don’t want to be,” Jade replied.

And she didn’t. No matter how much her mother and her cohorts had tried to teach her, Jade had never learned to enjoy being sweet while cutting, honest while evasive. She much preferred direct insults to veiled ones, outright lies to such intricate games.

Though, tonight she was setting herself up for a very intricate one, wasn’t she? The thought made her return her attention to the dark-haired stranger. She shivered a little. Intricate games, indeed.

“‘Bye, darling, have fun,” Tally said. Then she greeted the rich northerner with an air kiss and a gushing compliment on his clip-on tie, which Jade knew must be driving Tally mad.

Jade watched, then whispered, “Time to move.”

As she sipped her drink—ginger ale with a twist of lime, which would appear to most to be alcoholic—she scanned the crowd again. Even if she hadn’t been looking for the man when she’d shown up here tonight, she knew her eyes would have sought him out anyway. Just as any woman looked at something she desired but couldn’t have.

Only, Jade meant to have him.

Earlier, his blue suit had stood out in the sea of black tuxes and brightly colored gowns, but she didn’t spot him at first. Then finally she found him, leaning indolently against an arched doorway leading to another room.

Watching her.

He’d been watching her.

She flushed slightly. Darn. Caught off guard.

The man’s eyes met hers from across the room. Blue. Or green. Surrounded by lush lashes and topped by dark brows that were slightly raised as he caught her stare.

Then he smiled.

Her legs wobbled. Good lord, no man had made her legs wobble since she was twelve and her Cajun second cousin had visited from New Orleans. Stoddard was altogether too big. Too ruggedly handsome. Too powerful-looking to play games with.

Yet that’s exactly what Jade planned to do. Play games with him. And then leave him in the dirt.

But why is he here?

She didn’t mean why was he here in Savannah. She knew why—for a big architects’ convention, conveniently scheduled in her home city this year. The convention had saved her from traveling to New York to track him down.

But she’d expected him to stay at the hotel adjoining the convention center. Finding out from a friend at the hotel that he wasn’t registered there had been a shock. Even more of a shock had been learning he was staying here at the Medford House.

Ryan Stoddard had no business being in this secluded, exclusive little piece of Savannah society. No business at all. He should be sitting in a loud hotel bar with the sounds of tinkling glasses and businessmen comparing last year’s sales figures. Scoping out the women, flirting while they wondered how far they could go without technically cheating on their wives.

Not here, amid the husky laughter of bored millionaires and the scent of jasmine and magnolia that permeated the room from open French doors leading out to the lush grounds. Not in this place which many decades ago would have held tobacco planters and wounded veterans, as opposed to the bankers and stock brokers who comprised the elite set these days.

This was her turf. And damned if she wanted him on it. She’d planned to launch her attack on his ground, then slip away, back into the shadows of hers, where he’d never find her.

No way could she implement her original plan. A big chain hotel would have been simple—a pickup in a bar, a trip to his room, a heated encounter. Then walking out, laughter on her lips, leaving him naked and humiliated as he realized he’d been had. Realized he wasn’t going to get off scot-free for breaking the heart of a member of her family.