Strictly Business (3 page)

“Who are you and how did you get into this room?” he demanded.

“The hotel put me in this room,” she said, puzzled by his second question.

“Then they’ve got terrific room service. But I didn’t order room service, sweetheart, so how did you get into my room?”

She gaped at him. “Your … But this is my room!”

“Your room?” He frowned at her, then snatched something off the dresser and held it up. It was a key. “It says ten twenty-six. That was the room I was given when I registered. Where’s your key?”

“I—I don’t know.” She glanced around the room. It certainly looked like the same one she’d been put in last night. “I’m here with friends, and they registered for me … Wait a minute.”

She walked over to the chair and pulled her purse out from underneath her dress. She rummaged through it, hoping to find a hotel key, but none was there.

“My friends must have the key,” she muttered, a flush rising in her cheeks again.

“I think I just made some new friends,” he drawled, eyeing her lustfully.

There had to be a logical explanation here, she thought. “Maybe there was a mix-up at the desk and that’s how we wound up in the same room.”

“Sounds like my kind of mix-up.”

He looked as if he were about to take full advantage of the mix-up. She inhaled deeply to fight back her rising panic, telling herself she wouldn’t
not
remember if something had happened between them. Much as she wished she didn’t, she had to tell him who she was and remind him of their meeting on Tuesday.

“It’s definitely a mix-up,” she said, attempting a casual smile. It didn’t feel casual. “But I hope you have a sense of humor. You see—”

She was interrupted by a knock at the door.

“I bet it’s the manager, coming to tell us there’s a mix-up,” he said, striding over to the door. “Like we haven’t figured that out for ourselves.”

He unlocked the door and opened it. The stripper, Adonis, was standing on the threshold.

“Tony!”

Jess pressed a shaking hand against her eyes. The lover! Slowly, she sank down onto the edge of the mattress.
This is another fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into
, she thought.

“Well, well, well,” Tony said. Jess lowered her hand
just in time to see him stroll into the room. “Who have we here, Nick?”

“I haven’t found out yet,” Nick said, shutting the door with a bang.

“You mean you never even asked?” Tony exclaimed in a shocked voice. “A gentleman always asks, Nick.”

“Dammit, Tony, don’t tease. You ought to know better, after the talk we had last night—”

Jess broke in. “Ah … excuse me.”

The men turned toward her.

“This is not what you’re thinking,” she began. The younger man must be devastated by what seemed like a betrayal, she thought. She’d been in his position herself, and knew only too well how hurt and humiliated he must feel. She prayed that Mikaris would just be momentarily embarrassed that she knew about his sexual preference. Unfortunately, she didn’t think calling on the Almighty would help. She had a feeling her chances for the job were one big zip. “There seems to have been some kind of mix-up by the hotel, and your … ah, anyway, somehow we were given the same room.”

“Given the same room?” Tony asked, arching his eyebrows in clear disbelief.

“We only slept together—” Jess exclaimed, then realized how that sounded.

“Shared a bed,” Nick corrected.

“We didn’t know it … we were sleeping …” She snapped her jaw shut in frustration, counted to five, and said, “Look, it’s just a foul-up on the hotel’s part. But I know how it looks to you to catch a … loved one in a hotel room with another woman. I mean man. No, woman.” She groaned, finding it difficult to keep the genders straight. “We didn’t do
anything! After all, Mr.… well, he’s gay, and you’re gay. It’s just a very innocent mix-up, that’s all—”

A bellow of pure outrage blasted through the room. Shocked, Jess stared wide-eyed at Nick.

“I’m not gay!” he shouted. “Why the hell would anyone think I’m gay?”

“But you looked gay last night!” she said, hopelessly confused. “At the show … staring at him like—”

“This,” he said through clenched teeth, “is my brother!
My brother!
And I wasn’t staring at him the way I was staring at
you!
”

There was a moment of charged silence, then Tony burst into laughter. It took Jess a moment to realize that he was laughing. In fact, he was leaning against the wall as if he couldn’t hold himself upright.

“You were perfect,” he said, gasping. “You thought Nick was gay! I couldn’t have done better if I’d written a script.”

It suddenly dawned on her that this had to be a joke. A practical joke!

