Slow Hands

Slow Hands
Leslie Kelly

www.millsandboon.co.uk

A two-time RWA RITA^® Award nominee, eight-time Romantic Times BOOKreviews Award nominee and 2006 Romantic Times BOOKreviews Award winner, LESLIE KELLY has become known for her delightful characters, sparkling dialogue and outrageous humour. Since the publication of her first book in 1999, Leslie has gone on to pen more than two dozen sassy, sexy romances. Honoured with numerous other awards, including the National Readers’ Choice Award, Leslie writes sexy novels for Blaze^®, and single-title contemporaries. Keep up with her latest releases by visiting her website, www. lesliekelly.com, or her blog, www.plotmonkeys.com.

To the fabulous Plotmonkeys gang, including Katie, Jodie, Paula, Donna, Pat, Jeannie (and Zoey!), Tina, Kelly, Cher, Ev, Vero, Ardie, Jane, Estella, Elisa, Fedora, Kim, Stacy, Kathy, Bailey, Jaci, Patty, Michelle, Liza, Shari, Cherylann and so many more. Hanging out with all of you in The Jungle makes me smile every single day. Thank you so much for your friendship and support!

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Copyright

Prologue

“OH, MY GOD, I CAN’T DO THIS, it’s hopeless! We’re not going to be able to pull it off.”

Penny Rausch heard the panic in her partner’s voice and struggled to keep her own alarm under control. One of them had to stay calm. Otherwise they were both going to lose their minds…not to mention their fledgling graphic design business.

“Calm down. We’re almost there.”

Janice, her partner and more-than-slightly ditzy younger sister, thrust her hand into her spiked blond hair, sending it into even more crazy directions than it had been before. A highly sought-after graphic designer, Janice had no head for business, but wow, was the girl creative…and not just with her hair. Her graphics were incredible. Her drawings collectible. Her fashion sense wildly imaginative.

Too bad she was pretty helpless in nearly every other aspect of her life.

“I dropped the file. The last six photos went everywhere. Just shoot me now.”

She looked utterly exhausted, with dark circles under her eyes and a haggard hollowness in her cheeks. Janice was usually very precise about her appearance, but right now her yellow T-shirt was stained with something that was either ketchup from today’s fries or tomato sauce from last night’s pizza.

They hadn’t left their office in thirty-six hours. Not since Janice’s expensive, nearly brand-new computer had crashed, taking most of the files for the high-end, glossy brochure they were producing down with it. And almost taking down their company, too.

Because if they lost this job—creating the programs for a ritzy charity bachelor auction scheduled for next week—they were finished. They wouldn’t make the already-late rent, or keep the power on, or cover the printing bill. They’d be out of business overnight, after only being in it for eight months.

“We can handle this,” Penny insisted. “We’ve come this far, we’re almost there.”

“Maybe we could contact Mrs. Baxter…”

“No. Absolutely impossible.” They could not let the snooty Junior League socialite know they’d had yet another mishap in the design job. No way. They were already on probation, thanks to a few hiccups—like Janice’s case of the flu and a flood in the office. If they admitted to the computer crash, the woman would kick them to the curb for good.

“I can’t even tell them apart anymore,” Janice wailed, waving toward the table laden with photographs and copy. “Looking at one gorgeous man after another, hour after hour…”

“Tough job.”

“It’s not funny. I thought we were in the clear when we found the backup set of hard copies. Why didn’t we put the bachelors’ info on the back when we made them?”

The biographies of the bachelors being auctioned off to support Chicago’s needy children had been on the backs of the originals. But the originals had gone back to the penny-pinching auction organizer, Mrs. Baxter, once they’d been copied and scanned. Now they had the scans on disc, and they had the hard duplicates. They even had the printed biographies.

They just didn’t have any of those things together. And they had no way of knowing who was who.

If not for some easily identifiable, well-known bachelors, some handwritten notes, as well as Google, which they’d accessed on Penny’s still-working laptop, they would have had to give up. But not now. We’re not giving up now.

“We’re down to those last six men, Janice,” Penny insisted, bending to pick over the spilled photos. She laid them out on the worktable, grabbing the small index cards with the bios. “And I just identified four of them.”

