Misbehaving Under the Mistletoe: On the First Night of Christmas... / Secrets of the Rich & Famous / Truth-Or-Date.com. Heidi Rice
Christmas? Show a bit of respect for the season and stop being such a jerk.’
Typical. When Cassie Fitzgerald is on the hunt for a candy man, what does she get? A candy man with a crappy attitude.
Jacob Ryan cranked up the handbrake, slung his arm over the steering wheel and stared at the furious pixie in his passenger seat whose wide violet eyes were shooting daggers at him.
How the hell did I end up with Santa’s insane little helper in my car?
As if it weren’t bad enough that Helen had manoeuvred him into accepting an invitation to her ‘little soirée’ tonight, now he had a mad woman in his rented Mercedes. A mad woman who was dripping all over the custom-finished leather upholstery.
He’d never been a fan of the season to be jolly, but this was getting ridiculous.
The sight of the filthy splatter on her coat, though, had the tiniest prickle of guilt surfacing. The car had hit a rut in the road.
Hoisting his butt off the seat, he tugged his wallet out of his back pocket. Okay, maybe he had been the culprit. He’d been so aggravated by Helen’s petulant demands, he hadn’t been paying attention.
‘How much?’ he asked. A hundred ought to cover it.
Her full Cupid’s bow mouth flattened into a grim line and the daggers sharpened. ‘I don’t want your money,’ she announced. ‘That’s not what this is about.’
Yeah, right.
He counted five crisp twenty-pound notes out of his wallet and presented them to her. ‘Here you go. Merry Christmas.’
She gave the money a cursory glance, and the line of her lips twisted into a sneer. ‘I told you. I don’t want your money, Ebenezer.’
The sarcastic name grated, but then she tightened her arms under her breasts, and his gaze dipped—distracted by the creamy flesh exposed by the wide V in the lapels of her coat.
Hell, is she naked under that thing?
The wayward thought came out of nowhere, and sent a blast of heat somewhere he definitely didn’t need it.
‘What I want is an apology,’ she demanded.
He tore his eyes away from her breasts. ‘Huh?’
‘An apology? You do know what that is, right?’ she said, as if he had an IQ in single figures.
He shook his head, struggling to stem the immature fantasy. Of course she wasn’t naked under the coat. Not unless she was a lap dancer. And he doubted that. Given her big doe eyes and the helping of Christmas whimsy she’d dealt him, the picture of her getting sweaty tenners folded into a G-string didn’t fit, despite that eye-popping cleavage.
He stuffed the money back into the wallet and dumped it on the dash.
‘I apologise,’ he said curtly, deciding to humour her.
He didn’t usually bother with apologies. Especially to women. Because he’d discovered from experience they didn’t count for much. But these were extenuating circumstances. He needed to get her out of the car before that glimpse of cleavage melted the rest of his brain cells and he did something really daft. Like hitting on a crazy lady.
‘That’s it? That’s the best you can do?’ She twisted in her seat—all the better to glare at him, he suspected—but the movement made her breasts press against the confines of her coat and threaten to spill out. His mouth went dry.
‘I’m going to have to spend an hour on the tube,’ she ranted. ‘Then get hypothermia walking across the park. And you can’t come up with a better—’
‘Look, Pollyanna,’ he interrupted, the heat tying his gut in knots as he breathed in a lungful of her scent. Cinnamon and cloves and orange. ‘I’ve offered you money and you don’t want it,’ he ranted right back when she remained silent. ‘I apologised and you don’t want that, either. Short of sawing off my right arm and gift-wrapping it I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do to make amends.’
Her mouth closed and her delicately arched eyebrows launched up her forehead into the soft brown curls that haloed around her head.
That had certainly shut her up. Although he wasn’t quite sure what he’d said that had put the shell-shocked look on her face. The unusual colour of her eyes had darkened to a vivid turquoise and all the pigment had leached out of her cheeks.
She covered her mouth with her fingers. ‘Jace the Ace.’
The words were muffled, but distinctive enough to make him tense. ‘How do you know my name?’ he asked, although no one had called him by that particular nickname for fourteen years. Not since he’d been kicked out of school when he was seventeen. The minute the thought registered, another more disturbing one hit him—and the insistent throbbing in his groin increased.
Damn it. That had to be it. What other explanation was there for his instant response to her?
She hadn’t replied, so he forced himself to ask the obvious next question.
‘Have I slept with you?’
He doesn’t remember me. Thank you, God.
Cassie tried to speak, but her tongue was too numb to form coherent words. Not all that surprising given that the punch of recognition had hit her squarely in the solar plexus and expelled all the air from her lungs. She shook her head. ‘No,’ she whispered.
‘I definitely didn’t sleep with you?’ he asked as the unflinching emerald gaze that had broken a thousand female hearts at Hillsdown Road Secondary School searched her face.
She nodded.
His shoulders relaxed and she heard him mutter, ‘Good to know.’
No wonder she hadn’t recognised him straight away. The Jacob Ryan she remembered had been a boy. A tall, troubled and heart-stop-pingly handsome boy, who at seventeen had been the perfect mix of dashing and dangerous to a girl of thirteen with an overactive imagination and hyperactive hormones.
They hadn’t slept together. In fact, they’d never even kissed. She’d been four years younger than him, and when you were at school that might as well have been a fifty-year age difference. But she’d had a wealth of immature romantic fantasies about him—like every other girl in her year—which were now playing havoc with her heartbeat.
She shifted in her seat, feeling disorientated and a little light-headed, the damp velvet of her coat like a straightjacket.
Her stomach muscles clenched and released. Exactly as they always had all those years ago, if she’d spied him brooding in the dinner hall, or at the bus shelter busy ignoring all the girls giggling around him … Or during what had come to be known in the annals of Cassie’s teenage years as The Ultimate Humiliation. The excruciating moment when she’d disturbed him and head girl Jenny Kelty snogging on the back stairwell.
Cassie’s nipples tightened painfully, the impossibly erotic picture they’d made entwined on the dimly lit staircase still astonishingly fresh.
She’d been anchored to the spot, her thigh muscles dissolving as she gawped. His hand had been under Jenny’s blouse, his stroking fingers visible beneath the billowing white cotton. Cassie had watched transfixed, her teeth digging into her lip, as his other hand had skimmed to Jenny’s waist then moulded her bottom, grinding her against him. Then he’d raised his head and nipped at Jenny’s bottom lip. And Cassie had felt her own lip tingle.
As Jenny had groaned and writhed, warmth had flooded through Cassie’s system and her strangled gasp had slipped out without warning.
Jace Ryan’s sure steady gaze had locked on her face. She’d been trapped, like a deer about to be mown down by a juggernaut. Frozen in terror as reaction skidded up her spine.
But instead of