The Merciless Travis Wilde

Dammit, where were a man’s brothers when he needed them?

“The lady’s talkin’ to you.” The Mountain was leaning past Bev. God, his breath stank. “What’s the matter? You got a hearin’ problem or something, pretty boy?”

Conversation died out. People smiled.

Travis felt the first, heady pump of adrenaline.

“My name,” he said carefully, “is not ‘pretty boy.’”

“His name is not pretty boy,” The Mountain mimicked.

Bev, sporting a delighted smile, slid from her stool. Maybe he’d misjudged her purpose. Maybe setting up a fight had been her real job.

Either way, Travis saw his choices narrowing down, and rapidly.

Bev’s defender got to his feet.

“You’re making a mistake,” Travis said quietly.

The Mountain snorted.

Travis nodded, took a last swig of beer, said a mental “goodbye” to Monday’s meeting and stood up.

“Outside,” he said, “in the parking lot? Or right here?”

“Here,” a voice growled.

Three men had joined the Mountain. Travis smiled. The next five minutes might be the end of him.

Yeah, but they’d also be fun, especially considering his weird state of mind tonight.

“Fine,” he said. “Sounds good to me.”

Those words, the commitment to the inevitable, finalized things, sent his adrenaline not just pumping but racing. He hadn’t been in a down-and-dirty bar brawl in a very long time. Not since Manila, or maybe Kandahar.

Yes, Kandahar, his last mission, death all around him …

Suddenly, pounding the Mountain into pulp seemed a fine idea, never mind that deal in Frankfurt.

Besides, nothing short of a miracle could save him now …

The door to the street swung open.

For some reason Travis would never later be able to explain, the enraptured audience watching him and the Mountain turned toward it.

A blast of hot Texas air swept in.

So did a tall, beautiful, sexy-looking, straight-out-of-the-Neiman-Marcus-catalogue blonde.

Silence. Complete silence.

Everybody looked at Neiman Marcus.

Neiman Marcus looked at them.

And blanched.

“Well, lookee there,” somebody said.

Lookee, indeed, Travis thought.

Sanity returned.

There she was. His salvation.

“Finally,” he said, his tone bright and cheerful. “My date.”

Before anyone could say a word, he started toward the blonde and the door with the confidence of a man holding all four aces in a game of high stakes poker.

She tilted her head back as he got closer. She was tall, especially in sexy, nosebleed-high stilettos, but she still had to do that to look up at him.

He liked it.

It was a nice touch.

“Your what?” she said, or would have said, but he couldn’t afford to let things go that far.

“Baby,” he purred, “what took you so long?”

Her eyes widened. “Excuse me?”

Travis grinned.

“Only if you ask real nice,” he said, and before she could react, he drew her into his arms, brought her tightly against him and covered her mouth with his.

CHAPTER TWO

AN HOUR BEFORE she walked into Travis Wilde’s life, Jennie Cooper had been sitting in her ancient Civic, having a stern talk with herself.

By then, it had been close to nine o’clock, the evening wasn’t getting any younger, and she still hadn’t put her plan into action.

Ridiculous, of course.

She was a woman with a mission.

She was looking for a bar.

Really, how difficult could it be to find a bar in a city like Dallas?

Very.

Well, “very” if you were searching for just the right kind of bar.

Dallas was a big, sprawling town, and she’d driven through so many parts of it that she’d lost count.

She’d started with Richardson and though there were loads of bars in that area, it would have been foolish, better still, foolhardy to choose one of them.

It was too near the university campus.

So she’d headed for the Arts District, mostly because she knew it, if visiting a couple of galleries on a rainy Sunday qualified as “knowing” a place—after eight months, she was still learning about her new city—but as soon as she got there, she’d realized it, too, was a bad choice.

The Arts District was trendy, which meant she’d feel out of place. A laugh, really, considering that she was going to feel out of place no matter where she went tonight, but it was also a neighborhood that surely would be popular with university faculty.

Running into someone who knew her would be disaster.

