Up All Night

Only then did she realize they were seated on her flower-covered bed. Or rather, the stranger with the straight brown eyebrows and even browner eyes was seated on the bed. For her part, she was settled across his lap, her butt dipping slightly into the depression between his legs. And holy hysteria, her hip grazed his…maleness.

Not good. Not good. Not good.

Okay, fine for him. Impressive for him. Not good for her at all.

She wriggled on instinct until the soft scrape of his light wool trousers on her thong-exposed butt made her think the better of it. This situation of a stranger on her bed holding her half-naked body close to his…impressiveness…was completely absurd and inappropriate. But duh. What did wriggling do to any man sporting that kind of condition?

The problem increased in response.

As did her shaky, shallow breaths.

“Wait.” He squeezed her closer to his chest without really tightening his grip on her. Nevertheless, her breasts were a breath away from popping free of her scanty lace bra. “Sit still until you’re sure you can get up without hyperventilating. You scared five years off my life and I don’t even know you.”

“About that…” Her voice scraped awkwardly over her vocal cords, the pitch all wrong after her bout with too much breathing.

“I’m serious, lady.” He relaxed his hold again, keeping a wary gaze on her. “It’s Jenny, right?”

She nodded automatically before she could consider the wisdom of confirming her identity for a man who knew more about her than most of the rest of the world between guessing her name correctly and cradling her bare thigh in his palm.

And while the sensation didn’t feel good per se, given the fact that he could still be in her hotel room for nefarious reasons, she had to admit that having his hands on her wasn’t an entirely unpleasant experience either. She hadn’t been touched intimately since—ugh—her brief affair with a takeout delivery guy she’d slowly gotten used to seeing without leaving the safety of her home turf. But that had ended a year ago when she’d refused to go out on actual dates with him and, sweet psychosis, had she missed the sex.

“How did you know my name?” Had he been rifling through her purse while she was in her room rolling on her sexy one hundred percent silk stockings—items also available from the De-Luxe catalog?

If she hadn’t been so busy trying to get David to change his mind about a relationship tonight she might have heard this stranger’s entrance into her hotel suite.

“You signed the e-mail you sent me,” he informed her, his hands sliding away from her body completely, silently giving her permission to walk away now if she wanted.

Except that her insides still shook and she couldn’t believe her ears even though her Beethoven CD remained pleasantly soft in the background. The Ninth Symphony provided welcome familiarity in an uncomfortable situation.

“What e-mail?” She racked her brain, wondering if she’d ever met him before. Could he be with the psych conference? There were enough borderline crazy people in the Quintessence Hotel this week to ensure she ran into one every time she turned a new corner.

Sliding off his lap with as much grace as she could muster and possibly a little unwanted thrill, Jenny concentrated on taking slow, deep breaths as she kicked off her mules and tucked her legs up underneath her on the bed. The movement released the scent of roses, another sensory anchor that helped her hold steady in unfamiliar surroundings.

The sheer white robe she’d worn provided little coverage, but she drew it more tightly about her and attempted to regroup long enough to figure out what this guy was talking about. If he was an escapee from some local mental institution trying to fix himself via a weeklong psych seminar, Jenny had more reason than ever to watch her back around him.

“The note you sent inviting me to your room tonight.” He stared at her as if she was the mental patient.

“You got a message inviting you here?” She knew he could be lying to justify letting himself into her hotel room, but she couldn’t help but think about her note to David an hour ago. Could she have hit a wrong key? “What’s your e-mail address?”

“D B at Shore Engineers.” He straightened his shirt cuffs beneath the sleeves of his jacket. “You told me you saw me in the lobby bar earlier so I assumed you were someone attending the engineering seminar at the hotel this week. Are you in the industry? I’m pretty sure I’d remember you if we’d met before.”

The tightness in her chest returned, but she forced herself to breathe slowly through the pinch. It had been almost two years since her last full-blown panic attack and she didn’t plan to put herself through that scary ordeal again any time soon. She’d keep her inhalations steady now. Even.

“You work for Shore Engineers?”

