“How much?”
“Tell you what,” he said, looking if not smug, at least pleased by whatever idea was brewing in his thick head. “How about we cut us a little deal?”
Cut a deal? She’d trust any deal he made about as far as she could shot-put his beefy carcass after she killed him but before they hauled her off to jail. Justifiable homicide would be the worst possible charge they could level.
“I can just about imagine any deal you’d initiate. You haven’t changed a bit, have you?”
“Aw, Chrissie. You don’t still hold a grudge after all this time, do you?”
Oh, yeah. She held a grudge all right. He made it easy.
“Tell you what, just to show you I’m not so awful,” he said, working hard at sounding wounded, “since you want this stuff that badly, I’ll just give it to you.”
She eyed him with unconcealed suspicion. All six-plus lean feet of him. She couldn’t help but notice the way his long brown hair curled slightly at the edges, giving him a sexy boyish appeal. Couldn’t help but try to read the thoughts going on behind those summer-blue eyes that were always laughing, always teasing, always making her wonder what made him tick.
Well. Not always because she didn’t spend that much time thinking about him. At least, she didn’t do it intentionally. He sort of sneaked into her thoughts sometimes when she least expected it and caught her off guard.
Like now. Damn, all those wonder-boy good looks had sidetracked her again. Made her forget—if only for a second there—that she was mad and he was the reason.
“Okay. What’s the catch?” Skepticism oozed in each word.
“What makes you think there’s a catch?”
“Because I wasn’t born yesterday?”
“There ya go. You’re just as smart as you are pretty.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, save the sugar for someone with a sweet tooth.”
He considered her for a moment as if he were thinking about how badly he wanted to embarrass her. Then he very coolly said, “You can have the box of stuff on one condition. Be my date for the anniversary ball.”
It took a moment for Christine to process his words. When she finally realized what he was suggesting, her mouth dropped open. Nothing came out.
If he’d told her the condition was to strip and then run through the streets proclaiming she was madly in love with him, she would have been less surprised than she was right now.
And the chances of her agreeing to either condition were exactly the same.
“Boy, that got you thinking,” he said, his lean cheeks dimpling. “So, what do you say? How about it?”
He wasn’t serious. He couldn’t be. Never in a million years would Jake Thorne—Texas Cattleman’s Club member and one of the most sought-after bachelors in Royal—waste his time with her, not at something as big as the anniversary ball. Not when all the eligible socialites and darlings of society were lined up like Miss America candidates waiting for him to select one of them as his date for the biggest social event in recent Royal history. Beautiful, wealthy, socially adept women who ran in his circle and would look good on his arm—unlike her, who would look more like a lump of coal than a diamond.
Even though she didn’t want it to, it stung that he’d play with her this way when they both knew good and well that, unless he thought he could find some perverse pleasure humiliating her, he’d never in a million years include her on his list of possible dates.
This was just too cruel. And she’d had enough of his goading for one night.
“How about you take your condition and put it where the sun don’t shine?”
Then, hating herself for letting him get to her, she turned on her heel and stomped away while his highly amused “Was it something I said?” trailed her across the room.
Chapter Two
“I don’t get it,” Alison said the night after the auction as they waited at the back of the room for their self-defense class to start. “What’s the problem with going to the anniversary ball with Jake Thorne? It’s not like you already have a date. And good grief, girl, the man is a hottie of the major-flame variety. No pun intended.”
But it was a pun regardless since Jacob Thorne’s stock-in-trade was fighting oil-well fires. Or at least, it used to be his stock-in-trade to fight them until the accident. Everything had changed for him then. He still ran his own company, but from a desk now instead of on the actual site of the fires.
Christine sat down on the mat and fussed with the laces of her tennis shoes, shoving thoughts of the trauma he’d gone through from her mind.
“He’s a hottie all right. Of the inflammatory variety.”
“Well, he sure seems to have incited a riot in you.”
“We have a history,” Christine finally admitted in a weak moment as she pulled her straight shoulder-length hair into a ponytail and clipped it at her nape.
“No. I never would have guessed,” Alison said, clearly having guessed exactly that.
Christine grinned at her friend’s staged surprise.
“What did he do, dump you?”
“No,” she said sobering. “He did not dump me. We’ve never even dated.”
“Ah. So that’s the problem. You want to date him.”
“Yeah, right,” Christine said maybe a little too emphatically.
This time Alison didn’t say a word. She just raised an eyebrow and waited.
Christine expelled a weary sigh and rose to her feet. “Okay. The problem,” she sputtered, using Alison’s words, “is that he’s just making fun of me by inviting me to the dance. He’s always making fun of me. He taunts and teases and plays on the fact that I had a little crush on him once—a looonnnggg time ago—and he keeps exploiting it. You saw how he was at the auction. He didn’t want that box for any reason other than because I wanted it. And he didn’t ask me to the ball for any other reason than to mock me.”
She tugged down her T-shirt, then forked her fingers through her ponytail, getting mad all over again just thinking about it. “He just loves to push my buttons. I’m getting tired of it.”
“I think it’s kind of cute,” Alison said, then laughed when Christine threw her a disbelieving look. “Well, I do. Because it’s all in fun and what it really means is that he has a thing for you.”
Christine grunted. “It means that he’s childish and sophomoric. And he doesn’t have a thing for me. I mean, look at me—I’m as far from his type as a male stripper is from mine. He’s just…ornery. The man doesn’t have a sincere bone in his body. Everything’s a joke with him.”
“Everything?”
She thought for a moment. “Okay. For instance—he got hurt badly in an oil-well fire five years ago. Smoke and fire inhalation did some heavy-duty damage to his lungs and he spent over a month in the hospital. I was the unlucky one on duty the night they brought him in and I ended up spending a lot of time with him over the course of his recovery.”
When some other class members walked in, Christine lowered her voice because she didn’t want them to overhear her. And she really didn’t want to relive those days in a play-by-play for Alison.
That didn’t stop her from thinking about it, though. Jacob Thorne had been one sick puppy. She’d been so worried for him, while he’d been brave and determined to recover and joked his way through the pain and the fear of his prognosis. She’d