Play with Me. Leslie Kelly

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      PITTSBURGH TO CHICAGO was a short, easy trip even on a bad day. Fortunately, aside from the fact that he was taking his first flight in a vehicle that didn’t look much bigger than his SUV, today was shaping up to be a very good one. And he wasn’t just thinking about the weather, which was cool, crisp and clear.

      As they took off, Reese went over the situation again in his mind. One hour in the air—that was good. For a mere sixty minutes, he could trick his brain into believing he wasn’t really sitting inside an oversize tin can, hurtling across a couple of states.

      After that, he faced a short taxi ride to the newest location of a brew-pub chain owned by a wealthy Chicago family, the Braddocks. They had recently agreed to offer Campbell’s Lager as a house beer in a couple of their bars. It was a foot in the door, and Reese hoped to grow the account and get them to expand their order to include every one of their establishments. So he couldn’t refuse when he got a call from old Mr. Braddock himself this morning, asking him to come to put in an appearance at tonight’s opening.

      He wouldn’t have to stay long—just had to shake a few hands and say a few thank-yous. He should be in and out in under an hour.

      And after that … what?

      He had intended to hop a commercial flight back to Pittsburgh tonight. The trip had been too impromptu to fly that way this afternoon, but there was one regional jet leaving at 10:00 p.m. that he could undoubtedly find a seat on. If he wanted to.

      But ever since he had walked across the tarmac toward the small private plane and seen the woman standing at the base of the steps, he hadn’t wanted to. Because one look at her and he’d been interested. One word and he’d been intrigued. And one brief conversation and he’d been utterly hooked.

      It wasn’t just that she was beautiful. He knew better than to think beauty was ever more than a surface pleasantry. Besides, he was no chauvinist. He had four sisters, three of them unmarried and living at home, the fourth a divorced single mom. Since his brother was only in his early teens, Reese bore the full brunt of female judgment against his sex. The only other adult male in close proximity was Ralph, his black lab, who had lost his claim to maleness at the hands of a ruthless vet when he was just six months old. A female vet.

      So, yeah, Reese knew better than to ever judge a woman solely on appearance.

      Amanda Bauer’s amazing body, her thick reddish-brown hair that hung past her shoulders and her damn-near-perfect face might have stilled his heart for a moment or two. But her smile, her husky voice, the shininess of her green eyes and the snappy humor had brought about the full stop.

       So what are you going to do about it?

      He needed to decide. And he now had only about forty-five minutes in which to do it.

      In any other situation—if they’d met at a business meeting or a local bar—he might not have considered it. He’d been living in a fishbowl for the past two years, with his every move analyzed and dissected by his family. Bringing a woman into the picture was just inviting the kind of microscopic commentary he did not want.

      But this was totally different. His pilot was someone he’d never seen before and, after today, probably would never see again. The thought made him suddenly wonder about the ways in which they could spend that day.

      Fortunately, thinking about all those things had distracted him from the whole terrifying takeoff business. They’d chatted while she’d prepared for flight, but since the minute the tires had started rolling down the runway, Reese’s throat had been too tight to push any words out.

      He forced himself to swallow. “So, a full-time pilot, huh?” he asked, knowing the question was an inane one. But it was better than the silence that had fallen between them while she’d been occupied getting them up into the air.

      It also beat looking out the window at either the ground, which was getting farther away by the minute, or the wing of the plane, which looked far too small to be the only thing keeping him from a twenty-thousand-foot crash back to mother earth.

      He looked away.

      “Yep.”

      “Must be pretty interesting.”

      “It beats being a kindergarten teacher, which was what my folks wanted me to do.”

      He СКАЧАТЬ