The Thrill of It All Read online

  He was staring at the dashboard again. “It’s the hickey, okay? I can’t think straight when I can see that damn hickey on your neck.”

  “Oh.” Served him right for sucking on her. But she refastened the buttons anyway. “There.”

  He cast a sideways glance. She felt it flick over her buttons, then up to her face. When their gazes met, her pulse leaped and her blood rushed to the surface of her skin. The hickeys on her neck and her breasts throbbed. Last night his mouth had been—

  No! She wasn’t going to think about last night. Folding her arms over her chest, she tried forcing her brain onto something else. The alphabet. The alphabet backward. Z…y…x…

  Cursing, he started the car with a jerky motion.

  “What now?” Felicity choked out.

  He stayed focused on the road. “We need to talk alone, alone but around other people, all right?”

  She should tell him not to worry about it, that she wasn’t about to let her physical impulses overrule her mental reasoning again. Instead, she spent the next few minutes breathing.

  By the time they’d traveled a few traffic-congested blocks and pulled into a parking space, she’d regained her cool confidence. Let him rail, let him argue, but there was nothing she could do about leaving the area until her work for GetTV was completed. Her job came first, before anything.

  He grabbed her hand and pulled her down the street, tugging her through a door. Dark, quiet night switched to fluorescent-lighted, drumbeat-thumping day.

  She blinked. “What is this place?” She had to raise her voice over the loud rap beat of a Nelly song.

  “Rock gym.”

  A gymnasium, she realized, a cavernous, three-story-high structure, with walls that looked like sometimes-craggy and sometimes-smooth rock studded with small circles of different-colored plastic. The floor space was broken up by monolithic boulders made of the same material as the walls. Climbers in bright-colored sportswear crawled over the surfaces like insects while others watched from the ground.

  “Why are we here?” Felicity asked.

  “Nobody will know you.”

  He dragged her around one boulder and along half a wall before pushing her through another door. It was a small café, with a few tables, a juice/espresso bar, and a wall of glass that offered a view of the people moving over the gym’s perpendicular surfaces.

  Magee pulled out two chairs at a table along the glass wall and pushed her into one of them. “Want something?” He gestured toward the bar.

  Though she shook her head, he came back a few moments later with a bottle of sparkling mineral water for each of them.

  “So,” he said, settling into his seat. “You gotta get out of town. Go back. Go away.”

  She sighed. “Magee, you’re being unreasonable. I have a job to do.”

  His mouth flattened and he took the top off his water with a vicious twist. “We’re trouble for each other. You’ve gotta know that after the sex last night.”

  She made a big play of rolling her eyes, to show him who was boss. “Speak for yourself. As far as I’m concerned, we took care of the trouble last night. It’s over now. Done. Finis. Finito. Terminado. Inishedfay.”

  He’d waited patiently through her speech, not even cracking a smile at her pig latin. “Are you going to be staying at your aunt’s?”

  “Well, um…I haven’t really thought…” But she had. In that old bed, wrapped in quilts so worn that their batting was mere memory, and lulled by the motorboat purrs of many cats, she’d been sleeping like she hadn’t slept since she was eleven years old. She’d already decided to remain in her old room until the rest of the GetTV crew rolled into town.

  She lifted a shoulder. “Aunt Vi will expect it.”

  “Then we have a problem.” His gaze bore into hers. “We won’t be able to keep apart. At least admit that much. Within a few miles of each other and we become a magnet and metal filings.”

  Twisting off her own bottle top, she reminded herself that she wasn’t metal or a magnet or anything other than an ambitious woman who could forget the past when it was necessary. “I don’t agree,” she said coolly. “I can control myself.”

  One of his eyebrows lifted. “Maybe I can’t.”

  “Oh, please.” She just barely resisted the urge to lean over and bite him. “Magee—”

  “Do you know what I’ve been thinking about since I woke up this morning? The way your body is so soft and wet. The way it opens for my fingers, then grips them, hard, when I slide inside of you.”