That was David’s firm. His e-mails had glowed with pride about the success of his company. His father’s company that he’d recently taken over, in fact. How could this man have intercepted her note to him?

Unless…could David have given her someone else’s address by mistake?

“I’ve already handed in my notice but I’m still technically with the company for a few more days.” His now straight cuffs provided an interesting contrast to the front buttons of his shirt, one of which had been undone from the first moment she’d spotted him in the room tonight. He looked equal parts slick corporate guy and negligent playboy. “Are you suggesting you didn’t mean to e-mail me?”

“I, um—” Wavering, she didn’t wish to insult him, knowing firsthand how fragile an ego could be. But then he also deserved to understand the reason for her panic attack. “Actually, I meant to e-mail David Brady. One of your colleagues, I suspect? I thought that address belonged to him.”

“This was for Wonderboy Brady?” Pointing toward her outfit, he shook his head. “Please tell me you don’t know him well.”

The expression of pure contempt on his face made her hesitant to tell the truth. Would she be lumped in his condescension category if he knew she’d been e-mailing David through the dating service system for the past two months? Then again, most people who weren’t agoraphobic might consider that kind of contact very limited.

“I guess not.” She mourned the loss of her much-anticipated sex romp now that she knew this man had received her note instead of the intended party. “You’re DB?”

“Devon Baines. And I’ve been with the company longer than Brady so they let me keep the address even though I’ve got the same initials as the man you were hoping to contact tonight.” Something about the sardonic set of his mouth told her exactly what he thought of her taste in men. “His address is Hercules at Shore Engineers, by the way, if you’re still interested in salvaging a date.”

Hercules?

He started to rise as if their conversation had ended. But to Jenny’s way of thinking, things were just beginning to get interesting.

“Wait a minute.” Either this Devon Baines was making up stories or David Brady was a far cry from the man she thought she knew. “Hercules? Are you kidding?”

“I wish I was.” Cracking a grin for the first time since she’d spotted him in her room, Devon Baines gave a humorless laugh. “But in all fairness, he’s had the world by the tail his first six months with the company.”

“It’s not like those addresses are a letter different and he could have written it down wrong or I could have read it wrong.” Jenny knew she wasn’t the hottest woman in the world, but she wasn’t so unappealing that a man would just foist her off on another guy to get away from her. Was she? “He had to have given me your address on purpose. Is that some kind of sick joke you have going between the two of you? Write off the women you don’t want by giving them phony contact information?”

Anger burned anew in her, chasing away every last vestige of fear or self-consciousness she might have had about hosting Devon Baines in her hotel room. He wasn’t a killer or a sex fiend. Just a guy with a sick sense of humor. Either that, or he’d been set up.

Devon paced to the bed, retracing the steps he’d taken away from her.

“I avoid Dave Brady wherever possible, so I guarantee you he and I don’t sit around concocting high school-style hijinks to perpetrate on unsuspecting women.” His glare smoldered with barely leashed anger, his tall, strong frame outlined in golden candlelight giving him a glowing aura. “Jesus, Jenny, you could have called the cops when you saw a strange man in your hotel room. You think that kind of repercussion would ever be amusing to me?”

Ah, no.

Now that she heard his take on the subject she decided that wouldn’t be his cup of tea at all.

“Okay.” She offered up a tight smile and turned to David’s other motive. “Then I guess I have no choice but to believe your coworker found me so unappealing he purposely misled me and pawned me off on a person he apparently…dislikes?” She waited for confirmation, unsure from Devon’s side of the story if Dave found Devon as unlikable as Devon obviously found him.

“I can’t begin to speculate why he would have given you my address and I don’t know what he thinks about me personally.” Shrugging, he pulled a champagne bottle out of an ice bucket Jenny had left chilling on the nightstand. “But I can’t imagine any man ever finding anything unappealing about you.”

He shifted his gaze from the champagne label to her and Jenny thought her skin might start to sizzle from the weight of his stare. Memories of his hands on her waist, her thighs, replayed in her mind. The heat of his touch had anchored her through her anxiety attack, helping her battle her demons more effectively than any medication.

