When the Lights Go Down

Get a grip, Drake.

“Ms. Tyler.”

“Nicholas Drake.” The look she raked over him was scornful or borderline sexual, maybe both. She held his hand longer than necessary before letting go. “You were trespassing backstage last night.”

“I wanted to see you in action.” He’d certainly done that. She was a martinet, but everything she touched had fallen into place like clockwork.

“I don’t normally take meetings with people who won’t tell me who they’re representing, but I’m always ready to eat. Let’s go.”

She whipped a white trench coat off of an old-fashioned coat rack behind the door, shrugged it on, belted it and left the door open behind her as she plunged into the dim hallway.

Clarissa groaned from behind him.

“I heard that,” Maxie said from down the hall, laughing. “You said it was too late to make a good impression, girl, and I’m starving.”

* * *

Ten minutes later, Maxie was up to her eyebrows in Jamaican jerk chicken with dirty rice and beans and as happy as a kid with a new toy. She watched her “I’d prefer a breakfast meeting, if you don’t mind” nine-o’clock appointment stare with drawn brows at the photographs on the side of the boxy white truck parked at the curb. She’d bet twenty bucks he’d never bought food out of a van before.

Poor, deprived soul.

“Best plantains in the city,” she said and opened her foam container. The lid flip-flopped in the cool morning breeze.

He pushed back the straight, dark hair falling over his brow with an automatic gesture and didn’t seem to notice when it dropped right back into place.

“It’s nine o’clock in the morning.”

“Hey, opening night wrapped up at four and I came straight to work. Haven’t slept yet. Breakfast was hours ago.” He ordered coffee. She shook her head. His loss. She’d brought the man to the best Jamaican outside of Montego Bay. You could lead a horse to water...

“Yes, I’m sure you’ve been hard at work in your—” he flicked a hand at her “—what? Costume?”

“You don’t gotta wear construction boots to wheel a dolly of two-by-fours to the checkout line.” She grinned and winked at him. Like Clarissa said, the good impression window was closed. She might as well have fun. There was no need for him to know she’d worn the sixties sex-kitten outfit because it made her feel like a sexual powerhouse. She’d been restless in the hours before dawn this morning, still feeling his chest under her palms from their split second of physical contact the night before. A little boost had seemed in order. “Who do you think brought those two lunkheads who work for me the lumber? There’s a twenty-four-hour Home Depot just off North Avenue.”

“How did you get it to fit in the van?”

She was pretty sure the curiosity in his voice was unwilling. He looked like the type of man who’d just as soon file her neatly in a box and forget about her.

“I didn’t.” She shoveled a forkful of rice and beans in her mouth and let him wait for a minute while she chewed. She didn’t play around with Jahman’s food. “I picked it up in my truck. It has a longer flatbed, but those two are forbidden to drive it.”

She jerked her head at a bus-stop bench down the sidewalk. He followed and stood looming over her as she sat with her container on her lap and ate. Ignoring him as she dug into her second breakfast for the day, she ploughed through the meal and then sat back happily, having mopped up spicy jerk sauce with the last piece of fried plantain. A perfect bite.

She stretched her arms along the back of the aluminum bench and tilted her face back to catch the weak warmth of the sun on a Chicago spring day.

Cracking one eye open, she glanced up at the man who was watching her, one hand in his pocket, the other lifting the paper cup of coffee to his mouth with mechanical regularity. Just watching. The fine hairs on her arms stood up as she shivered under that gaze.

She crossed her legs and sat a bit straighter, unaccountably irritated.

“Look, Drake, you asked for this meeting, not me. Now would be a good time to start talking, before I fall into a food coma.”

“I represent some people who want to hire you.”

She waited. Nothing. She rolled her eyes and then glared at him. And?

“And I’m not at all convinced it’s a good idea.”

Ouch.

