In Bed with the Bachelor (Bachelor Auction Book 5)(2)

His hand was warm. Slightly rough, as if he sandpapered his palms or perhaps actually worked with those hands of his, with the long fingers she was tempted to consider elegant despite their obvious strength. That tugging thing inside of her shifted. Became heat.

He scowled as if she’d given him an electric shock, but he didn’t jerk his hand away the way she was tempted to do. The way she should have done, she realized, a long beat later, when she only stood there, gripping him as if he was a brilliant burst of light and some kind of savior, too.

He was the one to let go. Eventually.

“Jesse Grey,” he introduced himself, a considering sort of gleam in his dark eyes that made that heat bloom. Spread. “But you probably got that from the auctioneer.”

It was only to be expected, Michaela thought in a slight daze, that a man who looked the way he did should also sound the way he did. All dark, sinful things and that rough edge besides.

“Like the bar!” she said. Idiotically. “The one we’re standing in right now.”

“This is a saloon, Michaela,” Jesse said in a voice that was not quite a drawl, but wasn’t quite so surly, either.

She opted not to reflect on what her name sounded like, coming out of that mouth. Like a month of desserts, all of them too decadent to be believed.

“This is the Wild West. And if you look behind the bar, you’ll see an old man I vaguely resemble, also named Grey. It’s the family curse.”

Michaela pivoted obediently and blinked in the direction of the figures behind the bar. All good looking men in that rugged, Montana way, and none what she’d consider particularly old—but only one man was standing still, half in shadow, his arms folded over his chest while he glared out at the crowd as if they were doing something to him by drinking his liquor.

“The surliness is the curse?” she asked. “Or the family resemblance? Oh, or maybe the saloon is the curse? Though I guess all those things could be connected.”

She regretted that the minute she said it. It took a moment or two to look back at Jesse, though she could feel the way he looked at her, as if he’d set that whole side of her body on fire. Obviously, she told herself, this was what men like him did. That was why normal people didn’t have much to do with such creatures, with all that fire and brimstone and drama, to say nothing of the intent way he gazed at her, then.

The room fell away again. As if it had never existed. As if the pack of her relatives, stuffed into two gleeful booths on the other side of the saloon, was little more than a memory. As if he was the only thing in the whole of Montana and the great, wide world beyond it.

“So,” he said, his voice even, in a way that made her insides feel shaken loose from their moorings. “You won me. Or more specifically, a date in Seattle. Let me know the dates that work for you and I’ll fly you out. We’ll have fun.”

The way he said the word fun seemed to dance down the length of her spine like the obvious lie it was. Or maybe it was that his definition of fun wasn’t quite the same as hers. His, she was quite certain, included all manner of dark and tangled and needy things she didn’t know anything about. She could see that as easily as she could see that ridiculously beautiful face of his.

“Oh, well.” She almost let out a horrible, inappropriate giggle, but somehow kept herself from it. She’d felt this way once as a little girl, when she’d come face-to-face with a coyote on a hiking trail in the hills of southern Oregon where she’d grown up. Her parents had gone on ahead, around the next curve in the switchbacked trail, and she’d been briefly and terrifyingly alone. Just like back then, it was as if everything inside of her stilled, yet went on high alert. As if this absurd specimen of beautiful male was as dangerous, as predatory, as a wild animal. But that was ridiculous. “I actually live in Seattle.”

That considering gleam in his gaze became more intent. “Do you now.”

Nervous, she thought. A little bit wildly. He makes me nervous. She cleared her throat and told herself that was absolutely the right word to describe the sensations dancing inside of her. She was nervous, nothing more.

“Yes, and in fact, I think that’s why my aunts and cousins pitched in to buy you,” she told him. With perhaps a bit too much nervous in her voice. “They know who you are, of course, because so many of them are from here, and they really thought it would be a great idea to spend some time with you.”

“For five thousand dollars.” His voice had gone flat again.

Cool. Though his silky chocolate eyes were anything but.

“You probably could have just asked, sweetheart. I wouldn’t say I’m a nice man, necessarily, but I don’t bite.” He didn’t smile. She wasn’t sure he could, despite the hard gleam in his dark gaze that felt like acrobatics deep in her gut, like a wicked grin from a different man. “Much.”

There was a loud, buzzing sound. It took Michaela a breathless moment, then another to realize it was a kind of white noise and it was filling up her head. Her body’s defense mechanism against imagining this man and his… bite. She thought maybe she was coming down with something, suddenly. She was hot, then cold. She could hear Terrence’s reproving voice in her head then, warning her for the nine millionth time that if she insisted on reading those filthy romances in what little spare time she ever had, her mind would turn to mush. She always agreed with him that she should stop, that she should read Worthy and Important Works That Would Expand Her Mind and Impress Others, and then she went ahead and downloaded more of the books she actually liked onto her e-reader anyway.