Girl's Guide to Hunting & Kissing. Joanne Rock

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СКАЧАТЬ capacity and the women were running on a thin margin for loss given how much they’d each strapped themselves to personally invest in Club Paradise.

      To keep them financially solvent, they needed to fill every room every night and reserve them well into the next six months.

      Of course, Lainie had a plan for a massive promotion campaign that included assignments for everyone. Hence the spiral notebooks.

      “Brianne, you can call some of your contacts from the film industry and see if anyone wants to use the resort as a setting for a movie.” Lainie never asked questions. She issued orders.

      “It can be difficult to—” Brianne started, but Lainie was already on to the next assignment.

      “Giselle can muscle some of the food magazines about reviewing the restaurants at the club. We need a food critic in here—or several—so we can get some write-ups. And Summer has already contacted a travel magazine, so I’m sure we can expect a visit from them any day.” Lainie tapped her silver pen against her yellow legal pad as she perched on a corner of the scaffolding crowding the half-finished room. “We really need the positive press. We’ve been in the papers ever since the first Rat Pack embezzler was put behind bars. Mel Baxter’s trial has been calling into question the club’s reputation and making out-of-towners more leery of staying here. If we want to keep our heads above water this first year, we have to start fighting back.”

      Lainie couldn’t have issued a more powerful call to action as far as Summer was concerned. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—fail in her first attempt to pour something of herself into her work. Always before she’d taken jobs to bide the time, jobs to make money, jobs to allow her to travel around and see the country.

      Her work with Club Paradise was about more than that. She didn’t want to be a gypsy forever. She wanted to prove to herself that she could stay put long enough to accomplish something important, something special, something that contained a piece of her long after she’d gone.

      So even though her nerves throbbed with expectation at the thought of seeing Jackson again, she needed to delay her trip to his boat until she placed another call to Wanderlust magazine. For that matter, she would need to delay the date if she couldn’t get business sewn up first.

      Because no matter how much she wanted to get a little wild with South Beach’s hottest politician, her job had to come first.

      “DON’T YOU THINK your career needs to come first, Jack?”

      The voice of his future campaign manager rasped through Jackson’s cell phone, making a point he damn well didn’t want to hear. Fortunately, Jackson had walked through life masking annoyance for the sake of his family’s political ambitions many times and he smoothly lowered the small wooden gangplank on his sailboat while he set Lucky Adams straight.

      “I’m still determining my next career move, so it’s actually always in the forefront of my mind.” Though that might be stretching the truth a bit, since he was keeping one eye on the pier for Summer’s long blond hair and tiny pink braids the whole time he prepped his boat to hit the water. “I’m not going to make a lot of campaign plans until I’m one-hundred-percent sure this is what I want.”

      “Every day you wait, your chances of winning decrease.” Smooth-talking Lucky was a slick manager in his early thirties who’d already developed a reputation for building his clients into heavy hitters. He proceeded to launch into a well-articulated diatribe about the dire state of Jackson’s political future while Jackson checked the fuel tank and rolled up the canvas tarp covering the seats in the back of the boat.

      He didn’t need to hear the tirade again to know he was taking chances with his future by putting off his announcement to run in the state legislature race. But he’d been in a tailspin ever since the scandal involving his father had been uncovered. Ever since he’d learned his father’s entire political career—from his stint as an FBI assistant director to his term as a high-powered judge—was based on lies and deception.

      Sort of robbed the job of some of its sheen.

      Add to that the fact that the media would dissect all his father’s mistakes in relation to Jackson’s campaign and the whole proposition became less enticing.

      And then, there was Summer…

      Jackson spied her just as she jumped into his mind. She strode down the pier and onto the long wooden dock, her high heels traded for a pair of bright white tennis shoes with no socks and endlessly long legs tucked into denim shorts. A tiny white T-shirt with a bright blue emblem for water—the astrological thing again—didn’t quite reach the hem of the shorts. In one hand she held a shiny chrome cell phone that she now tucked inside her purse.

      The pink braids from last night had vanished without a trace. Today her hair was all blond and gathered in a loose ponytail which she had tossed over one shoulder.

      She would have looked almost conventional if not for the silver sunglasses she sported. The frames around her eyes were shaped like seashells and coated with glitter.

      His brain lost all focus as he absorbed the sight of her—sexy and eccentric, a definite original. Relief charged through him with as much force as anticipation, because up until that moment he hadn’t been entirely sure she would show.

      Yet here she was.

      “You there, Jackson?” The smooth-talking masculine voice on the other end of his phone jarred him.

      “I need to head out now, Lucky.” The words fell off his lips with wooden heaviness, his brain on a totally different path that had nothing to do with forming words. “I’ll stop by there later tonight and we’ll figure out when to schedule the press conference.”

      He disconnected the call and turned off the ringer for good measure. Jogging two steps down into the berth he tossed the phone on the bed in his stateroom. Out of sight, out of mind. He’d told Summer he would be impulsive today, hadn’t he? Taking time off from politics—both family and professional—would be a first for him.

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