brunette wasn’t laughing it up with her rich gal pals, or tossing back Manhattans while turning her hand to make sure her diamond rings showed to their greatest flashy advantage. In fact, if he had to guess, he’d say she looked almost disapproving, even tense. He couldn’t see her face very well, though he got a glimpse of a stiff little jaw, lifted up in visible determination. And her back was military straight.
He sensed she was keeping it that way intentionally, as if she didn’t dare let her guard down lest she be distracted from whatever mission she’d set for herself.
As if realizing she was being watched, the woman glanced around, turning her head enough to cast her face in a bit of light spilling off the stage. Enough to highlight the creamy skin, the curve of her cheek, the fullness of her lips and the dark flash of her eyes.
Beautiful.
Jake’s hands clenched into fists at his sides. Though she couldn’t possibly see him and was in no way mirroring his reaction, hers did the same.
She clenched out of visible concentration that seemed to swirl around her, creating a no-fly zone between her and everyone else in the room.
He clenched out of pure lust.
He hadn’t had sex in a while—not since breaking up with a woman he’d been dating last winter. And nobody had as much as given him a quickened pulse rate since. Not the women he met at the station. Not the ones he helped. Not the nurses at the hospital. Not the hot girl who’d moved in upstairs from him, the one who’d already locked herself out three times just so she’d have an excuse to ask for his help.
This stranger? She’d given him a hard-on from ten feet away.
She looked around the room again, watchful, her gaze passing without hesitation over the crease in the drapes behind which he stood.
Buy me.
She couldn’t possibly have heard the mental order, yet she narrowed her eyes, focusing again on the drapes concealing him.
He couldn’t help repeating the silent appeal, trying to remember all the stuff one of his sisters had said about that dumb book she’d been obsessed with lately. About how the universe would grant you what you want if you just visualized it hard enough.
Oh, it was easy to come up with some fast-and-hot visualizations right now.
“You want to know my biggest fear?” said Number Eighteen, a blond-haired surfer-looking guy who said he worked as a stockbroker. “What if whoever wins me pays like fifty bucks? I mean, how frigging humiliating would that be when the richest women in Chicago are all drooling like a pack of stray dogs eyeing a butcher shop window out there?”
Mr. Polished European guy laughed softly at the very thought of that even being a possibility for him. Jake, however, immediately understood the stockbroker’s worries.
Geez. He’d thought being bid on would be a humiliation. But not being bid on? “Get me out of here.”
“Too late,” said a perky voice belonging to the young woman who was stage-managing tonight’s events. She glanced at the blond pretty boy. “You’re on. They’re reading the introduction right now.” Then she pointed the tip of her pencil at Jake. “And you’re right behind him, Nineteen.”
Nineteen. That’s how they’d addressed him from the moment he’d checked in at the event desk and had been whisked to a private dressing room with all the other saps whose bosses, friends, siblings, mothers or coworkers had talked them into doing this.
Jake glanced through the slit in the drapes again, whispering, “Nineteen.”
He could easily envision nineteen things he’d say to the brunette when they met. Nineteen ways to bring about that meeting. The nineteen minutes it would take to run out from behind the curtain, grab her hand and drag her to his place. The number of times he wanted to make love to her and the number of positions he wanted to do it.
“Nineteen? Hello?”
Jake jerked his attention back toward the stage manager who was watching him with an expectant—yet slightly exasperated—look. He’d obviously been visualizing for several minutes. “The guy before you is done.”
“What’d he go for?” Jake couldn’t help asking.
“Thirty-five.”
Thirty-five. Oh, God, thirty-five bucks? He’d whip out his checkbook and pay ten times that if he could get out of this. Then he’d go straight out and introduce himself to the brunette in blue.
“Thirty-five hundred,” the woman added, obviously reading his expression.
“Holy shit.”
He could barely scrape up one times that amount, and if he had ten times it in his checking account, he sure as hell wouldn’t be living in a one-bedroom apartment over a flower shop in Hyde Park.
“They’re reading your bio right now, so we need to move quickly,” Miss Pencil Tapper said, actually reaching out to grasp his arm. She must know he wanted to bolt. He doubted he was the first to feel that way tonight.
“Fine, fine,” he muttered, not even listening to the announcer, whose voice was droning through the hotel sound system. He let go of the black drape curtain, regret making his fingers glide against it for a moment longer than necessary. Then he was being pushed onto the stage, blinded by a spotlight, deafened by the roar of a hundred tipsy women.
This must be what those Chippendales dudes felt like. The thought of doing this dressed in leather cowboy chaps and nothing else was enough to make his stomach heave.
“Who’s going to start the bidding?”
“Five hundred!” someone yelled.
Okay. It was a start. Five hundred…that was a worthy donation. That’d buy a lot of Christmas presents for needy kids. Like, you know, a hundred games of Go Fish or whatever that crap sold for now. But, man, it sounded pathetic considering the pretty boy stockbroker went for seven times that much.
“Six.”
“Seven!”
The numbers started flying at a dizzying speed, and Jake couldn’t keep up with them for a while. Not until a loud, determined female voice cut through the catcalls to shout, “Five thousand dollars!”
Everyone fell silent for an infinitesimal moment. Jake included. He didn’t know what the highest bachelor had sold for, but at least he wasn’t going to be rock bottom.
“We have a bid of five thousand dollars for this excellent cause,” the auctioneer preened. “And I imagine our handsome bachelor will be worth every penny of it.”
Ahh, the joy of being pimped by a fat guy with sweaty jowls and a smarmy smile.
The searing heat of the spotlight suddenly left his face. Jake watched as the large, golden circle washed over the crowd, turning to illuminate the woman who’d ignored auction protocol by upping the ante so dramatically.
Jake held his breath, something in his brain telling him it had been her. The brunette. The one he couldn’t stop thinking about had heard his mental 911 call.
The spotlight finally came to rest on the top of a very blond head.
Shit.
The middle-aged woman trying to look ten years younger sat at one of the exclusive, reserved tables up front, with a few other equally jaded-looking upper crusters. She smiled, well pleased with herself for having silenced the entire room.
But the complacent silence didn’t last for long. Because suddenly, as if they all had one voice, her three companions jumped into the fray.
“Fifty-one hundred.”
“Fifty-two.”
“Fifty-five.”
It went on for at least