please,” he grumbled. “I own my own company. I can pay for a few pairs of jeans.”
“Pants,” she corrected. “Nice pants.”
“I hate to point this out, but I never agreed to a wardrobe change.”
“Don’t make this more difficult than it has to be.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him toward a men’s store. “You have a roof over your head—and I have you. For four weeks. Body and soul.”
He liked the way that sounded. He knew he shouldn’t. But he did.
She glanced at her watch as they walked. “Then after you get clothes we’ll go see Domingo.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What’s a Domingo?”
“Not what, who,” Maggie explained. “Domingo is a hairstylist. Well, actually he’s a hair genius, but—”
“Hell, no. No way. No!”
“Oh, c’mon.”
“No.”
She stopped at the store’s entrance, crossed her arms over her chest. “Is this a Samson thing? Shed your locks and lose your strength?”
“First of all, I don’t have locks and second, women find my hair sexy.”
“It’s not the hair, Nick,” she said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
Her gaze flickered from his face to the floor and back. “Well, maybe it’s not the hair they find sexy. Maybe…ah…maybe it’s just you.”
His gut tightened as if he was taking Suicide Pass at eighty miles an hour. She wasn’t supposed to be talking to him like that or looking at him like that, either. This whole day was just plain strange. He had no idea how it could get any stranger.
But it suddenly did.
Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a young woman. Blond, pretty, with eyes like his own.
He muttered an oath, grabbed Maggie’s hand and pulled her into the men’s store.
“Good decision,” she said as he turned to see the woman glance in his direction. “They have very nice things in here.”
What was she doing home from college? Nick wondered, his gaze fixed on the huge plate-glass window, on the young woman and her searching eyes.
He dropped to the floor behind a rack of pants.
“What on earth are you doing down there, Nick?” Maggie asked as she peeked around the rack and looked down at him.
“Looking for the lowest prices,” he muttered, pulling apart several pairs of pants to get a better view. She was still there.
Maggie stared at him, questions behind her eyes, then she began to laugh. “I had no idea you had a sense of humor, Nick,” she said, hunkering down on the ground next to him. “That’s going to be a big plus with the ladies.”
Yeah, right. He was a regular Jim Carrey, he mused as his gaze flickered to the store’s entrance. The woman was gone. Relief swept over him.
“We can get up…” His words petered out and he stayed where he was. Maggie was close, inches away, her sweet scent impaling his senses.
Under the soft lights, beside a mess of pressed pants, she smiled at him again, her eyes still glowing with laughter. At that moment he would’ve worn a sweater vest if she’d asked him to.
And for Nick Kaplan—a man who hadn’t worn a sweater since the third grade—that realization meant he was headed for trouble.
Three
Look No Further. The Girl Of Your Dreams Could Be Right Under Your Nose.
Rock music blared throughout the fashionable salon, making it hard for Maggie to concentrate on her continuing struggles with slogan writing. She glanced around the lobby with its bottles of expensive shampoo and styling gels, wondering if anyone else felt that the music was just a bit too loud. Behind the front desk, the cherry-tinted receptionist was practically shouting into the phone, and the older woman sitting next to Maggie was ripping up a tissue and stuffing the pieces into her ears.
Oh, good. I’m not going crazy.
She’d certainly wondered at that possibility after Nick’s spur-of-the-moment price check on the floor of the store. But at least in all the craziness she’d gotten him to buy three pairs of nice pants and a couple of shirts.
His playfulness had surprised her. The big, bad biker had a silly streak, and she found it immensely attractive.
Maggie glanced at the clock on the salon wall. Nick had been in with Domingo for more than an hour and a half. The two men were probably at war behind those double doors. It wouldn’t be much of a shocker after the touch-me-again-and-you-die glare that Nick had sent the bald hairstylist when he’d taken one look at Nick and exclaimed, “Now, aren’t you a handsome one.”
Laughter bubbled in Maggie’s throat. Mr. Masculinity vs. Mr. Clean. This project was going to be some fun.
“Miss Conner?” Domingo’s assistant stood directly in front of her, but because the music was so loud, she looked as if she was mouthing the query.
Maggie nodded, not willing to shout.
“Domingo is just finishing up with your friend.” The blaring rock song ended abruptly and a soft ballad took its place. “He’ll be out in a minute.” The girl winked. “He’s really something.”
Maggie stared after the girl. What in the world did that mean? He was something? Stashing her pen and pad of paper in her purse, she stood up and hustled to the front to pay.
“Mr. Kaplan already took care of it,” the cherry-haired receptionist informed her.
“He did?”
“Yes, I did,” came his smooth baritone from behind her. “I told you I would.”
She turned sharply, then froze where she stood. Every word of “this project is going to be some fun” melted like a Popsicle on a hot day. Nick Kaplan looked like a sexy rebel out of a men’s fashion magazine. He still wore his faded jeans, but he’d put on one of the white shirts they’d picked out that afternoon. He looked like a different man, yet not quite.
Her pulse pounded like a steel drum, and she wondered if everyone could hear it, even the lady with the tissue in her ears. Surely they could see her face, her eyes, as she took in the transformation of her drop-dead-gorgeous roommate.
Clean shaven, he had a stubborn, confident face that had seen sun and wind, had confronted them head-on. Like he did all challenges, she imagined. His hair had been cut short—but not too short. The chestnut waves licked the edges of his white collar, while the same maple-colored hair on his chest peeked out from the vee. And when her gaze trailed reluctantly upward, she found him staring at her, his green eyes blazing a wild streak, daring her to say something.
No doubt about it, he was still the same bad boy who had walked into her office that morning. He was just a stylized one.
“Satisfied?” he asked.
Her throat went dry as cotton. “What?”
“Well, you did this to me,” he said on a chuckle. “Do I look fine, or what?”
You are about the finest looking man I’ve ever seen, she wanted to say, but the Sahara had replaced the cotton in her throat and she wasn’t doing much talking. She looked around her. Did Nick have any idea that every woman in the salon was staring at him, their eyes filled with longing?
And she had to go home with this Greek god.
Maggie groaned inwardly. What had she done? What in the world had made her believe that she could continue being unaffected by men when someone