She might joke about not caring about good impressions, but it still stung when someone told you they didn’t think you were good enough. She knew better than to indulge in hurt feelings and was annoyed that she couldn’t find her normal self-control. “What a surprise,” she said. “Like your underlings a little bit more conventional, do you?” The drawled words scratched him back with a not very well-hidden swipe of her claws. Burning a professional contact wasn’t her normal style, but she would already have heard of this guy if he were a name in theater, so she felt free to play a little. Especially since next week’s interview was looking like more of a lock with every day that passed, according to the gossip in her network. She swung her legs up on the bench, just missing kicking him in the knife-sharp crease of his slacks.

To her surprise, he smiled at her. Pulled out his sunglasses and slid them on.

She didn’t like not being able to see where his eyes were directed. Not knowing what he was looking at made her feel as if his gaze was touching her everywhere.

Instead of responding to her taunt, he came back with a question.

“Why Carving Bananas?”

She laughed and stared up at his dark shades, wondering how he’d take her explanation.

Some men took it personally.

“Eisenhower was speaking of Montgomery when he said, ‘I could carve a better man out of a banana.’” She paused for a moment, remembering the old embarrassment. “Or, at least, I thought he did. Turns out the historian who wrote the book I read made that up. Live and learn. Once a two hundred pound carving of a banana has been delivered to your door, you suck it up.”

After a silent moment, he pulled the sunglasses off. The shock of meeting his eyes again, the blue of Lake Michigan in July framed by dark lashes, made her wobbly. He studied her, eyes narrowing. She couldn’t read minds, but she’d swear that he was finally ignoring her outfit and how she talked to him, and looking at her.

“And you’re Eisenhower, I take it?”

She bestowed her grin like a teacher giving a gold star to her favorite pupil.

“You got it.”

Focused on him, she forgot the grooved metal slats under her thighs and the ruffle of cool air against her bare skin. She felt him step a little deeper into her mind.

“More like General Patton, I bet.”

“I’ve got more subtlety and a broader grasp of the field of engagement than that. Besides, have you seen the state of education in this country? Most kids wouldn’t know who Patton was if he walked up and smacked them on the head with his riding crop.”

“I bet you’d like to wear the boots, though.” His mouth quirked into a grin.

A mental picture of herself in thigh-high riding boots and a jacket covered in military ribbons floated up from Maxie’s subconscious and she laughed out loud.

“That might be one look even I can’t pull off.” She stood up, dumped her empty food container into the trash can next to the bench, and scrubbed her hands with her napkin before balling it up and making a rim shot into the open mouth of the can.

She took two steps and stopped in front of him. Her mother had always advised her to face her fears head on.

Wise woman.

“You may think I’m not what you’re looking for, Mr. Drake. But if you get to know me better, you’ll find I’m exactly what you want. You’d be lucky to hire me or my company for your show, whatever it is.” Even in the boots, she had to tilt her head back at an uncomfortable angle to avoid staring at the front of his blindingly white shirt. She felt the snap and sizzle of sexual tension between them and fed off it.

“Oh, I’m changing my mind about what I want.” His voice was low as he loomed over her.

It took her a moment to figure out what he meant, and then she shook her platinum hair back with a swing of her head.

She bet his usual type wore Louboutin shoes and pencil skirts as a daily uniform, but she damn well knew what he wanted right now.

She smacked her palm flat on his chest and left it there. His heart thumped under her fingertips and she tapped her index finger against the muscles of his chest.

“Hiring me would be the best bad idea you ever had.” She didn’t know why she was pushing this. If she picked up the Broadway second run, her entire crew would be booked. She wouldn’t be able take any more jobs.

His hand wrapped around her wrist.

“If that’s a bad idea, then I’m pretty sure this is a terrible one.”

The blue of his eyes blotted out the spring sky as his head dipped toward hers, slow enough for her to pull her back if she’d wanted to do any such thing. Instead, she touched her tongue to her teeth and waited until his lips pressed against hers, his hand tightening on her wrist. Then her mouth fell open and she was lost.

Chapter Two

He tasted like coffee and cream from the cup he’d dropped at their feet. She had just enough brainpower left to register surprise at the sweetness, too. She’d have laid money on him taking it black.

And god, this was stupid. The one thing she never, ever did was get involved with anyone in her professional life. She’d learned her lesson, thank you, and that burn had taken a long time to heal.

