Chasing Dreams. Cara Colter

he didn’t know better he would have called it hunger.

      She had poked a rather delectable tongue out between lips that he’d already been misguided enough to touch. Those lips had been plump and sensuous, and that had been before she licked them.

      “Sheesh,” he said to himself.

      From the size of that rock on her finger, she was very engaged.

      Dumb was bad for an office manager, but complicated was way, way worse.

      And complicated was his mind insisting on asking questions that were none of his business. Like why did a girl wearing a ring like that look so, well, not in love? None of that telltale glow and way too interested in a man who was not her fiancé zipping up his pants. Plus chocolate before nine in the morning? That woman was not happy.

      Rich women were never happy.

      His mother had been the first to teach him that lesson, but he’d insisted on repeating it several times, most recently with Kathy-Anne Rice-Chapman.

      Besides, the plain fact of the matter was, even without the complication of Jessica being Jake King’s daughter, Garner did not consider himself good at reading the intricacies of the female of his species, with the possible exception of Aunt Mattie. Though he’d even misread his good aunt. He’d thought she was staying forever, pure and simple. Though his daddy had warned him, a long, long time ago there was no such thing as a woman who stayed forever, and Garner’s mother had been a case in point.

      Jessica King had been here only moments, and Garner realized he was contemplating the most miserable moments of his life. It was not a good omen.

      Garner Blake was good with cars. He read cars the way scholars read books. He could rebuild an old one until it purred like a kitten. He could ferret out the most elusive of mechanical problems. When parts didn’t exist he could manufacture them. There was a science of sorts to cars. As far as he could tell, women did not come with the same predictable set of rules as the mechanical workings underneath the hood.

      He had spent two days getting out every old box of files and bills he could find to scare Jessica King right off his place. Now he had upped the ante by daring her to last more than two hours. Of course, hearing the mousetrap go off under her desk had made him up his bet.

      “Rich girls do not like rodents,” Garner said cheerfully. He consulted his watch. One hour and fifty-one more minutes to go.

      Garner sank down at his desk, took a sip of coffee and winced. As ungrateful as Clive would be for it, he felt responsible for Clive’s child, or at least for the livelihood of that child’s father. He had not missed the veiled threat in Jake King’s voice during that last phone call. But if she left on her own, gave up, tossed in the towel…

      He sighed. He had his own lawyers researching documents now, but it didn’t look promising.

      “You want what?” his lawyer had said. “Garner, those documents were likely signed two or three decades ago. I don’t think this firm handled it.”

      So why was Jake King digging up decades-old dirt? Garner had known, of course, that Jake owned half the building. Years ago, as soon as he’d cleared up the wreckage of his father’s mismanagement, he’d offered to buy Jake out. The offer had been rejected without explanation. Now this. Did Jake really have a say-so in how Garner ran his business? Did Jake own more than half the building?

      Thinking of the legal tangle that could cause made Garner’s head hurt.

      What was that old devil, Jake King, up to?

      And why on earth would he send his daughter here, straight into the camp of the enemy?

      Maybe he doesn’t like her, Garner mused, but Jessica King did not have the look—or the attitude—of a child not liked. He suspected she had been adored.

      With relief, he remembered he had to look at her damaged car. If she was only going to be here another hour and forty-nine minutes, there needed to be no hitches to her leaving. He abandoned the coffee happily and began to whistle the moment he got behind the wheel.