Although there was nothing remotely medicinal about his effect on her right now.

“Thank you.” She hadn’t realized how starved her feminine senses were until his compliment warmed her to her toes and heated a few other things on the way. “But apparently David decided at a moment’s glance that I wasn’t his type. We met through a dating service online a few weeks ago, but today was the first time I saw him in person and he fled the table before our drinks arrived.”

Why she felt compelled to offer the most embarrassing details of her dating history, she had no idea, but it seemed as though she owed Devon Baines some sort of explanation for his trouble. Especially since he’d gotten stuck playing doctor to her when she freaked out.

“He might be kicking butt at the office, but he obviously made a big mistake tonight.” Devon settled the bottle back in the ice bucket. “And I have to tell you that if you ever invited me to crack open this highbrow vintage for you, I would never be stupid enough to leave before we kicked the bottle.”

His words coaxed a smile from deep inside her despite the mixed-up craziness of her night. Her whole life.

She liked Devon Baines.

“Whether I owe the pleasure of your company to my good taste in champagne or my habit of heavy breathing on the first date, I think I might invite you to do just that since I usually never fall asleep until dawn.” Another sin confessed. Since she had nothing to lose with the stranger, she might as well be upfront with him. “I’m a total insomniac.”

“You’re kidding.” He stilled in the middle of flipping over the two slender flutes beside the bucket. “Me, too.”

So he wasn’t with the psych convention, but he had a few quirks of his own. Sounded like a promising start to an unexpected new…friendship?

Or more.

“Cool.” Pulling herself from the bed she rose to find a real bathrobe that wasn’t see-through. Something appropriate for a guy she wasn’t planning to seduce quite yet. “Then you won’t think it’s strange that I love having company at 3:00 a.m. If you’ll excuse me for a minute, I’ll just go find something else to wear and we can stay up all night.”

DEVON DIDN’T BOTHER resisting the urge to watch her walk away. If this was his last view of those thighs in garters, he’d strain his eyes for a good look until she disappeared into the bathroom.

Well damn.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had such a crazy night. He’d ditched the networking opportunity offered by the seminar mixer downstairs. Then he’d received a wayward e-mail inviting him for what sounded like hot and heavy sex. Then the sender of the message turned out to be a total babe who panicked at the sight of him but offered for him to stick around nevertheless.

A sane man would leave. Devon had a sudden craving for champagne and a woman named Jenny.

Popping the cork on the bottle, he poured bubbling froth into the chilled glasses on the nightstand and told himself there was no reason in the world he couldn’t spend the night with her in her gardenia-scented haven full of luxury if he so chose.

He got the impression she wasn’t an engineer. God, he hoped she hadn’t come here for the sole purpose of meeting Brady. The kid had disappointed his old man at every turn, wanting nothing to do with the company his father had built until John Brady gasped his last breath at seventy-five years old.

Devon concentrated on enjoying the moment, something he’d learned to do at a young age for a variety of reasons he didn’t care to remember. And living for the moment was pretty much a cakewalk tonight when he got to share his insomnia with a woman who wore lacy white lingerie and seemed to embrace risk-taking as much as him.

“So I never told you my last name.” She reappeared suddenly, a man’s black and red flannel bathrobe covering her from midcalf to neck, although her feet remained covered by the sheer white silk that could only be the gartered stockings she’d been wearing earlier. An enticing prospect to know what waited beneath the flannel. “It’s Moore.”

“Nice to meet you, Jenny Moore.” He held out a glass of champagne to her and raised his own with the other hand. “Here’s to shared insomnia.”

“Cheers.” Accepting the glass, she clinked it against his before taking a sip. “I’m not usually the kind of woman who propositions men she hardly knows, but I’ve been pushing myself to take more risks lately. Be a little more bold.”

Seemed to him she was doing just fine in the bold department. Her note had been…intriguingly forthright.

“Are you in town for the engineering conference?” He followed her toward the sofa away from the bed. A damn shame she wasn’t thinking about jumping his bones the way he wanted to jump hers, but he found himself intrigued by more than her silk stockings. Even wrapped up in flannel, he wanted to get to know her.