That was when Jennie had pulled to the curb, put her wheezing Civic in neutral and told herself to think fast, before her plan fell apart.

What other parts of Dallas were there?

Turtle Creek.

She knew it only by reputation, and that it was home to lots of young, successful, rich professionals.

Well, she’d thought with what might have been a choked laugh, she was young, anyway.

Rich? Not on a teaching assistant’s stipend. Successful? Not in Turtle Creek terms, where the word surely referred to attorneys and doctors, financial gurus and industrialists.

What kind of small talk could she make with a man who was all those things, assuming such a man would look twice at her?

Assuming there’d be any small talk because, really, that wasn’t what tonight was all about.

The realization sent a bolt of terror zinging along her nerve endings.

Jennie fought against it.

She wasn’t scared.

Certainly not.

She was—she was anxious, and who wouldn’t be? She’d spent weeks and weeks, planning this—this event.

She wasn’t going to add to that anxiety by going to a bar in a place like Turtle Creek on a Friday night when—when singles mingled.

When singles hook up, Genevieve baby, her always-until-now-oh-so-logical alter ego had suddenly whispered.

“They mingle,” Jennie had muttered. “And my name is not—”

Except, it was. For tonight. She’d decided that the same time she’d hatched this plan.

Good. You remembered. You’re Genevieve. And you’re trying to pretty things up. Tonight is not about mingling, it is about—

Jennie had stopped listening.

Still, there was truth to it.

Nobody could pretty this up.

Her plan was basic.

Find a bar. Go inside. Order a drink. Find a man she liked, flirt with him …

Forget the metaphors.

What she wanted was to find a man she liked enough to take home to bed.

Her teeth chattered.

“Stop it,” she said sharply.

She was a grown woman. Twenty-four years old just last Sunday. That she had never slept with a man was disgraceful. It was worse than that.

It was unbelievable.

And the old Stones song lied.

Time wasn’t on her side, which was why she was going to remedy that failing tonight.

“Happy birthday to me,” she said, under her breath, and her teeth did the castanet thing again, which was ridiculous.

She had thought about this for a long time, examined the concept from every possible angle.

This was right. It was logical. It was appropriate.

It was how things had to be done.

No romance. This wasn’t about romance.

No attachment. That part wasn’t even worth analyzing.

She didn’t have time for attachment, or emotion, or anything but the experience.

That was what this was all about.

It was research. It was learning something you’d only read about.

It was no different from what she’d done in the past, driving from New Hampshire to New York before she wrote her senior paper so that she could experience what had once been the narrow streets where Stanton Coit had established a settlement house for immigrants long before there were such things as social workers, or the trip she’d planned to see the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago …

Her throat constricted.

Never mind all that.

Her days of academic research would soon be meaningless.

What she needed now was reality research, and if there wasn’t such a branch of study, there should be.

And she was wasting precious time.

Jennie checked both rearview mirrors, put on her signal light and pulled away from the curb.

She headed south.

After a while, the streets began to change.

They grew narrower. Darker. The houses were smaller, crammed together as if huddled against a starless Texas night.

The one good thing was that there were lots of bars.

Lots and lots of bars.

She drove past them all.

Of course, she did.

None passed muster.

One didn’t have enough vehicles parked outside.

One had too many.

One had the wrong kind.

Jennie’s alter-ego gave an impolite snort. Jennie couldn’t blame her. That made three out of three.

What was she, Goldilocks?

Okay. The very next bar would be The One. In caps. Definitely, The One.

She’d park, check her hair, her makeup—she’d never used this much makeup before and, ten to one, it was smeared …

BAR.

Her heart thumped.

There it was. Straight ahead. A bar called, appropriately enough, BAR. Well, no. That wasn’t its name—she was pretty sure of that—it was simply a description, like a sign saying “liquor” outside a liquor store, or one that said “motel” outside a motel, or …

For God’s sake, Genevieve, it’s a bar!

She slowed the car, turned on her signal light, checked the mirrors, waited patiently for an approaching vehicle a block away to pass before she pulled into the parking lot.