  Her stomach hiccuped. Heat swarmed over her body. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it. She tried the alphabet backward thing again. Z…y…x… It wasn’t working. “You just say things…things like that to aggravate me.”

  Sighing, he shook his head. “Aggravate you? No, dollface, if I wanted to aggravate you, I’d tell you the truth. I’d tell you—”

  A thunderous knock on that glass wall just inches away startled them both. A man on the other side directed a series of hand gestures and eyebrow signals at Magee. Though he tried waving the other man off, though he tried an irritated “Get lost,” though he even tried turning his back, the other man was having none of it. In obvious challenge, he shook a coiled rope in Magee’s face and grinned.

  With a groan, Magee rose out of his chair. “He won’t leave me alone until I take care of this.”

  For her part, she could kiss the guy for giving her some time to recover. When Magee returned, she’d get him to take her back to her car. From there she’d go home, crawl under the quilts, pull a cat or two over her eyes, and use sleep to restore her battered self-control.

  After all, one night of wanton, reckless sex with the wrong kind of man didn’t mean she’d taken an irrevocable turn. She’d remade herself and sex with Michael Magee didn’t mean her image was permanently marred or her life plan irrevocably changed. Closing her eyes, she thought of the Joanie as she’d seen it on the dais in that Las Vegas ballroom. Cool, gleaming, golden feet firmly rooted onto golden ground.

  “Hey, Lissie! Don’t you want to see Magee air-walk?”

  Felicity’s eyes popped opened. It was Gwen from the climbing shop, her head poking through the café’s door, her dozen braids quivering.

  “What?”

  “He’s going up on the tightrope.”

  Tightrope? Curious, she followed Gwen into the gym. At the far end, climbers were huddled beneath two giant boulders that were twenty-five feet high and twenty feet apart. A figure on top of each mammoth rock was busy knotting down a line between them. One of the figures was Magee.

  Felicity felt her eyes bulge. “What is going on?”

  Gwen’s gaze was glued to the activity above them. “It’s called tightroping a slack line.”

  “Slack?” Felicity squeaked. Slack did not sound good.

  Gwen nodded. “Circus ropes are tight, helps with balance. But Magee and my brother won’t have that much tension on the rope.”

  “Before they walk on it.” She was still squeaking.

  The girl sent her an impatient glance. “Don’t be such a sissy. I’ve seen Magee walk a line a hundred feet off the ground. All it takes is incredible balance and juevos grande.”

  Felicity’s stomach churned. “Oh. Well.” Were these people crazy? “If that’s all.”

  “I knew you couldn’t appreciate a man like Magee.”

  The you’re-not-one-of-the-tribe dismissal from this tomboyish little twit made Felicity want to whack her with a high heel and then spray her silly with a particularly cloying eau de toilette. “Explain him to me, then.”

  “Magee’s put new routes up some of the toughest mountains in the world. But he gets off all the same, he says, on a boulder or a cliff that’s been climbed a hundred times before. He just looks between the regular routes and finds one even hairier, even sicker.” She shrugged. “And then he does it.”

  “It’s a math thing,” Felicity murmured. “A math problem.”

&n
bsp; Gwen’s head turned around to stare at her. “You do know him.”

  She didn’t. Because he claimed to be giving up the very thing that so very clearly defined him. But there was no time to puzzle out why when one of the men—Gwen’s brother, she was told—clipped a short lead from his harness to the line strung between the boulders. With a grin for the crowd gathered below, and then another for Magee, he started across.

  At his first wide-armed step, the rope sank and Felicity gasped. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Nah,” Gwen replied. “Climbing ropes are designed to stretch a foot or two when under stress.”

  Tension! Stress! Apparently these people didn’t know the meaning of the word, because they were all watching the man wobble and dip with a nonchalance that had Felicity ready to scream. And then she did, just a short, choked-off one, when, halfway across, Gwen’s brother lost his balance. His fall was a quick, downward jerk as if an invisible Jaws lurked in the ocean of air beneath him.

  At the same instant, the lead clipped at the man’s waist pulled taut and his fist closed over the line. Hanging by one arm, he wryly grinned at the spattering of applause from those below. Then he walked himself, hand over hand, to the boulder he’d started from and scrambled back on top.