“If you knew me better you’d realize that’s like asking Shaquille O’Neal if he’s in town for the knitting classes.” Dropping onto the white leather couch that was more comfortable than his black and Lucite-crammed suite, Jenny sipped her drink and folded her legs underneath her. “I’m a small business owner and I run a catalog company called De-Luxe. My refined tastes and love of shopping have finally parlayed themselves into a lucrative career after years of simply running me into credit card debt. I’m thinking about expanding this year and taking the company public.”

“So the fur-lined slippers and the exotic vintage champagne are par for the course for you.” He didn’t know what he thought about that since he’d never been a connoisseur of anything beyond beer and tractors. Not that he was Joe Farmer, but he’d gotten his first taste for mechanical engineering when he’d taken apart a neighbor’s old John Deere and put it together again.

“They’re not real fur, just a top-of-the-line facsimile.” She set her glass on the coffee table and studied him in the candlelight, her eyes clearly a shade of hazel now that he saw them up close. “And the luxury goods definitely aren’t the norm for me anymore since I’ve learned to put most of my earnings back into the business, but there are a few items we carry that I can’t help but scoop up.”

“You live in Jersey?” He noticed her hands were bare of rings, her nails neatly polished in a shiny clear finish with the tips painted extra white. “You don’t sound like a native.”

“It took years of practice to erase the accent, believe me.” She winked and he wanted to pull her closer to sit her on his lap again. “But since I started out as the sole operator for the De-Luxe 800 number, I wanted to sound a little more upscale than the Jersey twang suggests. I grew up just south of Seaside Heights, about an hour north of Atlantic City. You?”

“I started out in Philly and I still have a place there. But I keep an apartment near Wildwood since Shore Engineers is based down there. We do work all over the eastern seaboard.” He’d embraced the traveling as part of his job since he still tended to go stir-crazy if he stayed in one place for too long. “In fact, I think I put in a small coaster at an amusement park just north of Seaside Heights. One of my first.”

“You build roller coasters?” Her eyes lit up, brighter than the lights on the glittering boardwalk outlined behind her.

He really liked Jenny.

“I’ve designed a few. That’s the payoff for being a math nerd all through high school. Eventually you recoup a certain amount of cool that you never could cultivate by busting the grading curve on every test.” Not that Devon had ever needed anyone else’s approval.

“So what’s it like to create a thrill ride? Are you the first to try it out? Do you ever get scared you forgot a safety feature and you’ll be tossed out of the car on your ear?” She focused solely on him, her pupils wide in the dim light.

A damn heady experience to be on the receiving end of that focus.

“I’m not always the primary tester, but I try to be whenever possible.” What was the point of designing and strategizing for the best adrenaline buzz if you couldn’t critique it afterward and learn from the experience? Good mechanics were all about subtle adjustments. The esoteric changes that couldn’t always be accounted for on paper. “And I would consider the ride a failure if there wasn’t a hint of fear along with the fun. That’s what initiates the adrenaline rush necessary for a good experience.”

“Really?” She seemed to contemplate that as if he’d unveiled some important secret. “You scare yourself on purpose. But don’t you eventually not fear it anymore? If you take the ride too often, do you grow kind of blasé about the whole thing?”

“Not me.” He’d never let that happen. “I live in the moment and actively seek the thrill. I think you can only grow detached like that if you want to take the fun out of it.”

Frowning, she twisted her finger around the dangling belt of her robe. “Or if you want to take away the fear. But what does it feel like?”

“What does what feel like? Designing a coaster?”

“No. Experiencing it firsthand.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never been on a roller coaster.” He couldn’t imagine someone depriving themselves of the experience.

“Never.”

He smacked his forehead in disbelief, but he’d gladly share his take on it. This was one woman he planned to convert.

Setting his glass beside hers on the coffee table, he leaned forward. Closer. Firmly into Jenny Moore’s personal space.

