Racing Heart (The Billionaire Brothers 1) (3 page)

Megan stopped herself for a moment. Googling someone before a date, she told herself, was standard practice these days, but part of her felt that Jake was at a particular disadvantage, given the wealth of speculation about his love life which floated daily around the Blogosphere. If she’d had a date with a medical student, Megan mused, there wouldn’t be pages dedicated to his past conquests. Did it matter, after all, if Jake had played the field? He was a young, handsome man with all the time in the world to ‘settle down’ with the right woman.

Still, the litany of short relationships unsettled Megan. “One drink,” she whispered to his most glamorous image, a portrait of him in a beautifully-fitting suit, apparently taken at an awards dinner. “
One
drink. Nothing more.”

***

Megan could happily have strangled the scheduling office, but that wouldn’t have changed anything. Here she was, an hour from being picked up by the legendary Jake McMahon, and she was only now getting scrubbed after a six-hour ward shift.

“Did Mrs. Bennett get discharged?” her nurse colleague wanted to know.

Megan nodded. “I think we’ll see her again, unless she agrees to use a walker. Three falls in a month, wasn’t it?”

It had been a busy shift, made yet more stressful by endlessly worrying about whether she would have enough time to get home and change. And, what would she wear? And, which perfume to choose? And, should she let Jake kiss her at the end of the night? It was a minor miracle that her only slip-up was during drawing some blood, when her distracted needle work had condemned a very pale young man to a marginally more painful experience than was strictly necessary.
He’ll get over it
, she remembered thinking to herself.
This is hardly the first needle to have gone into his arm.
 

Fallen grandmothers, mute drug addicts and hassled colleagues all behind her, Megan fairly dashed to her Fiesta for the drive home. Saturday evening’s traffic was only slightly better than on weekdays, and by the time she trotted up the stairs to her apartment, only 40 minutes remained.

“You could text him and tell him you’re running late,” Erica advised. She was lounging in the living room reading the latest
Cosmopolitan
and making a start on a bottle of Chianti.

Megan was transitioning from shower back to bedroom. “I don’t want to look flaky.”

Erica laughed companionably. “It’s not flaky to give yourself enough time to look
fabulous
,” she argued. Still, Megan would not be moved, choosing instead to make her dress selection, perfume choice and, perhaps most agonizingly, underwear decisions in a white heat of flustered preparation.

“Sexy or slimming?” she asked Erica, holding up two pairs of panties. “These ones are sexy and empowering, whereas
these
,” she said, “remind me not to go home with a guy on the first date.” She held them both aloft. “What do you think?”

Erica closed her magazine and gave the choice some thought. “I think,” she said after a long moment, “that whichever pair you choose, they’ll be on his bedroom floor later tonight. May as well go sexy”.

Used to such salacious commentary from her roommate, Megan feigned a shocked disgust. “You know how many men have had my underwear on their floor in the last year?”

Erica held up a circled thumb and forefinger. “Is that about right? Plus or minus?”

“Yes it is, young lady.
But
, like I said, I
don’t
screw guys on first dates. I thought you knew that about me.”

The two women heard a car pull up outside, but it was Erica who stepped to the window. “Yeah,” she offered, looking out. “I have the feeling you’ll be rethinking that rule this evening.”

“Oh, really?” Megan replied, fastening a pair of silver earrings to her ears. “Why is that?”

Erica pointed out of the window and Megan followed her gesture to find a gleaming, almost futuristic sports car adorning their street. A gull-wing door opened in the sleek, silver fuselage and Jake McMahon stepped out.

“Holy shit! It’s a
Back To The Future
car!”

Erica laughed and helped smooth down Megan’s dress, a tight-ish, black cocktail dress, short enough to be sexy but not so short as to risk an immodest display when getting into a sports car. “You’ll be fine. Be yourself, but no jokes about ‘compensating’ or asking him if he has hair plugs!”

“But you didn’t
see
that guy!” Megan protested.

“Yeah,” replied Erica drily. “If I remember correctly, you never saw him again, either.”

Megan shrugged. “Yeah, well. He had hair plugs. Who wants to date a guy with
hair plugs
? Anyway, Jake looks like a goddamn model. I’ll be lucky if I can talk at all in front of him.”

