Raising the Stakes
“No!” She swung toward him, her forehead wrinkled in consternation. “Mr. Baron—”
“Don’t tell me we’re going back to that.”
“Gray.” She took a deep breath. He was learning things about her. That deep breath meant she was readying a logical, reasonable, perfectly sane explanation for why she wouldn’t have dinner with him. “Look, Gray—”
“It’s a debt of honor.”
“I know it is.” She opened her purse, pulled out a wallet. “And if you’ll just tell me how much—”
“I don’t know how much.” He looked at her, then back at the road. “What’s it cost, do you think, to have your own private Triple A?”
“Your what?”
“Your private Automobile Association of America. A hundred bucks a year? A thousand? Take a guess.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Nope,” he said cheerfully, “it isn’t. But you have to admit, there’s something unusual about the same guy rescuing the same damsel in distress three separate times.”
“Twice,” she said quickly.
“Thrice,” he said, just as quickly. Did she smile? He thought she might have, but it came and went in a flash.
“Two times. On Las Vegas Boulevard. And then today.”
“Right. And now I’m driving all the way back to where your car conked out. What do you figure? Seventy miles, round trip?”
He could feel her glaring at him. Then she slouched in her seat, looked straight ahead and folded her arms, and he knew he’d won.
“Home Cooking.”
“Huh?”
“I’ll have dinner with you, and that’s what you’ll get. Home Cooking.”
It was more than he’d hoped for. Dinner, at her apartment. He told himself it would give him insights into her he’d never get elsewhere, because it couldn’t be the idea of being alone with her that was making his blood sing.
“Well. That’s very nice of you. I didn’t expect you to go to all that trouble.”
She turned her head and looked at him, and he knew, as soon as he saw her face, that he hadn’t won at all.
“It’s no trouble,” Dawn said sweetly. “Home Cooking. That charming little restaurant where we just got that gas.” She gave him a blinding smile. “I just hope neither of us comes down with ptomaine.”
* * *
He was, at the very least, a persistent and determined man.
Dawn pulled onto the highway with Gray’s car right behind her.
Persistent, determined, better-looking than any man had the right to be—and he was crowding her. Another woman would probably love all the attention. Not her. There was no room in her life for a man, not even for one who would only be in Vegas for a few days.
She glanced into the mirror again. He was still there, following along at a safe distance and that was probably the only “safe” thing about him. He wanted dinner, but she knew that wouldn’t be all. He’d want more. Expect more. And she had nothing to give. He could be as charming, as handsome as he liked but she wasn’t going to sleep with him, and wasn’t that a hell of a stupid way to describe what happened between a man and a woman in bed?
She took a breath.
Okay. Maybe she was jumping ahead. Maybe she was reading things wrong. Maybe he’d be satisfied with dinner, though she doubted it. Still, she’d made a decision four years ago. She wasn’t going to let anybody get close. Well, Cassie, yes, but Cassie was a woman. She had her own secrets and they knew enough not to poke at each other’s pasts the way Gray and his cousins must have poked at that dead snake.
Dawn smiled.