“It’s an adrenaline rush.” The kind of experience he sought out whenever possible, just for kicks. “A slow build that climbs with anticipation until you can barely hold still for what’s going to happen next. Then a heart-flipping moment where you feel like you’re going to fall over the biggest ledge of your life and your whole nervous system goes ballistic with erratic impulses. You can’t breathe. You can only scream your brains out and hold on for dear life.”

Unable to resist the lure of her hazel eyes hanging on his every word, he reached out to stroke a finger down the side of her soft cheek.

“Sort of like sex.”

3

“MY EXPERIENCES must be lacking because I can’t ever recall sex having such a profound effect.” She knew she’d been seriously deprived when it came to quantity of intimate encounters, but now she had to consider that she’d never even enjoyed much quality in that department. “And since I have built a whole company around the idea of indulging your inner hedonist, I think I’m going to have to investigate this sex-as-thrill premise.”

His hand cupped her chin tilting her face toward his in a way that sent her pulse into overdrive.

“It can be risky to seek adventure with someone you don’t know much about.”

As if she didn’t have enough phobias without him resorting to scare tactics.

“Trying to warn me away?”

“Not from me.” His thumb dragged slowly along her bottom lip. “Selfishly, maybe I’m just hoping you don’t consider propositioning anyone else. I’d like to be the one to get to know you better.”

The heat that had been flowing through her veins cooled slightly at the reminder that her night had started off with another man.

“I’ll keep that in mind if ever I feel the need to issue a proposition again.” She smoothed the heavy red flannel of her robe over her knee. “Considering my first attempt landed a total stranger in my room, caused a panic attack and proved that the one guy I tried propositioning is flat-out deceitful, I probably won’t put myself out on a limb for sex again anytime too soon.”

“I shouldn’t have brought it up.” Devon leaned back on the couch, giving her enough space to start thinking with her mind again instead of her overheated body that still remembered the feel of his hands on her naked thigh. “There’s a chance this guy Brady used some semi-shady tactics to squeeze me out of a job, and while I’ve got plenty of career doors open to me, I can’t help but resent that his maneuvering flew in the face of his old man’s wishes just a few months after the guy kicked the bucket. I’ll admit, I might just be choking on a couple of sour grapes. But in case I’m not, you might want to be careful.”

“I make it a habit not to let somebody close to me again if they hurt me once.” She had enough problems with trust without putting herself on the line that way. “What about you? Are you leaving the company because this guy stole your spot?”

“I’m not willing to play games to win back the job without the board’s endorsement. I probably should have made more noise about my qualifications sooner in the decision process, but I tend to get wrapped up in projects more than politics.”

“So you bow out gracefully even though you don’t have much faith in the company’s new director?” Jenny knew she’d never have the heart to play those kinds of games either, but Devon built thrill rides for the fun.

No doubt he could successfully handle corporate politics.

“The board chose him, so maybe he has strengths I don’t know about. There comes a time when peace is more important than fighting for what I might think is fair.” He almost looked convinced of it. Almost. “Besides, no one promises life will be fair. You know that going in.”

“So you’re leaving Shore Engineers to do what?”

“Go out on my own. Do some consulting work for a few amusement parks to put together the kinds of rides thrill seekers want.” He pulled over the champagne bucket and refilled their glasses. “Now that our day-to-day lives are so insulated from physical danger, theme parks are more popular than ever because they provide the edge-of-your-seat experience absent from our lives.”

“I see you’ve given this idea of incorporating excitement into life a lot of thought.” She sipped her champagne and let the bubbles tickle her lip. The dry bite of the drink made her all the more thirsty somehow, but she knew drinking more wouldn’t help.

A taste of Devon Baines, however, might just do the trick.

“I grew up with an appreciation for adventure.” His arm sprawled along the back of the sofa while he soaked up the view of Atlantic City and the ocean out the window and she soaked up the view of him.

How might her life be different if she allowed herself to dive headfirst into adventure sometimes instead of retreating behind the safe four walls of her apartment? She’d taken a risk and faced danger by coming here this week and look at how she’d thrived in spite of the potential consequences. She’d survived an anxiety attack and met a fascinating man in the process. Her agoraphobia didn’t have to rule her life.