“I need to place a personal ad.”
His warm baritone voice jerked Olivia into the present and her gaze connected with his. Since only a forty-inch counter and some Plexiglas stood between them, she could see that his eyes were a mesmerizing shade of blue.
Olivia had never understood what people meant when they said “time stood still,” but at this moment she swore it was happening. Her heart seemed frozen, although she could feel it beating and could hear it pounding in her ears.
“A personal ad,” he repeated, obviously irritated at her incompetence.
He drummed his fingers on the counter, the staccato sound forcing Olivia to regain her senses.
“Yes, of course. I’d be happy to help,” she somehow managed to say. She couldn’t have anyone complaining to the bosses about Chrissy.
“This is the ad I wish to run.” He slid a wadded piece of paper into the metal channel and underneath the Plexiglas. “Can you take care of it?”
If she were a bad girl, she’d take care of him in any way he needed. Be a bad girl, something unfamiliar inside her whispered.
She smoothed out the paper and turned her attention to reading his ad. She glanced up sharply. “You need a date?”
His blue eyes gleamed, and she swallowed. Just the power of his look held her attention. “I apologize. That was quite unprofessional of me.”
He didn’t agree or disagree; he just watched her. Years of PR training came in handy as she hid her trembling and presented a poised appearance. She reached for an advertising form and a pen.
“So. How long do you want your ad to run? Our best value, which I suggest, is five days at five dollars a day. If not you can—”
He cut her off. “That’s fine.”
Olivia’s forehead wrinkled and her headband itched. Something wasn’t right in Mound City. Her extensive PR experience had also taught her a lot about body language.
For someone placing a personal ad, the man standing in front of her wasn’t keen on the idea.
He came across like a man sitting in a dentist’s chair, waiting for a tooth extraction. But whatever his problem, she had an ad to sell. “We have three retrieval services, depending on what type of response you’d like,” she said, warming to her sales pitch. She and Chrissy had held a contest to see who could say it faster. “You can place a voice-mail ad, meaning the person calls a special phone number and presses your mailbox number. You receive a code to retrieve the messages. For an additional fee, we can set up a temporary e-mail account for you, meaning we act as your firewall. You can also go with the traditional snail-mail option, which—”
“Which one gets this over with the fastest?”
His blunt query had Olivia losing her train of thought and flubbing her sales spiel. “The phone messages,” she said as she recovered. “The people interested in you dial a nine-hundred number—you retrieve the messages using an eight-hundred number.”
“Fine,” he said with a curt nod that caused a lock of blond hair to fall into his face. “That’s what I want for the shortest period you offer.”
“One week.”
He didn’t smile. “Perfect.”
She pushed the contract under the glass. “I’ll need your contact information. If you could please fill this out…”
As he put pen to paper, Olivia couldn’t help but watch him, observing the way his muscles flexed even when he did something so simple as write. He’d barely finished printing his first name in the required block letters when he glanced up at her.
“Is something wrong?”
“Yes,” Olivia said, the words escaping her lips before she could even think to stop them. “Why does a gorgeous man like you need to place an ad?”
His blond eyebrows arched. “For the same reason a grown-up woman like you dresses like a Catholic schoolgirl.”
“Fashion,” Olivia retorted.
His unexpectedly wide smile undid her. It crooked into two dimples, lighting up his whole face. She gripped the countertop.
“No, the obvious,” he said. “Because like everyone else who places these personal ads, I need a date. Just one, but a date nevertheless.”
As his gaze remained locked with Olivia’s, she inwardly melted. All those romance clichés fit. An invisible string tugged her insides and her toes curled. Blood drummed in her ears. The man had turned her into molten jelly with a mere glance. Made her feel wanton with only his simple, sexy manner.
At that moment, Olivia’s inner bad girl roared to life and took over. She wanted to experience life to the fullest, right? This man would make her feel full, that was for certain. Many women had no doubt propositioned this beautiful, sexy man, but the prodigal daughter didn’t care. He only needed one date.
She only needed one night.
She could atone for her many sins later.
Olivia turned on her best smile. Her baby blue-eyes with the outer rim of dark blue—the blue eyes that every Jacobsen family member shared—were her strongest feature, and she refused to blink. The husky voice leaving her lips sounded unfamiliar.
“So if you only need one date,” Olivia said, “why not save your money and just ask me?”
Chapter Two
Had he heard her correctly? Had she just propositioned him? Garrett surveyed the woman behind the counter. She’d finally blinked and glanced away, but Garrett knew his excellent hearing hadn’t failed him. The girl who was doing her best to imitate the cover of Britney Spears’s first album had just made a pass at him.
Was there a woman in the world who wouldn’t?
He continued to study her as she placed some pens in a holder. Admittedly, she seemed different from the others who had hit on him. Very classic. Very traditional. She wore a short-sleeved pink sweater and had pearls around her neck. Her dark hair fell to her shoulders. Her headband matched the pleated skirt he could see because of his height. She had high cheekbones, a straight nose that tweaked up slightly at the tip, and her eyes…those blue orbs were hypnotic. He’d noticed them the moment he’d walked into the office.
An urge stirred in his groin. Did he really want to reach through the glass and feel how silky those dark locks were?
She definitely wasn’t unattractive. Far from it.
But she had boldly propositioned him, and after this past year, Garrett was sick and tired of aggressive women. He couldn’t wait until December, when, he hoped, everyone would throw this year’s charity calendar away and instead ogle the people in the new one.
He couldn’t go back to the station without arranging for a date. One date, to be precise. And if he took her up on her offer, he could have that one date without having to place a silly ad, or ever having some silly ad traced back to him.
He also wouldn’t have to listen to any phone messages. He wouldn’t have to call anyone up and make idle conversation he didn’t have time for. Yes, the longer he considered asking out the counter girl, the more the idea appealed. Even better—since she was a counter girl, she certainly wouldn’t have the upper-crust St. Louis snobbery of his ex-wife.
Having had women throw themselves at him, he’d long ago learned to turn his sexuality down. Now he let every ounce of his male magnetism loose. He leaned on the counter, bringing himself down