Janice’s eyes widened in delight. “Really?”

Penny nodded, putting the correct bio cards with the correct faces, clipping them together in case there were any more spills. “I have spent the past five hours looking at archives in the Trib and I’ve found more of our boys. Eligible bachelors apparently get a lot of press coverage.”

Janice threw her arms around Penny and squeezed her. “So we’re down to these last two.”

Yes. Just two. “But we’re out of time. We have less than an hour to get the whole package to the printer’s if we’re going to make the deadline.” No more time to research…no more hesitation.

Penny lifted the two photographs, studying the handsome faces carefully. Both were dark-haired, but that was where the resemblance ended. One had warm brown eyes, the other vivid blue. One’s hair was short and conservative, the other’s a little longer, almost brushing his collar. One had a dangerous glint in his eye, the other a sexy smile on his curved lips.

“One is a paramedic, the other an international businessman,” Penny whispered, knowing their bios by heart. “One of you is Jake and one of you is Sean.”

Janice came closer, looking over Penny’s shoulder. Penny could almost feel her sister’s heartbeat just inches from her arm. She could definitely hear her deep, quick inhalations.

This was the moment—she had to choose. Suddenly remembering that old Lady or the Tiger story from her school days, she drew in a deep breath and pointed to the unsmiling one with the short hair and brown eyes. “He’s got to be the businessman.”

Beside her, Janice immediately nodded, pointing toward the other picture with the smiling, longer-haired guy. “And that’s a strong rescue worker if I ever saw one.”

“So we’re agreed?”

“Agreed. Absolutely. No doubt about it.”

Then it was done. Penny clipped the bios to the back of each picture, glad her sister was just as confident as she was that they’d made the right choice. Then she sat down to finish up the program on her own, older computer. And as she typed away as fast as she could, incorporating the newly recreated graphics, she tried hard to pretend she didn’t hear her younger sister’s whisper.

“I hope.”

1

“OUR STEPMOMMY DEAREST is about to buy herself a gigolo.”

Madeline Turner, who’d been signing a foot-tall stack of documents at her desk, dropped her pen, leaving a blot of black ink on the second quarter Profit and Loss Statement from a major local firm. Looking up, she could muster no surprise when she realized her sharp-toned visitor was her older half sister, Tabitha, looking as enraged as she sounded.

Enraged…but beautiful, as always. The stunning fashion plate had inherited all her mother’s tall and slender genes, blond hair and elegance, which suited her lifestyle to a T. Madeline, meanwhile, had been gifted with their father’s more short and round frame, plus her late mother’s nearly black hair; dark, laughing eyes and dimples. Which did not suit her lifestyle as a nose-to-the-grindstone bank manager to an R or a squiggly S, much less to a T.

Tabitha tossed her designer handbag onto an empty chair and kicked the door shut with the heel of one pointy-toed, five-hundred-dollar shoe. “Maddy, did you hear me?”

“I think the construction workers twenty floors down heard you,” Madeline mumbled, wondering why Tabitha always had to be so damned melodramatic. Something else she’d inherited from her jet-setting mother.

“The money-grubbing witch is going to cheat on our father.”

Considering Tabitha had cheated on one of her husbands and one of her fiancés, Maddy figured her sister had better jump off that moral high ground upon which she was perched before it crumbled out from underneath her. Still she frowned, not happy with the news that their father’s newest wife—his fourth—was already looking around for more adventure than her older husband could provide.

Tabby might loathe Deborah, but Maddy had never had anything against her. The woman wasn’t exactly warmth personified, especially not to her adult stepdaughters, but she was a lot better than some of the alternatives. Their father could have married a twenty-five-year old…someone younger than Maddy or her sister. At least Deborah, aside from being in her forties, was well-spoken, graceful and successful. She had once run her own successful ballroom dancing studio—that’s where she’d met Maddy’s father—and seemed to make him happy, first as a dance partner, now as a wife.

So she really hoped Tabby was wrong. “How do you know this?”

“I got it straight from Bitsy Wellington.”

Their stepmother’s best gal pal. “Why would she tell you?”

