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Our latest bachelor has enough family in Marietta to qualify as an honorary native, but hails instead from Seattle, WA, which is where he’ll fly you for a glamorous weekend on the shores of the sparkling Puget Sound. Jesse Grey will treat you the way a local boy turned construction tycoon should: five star accommodations, gourmet dinners, and celebrated Washington wines. We just can’t promise he’ll smile much. Or at all.
Sold to the highest bidder!
Jesse Grey, notorious bachelor and one of Seattle’s foremost construction tycoons, has been roped into participating in the Marietta Bachelor Auction thanks to an expertly executed guilt trip laid out by his family.
Michaela Townsend already has a fiancé and certainly doesn’t need another man in her life. So when her family buys her surly, sexy Jesse at the auction and wrangles him into driving her from Montana to Seattle, she’s appalled yet disturbingly attracted.
As far as Jesse is concerned, Michaela is forbidden fruit. Even though he knows her fiancé isn’t all he seems, Jesse would never take what didn’t belong to him. But how long can he resist the one woman he shouldn’t touch?
Excerpt:
Jesse
Grey was taking over the whole of the front hall as if he was a black
hole, light and air and energy collapsing into him and simmering
there in the set of that mouth of his, that glitter in his milk
chocolate gaze, neither of which—she told herself stoutly—affected
her. At all.
“I’m
your ride,” he said, after a long pause that Michaela thought might
have lasted several years.
She
stiffened, while her head toppled off into the gutter. She was
certain he could hear
it. “I beg your pardon?”
Jesse
smirked. “I’m your ride,” he said again. “To Seattle.”
When
she only stared back at him he sighed, and then jerked his head
toward the door behind him and, she supposed, the world outside it
she’d completely forgotten about since she’d set eyes on him.
Again.
“A
big storm’s about to hit,” he grated out. “I’m driving west
because I can’t get stuck here and they’re grounding planes at
the Bozeman airport. Your aunt and my uncle decided you should come
along, but you’re more than welcome to stay here snowed in until
later this week. Your call.”
She
should have some kind of response to that. Michaela knew she should.
She should say
something, nip that crazy suggestion in the bud, assure this odd and
unfriendly man that she absolutely did not need him to drive her
anywhere, much less some seven hundred miles west to Seattle.
But
instead, she stared. Every vivid thing she’d dreamed about
traipsed through her head, kicking up heat and making her face go
red, and what little air was leftover in the space Jesse Grey didn’t
take up seemed to sizzle.
“I’m
not packed,” she said, like the idiot she was in this man’s
presence and nowhere else.
And
that marvelous mouth of his curved then, as something that might have
been humor, if much harder, moved through his gaze.
“You
have five minutes.”
Michaela
took more like twenty-five. She confirmed that her flight out of
Bozeman that evening really was likely to be cancelled, she texted
Amos to inform him that the weather might keep her away from the
office longer than she’d planned and he should try not to freak
out, and she threw her things into her small, carry on roller bag.
Then she paused to make the usual series of mild death threats to her
meddling, irritating, cackling relatives gathered around her aunt’s
kitchen table, until her mother cut that off midstream. Bonnie
Townsend sipped at her coffee in that delicate way of hers that made
Michaela feel like some kind of lumbering wildebeest in comparison,
the perfectly-shaped eyebrows Michaela had been envious of all her
life high on her forehead.
“My
goodness, Michaela,” she murmured in repressive tones. The same
way she’d chastised Michaela for her impatience with her family’s
inability to understand every last one of her life choices only last
night. They want to
know these things because they love you, not because they want to
annoy you. I don’t think it would hurt you to try to remember
that. “If you’re
not interested in having a favor done for you, I’m certain there
are more gracious ways to say so.”
Feeling
suitably chastened and about an inch tall, as ever, Michaela buttoned
her lip and wheeled her suitcase out into the hall, where Jesse Grey
was making like a column of granite. Except less approachable and
far less sunny of disposition.
“Okay!”
she chirped at him like some kind of psychotic kindergarten teacher,
as if that might soften him up. “I’m ready!”
He
exuded grittiness without seeming to do anything but stand there, and
she felt that tugging thing low in her belly again, even more
insistent today than it had been the night before.
There
was human,
she thought than, and then there was straight up destructive,
and she wasn’t sure she could tell the difference. It had never
been an issue before.
“Are
you sure?” he asked in that low rumble of a voice. “Maybe you
want to say goodbye to everyone down on Main Street, too? The
outlying ranches? The whole of Montana while you’re at it?”
“What’s
interesting about you, Jesse,” she said, and it was a bit of a
fight to keep hold of her not-entirely-polite smile, “is that
you’re possibly the most unfriendly man I’ve ever met. Why did
anyone think you’d make a good Bachelor Auction item?”
“Must
be you,” he replied, with an almost-smile that didn’t ease the
bite of his words at all. “This is the friendliest I’ve been in
years. To anyone.”
“Childhood
trauma?”
His
mouth was lethal then. “Something like that.”
“What
fun,” she said, and beamed at him like she meant it. “And we
have hours upon hours trapped in a car together! Hooray!”
He
moved then, which was something a little more than surprising, or at
least that was how she interpreted that liquid thing that washed
through her and that jolt that catapulted from her heart to her feet
and back up again.
“Be
nice,” he growled. “Or I’ll make you carry your own damned
bag.”
She
couldn’t breathe. Or process that.
“I
always carry my own bag,” she informed him, on auto-pilot. “I’m
a liberated woman, thank you. My partner isn’t a bell hop. What
does that even mean?”
He
muttered something that sounded filthy, which Michaela told herself
was further evidence that he was terrible in every way, but that
wasn’t what that swirling, heated thing inside her felt about any
of this. Definitely not.
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