“I’m the jokee?” she asked in shock. “Dammit! I’m really this year’s victim, right?”

Still laughing, Tony nodded.

Jess started to laugh from sheer nerves. She couldn’t help it, even though she had to press her palm against the top of her head to stop the pain her laughter caused. Sandy had suckered her beautifully, she thought, and she would kill her good friend later.

“I should have known it,” she finally said, shaking her head.

“What the hell is this about a joke?” Nick asked angrily.

“Your downfall, Nick,” Tony said. “And it was even better than I’d planned.”

“My downfall?” He glared at Tony. “Do you mean you planned this little stunt?”

Tony grinned. “Let’s just say I took a joke one step farther.” He turned to Jess. “I borrowed Sandy’s joke to play one on my brother, Ms. Brannen.”

At her name, Nick instantly shifted his gaze to her. Jess realized that he hadn’t been amused at being the victim of a practical joke, and he wasn’t about to start now. The joke wasn’t funny anymore. Not funny at all.

Fate, she decided, had a warped sense of humor. Facing Nick, she pulled her courage together and lifted her chin. “I started to tell you before that I’m Jess Brannen, but we were interrupted. It would seem, Mr. Mikaris, that our interview was moved up to this morning. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to get dressed, go home, and have a good scream.”

“But I don’t understand,” Sandy exclaimed into the phone. “The joke was supposed to be that you’d wake up to find a man in your room who would act like you’d picked him up. You’ve never done that in your life. But it was supposed to be Tony Mikaris! I didn’t even know Nick was going to be there.”

“Well, he was.” Jess wished she could yank her friend through the telephone wire and into her kitchen. It would be lovely to put her hands around Sandy’s throat. “This is just great. I had a meeting with Mikaris to get the landscaping job for the model of these custom farmettes he’s building near Washington’s Crossing. It’s called MeadowHill.”

“I didn’t know that. I mean I know about MeadowHill. Marty’s one of Nick’s backers. But I didn’t know you were up for the landscaping job.”

“Your wonderful husband Marty recommended me!” Jess resisted the urge to scream in frustration. Anyway, she’d done that on the two-hour drive home, and it hadn’t helped.

“But you didn’t tell me, and neither did Marty,” Sandy wailed.

“I didn’t tell you because I have this stupid superstition that I’ll jinx a job if I blab.” Jess rubbed her forehead. “I was going to tell you after I got it. I don’t know why Marty didn’t tell you.”

“He probably thought you would want to be the one to tell me. He’s like that, the idiot. Jess, I’m sorry the joke backfired. Really sorry. Look, it’s not that bad. Just explain to Nick—”

“Sandy,” Jess interrupted, “I thought the man was gay! If he didn’t have a sense of humor on that one, he’s certainly not going to be Mr. Understanding about the rest of it.”

“You thought …” Sandy burst into laughter. “Lord, Jess! You must have hit him in his male pride. Nick’s got a lot of that.”

Jess groaned. “I doubt that it was the high point in his life. But, dammit, Sandy! This is all your fault!”

“I wasn’t the one who thought he was gay, Jess.”

“I don’t mean that part!” Jess wished she could forget that she’d ever thought it of Nick. “Everything would have been fine if you’d found a more reliable participant than Tony. He’s the one who made the switch.”

There was a long pause before Sandy asked, “Are you planning on speaking to me ever again?”

“I don’t know.”

“I forgave you when that damn mariachi band played for four hours on my anniversary, Jess,” Sandy wheedled. “At one in the morning. Believe me, that wasn’t easy, especially when they interrupted our reenactment of the wedding night.”

Jess giggled.

“Four hours, Jess. No amount of money would buy them off, either. I thought Marty would go crazy. But I forgave you. Really and truly, in my heart of hearts, I forgave you for that one.”

“Since you put it like that …”

When Jess finally hung up the phone, she stared at it in disgust. What a disaster. It was obvious that Sandy had planned an entirely different ending to the joke, but it hadn’t worked out that way.

She pulled out a stool at the kitchen counter and sat down. Dammit! She had really wanted that job on the Mikaris model. It would have established her as a legitimate landscaper. Nick Mikaris wasn’t someone who would hire her only so he could say afterward, “Would you believe it? Jess Brannen laid my sod.”