It was crowded.

The last available empty space was between a shiny black behemoth of a truck and a battered red van.

She pulled between them, opened her door, checked the faded white lines, saw that she hadn’t managed to center her car, shut the door, backed up carefully, shifted, pulled forward, checked again, backed up, checked one last time, saw she’d finally parked properly and shut off the engine.

Tick, tick, tick it said, and finally went silent.

Too silent.

She could hear her heart thudding.

Stop it!

Quickly, she opened her consignment-shop Dior purse, rummaged inside it, found her compact and flipped it open.

She’d spent twenty minutes this afternoon at Neiman Marcus, nervously wandering around among the endless cosmetic counters before she’d finally chosen one mostly because the clerk behind it looked a shade less unapproachable than the others.

“How may I help you, miss?” she’d said. “Foundation? Blusher? Eyebrows? Eyes? Lips? Hair? Skin?”

Translation: Sweetie, you need work!

But her smile had been pleasant and Jennie had taken a deep breath and said, “Do you do makeovers?”

Almost an hour later, the clerk—she was, she’d said, a cosmetician—put a big mirror in her hands and said, “Take a look.”

Jennie had looked.

Nobody she knew looked back.

Who was this person with the long, loose blond waves framing her face? When had her pale lashes become curly and dark? And that pouting pink mouth, those cheekbones …

Cheekbones?

“Wow,” she’d said softly.

The cosmetician had grinned.

“Wow, indeed. Your guy is gonna melt when he sees you tonight.”

“No. I mean, that’s just the point. I don’t have—”

“So,” the cosmetician had chirped, “what do we want to purchase?”

“Purchase?” Jennie had said, staring at the lineup of vials, bottles and tubes, the sprays, salves and brushes, even an instruction sheet about how to replicate the magic transformation. Her gaze had flown to the woman. “I can’t possibly …” She’d swallowed hard, pointed to a tube of thirty-dollar mascara and said, “I’ll take that.”

Nobody was happy. Not the cosmetics wizard. Not Jennie, whose last mascara purchase had cost her six bucks at the supermarket.

Had all that time and money been worth it?

It was time to find out.

Even in the badly lit parking lot, her mirror assured her that she looked different.

It also assured her that she was wearing a mask.

Well, a disguise. Which was good.

It made her feel as if she was what she’d been trained to be, a researcher. An observer. An academic who would spend the next hours in a different kind of academia than she was accustomed to.

Jennie snapped the compact shut and put it back in her purse.

Which was why she was parked outside this place with the blinking neon sign.

Upscale? No. The lot was full of pickup trucks. She knew by now that pickup trucks were Texas the same way four-wheel drives were New England, but most of these were old. There were motorcycles, too.

Weren’t motorcycles supposed to be sexy?

And there were lots of lighted beer signs in the window.

Downscale? Well, as compared to what? True, something about the place didn’t seem appealing.

It’s a bar, the dry voice inside her muttered. What are you, a scout for Better Homes and Gardens?

Still, was this a good choice? She’d worked up logical criteria.

A: Choose a place that drew singles. She knew what happened in singles bars. Well, she’d heard what happened, anyway—that they were where people went for uninhibited fun, drinking, dancing … and other things.

B: Do what she was going to do before summer changed to autumn.

C: Actually, it had not occurred to her there might be a part C. But there was.

Do Not Prevaricate.

And she was prevaricating.

She put away her compact. Opened the door. Stepped from the car. Shut the door. Locked it. Opened her purse. Put her keys inside. Closed the purse. Hung the thin strap over the shoulder of her equally thin-strapped emerald-green silk dress, bought from the same consignment shop as the purse, the Neiman Marcus tag still inside.

Assuming you could call something that stopped at midthigh a dress.

She knew it was.

Girls on campus wore dresses this length.

You’re not a girl on campus, Jennie. And even when you were, back in New Hampshire, you never wore anything that looked like this.