But his mouth on hers was hot and she was slipping under his spell, her hand on his chest flexing as she dug her fingertips into the hard muscle under his corporate costume. He licked at her mouth and she let him in, a surge of heat shooting through her belly until she felt dizzy. Only the sharp pain of bobby pins poking her scalp when he tugged on her hair brought her to her senses before she climbed this guy like a tree in front of her favorite food-truck driver.

* * *

Maxie spent the next forty-eight hours thinking about what she’d agreed to after her kiss with Nick, and she still wasn’t sure it was a good idea. But she did know she could count on her sisters to tell her the truth.

Whether or not she actually wanted it.

She met her sister-in-law, Grace, and her two older sisters, both of them hugely pregnant, for an emergency summit slash massive laundry session the afternoon after her kiss with Nicholas Drake. Apparently everything that came into contact with babies needed to be washed in a special detergent, and between her two sisters they’d bought out most of Babies”R”Us. Her oldest sister Addy’s house was centrally located for all of the sisters and for their sister-in-law, Grace, who’d already knocked out her two kids and called a halt to further procreation, so they’d gathered there.

Hip-deep in burp cloths and onesies, Maxie was starting to regret giving them the details of her interactions with the well-tailored businessman. Addy, Sarah and Grace had leaped onto the details like lions attacking a wounded wildebeest, oversharing way too many details of their own about the dearth of sex in late pregnancy. She’d threatened to leave and deprive them of her Gap-trained folding skills, but Maxie knew there was no chance she was getting off the hook.

The speculation from her sisters, the preggos each sprawled on a separate couch, was getting progressively more explicit when Maxie finally gave up and raised her hands in surrender. “All right! All right! Pains in my ass.” She marched over and planted herself at the edge of the coffee table that stretched between the two couches. Bending her knees and leaning forward, hands on her thighs like an umpire at the plate, she glared at them.

“It was hot. It was wet. After he dropped his coffee cup, he tangled his hand in my hair and pulled my head back a little.” She nearly lost it when Sarah gave a wistful sigh and only managed to keep a straight face by biting her lip hard. “I was pressed up against him and bent backward over his arm and we didn’t come up for air for ages.” Addy’s aww distracted her for a moment, but she nailed the finale.

“Five more minutes and I would’ve jumped him on that bench. The thirty-three Washington bus could’ve stopped, unloaded passengers and driven off and I never would’ve noticed.”

Her sisters closed their eyes and smiled dreamily in unison. She was sure each was imagining her own husband, ridiculously attractive men that they were.

But the habit of sisterly ribbing was not to be denied for long. Addy cracked an eye open and lifted a brow. “Would have been funny if you’d lost that wig.”

She definitely regretted telling them what she’d worn to work that day.

Always the performer in the family, she held a beat before giving in.

“I almost cried like a baby when all of those bobby pins dug into my skull. Who knew the man was gonna want to pull my hair?”

They laughed at her until both had to get up and go pee and she returned to the laundry. The mountain of baby clothes had been transformed into neat piles of color-coded outfits, all greens and yellows and peaches. Both of them were waiting to find out the sex of their babies and they avoided anything pink or blue like the plague.

“So.” Grace folded the last of the baby blankets. “Close encounters with bus-stop sex aside, what happened? Does the guy want to hire you? And who is he? His name rings a bell.”

Maxie wrinkled her nose.

“He’s not part of the scene, that’s for sure. And he asked me to dinner. Tonight. Said we’d give the business meeting another chance, only this time he was damn well not going to eat his meal on a street corner.”

She still wasn’t sure that meeting this man, whose presence danced on her nerves, in a non-business setting was a good idea.

“Hmm.” She could read Grace as easily as she could her sisters. After all, this was the woman to whom she confessed her secrets when she wanted advice but wasn’t ready to talk to her sisters. It had been that way since she was a teenager.

