The Charmer (Harbor City 2)

“Ignore them. They’re all lying,” Clover said. “Tell me more.”

And that’s how the night went. Clover and Felicia talked ants, travel, and food he’d never heard of while he nodded in the right places and took every opportunity to touch Felicia—an arm draped around her shoulders, tucking one of the tendrils that had escaped her bun behind her ear, and even feeding her a forkful of his garlic mashed potatoes because she’d ordered the sweet potatoes. It wasn’t over the top, but you couldn’t miss the message about Felicia that Hudson was sending—unless you were Tyler, it seemed. The man glanced over, occasionally giving him a slightly confused but nowhere near jealous look before deep diving back into talks with Sawyer about business and the latest Harbor City Giants game. For her part, Felicia barely said two words to the man. In fact, except for the borderline stalker way she looked at Tyler when she thought no one was watching, it was as if she wasn’t able to communicate with him in any way visible to the naked eye. She had no flirting game. None. And it didn’t help that she melted against him and then squirmed away every time he touched her. For a woman who wanted to make another man jealous, she sure wasn’t acting the part.

“If I give you two tickets to the next Giants game, will you please stop talking baseball?”

Sawyer and Tyler both turned to him, mouths hanging open in shock.

“Don’t tease, Hudson,” Clover laughed. “Those playoff tickets are crazy hard to get. You don’t even want to know how much money he’s offered up for a pair.”

Hard? Try impossible. The man he’d gotten them from had paid an arm and a leg for them. All Hudson had had to do was paint an arm and a leg and voila the tickets were his. “I have two tickets behind home plate.”

“You don’t even like baseball,” Sawyer said.

“Let’s just say I have my ways.” Sadly, a way that no one in his family knew about—or could know about unless he wanted to disappoint them and insult his dead father’s memory beyond repair. “They’re for game three next week. You want them or not?”

Sawyer had that look, the one that said he was still trying to work out how his baseball-hating little brother had two of the most sought-after tickets in sports. “But—”

“Stop interrogating him and say yes, Carlyle,” Tyler interrupted. “You never did know when to let something go.”

“That’s hilarious coming from you,” Sawyer shot back. “You are the king of grudge holders. Do you remember our sophomore year in prep school when…”

And the two men were off, reliving high school memories and planning for their night at Giants Field. Hudson relaxed back in his seat, satisfied that at least one of the missions he’d had for tonight was working out. When Arthur Graves had offered to trade him the two tickets for one of Hughston’s most famous paintings, Hudson had known immediately that it was the perfect way to get his brother and Tyler to spend some time together. That Hudson was handing off the first critically acclaimed paintings that he had ever completed under his alter ego’s name was a small price to pay.

“Up to your old tricks again?” Clover asked, putting all the details together in an instant the way she always did.

She’d been one of the first people to realize that Hudson had been finagling to get her and Sawyer together from the get-go. It had been the perfect solution to keeping everyone in the Carlyle family happy after his father’s death had left everyone mourning in their own way. Sawyer’s obsession with work had dialed up to two hundred and their mom had thrown herself into Operation: Marry Off Sawyer, scared out of her mind that her eldest son was going to go through life alone and die too young of a heart attack like their father.

“Just pawning off some tickets I didn’t want,” he said, curling some of Felicia’s hair that had escaped her bun around his finger. The silky strands soothing the jagged rip that appeared inside him when he thought about his father. “There’s nothing more to it than that. You know me.”

“Exactly.” The speculative gleam in Clover’s eyes confirming that she was on to him.

“I feel like I’m missing something,” Felicia said, looking from him to Clover and back again.

“Clover just likes to think of me as one of her fixer upper projects,” he said.

“You’re a diamond hiding in plain sight, and you know it.”

“Everyone in Harbor City knows I’m handsome, rich, and fun.” He lifted his wine glass in a sardonic toast to himself. “If that’s hiding, then I am fantastic at it.”

Clover laughed and Sawyer pulled her into his conversation with Tyler—something about Australia—and Hudson turned to Felicia. She was chewing her bottom lip as if she hadn’t just had a fabulous steak dinner, and her black-framed glasses did nothing to hide the worry making a V between her eyes as she stared at Tyler.

“I don’t understand why it isn’t working,” she whispered.

Because A plus B didn’t always equal C, a fact that had to drive a logical, linear thinking person like herself way past the point of frustration.

“I do.” He leaned his head in close to hers, inhaling the scent of that fruity shampoo she always used. “Are you ready to do things my way from now on?”

A delicate shiver shook her shoulders. “Am I going to regret it?”

“It’ll only hurt a little,” he teased.

“We’ll talk about it later,” she huffed and nudged him back into his own personal space.

That they definitely would.

Chapter Seven

Hours later, questions and second-guesses whirled around inside Felicia’s head as she paced barefoot from the edge of her small kitchen to the opposite side of her living room. Hudson watched, an amused expression on his face. The ass. He shouldn’t be allowed to look all sexy smug with her cat purring up a storm at his feet while she tried to unwind what went wrong tonight in her head.