“Well, you know Bitsy. She can never resist causing trouble.”

True. The woman was completely toxic.

“Besides, she wants the man for herself. He’s some European gigolo being auctioned off at that Give A Kid A Christmas charity gig at the InterContinental tomorrow night.”

A gigolo being sold to benefit a children’s charity. There was some serious irony in that. Leave it to the Ladies Who Lunch of Chicago to come up with the idea of buying a stud to raise money for a worthy cause. And then, to compete over him.

Tabitha lowered herself to one of the chairs across from Maddy’s broad desk, sniffing slightly at the messy files strewn across it. Her big sister liked the money that came from the bank their great-grandfather had founded several decades ago. She just didn’t particularly like the stench of work that came along with it.

Sometimes Maddy wondered if one of them had been adopted. Or found on a doorstep. They had so little in common with each other, physically as well as everything else.

In personality, she was told she was a lot like her mother, Jason Turner’s second wife, who’d died when Maddy was four. Supposedly, though he never spoke of her, Jason had mourned her greatly. Which could explain why her sister always harassed Maddy about being their father’s favorite.

Maybe it was just that they had more in common. Aside from looking more like Jason than Tabby did, Maddy was also blessed with his quick mind, one fascinated by banking and finance. She also had the work ethic to run the business that had been in the family for generations.

That didn’t mean Tabitha hadn’t gotten something from their father, too—his fickleness. Maddy seemed to be the only Turner who didn’t fall in and out of love as frequently as the networks changed their Friday night lineup.

“We have to do something.”

“About what?”

“About the little cheater, that’s what!”

Maddy sighed, lowered her pen, and leaned back in her chair. “But she hasn’t cheated yet, has she?”

“No…and we’re going to make damn sure she doesn’t.”

Frankly, her sister’s attitude came as a surprise. Considering how strongly Tabitha disliked their father’s new wife, Maddy would have figured Tabitha would want Deborah to cheat, and get caught. Her father would tolerate a lot when it came to his wives—spending money, demanding attention and throwing tantrums. But he would never tolerate being cheated on. As a few of his former loves could certainly attest. Tabitha’s mother included.

“I’m surprised you haven’t hired a detective to follow her and get the goods yourself.”

Tabitha frowned, shifting her pretty blue eyes away to study her perfectly manicured nails.

“You have? Jesus, Tabby…”

“Look, it was stupid, and I changed my mind almost right away. I don’t want to catch the bitch cheating.”

“You don’t?”

Her sister finally lifted her eyes, and in them was a hint of genuineness, an emotion Tabitha didn’t often let the world see, but which Maddy knew lurked beneath her sister’s polished, shiny, brittle surface. “He loves her, Mad. Really loves her and she makes him so happy. It’s like he’s twenty years younger.” She swallowed, murmuring, “I don’t want him hurt. Again.”

Wow. That stunned her. So much that she couldn’t reply for a minute. Because while she completely understood the sentiment—and felt the same way—she wouldn’t have expected it of Tabitha.

Then she remembered the one area where she and her sister were absolutely, one hundred percent alike: in their love for their father.

She lowered her pen to her desk, finally giving her sister her undivided attention. “Okay. What do you propose we do?”

Tabitha dissembled for a moment, glancing around the room, at the few framed photos on Maddy’s bookshelf—all family—at the plants in the corner and the view of the Chicago skyline out the window.

She wasn’t going to like this, Maddy knew. Tabitha had the same look she’d had when they were nine and twelve and her big sister had suggested they “borrow” their new stepmother’s—wife three’s—Dior gowns to play house. And Maddy had the same reaction—the similar twitch in her temple and the sweatiness in her palms she’d experienced on that day.

One thing was sure…sweat wouldn’t wash any better out of her Chanel suit now than it had out of Dior then.

“Tabby?”

Her sister finally met her stare, appearing almost defiant. “It’s simple, really.”

The twitching intensified. The moisture on her palms could water the office plants for a week. “Oh?”

“Yes. She can’t cheat on our father with the guy if somebody outbids her.” With a smile that showed off the twenty-thousanddollar smile their father had bestowed upon his oldest daughter, Tabitha continued.