“Just text me later, OK?” She kissed Megan on the cheek. “Especially if you need me to be, erm...”

“Out of the way?” Megan guessed.

“Let’s say that. I don’t want to interrupt anything.”

Megan turned to the mirror at the top of the stairs. “Crap! I haven’t done anything to my hair and he’s already here!”

Erica watched this pre-departure chaos with amusement but always wished Megan success, especially in her stuttering love life. “Just flip your head over and shake it out,” she advised. “The sexy bed-head look is very popular with guys.”

Megan obliged and then flipped her head back up. “Okay?”

“You look like a friggin’ supermodel. You may
both
spend the evening incapable of speech!”

Megan spanked Erica’s butt playfully on the way out, grabbed her black leather purse and slinked down the stair, feeling a little like a model on a catwalk. Her outward bravado hid some pretty major inner nerves.
Breathe, Megan. He ain’t all that, really. Just a world-famous, tech-genius, Lamborghini-driving serial monogamist.
 

Oh. Fuck.

Megan opened the door.

“Good evening.” Jake was in a relaxed, dark blue suit with a white button-down shirt, the top two buttons undone. His blonde hair was looking its best, as if he’d come straight from the barber. He wore a smile which exuded confidence in an open, rather sexy way. In the two seconds it took Megan to form an impression, she quickly found herself close to panic.
What is
this guy
doing on a date with
me?

“Well, I have to tell you, Jake,” she quipped nervously, motioning to the sports car, “if this is intended to impress me, it’s working.”

He seemed slightly surprised. “Oh, this? I’m just test-driving this for a friend. Going to take it back later tonight. I just thought you’d like to see it before I do.” He stepped back and invited her to occupy the passenger seat.

The Lamborghini Huracan was built principally for speed, but luxury was crafted into every aspect of the design. Megan seemed to slide into the seat, the wonderful sensation of fine leather very much present through her black cocktail dress. Rather than close it in the conventional manner, Jake effortlessly nudged the raised door downward and it slid into the fuselage like a well-engineered glove. There was something comforting in that precision, something even attractive in that attention to detail.
He appreciates quality,
Megan thought,
like a surgeon who knows when a scalpel is truly sharp.
She felt slightly giddy, a little self-conscious, but also pleasingly excited
.
 

“It must feel pretty good,” Megan observed as they slid smoothly along the streets of her neighborhood, “to be driving around in something that looks like a billion dollars.”

Jake would have been lying if he’d claimed indifference to the turning heads, especially those of the town’s more than adequate number of attractive women. “I get a kick out of it,” he admitted with a grin. “I guess, at heart, I’m a showman.”

No kidding.
Megan watched him negotiate the traffic and turns of central Boston, not a traffic environment for the faint hearted. “So, where are we going?” she asked.

Jake was pressing buttons, seemingly experimentally. “Do you know a bar called Circus?”

Megan shook her head, and couldn’t help noticing an odd sensation from beneath the seat. “Jake?”

“Hmm?”

She paused to check she wasn’t imagining things. “Are you warming my ass right now?”

His hand flew to the dashboard and clicked off a small button. “Sorry...” he said. “I’m like a boy on Christmas morning when they let me drive one of these cars.”

“If it were Christmas morning, I wouldn’t mind,” she said with a wry smile, “but it’s seventy degrees out. Come the next nor’easter, though, you can warm my ass as much as you want.”

She cringed inwardly. The Voice of Reason, so often ignored in her chaotic life, expressed its own eye-rolling distaste. Do you ever... and I do mean *ever* actually take the risk of *thinking* before you speak? ‘You can warm my ass...’ For heaven’s sake. You’re not even drunk!

Jake seemed either to remember her penchant for blurting out the least appropriate comment, or was content to be quietly amused, reacting with another indulging smile. Megan’s embarrassment eased only as they found a parking space in one of central Boston’s quiet back streets. Jake offered his arm and they walked together down to the street level and around the corner, dodging the early-evening dinner and theater crowds. The city was very alive at this hour, a pleasant late-spring air having brought out locals and students for food and a walk on the Common.