“Yeah, I know. It didn’t really feel like a business kiss when he laid it on me.” She tossed the little hat she was playing with back into the basket and flopped onto the armchair behind her. She dropped the sarcasm. “I’d be a fool not to meet with him, at least. This is the first time someone’s come to me about a job, instead of me pitching to them. It’s taken six years to get to the point where we’re almost a real player in the industry. And Ruben is ready to call the show tonight. More than ready, really. He’s bored being the assistant stage manager.” She tucked her feet beneath her loose floral skirt. She’d felt very peasant-girl-come-to-do-the-laundry when she got dressed this morning.

“You know it takes time to build up a business reputation,” Grace reminded her.

“I know. And between the outfit and the make-out session, I may have started Carving Bananas on the road to a reputation for something other than business.” She frowned and pulled a final onesie from the laundry basket. “Not that I can take the job if I get the Broadway show. But still, options are nice.” She folded the onesie and dropped it on a pile. Straightened the pile until it stopped listing to one side.

“Hey, he kissed you.”

That was Grace. Always on your side. Maxie smiled.

“I provoked it.”

“So, show him you mean business. You’re good, Maxie, and if this guy has any kind of business sense, he’ll be able to see that in no time at all. There’s really only one question.”

Maxie arched a brow at her sister-in-law and cocked her head to one side, listening. She’d taken advantage of Grace’s acumen when she’d first had the idea to turn her habit of filling her family members’ basements with discarded props from the shows she stage-managed into a business. Anything Grace—who hobnobbed with the movers and shakers of Chicago with ease while running her restaurant conglomerate—had to say was worth hearing.

“He’s seen Go-Go Girl Maxie, and the anti-glamour, can-you-really-tell-she’s-a-woman, Opening Night Maxie. Who he’s going to meet tonight?”

It was a good question. Maxie sank back into the cushions and tapped a fingernail against her bottom lip, staring across the room, seeing nothing at all.

Who indeed would Nick Drake meet tonight at Nomi, in the spare white environment of one of the city’s best restaurants? There would be two-hundred-dollar bottles of wine, no doubt, and tiny and intricately constructed morsels of food speared on metal sculptures or some such.

Who should be sitting across the table from the classic businessman in a bowler hat, metaphorically speaking?

He’d found her a bit loose the other day, perhaps. Uncontrolled. And he seemed like a man who had a thing for giving orders, and having someone else take them.

That would be a problem. On several levels. Maxie considered herself the person most capable of dishing out the orders in any given situation. Nothing personal, but she knew the most efficient way to handle things and had become convinced that being in charge was where she belonged.

He liked control. Perhaps he wanted to see more of it from her...

Well, she would show him her idea of control.

* * *

Nick let a sip of Cabernet roll over his tongue, the heat and fruit and spice building in his mouth like a kiss. His entire week had been hectic, not the least because he’d been unable to shake thoughts of Maxie Tyler and her conflicting personas out of his brain.

Who was he kidding? The only things stuck in his head were memories of her mouth, spicy and hot and open to him, her body, so small but a powerhouse of lean muscle, pressed against him, and her eyes...

In more than one meeting since that morning, he’d caught himself blinking at a room full of silent observers, only to realize that he’d once again lost focus, sunk in the memory of those deep dark eyes locked on his.

The fact that no one else knew what he was picturing did nothing to quell the embarrassment.

His usual self-control was failing him.

He wasn’t sure what had possessed him to suggest dinner after the breakfast meeting had offered up such unpredictable fare. Aside from his momentary indulgence in a purely physical attraction, the entire interaction had been beyond the pale. Much like the rest of the time he’d spent on this latest obsession of his mother’s. Par for the course for her, although he’d spoken to more than one contact in the arts world who swore that this playwright actually had the chops to write an award-winner. Still, there would be no shortage of local gossips eager to tear this latest eccentricity to pieces. His own involvement only drew more attention to his mother’s whims, as Nick’s business activities were reported on as a matter of course in the business press.

Not that Maxie Tyler wasn’t intriguing. The World War II history buff didn’t fit with the flighty theater drama queen he’d anticipated from someone who would show up in costume to a meeting. Maybe stage managers were a different breed.

