In Bed with the Bachelor (Bachelor Auction Book 5)(3)

Jesse Grey made her feel… mushy. Like a really good romance novel, in fact. The kind that took her breath away and kept her up half the night, desperate to see how it ended.

But it was the thought of Terrence that finally penetrated the haze she’d been in since her cousin Missy had shoved her toward this man to “collect her prize.”

“It’s not for me,” she assured Jesse. Or maybe herself. “It’s for Terrence.”

He eyed her. “Terrence?”

“My fiancé,” she supplied. Helpfully, she thought.

His gaze then seemed to pry off the top of her head and rummage around inside, and Michaela would have had to have been half-dead or an idiot not to recognize the danger in that, something far more precarious than nerves—but she didn’t do a thing. She didn’t look away, step back, run from him the way she should have. It was as if she couldn’t. As if her body was going to do exactly as it pleased, and what it pleased was to stand right there in front of this beautiful, lethal man and… wait.

“You in the habit of setting up your fiancé on dates with other men?” Jesse asked, and there was a different note in his voice. Lazy, maybe, with an edge. It colored his gaze, too, making his eyes seem shot through with whiskey—

Or maybe Michaela had had too many of those slushy drinks her cousin Missy had insisted upon ordering by the table-load earlier.

“Only when it might help him out,” she said, feeling something much too close to drunk. It was definitely the slushy stuff, she assured herself. Nothing else. Not that focus of his, turned on her like that, as if she was somehow as fascinating as he was. Certainly not. “Terrence has had a run of bad luck, you see. It could happen to anyone these days, with the economy being what it is.”

“Is Terrence an economist?”

Michaela thought the question was on the dry and pointed side, which was only one of the many reasons she needed to ignore all the stuff going on inside of her. She pushed on.

“My aunts seem to think you might be able to point him in a better direction, since you’re the construction guru of Seattle. Their words, not mine.” She laughed nervously. Definitely, that was nerves. “Do you prefer ‘tycoon?’ Is that pejorative? I know successful men sometimes prefer to pretend they’re not all that successful, for various privacy reasons. Terrence was involved in this kind of weird hotel situation but it fell apart about ten months ago and he—”

“Please tell me you’re not talking about Terrence Polk,” Jesse said, his voice back to flat and a different, assessing light in his chocolate liqueur gaze. A light that made her think yes, this lazy, dangerous, coyote of a man could indeed be the successful businessman her relatives seemed to think he was, despite all that natural beauty of his, which had made her doubt it.

“Oh, do you know him?” Michaela asked in a rush of… something. Something she knew had to do with that cool, crisp knowledge in Jesse’s eyes that she very much wanted to avoid examining any more closely. With every last particle of her being. Because maybe the truth was, despite what she’d told Terrence and herself a thousand times, she wasn’t actually that mature after all. “We’re getting married in June.”

*

This day had started fairly uncomfortably on the couch in his uncle’s back office right here in the saloon and was now bordering on some kind of practical joke, and Jesse Grey was not in the mood.

First, there was the fact he was in Marietta, Montana, the place his extended family considered its historic seat, since various booze-slinging Greys had been in the area since before the actual official founding of the town in the late 1800s. Jesse had missed the traditional Christmas with the extended Grey family this past December the way he’d been doing for three years now, ever since his own father had found it necessary to seduce Jesse’s girlfriend, marry her, then impregnate her—with twins, no less, and maybe not precisely in that order.

Jesse had decided he didn’t need to be in the same room with his father or his father’s blushing bride ever again, and no matter that his much-married and more-divorced father claimed it was True Love for him this time. Jesse had steadfastly stuck to his Zero Contact position—no matter how many whiny, accusatory voicemail messages his old man liked to leave on his phone, especially around the holidays when Jesse’s pointed absence was likely to cause the very commentary his father most wanted to do without.

But missing the big Grey family Christmas meant he felt compelled to come out to visit his grandparents around Valentine’s Day each year. Not because he was filled with the joy of the manufactured holiday or brimming with the need for bright, red cut-out hearts or any of that crap, but because a single man of his inarguable means was basically a walking target at this time of year back home in Seattle. Jesse liked to take a break from the voracious women who were forever trying to tie him down to more than one night, all of whom seemed to lose their collective minds every February.

Or he usually got to take this time as a break, anyway. This year, he’d come out a week early to spend more time with his grandparents, like a dutiful grandson. And his jackass uncle Jason had decided it would be entertaining to mess with him, and had not only signed Jesse up for this auction, but had flat-out dared him to go through with it.

A man could walk away from many things, as Jesse knew from personal experience. But a direct challenge was not one of them—not when the challenger in question was a family member who would, quite literally, gleefully throw it in his face for the rest of his goddamned life.