Circus wasn’t heaving quite yet, but it was nearly full. A trendy, blue-lit place with scatterings of grouped chairs around tall, circular tables, the place was dominated by an elongated, curved bar around which a growing throng was trying, with mixed success, to get the barman’s attention. Jake spoke quietly to the hostess, a blonde bombshell in an outrageously slinky green number who escorted the pair to their table, as quiet as one could hope for amid the early-evening din.

“Are you here a lot?” Megan asked, noting that Jake seemed familiar with the hostess. And immediately wondering if that was a personal, or merely a professional connection.

“A few times a month,” he replied. “One of my software partners introduced it to me as his favorite place for pre-dinner drinks.” Megan wondered how many flustered trainee nurses his ‘software partner’ had brought here. Looking around, she noticed that a lot of the clientele were wearing the value of her student debt. Jake though, seemed to be reading her mind. “You look terrific tonight,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wearing something so...”

Megan let it hang in the air. “So...?”

Jake checked himself, laughed self-consciously. “I was going to say, ‘so grown up’, but then we’ve known each other a long time, haven’t we?”

Megan glanced at the menu distractedly. “You’d have to say, ‘on and off’ for a long time. You do have a habit of disappearing.” Most of the drinks cost enough to buy a major nursing textbook.

“The curse of my profession,” he said, almost sadly. “Tom takes care of the technology. I’m in charge of the
presentation
,” he added with a flourish. “These days, it won’t sell unless it’s smarter than Einstein, smaller than the competition, or just plain old sexy.”

Megan picked her drink. “Which one of those three are you?”
Will. You. Shut. Up.
 

“Either number one, or number three, but definitely not number two,” he assured her. “As for the products, it’s always true that sex sells better than science,” he said with a brief, unconscious but all too obvious glance at the hostess’ delectable curves.

“And what does that say about us? As consumers?” Megan asked.

Jake made his own selection and lowered his menu. “That we’re human. And that we know what we want.”

The waitress arrived.
Jesus, do they hire exclusively supermodels for this place, or has Boston’s pool of floor staff suddenly gotten a lot sexier?
“Good evening,” the waitress said cheerily, placing coasters in front of them both. “What can I get for you to begin?”

Jake motioned to Megan. “A dry martini,” she said confidently. “Extra dirty.” She watched as Jake raised an amused eyebrow.

You don’t even know what that means. You just wanted him to hear you say it. God, you’re damaged.
 

“Certainly,” the waitress purred. “And for you, Sir?”

“Macallan, 1824. Neat, no ice.” He quickly added, “Please”.

“Coming right up,” the young woman assured them, returning to the bar with the air of someone whose tips would pay the week’s rent in this one evening.

Megan glanced back at her menu before closing it up. “A ninety dollar whiskey? A Lamborghini? Don’t tell me you haven’t changed since you were the nerdy teenager I thought had the hots for me.”

“Well, some things don’t change,” Jake said. Megan stared at him, and he looked thoughtfully back at her across the table. Then, as though a switch had been flipped, his charming smile returned. “I loved sports cars, even back then.”

Megan resisted, only barely, the urge to kick his shin under the table. “You must have seen a lot of the world by now,” she said, changing the subject. “Weren’t you somewhere in Asia last week?” Googling him had revealed more than salacious photos; he was truly an international presence.

“Kuala Lumpur,” Jake confirmed. “Tom needs a reliable source for a suite of servo motors.” Megan’s reaction was a blank stare. “They control the fine movements of robot arms for his new space station experiment.”

The blankness turned to amazement. “Tom’s going into
space?
”

His first real laugh of the evening was sweetly resonant, a genuine and pleasing sound.
Even if it’s because I’m a dimwit, I do kinda like making him laugh.
“I’m afraid not, although plenty of people would love to see him go. He’s building an experiment in automated repair for the International Space Station. The big solar panels are wearing out and space walks would be too dangerous.”

Their drinks arrived, the waitress doing her best to neither let Jake know that she recognized him, nor that she’d gladly take him home if his date didn’t work out. “Thank you,” he said, and then followed her with his eyes. Her back was revealed almost in its entirety by a dress so low-cut it barely seemed there at all.