None of her friends or family took her landscaping business seriously. To an extent, she couldn’t blame them. After all, she’d grown up with three trust funds. Arranging flowers was an acceptable hobby for someone with her background, but spreading fertilizer wasn’t. She’d already done the acceptable thing—prep school, college, marriage, charity work. It had taken a humiliating divorce before she’d realized that the acceptable wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Jess smiled wryly. Her mother had warned her.

Shortly after the divorce, she had needed something normal. Something that wouldn’t raise eyebrows or be splattered in the gossip columns of the newspapers. By accident, she had discovered landscaping. Nothing was more satisfying for her than to take the bare earth and create pleasure for the senses from it. All she asked for was a little respect while she was doing it. When Sandy’s husband, Marty, one of Mikaris’s investors, had suggested she see Nick, she’d jumped at the chance. After a couple of years in operation, her business was ready to move up, and she’d been looking for the perfect job to put her over the edge. Mikaris was only building ten homes, five-acre farmettes actually, but the job had sounded perfect. And best of all, it would have been two professionals working together. He would customize the homes to the owners’ specifications, and she would customize the properties. She had known her background might hamper her, and she had asked Marty not to say anything, planning to tell Mikaris herself. After she got the job.

Now, because of a dumb practical joke that had backfired, she’d lost the opportunity altogether.

“Damn! The whole thing blown in one morning because of a silly joke,” she muttered to herself.

She remembered how she had grabbed her dress and purse and run out of the room, leaving her shoes behind.
Real professional, Jess
, she thought in frustration. She’d stuck him with the hotel bill, too.

He’d never subcontract the landscaping to her now. How would she ever explain the mess in one breath and persuade him she was a businesswoman in the next? And what about her unexpected yet strong
attraction to Mikaris? She considered that and decided that being attracted to him might have complicated things a little, but she could have handled it. He was hard-edged, not at all the kind of man she usually gravitated toward, or ever thought she would be attracted to. And knowing what she knew about herself, she had no alternative but to ignore her attraction …

Jess straightened, as a thought occurred to her. She was a mature woman, but she hadn’t been thinking like one. Why shouldn’t she keep the interview? She had simply been caught up in a practical joke between brothers. Granted, it was embarrassing, but it had nothing to do with the job. Granted, she found him attractive, but she had enough barriers erected to keep her in balance. It wouldn’t be easy to face him again, but she’d be a fool not to try. The MeadowHill project would make her name in landscaping.

After all, what really mattered was that the man needed a landscaper. She was a landscaper, and a damn good one.

Now all she needed to do was persuade Nick Mikaris of that.

Perched atop the unfinished roof of his model house, Nick watched a red BMW pull onto the construction site and stop next to the office trailer.

Jess Brannen emerged gracefully from the car and into the cool April day. She was dressed in a cream-colored suit and sensible low-heeled shoes. She pulled a large portfolio from the car, then looked around the site, taking in the house whose exterior was nearly finished. Land had been cleared for four more. Leisurely surveying her, he had to admit that she possessed the best legs he’d ever seen. From under the hem of her skirt, smooth calves tapered into trim ankles …

Suddenly, he became aware of whistles and catcalls from his workers.

“Back to work, guys,” he ordered, not liking the way they were eyeing her. The male appreciation was instantly replaced by the racket of busy hammers and saws.

As he climbed down a ladder, Nick admitted that he hadn’t expected her to keep the appointment, not after the other morning. He really ought to throw her off the site. Over the weekend he’d discovered a few disturbing things about Jess Brannen. She liked to involve herself in silly practical jokes. The one in Atlantic City was hardly the first. Her family was “old” Philadelphia money, something his lawyer, Marty Fitzgerald, had neglected to tell him earlier. And she’d only worked with single homes before, probably friends of her parents.

Still, he hadn’t been able to rid himself of the vision of her as she’d been that morning. Dark, dark hair had tumbled about her shoulders, and translucent silk had barely hidden her delicious curves. She could easily drive a man to insanity … and satisfaction.

She had thought he was gay.

That irritated him beyond reason. He knew he shouldn’t hold the incident in Atlantic City against her. The simple fact was that he needed a professional, experienced landscaper for his homes and Jess Brannen didn’t qualify for the job.