The Ruthless Caleb Wilde

“Sorry,” he said, “but I’m going to leave soon.”

She leaned in a little. Her breasts brushed lightly against his arm and she pulled back but the contact, quick as it was, shot straight through him.

She spoke again. He still couldn’t hear her, thanks to the music, but he could certainly take a second look.

What the hell was that thing she was wearing? A dress, or something that could have been a dress if you’d added another twelve inches of fabric. It was black. Or deep blue. Iridescent, anyway, glittery, or maybe it was the effect of the light.

Either way, the dress looked as if it had been glued on her. Skinny straps. Low bodice. A sinfully low bodice, revealing the curve of lush breasts.

His gaze drifted lower, to where the dress ended at the very tops of her thighs.

To his amazement, he felt his body and brain coming back on-line.

He smiled. The girl didn’t.

“I’m Caleb,” he said. “I didn’t get your name.”

Those big blue eyes turned icy.

“I didn’t give it.”

So much for that. She might be in the mood for games. He sure as hell wasn’t.

“In that case,” he said in his best, intimidate-the-witness tone, “why are you talking to me?”

“I’m paid to talk to you,” she said, her voice as cold as her eyes.

“Well, that’s certainly blunt but I promise you, lady, I am absolutely not inter—”

“I’m paid to ask what you’re drinking. And to bring you a refill.” This time, the look she gave him was filled with stony satisfaction. “I’m a waitress, sir. Trust me. I wouldn’t have looked at you twice if I weren’t.”

Caleb blinked.

Over the years, a couple of women had told him off. There was the girl in fifth grade, Carrie or Corey, something like that, who’d slugged him after he’d made fun of her over some silly thing at recess. And a mistress—a former mistress—who’d told him exactly what he could do with the farewell sapphire earrings he’d sent her after she’d told him it was time they set a wedding date.

Neither had put him in his place better than this, or even as well.

He supposed he ought to be angry.

He wasn’t.

The fact was, he admired Blondie’s gumption. An old-fashioned, down-home word, gumption, but it was eminently suitable.

That face, that body, that dress … she’d probably been hit on a dozen times tonight until she’d finally thought, enough!

He wasn’t foolish enough to think she could have avoided the problem by wearing something else.

Caleb had worked his way through law school, rather than touch his father’s money or the money he’d inherited from his mother.

He’d delivered pizza, waited tables at Friendly’s, worked at an off-campus bar.

There’d been a dress code for the wait staff at the bar.

For the men: white shirts, black bow ties, black trousers, black shoes.

For the women: black ribbons around their throats, low-cut white T-shirts a size too small, swingy black skirts that barely covered their asses and black stiletto heels.

Or they were fired.

Sexual discrimination was alive and well in twenty-first century America. As a lawyer, as a man, Caleb knew that.

Still, he figured he deserved better than being treated like some kind of predator.

He told that to Blondie.

She raised her chin.

“Is that a ‘no’ to another drink?” she said coldly.

“That’s exactly what it is,” he said. Then he turned his back to her, drank a little more of what remained of his Scotch and settled in to observe the scene for the next fifteen or twenty minutes.

It was pretty much the same as it had been since he’d arrived. The only thing that had changed was that the dancing had grown faster. Maybe hotter was a better word.

Lots of bodies rubbing. Lots of moves that were almost as much fun done vertically as they’d have been if done horizontally.

The crowd was really in to it.

The wait staff, too.

He hadn’t noticed them before. Now, his eye picked them up without trying. Good-looking guys, shirtless, wearing tight black trousers, laughing with the customers who were obviously joking with them, accommodating the women who flirted with them.

Good-looking women, in duplicates of Blondie’s outfit—tight, low-cut, short, glittery dresses that left bare long, long legs made even longer by sky-high stilettos.

None of the women were as good-looking as Blondie.

Or maybe none of them carried themselves the same way.

She was easy to spot, even in the crowd. She had her hair piled up on top of her head in a mass of curls. Plus, there was the way she held herself. Tall. Proud. Her posture almost rigid.

Forget what she was wearing, that I’m-too-sexy-for-this-dress thing.

It was her bearing that spoke loudest, and what it said was, Keep Away.

Caleb found his eyes glued to her.

He saw what happened when she approached one of the tiny tables ringed around the dance floor and one of the bozos seated at it laughed up at her, said something, and put a hand on her hip.

She pulled back as if that hand was a scorpion.