A Bad Boy is Good to Find(5)

She racked her mind to remember the conversation. “So what did you mean?”

“I’m a mechanic.” He looked at her, soft apology in his brown eyes. “I work on cars.”

She blinked rapidly and felt her forehead crease. “But that time we tried to meet for lunch—Wheelock Engineering LLC, the sign said. Isn’t that where you work?” She still remembered waiting for him outside the glass-fronted high-rise just off Lexington. Waiting and waiting, until she’d finally given up. Caught in a meeting, he’d said later. They’d never actually made the rain date for that lunch.

He rubbed his upper arm. The desk light highlighted a taut bicep. “I don’t work at Wheelock Engineering. I do some work in the garage across the street. That’s where I’d meant to meet you.”

What? “There’s a garage on that street?” She racked her brain and couldn’t even picture it. As far as she could remember, all the other buildings were brownstones. That’s why she’d assumed…

“Yes. Maybe you never noticed it. It’s a small place.” He shrugged, his expression guarded.

None of this makes sense. Lizzie shook her head. She’d never doubted for a second that he was successful, well-off, educated…

“But aren’t your family Louisiana landowners, descended from French aristocracy?”

He hung his head for a second, hair falling into his eyes. He lifted his chin and met her gaze again. “I’m from Louisiana alright. And my family’s been sitting on the same patch of swamp for as long as anyone can remember, but I’m about as aristocratic as that cockroach there.” He nodded his head at the wall behind her.

She wheeled around and saw a small roach scaling the striped wallpaper. On sudden instinct she picked up a slipper and threw it, left a brown smear on the wall.

Her breath came in heaving gulps. “I don’t understand… You said…”

“I didn’t say all that much.” He wiped a hand over his face and looked at her, his eyes so sad. “I let you do most of the talking. I love listening to you talk. When I’m with you I really do feel like some old-money Creole aristo with an avenue of live oaks back home.” He lifted his hand and stroked her cheek.

His soft touch felt as good as ever.

She recoiled from it. “Who are you?”

“I’m Conroy Beale.”

“That’s your real name?”

“Yes.”

She stared at him. “But you’re not wealthy.”

He paused, then shook his head. “No.”

“What about that Range Rover you were driving when we met? Those don’t come cheap.”

“It belonged to a friend.” He hung his head a little. “I never said it was mine. I helped you get your car going that first time we met, remember? I never said I was anyone but who I am.”

The hero who’d saved the day by putting Evian in her empty radiator. She’d broken down on Third Avenue on her way back from the Island. Her rescuer had been dressed in Armani and driving a Range Rover—what was she supposed to think?

“I just made all this stuff up in my head?” Her head spun in all directions, trying to make sense of the cataclysm of information it couldn’t quite process. One minute she was a wealthy woman with a charming, successful, fiancé, the next she was—

She didn’t know what the hell she was.

A dupe.

He looked apologetic. “I guess you did make it up, a little bit. Believed what you wanted to believe.”

Her heart contracted at the sight of his kind brown eyes. He looked like Con. The wonderful man who’d brought her out of her protective shell and turned her into a self-confident, sensual, loving woman. Who’d taken her dreary existence and blown it open like a window thrown up in a dusty attic.

Her chest heaved under her satin dressing gown. “So when you said I was… I was beautiful…” her voice cracked. “It was all a lie?”

“No. You’re the loveliest woman I’ve ever met.” He looked right at her.

“No, I’m not.” She squirmed, suddenly conscious of her big breasts, her big thighs. “I should have known.”

“You are beautiful. You’re also a loving, passionate woman with a big heart.”

Am I?

She stared at him. So breathtakingly handsome with his dark hair tousled and his chiseled features shaded by two days’ beard. She couldn’t help the stirring of warmth—more—at the sight of him.

“You’re a special woman, Lizzie.” His hands hung by his sides and in spite of everything she found herself wishing he’d reach up and touch her. That look in his eyes—he did love her, didn’t he?

So he wasn’t a mechanical engineer or a French aristocrat. Was that the end of the world? He was smart, no doubt about that. “Your college degree, what’s it in?”

“I didn’t go to college.” Contrition in his eyes.

“What? But you said you went to… St. Swithin’s. I thought that was where you studied mechanical… mechanic—” She racked her brain, trying to remember exactly what he had told her.

“St. Swithin’s is a reform school in Natchez, Mississippi.”

Her mouth dropped and an undignified “oh” escaped.

She gasped for breath. “So you took auto shop there and I somehow translated that into a summa cum laude degree in engineering?” Her voice shook. “Why did you let me believe all those lies?”

She stared at him, unable to reconcile the seductive image before her with the ugly reality unfolding behind it’s shimmering surface.

“Oh, Lizzie. We were going to be so happy. I had it all figured out.”

“But now I don’t come with a lot of zeros in the bank, the deal is off, huh?” The room pulsed in hideous Technicolor clarity.

The sad look in Con’s eyes almost affected her.

“I don’t have anything to offer you,” he said quietly.

“Is that so? What exactly were you planning to offer me prior to this latest wrinkle in your plan?”

“Happiness. I did make you happy, didn’t I?”

Yes.

She swallowed. “An illusion. I thought I was happy because I thought you were someone else. You lied to me, maybe not in so many words, but in the things you didn’t say. And maybe you lied to me another way with all those gentle touches and long, heartfelt kisses I’m apparently such a sucker for. I loved you.”

Her words hung in the air, ringing with raw pain and already in past tense. Everything had changed irrevocably. Totally. The happiness of the last few weeks—the life-transforming joy—lay in ruins.

Conroy Beale—whoever he really was—didn’t say a word.

“What a freaking joke. I’ve been skipping around in my own world of delusion, happy little Lizzie, while everyone who supposedly loved me was coming up with some way to milk me like a cash cow. What was I thinking? Why would anyone actually love me? As my father so kindly said, I’m just a fat little nobody.”