  At his go-ahead gesture, Felicity realized it was Magee’s turn.

  He’d removed his shirt and shoes. His naked torso gleamed under the fluorescent lights. In contrast to his pleated dress slacks and polished leather belt, his ripped pectorals and sculpted abdominal muscles appeared even more powerful and primitive.

  Folding her arms tight against her chest, Felicity reminded herself she liked civilized, cerebral men. Her gaze stuck on Magee, though, as he called out something insulting to his challenger, then approached the tightrope and clipped on his own safety leash from the slack line to the harness around his hips.

  Even from two and a half stories below, she could see the new light in his eyes and feel the heat of the daredevil rising in his blood. He glanced down at her and grinned.

  She couldn’t help herself. She grinned back. He looked so young, so free, so full of energy that it didn’t matter, suddenly, how “sick” and how “hairy” the tightrope walk appeared to her. His confidence was infectious. If at that moment he’d told her he was going to fly, she’d have believed him.

  He took his first step, and the climbing rope sagged.

  After that, Felicity didn’t blink. She just dug in, her feet to the floor, her fingernails into her palms, and watched Michael Magee stroll across air.

  Oh, my Lord.

  It was beautiful. He was beautiful. He held his head slightly back so that his dark, bad-boy hair brushed the spine between his shoulder blades. A slight sheen of sweat glistened on his sculpted chest and arms as he moved with relaxed grace. Her heart contracted, but it was fascination, not fear, that squeezed from it.

  Her breath caught as he approached the halfway point—the point where the other man had fallen. But she wasn’t worried about Magee. He would have no trouble surviving this.

  She wasn’t so sure about herself.

  Because each step of his animal-prowl brought her nearer to the brink of her own giant chasm. She sensed it yawning in front of her, she could feel it in the panicked fluttering in her belly and the pounding of her fist-tight heart. Each of his moves brought her nearer to the ledge.

  Another step. Then another.

  Magee didn’t wobble, didn’t strain, didn’t hesitate.

  One step more.

  He glanced down, his gaze touching Felicity’s face. As his bare foot reached the boulder on the other side, his intense, rawly male expression transformed into a boyish, look-what-I-can-do! smile.

  Just like that, Felicity felt herself falling, her feet scrabbling on nothing, her stomach elevator-whooshing, and—

  —then she remembered what had been written on the T-shirt he’d been wearing the night before. WANTED: A Meaningful Overnight Relationship.

  With one massive, metaphorical effort, she slung up an imaginary arm and gripped the ledge’s edge. It only took recalling another of his T-shirt slogans—I’m The One Your Mother Warned You About—to haul herself back onto solid ground.

  To the tune of the crowd’s applause, Felicity turned away from the tightrope, cursing herself. How could she have put herself at so much risk?

  Sure, watching him air-walk had given her the final nudge, but she’d been flirting with disaster since the first time she’d set eyes on him and felt that odd tug of recognition. But falling in love with Magee would have been flat-out ridiculous.

  “Sheesh,” she muttered aloud. “What a near nitwit miss.”

  “Are you talking to me?”

  She swung around to confront Magee. Regarding her with a bemused smile, he slipped his arms into his shirtsleeves. Her gaze moved from his mouth and settled on the slice of golden chest between the unbuttoned edges. This time, when her heart squeezed, her inner thigh muscles followed suit.

  “Charm-ish,” she added. “Embarrassing, irresponsible, and shameless.” He wasn’t her type. His T-shirts weren’t her type. The uncivilized way he went about sex wasn’t the way she liked it at all.

  “Oh, God.” She closed her eyes. Don’t think about the sex. Don’t think about the control he had over his body in order to walk across that rope.

  “You’re trembling.” Magee’s voice lowered. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” She couldn’t let him guess she was anything but, because she was stuck in the area a few days longer. If his magnet-and-metal-filings theory was true, she’d have to get real good at ignoring her inconvenient urges and at staying away from that looming ledge. “But I’m tired. Just get me out of here, please.”

