Up All Night

“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?”