“You buy the gigolo.”

PARAMEDIC JAKE WALLACE had faced death dozens of times since he’d started working with Chicago FD’s 4th Battalion five years ago. He’d responded to fires and shootings, to brawls and domestic abuse calls. To riots and hostage standoffs. He’d treated heart attacks, drowning victims and people two steps past death who’d miraculously taken three steps back into existence.

He’d once talked a whacked-out druggie into letting him take his injured girlfriend—whom said druggie had stabbed—out of their house for emergency treatment. And he’d then gotten chewed out by his lieutenant for not following protocol by waiting for the Chicago P.D. to handle it. Right—as if he was going to let her die.

None of those situations had intimidated him.

But this? This scared the hell out of him.

“Why did I ever agree to get involved with this?” he muttered.

One reason. Because he owed his lieutenant big and his lieutenant owed the chief big and the chief’s wife loved this particular pet charity. End of story. Which was why two of his buddies from the battalion had already taken their turns under the spotlight.

“I’ve been asking myself the same thing,” a stranger’s voice replied.

Jake tugged helplessly at the bow tie that was choking him and glanced at Bachelor Number Eighteen, the one right before him. The other man looked just about as happy to be here as Jake, which was saying a lot. Because Jake would just as soon give CPR to a toothless octogenarian with halitosis than stand up on stage and be bid on by a bunch of rich, horny women with way too much time on their hands and too little self-respect. Or self-control.

“I should feel better about it,” he said, trying to convince himself more than the other final few “bachelors” waiting for their turn on the block. “It is for a good cause, right? So I suffer a few minutes’ embarrassment and a bad date. It’s worth it.”

Number Twenty offered a jaded smile as he leaned indolently against a column in the backstage area that had been set up for this evening’s event. The guy looked almost bored, and Jake envied him his calm. “What, you don’t enjoy having women ‘paying’ for your services?” The voice held amusement, and a hint of a foreign accent, possibly Irish.

Maybe European dudes were more at ease playing meat-onparade. But this all-American rescue worker most definitely was not. “You do?”

Number twenty smiled as he checked his sleeves, the gold sheen of expensive cuff links flashing beneath the obviously pricey, tailored tux. Jake would lay money it was not rented.

“It can be…entertaining.” This guy’s suit and demeanor said he had money enough to donate to worthy causes on his own. But the longish hair scooped back into a black ponytail said he also liked to live dangerously.

So did Jake. But he got quite enough thrills out of putting his ass on the line at emergency scenes, thank you very much. He didn’t particularly want to put it out there to be appraised, pinched, ogled or catcalled over by a bunch of strange women with itches between their legs and enough dollar bills to scratch them.

The other man continued. “Besides, as you said, it’s for a good cause.”

Right. Good cause. Kids. I like kids. Don’t have any, don’t really want any for a few more years, but they’re cute in a longdistance way. As long as they’re not sticking raisins up their noses or falling down into sewer drains or following the family cat up a tree.

Okay, so maybe he didn’t like kids so much. Not enough to go through this humiliation.

Then he thought about his own baby niece and twin nephews. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to make sure they remained the safe, healthy munchkins they were.

Damn. He was going to have to go through with it.

Tugging again at the too-tight collar of his own rent-a-tux, Jake peered through a crease in the black cloth curtains, eyeing the audience. The elegant ballroom was packed with round, white-draped tables, around which sat dozens of women in gowns and shimmery cocktail dresses. Laughter and gossip reigned supreme as they tossed back fruity Cosmos or sparkling champagne. They all watched hungrily, calling out bawdy suggestions as the raucous bidding continued for Bachelor Seventeen, who was currently center stage.

Well, all except one. A brunette who stood about ten feet away from the curtain he was peeking through. She drew his eye as he scanned the crowd…then drew it again. And this time, he let his gaze linger.

She was almost shadowed by one of the giant standing spotlights, which cast gaudy, unforgiving pools of light on the spectacle occurring on the stage. But what he saw of her was definitely enough to pique his interest.