  Back in his car, she shut out him and his disturbing presence by closing her eyes and huddling into the hard plastic seat. Hold on, she told herself. In minutes she’d be alone in her own car and leaving him behind.

  Without warning, he swerved, then braked.

  Startled, her eyes popped open and then she was startled all over again. She must have dozed off, because outside the windshield was dark desert night and a black ribbon of road surrounded by scrub-covered sand.

  “Where are we?” she demanded.

  Stupid question. They were nowhere! “Take me back to the convention center. Take me to my car.”

  “We haven’t had that talk. Look, Felicity…” He turned in his seat to face her and placed a gentle hand on her knee.

  She nearly jumped out of her skin. It was the late hour, the dark, the desert. It was him and how her reckless, wicked body responded to him.

  He frowned. “You’re trembling again. Is it the air-walk? I didn’t mean to scare you.” Reassuring and friendly, he squeezed her knee.

  The top of her head almost hit the roof of the car, but this time she managed to find her voice. “Of course you didn’t scare me. Nothing about you scares me. I could never be scared by you or anything to do with you. As a matter of fact, you so not scare me that…”

  Argh, she thought, edging her leg out from under his palm. On the scale of denials, what she’d let loose was much closer to Babbling Defense than Emphatic Truth.

  He stayed silent a moment, then prodded her again. “That what? What is it?”

  In search of inspiration, she shifted her gaze away from his dangerous, gorgeous face toward the bleak desert landscape. Find something. Telling him that she wanted him so much it was scaring her wasn’t a smart move. Find something else.

  “Um…spiders, all right? I was thinking about spiders.”

  His eyes narrowed as if GRASPING AT STRAWS were written on her forehead in big block letters. “Spiders.” Oh, yeah, he sounded dubious. “Just thinking of them makes your bones rattle.”

  “Yes.” That part was true. “Ask anybody. Ask Ashley.”

  His jaw tightened and he straightened in his seat. “Felicity, about Ashley—”

  “She’ll tell you! So let’s go back to Half Palm, let
’s go back right now, and she’ll tell you all about it.”

  Magee’s eyes narrowed again, and it was obvious her eagerness to get away from him was reigniting his suspicions. “You tell me.”

  She hesitated. Damn, she’d painted herself into a corner. He wasn’t going to be satisfied without a confession, and the only other one that felt ready to trip off her tongue was drastically close to the David Cassidy variety. And she’d rip out her tongue—not to mention her heart—before she leaped onto the seat and belted out, “I Think I Love You.”

  Because it wasn’t true.

  It would never be true.

  “Felicity?” He switched on the overhead light.

  She blinked to adjust her eyes to the dazzle. “Freud would have a field day with the spiders, okay?”

  Magee raised an eyebrow. “You’re telling me you’re nuts? I’ve seen those rubber gloves you sell.”

  She smiled a little. “And almost bought them, too.”

  “Okay, so we’re both a little crazy.” He stretched out his legs in the large space between their seats and crossed his ankles. “Go on.”

  “The spider thing, well…” She’d toss it out there and then he’d take her back home. “We—me and a bunch of cousins—were camping out in Aunt Vi’s back yard. I was little—four years old. My parents were spending the weekend in Las Vegas.”

  As usual, she closed her eyes, trying to conjure them up, and for a moment, for the first time ever, she thought she…But no. Opening her eyes again, she looked up at Magee. “It was tarantula migration season. When the grown-ups came to tell me my mom and dad had died in a car accident, they had these big flashlights that lit up the tent. And crawling all over it were…were the—”

  She broke off, shuddering as she remembered the huge shadows creeping along the outside of the musty-smelling canvas—the hairy-legged embodiment of the bad news waiting to pounce on her. She’d always felt as if the tarantulas had carried away her security as well as her parents.

  With a grimace, she lifted her hands. “Go ahead, laugh. Tell me I’m a basket case.”

  Shaking his head, he reached out to tangle the fingers of one hand with hers. “Everybody has their kink or two. My brother, he hates the taste, even just the smell, of Tootsie Pops.”