“No.” She took a breath. “I just…have a proposition for you.”
His eyes widened. “A proposition?”
What the hell did that mean?
“A business proposition,” Molly said. Her voice sounded raspy and she licked her lips as if they were parched. She looked hot. The Caribbean sun was baking.
“Why don’t you come over and sit down and tell me what you have in mind,” Joaquin said. Before you faint and fall off the damn balcony.
“I—all right.” She scrambled over the railing to his balcony, leaving a couple of greasy fingerprints on the white paint.
“Sit down,” Joaquin said. If she had engine grease on the seat of her shorts that was Lachlan’s problem. She was his sister, after all. “Do you want something to drink? Beer? A glass of wine? A soda?” There was a small but well-stocked refrigerator in his room.
“A beer,” Molly decided abruptly.
And before he could make a move to get one for her, she darted past him into his room and got one herself! Actually she got two and handed one to him.
“Thank you,” he said, deadpan.
She gave a jerky little nod. “My pleasure. Well, Lachlan’s actually,” she corrected herself. She twisted the cap off the beer as she paced around the small balcony, still not looking his way.
Joaquin watched, not speaking as she stopped with her back to him and stared out across the beach. Then she tipped her head back and took a long gulp of the beer before squaring narrow shoulders and turning to face him.
“I want to hire you,” she said.
“Hire me?” His gaze narrowed. He didn’t know the first thing about engines. Wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in them. Never had been. And just because Lachlan had been saying he should stay busy, that didn’t mean he needed some misguided female in steel-toed boots offering him work out of pity.
“No, thanks,” he bit out.
Molly’s fingers tightened on the beer bottle. “You haven’t even heard me out.”
“I don’t need to. I don’t know an oil pan from a tail rotor and I don’t want to.”
“I imagine even you could tell the difference between those two,” she retorted with a roll of her eyes. But then she hunched her shoulders. “It’s not that kind of work. It’s something you’re good at.”
“Not soccer,” he said flatly. “I’m not helping Lachlan with the soccer team.”
In a misguided attempt to cheer him up when he’d first arrived, Lachlan had invited him to help coach the kids’ soccer team. That was the last thing Joaquin wanted to do.
If he couldn’t play the sport he loved, he wanted nothing at all to do with it. It hurt too much to watch anyone do what he could do no longer. Especially when he was going to be doing what he didn’t want to do at all.
But Molly shook her head. “Not soccer.”
Joaquin couldn’t think of anything else he was good at. “Then what?”
Her fingers strangled the beer bottle again. She took a breath. “I need you to teach me—” another swift deep breath. And another. Hell, in a minute she’d hyperventilate! “—how to seduce a man.”
His jaw dropped. The beer bottle slipped from his hand.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Molly bent down and snatched the bottle off the deck, slapped it on the table, then ducked past him into the room and, returning with one of the bathroom towels, used it to blot up the beer with a gravity far exceeding the amount that had spilled.
His brain was still buzzing, wondering if it was the heat of the afternoon sun or the beer that had caused his hearing to go. “You want me to what?”
As she mopped he could see that the back of her slender neck was almost as red as her hair. And when she stood up, her face was flaming. “Never mind! Forget I said anything. It was a stupid idea!” She tried to dart past him into the room, but he hauled her up short.
She jerked her arm, but he wouldn’t let her go. “Sit down.” He still couldn’t believe it, but her behavior was making it seem more and more like his hearing wasn’t as bad as he’d thought.
“Did you say you want me to teach you to—” now he was having trouble getting his mouth around the words! “—seduce a man?”
Her shoulders lifted and her mouth twisted in one of those distasteful faces she’d been making earlier. But then she met his gaze squarely and seemed to defy him to make something of it. “Yes.” The word hissed through her teeth.
Good lord. He tried to bend his mind around it. His mind wasn’t that flexible. “Why?” he asked stupidly.
“For the usual reasons,” she snapped. “Why the hell do you think?”
He shrugged helplessly. He’d always thought he understood women very well. He sure as hell didn’t understand this one!
She sighed and squared her shoulders beneath the gargantuan T-shirt, then said evenly, “Look. It’s simple. I’m thirty-one years old.”
He was surprised. Of course she had to be, as she was only a couple of years younger than he was. But somehow he’d never thought of her as any older than when he’d first met her. She’d been about seventeen then. Still, “Thirty-one?” he echoed doubtfully. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure! I’m not ancient.”
“I know that,” he said quickly. “I thought…younger. You look—”
“Like a thirteen-year-old boy?” Her mouth twisted.
Yes, actually. In those clothes. Though she sure as hell hadn’t at Lachlan’s wedding in that borrowed dress. But he wasn’t going there, either. “Fine,” he said at length. “You’re thirty-one. So what? Like you said, it’s not ancient.”
“Not yet. But it’s time I got married.”
“Married?”
He’d never even seen her with a boyfriend! It wasn’t that he’d thought she might prefer women, it was that she’d never given any indication of preferring anyone at all. Some people didn’t.
“Not everyone has to get married,” he said, in case she had suddenly begun to worry about it. “Lots of people lead perfectly happy single lives.”
“You, for example,” she said tartly. “I know that. But I presume that’s because you want to.”
“Damn right.”
“So, fine. Hooray for you. But I don’t want to.”
He blinked at her vehemence. “You don’t?”
“No!” She took a quick breath, then said more moderately, “No. I don’t. As surprising as it may seem, I want a husband. I want a family. I always have.” She said the words with almost as much bluntness as he was accustomed to hearing from her. And yet they weren’t disinterested. There was an emotional edge underlying them. She sounded vulnerable.
Molly McGillivray? Vulnerable?
“Your sister wears army boots?” he’d said incredulously to Lachlan the first time he’d met her.
And Lachlan had agreed with a wince as he’d rubbed his shin. “And she knows how to use them.”
That was the Molly McGillivray he knew. Not this one.
Now he rubbed the back of his neck and