First because she had some wicked curves. She wasn’t a tall stick figure in a little black dress like half the women here. Instead she was petite, very rounded with the kind of full curves—generous hips and lush breasts revealed in a low-cut, silky blue dress—that weren’t currently fashionable but made his heart pick up its pace and his recently dormant cock come awake in his pants.

Nor did she have bottled blond hair swept up in a complicated hairdo like the other half of the audience. No, hers was dark and thick, with long curls that fell in disarray past her shoulders. The look was wildly seductive, as if she’d just left her bed rather than an exclusive Michigan Avenue beauty salon.

Earthy, sultry, not at all restrained. The woman was sexy in a way that women didn’t seem to allow themselves to be sexy anymore.

Her looks, however, merely started the fire in his gut. Her untouchable, out-of-place demeanor stoked it until it almost engulfed him.

The brunette wasn’t laughing it up with her rich gal pals, or tossing back Manhattans while turning her hand to make sure her diamond rings showed to their greatest flashy advantage. In fact, if he had to guess, he’d say she looked almost disapproving, even tense. He couldn’t see her face very well, though he got a glimpse of a stiff little jaw, lifted up in visible determination. And her back was military straight.

He sensed she was keeping it that way intentionally, as if she didn’t dare let her guard down lest she be distracted from whatever mission she’d set for herself.

As if realizing she was being watched, the woman glanced around, turning her head enough to cast her face in a bit of light spilling off the stage. Enough to highlight the creamy skin, the curve of her cheek, the fullness of her lips and the dark flash of her eyes.

Beautiful.

Jake’s hands clenched into fists at his sides. Though she couldn’t possibly see him and was in no way mirroring his reaction, hers did the same.

She clenched out of visible concentration that seemed to swirl around her, creating a no-fly zone between her and everyone else in the room.

He clenched out of pure lust.

He hadn’t had sex in a while—not since breaking up with a woman he’d been dating last winter. And nobody had as much as given him a quickened pulse rate since. Not the women he met at the station. Not the ones he helped. Not the nurses at the hospital. Not the hot girl who’d moved in upstairs from him, the one who’d already locked herself out three times just so she’d have an excuse to ask for his help.

This stranger? She’d given him a hard-on from ten feet away.

She looked around the room again, watchful, her gaze passing without hesitation over the crease in the drapes behind which he stood.

Buy me.

She couldn’t possibly have heard the mental order, yet she narrowed her eyes, focusing again on the drapes concealing him.

He couldn’t help repeating the silent appeal, trying to remember all the stuff one of his sisters had said about that dumb book she’d been obsessed with lately. About how the universe would grant you what you want if you just visualized it hard enough.

Oh, it was easy to come up with some fast-and-hot visualizations right now.

“You want to know my biggest fear?” said Number Eighteen, a blond-haired surfer-looking guy who said he worked as a stockbroker. “What if whoever wins me pays like fifty bucks? I mean, how frigging humiliating would that be when the richest women in Chicago are all drooling like a pack of stray dogs eyeing a butcher shop window out there?”

Mr. Polished European guy laughed softly at the very thought of that even being a possibility for him. Jake, however, immediately understood the stockbroker’s worries.

Geez. He’d thought being bid on would be a humiliation. But not being bid on? “Get me out of here.”

“Too late,” said a perky voice belonging to the young woman who was stage-managing tonight’s events. She glanced at the blond pretty boy. “You’re on. They’re reading the introduction right now.” Then she pointed the tip of her pencil at Jake. “And you’re right behind him, Nineteen.”

Nineteen. That’s how they’d addressed him from the moment he’d checked in at the event desk and had been whisked to a private dressing room with all the other saps whose bosses, friends, siblings, mothers or coworkers had talked them into doing this.

Jake glanced through the slit in the drapes again, whispering, “Nineteen.”

He could easily envision nineteen things he’d say to the brunette when they met. Nineteen ways to bring about that meeting. The nineteen minutes it would take to run out from behind the curtain, grab her hand and drag her to his place. The number of times he wanted to make love to her and the number of positions he wanted to do it.

“Nineteen? Hello?”