And maybe if she had, she wouldn’t be doing this tonight. She wouldn’t have to be looking for answers to questions that needed answers, questions she was running out of time to ask …

“Stop,” she whispered.

It was time to get moving.

She took a breath, then started walking toward the entrance to the bar, stumbling a little in the sky-high heels she’d also bought at the consignment shop.

She was properly turned out, from head to toe, to lure the kind of man she wanted into her bed. Somebody tall. Broad-shouldered. A long, lean, buff body. Dark hair, dark eyes, a gorgeous face because if you were going to lose your virginity to a stranger, if this was going to be your One and Only sexual experience, Jennie thought as she put her hand on the door to the bar and pushed it open, if this was going to be It, you wanted the man to be …

Was that music?

It was loud. Very loud. What was it? She had no idea. Telling Tchaikovsky from Mozart was one thing. Telling rock from rock was another.

She caught her bottom lip between her teeth.

Maybe she was making a mistake.

Yes, the place was far from the university. She wouldn’t see anyone she knew, but what about the rest? Was it a singles

bar? Or was it—what did people call them? A tavern? A neighborhood place where people came to drink?

Such a dark street. Such an unprepossessing building. That neon sign, even the asphalt because now that she’d seen it, close-up, she could see that it was cracked …

That’s enough!

She’d talked herself out of a dozen other possibilities. She was not talking herself out of this one.

Chin up, back straight—okay, one last hand smoothing her hair, one last tug at her dress and she really should have chosen one that covered her thighs …

Jennie reached for the door, yanked it open …

And stepped into a sensory explosion.

The music pulsed off the walls, vibrated through the floor.

The smell was awful. Yeasty, kind of like rising bread dough but not as pleasant, and under it, the smell of things frying in grease.

And the noise! People shouting over the music. What sounded like hundreds of them. Not really; there weren’t hundreds of people at the long bar, at the handful of tables, but there were lots of them … And they were mostly male.

Some were wearing leather.

Maybe she’d made a mistake. Wandered into a gay …

No. These guys weren’t gay. They were—they were unattractive. Lots of facial hair. Lots of tattoos. Lots of big bellies overhanging stained jeans.

There were a few women, but that didn’t help. The women were—big. Big hair. Big boobs. Big everything.

People were looking at her.

Indeed they are, Genevieve. That’s what people do, when a woman all dressed up walks into a place like this.

Oh, God. Even her alter-ego thought she’d made a mistake!

Her heart leaped into her throat. She wanted to turn around and go right out the door.

But it was too late.

A man was walking toward her.

Not walking. Sauntering, was more accurate, his long stride slow and easy, more than a match for his lazy smile.

Her breath caught.

His eyes were dark. His hair was the color of rich, dark coffee. It was thick, and longer than a man’s hair should be, longer, anyway, than the way men in her world wore it, and she had the swift, almost overwhelming desire to bury her hands in it.

Plus, he was tall.

Tall and long and lean and muscled.

You could almost sense the hard delineation of muscle in his wide shoulders and arms and chest, and—and she was almost certain he had a—what did you call it? A six-pack, that was it. A six-pack right there, in his middle.

A middle that led down to—down to his lower middle.

To more muscle, a different kind of muscle, hidden behind faded denim …

Her cheeks burned.

Her gaze flew up again, over, what, all six foot two, six foot three of him. Flew up over worn boots, jeans that fit his long legs and narrow hips like a second skin, a T-shirt that clung to his torso.

Their eyes met.

Tall as she was, especially in the stilettos, she had to look up for that to happen.

He smiled.

Her mouth went dry. He was, in a word, gorgeous.

“Baby,” he said in a husky voice. “What took you so long?”

Huh?

Nobody knew she’d been coming here tonight. She hadn’t even known it herself, until she’d pulled into the parking lot.

“Excuse me?”

His smile became a grin. Could grins be sexy and hot? Oh yes. Yes, they could.

“Only if you ask real nice,” he said, and then, without any warning, she was in his arms and his mouth was on hers.

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