He glanced at his watch and sighed. Every theater person he’d met so far was absolutely reliable in never showing up on time. Ironic, that. Since they’d agreed to meet at eight and it was now five minutes to, he figured he had about half an hour of quiet anonymity to enjoy at the restaurant’s bar. He’d have some time to sip this robust wine and throw off a little of the week’s tension. The details were falling into place on his latest venture capital deal—and the kids who’d started this new company were brilliant—but he never relaxed until a deal was done.

Actually, even then he didn’t relax. After all, someone had to make sure the businesses in which he invested grew at the proper pace and in the correct directions. And that someone was always him.

He lifted his glass and scanned the room, from the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Chicago Avenue to the host stand at the entrance. And promptly choked on his Cabernet.

Damn.

Boots again.

He watched her brush past the hostess with a brief word and imagined he could hear the pounding bass beat of a movie soundtrack with each stalking step she took across the room to where he waited, glass still lifted to his mouth.

And he’d been worried about his self-control.

She looked like someone who asserted control—no, let’s be accurate here, domination is the word that comes to mind—over others as a way of life.

Who would have thought that a woman showing barely an inch of skin below the neck could look like a walking sexual fantasy in midnight black?

A form-fitting black leather jacket with a stiff military collar hugged her torso from the shoulders to the swell of her hips. The narrow black skirt would have looked prim if it weren’t so tight, right down to where its edge brushed the top of her boots. And if he’d ever believed that stiletto heels were the height of sexiness, he was rapidly changing his opinion in favor of these black boots that laced up the front in a style more reminiscent of a motorcycle gang than Milan.

Heads turned to follow her all the way across the crowded bar as she arrowed a straight line to the empty seat he’d saved beside him. He had a moment to regret the way she drew attention just by moving. Nick was always happier staying in the background. She swung one hip up onto the high chair and held out a hand.

“Ms. Tyler.” He squelched the urge to wolf whistle. That he could dredge her name up from his stunned brain was amazing.

“Nicholas Drake.”

Her low voice was quiet enough that he needed to lean in to hear her. He didn’t remember taking her hand in his, but when she smiled and glanced down to where he still held it, he dropped it and set his wine glass on the bar, happy enough to break contact with her for a moment. He couldn’t think when he was touching her.

At his lifted hand, the bartender stepped over. Maxie leaned forward to order a drink and he caught the scent of her, warm and sweet, rising from the tight knot of hair that was twisted at the nape of her neck. She accepted her own glass of red wine and lifted it to his, her face pale and bare except for the thick smoky smudges around her lashes and the deep crimson of lips that already looked wine-stained.

He tapped his glass against hers with a crystalline ring that he felt in his fingertips. This might be the most dysfunctional business meeting ever, but it was shaping up to be one of the more interesting evenings of his life.

Over the sharply stitched line of her shoulder, the hostess caught his gaze, lifting a graceful hand in the direction of the dining room.

“Our table is ready,” he said. “Shall we?”

She stood up in one flowing motion, swung a large black portfolio he hadn’t noticed over one shoulder, and began walking. He indulged himself with a muscle-loosening shake of the head and shoulders before giving a short bark of a laugh and following her.

The leisurely stare he focused on her ass during the stroll to the dining room wasn’t an indulgence.

He was damn sure it was the entire purpose of a walk like that.

At the table, she leaned the portfolio against her chair and allowed an attendant to slide her into her seat. Somewhere between the server’s spiel about the specials and them ordering their meals, Nick realized he was grinning. He’d stopped wondering if every other diner in the posh restaurant was staring at the woman seated across from him because he was too busy staring at her himself.

“Where’s that riding crop, General?”

She smiled an acknowledgement. “It’s never a good idea to over-accessorize. Besides, I’m hoping for my second chance to make a good first impression.”

“They say you never get one of those.”

“I’m not a big fan of relying on anyone’s judgment other than my own, and mine tells me you’re open to it.”

“Open to what?”

She leaned forward, resting her forearms on the table, and looked at him from beneath lifted brows. Her lips twisted into a close-mouthed smile.