Jake jerked his attention back toward the stage manager who was watching him with an expectant—yet slightly exasperated—look. He’d obviously been visualizing for several minutes. “The guy before you is done.”

“What’d he go for?” Jake couldn’t help asking.

“Thirty-five.”

Thirty-five. Oh, God, thirty-five bucks? He’d whip out his checkbook and pay ten times that if he could get out of this. Then he’d go straight out and introduce himself to the brunette in blue.

“Thirty-five hundred,” the woman added, obviously reading his expression.

“Holy shit.”

He could barely scrape up one times that amount, and if he had ten times it in his checking account, he sure as hell wouldn’t be living in a one-bedroom apartment over a flower shop in Hyde Park.

“They’re reading your bio right now, so we need to move quickly,” Miss Pencil Tapper said, actually reaching out to grasp his arm. She must know he wanted to bolt. He doubted he was the first to feel that way tonight.

“Fine, fine,” he muttered, not even listening to the announcer, whose voice was droning through the hotel sound system. He let go of the black drape curtain, regret making his fingers glide against it for a moment longer than necessary. Then he was being pushed onto the stage, blinded by a spotlight, deafened by the roar of a hundred tipsy women.

This must be what those Chippendales dudes felt like. The thought of doing this dressed in leather cowboy chaps and nothing else was enough to make his stomach heave.

“Who’s going to start the bidding?”

“Five hundred!” someone yelled.

Okay. It was a start. Five hundred…that was a worthy donation. That’d buy a lot of Christmas presents for needy kids. Like, you know, a hundred games of Go Fish or whatever that crap sold for now. But, man, it sounded pathetic considering the pretty boy stockbroker went for seven times that much.

“Six.”

“Seven!”

The numbers started flying at a dizzying speed, and Jake couldn’t keep up with them for a while. Not until a loud, determined female voice cut through the catcalls to shout, “Five thousand dollars!”

Everyone fell silent for an infinitesimal moment. Jake included. He didn’t know what the highest bachelor had sold for, but at least he wasn’t going to be rock bottom.

“We have a bid of five thousand dollars for this excellent cause,” the auctioneer preened. “And I imagine our handsome bachelor will be worth every penny of it.”

Ahh, the joy of being pimped by a fat guy with sweaty jowls and a smarmy smile.

The searing heat of the spotlight suddenly left his face. Jake watched as the large, golden circle washed over the crowd, turning to illuminate the woman who’d ignored auction protocol by upping the ante so dramatically.

Jake held his breath, something in his brain telling him it had been her. The brunette. The one he couldn’t stop thinking about had heard his mental 911 call.

The spotlight finally came to rest on the top of a very blond head.

Shit.

The middle-aged woman trying to look ten years younger sat at one of the exclusive, reserved tables up front, with a few other equally jaded-looking upper crusters. She smiled, well pleased with herself for having silenced the entire room.

But the complacent silence didn’t last for long. Because suddenly, as if they all had one voice, her three companions jumped into the fray.

“Fifty-one hundred.”

“Fifty-two.”

“Fifty-five.”

It went on for at least a minute, until Jake’s head was spinning. These crazy rich females were willing to lay out what amounted to a down payment on a house to go to dinner and a ball game with him? Insane.

It’s for a good cause. True, but damned if he wasn’t getting tired of hearing that refrain in his head.

The figure had hit eight thousand, the blonde and her three friends laughing as they tossed it higher and higher like a volley-ball being lobbed over a net. Jake had hated volleyball ever since he’d been an oversize, clumsy fourth grader who always got picked last for the team in gym. And he especially hated being the ball.

Though the bidding women were laughing, their amusement held a hint of malice and their smiles were tight. They might have started this as a game, but now their competitive spirits were rising.

He didn’t know how long it might have gone on, if he’d continued to be nibbled at in one-hundred dollar bites. Suddenly the whole room froze again. Because another voice—from the other side of the ballroom—shouted, silencing the three bidding crows.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

Jake visualized it, asked the Fates to be kind, then followed the spotlight.

And for once, he realized, his loopy kid sister was right. He’d asked, and the universe had answered. Because the winning bidder was his beautiful brunette.