by Julie James
Her second thought was that her first thought was ridiculous, and she nearly laughed out loud at herself. Run. Really? He was just some guy in a bar; having spent five years in a college town that allowed people to enter bars at the age of nineteen, she’d seen plenty of those.
She gestured to the crowd around them. It was after eleven o’clock, and the place was packed to the gills. “Last day of finals. It’s a party for everybody.”
He looked her over with assessing eyes. “Let me guess. You’re graduating this weekend. You just took your last exam, and tonight you’re celebrating your entry into the real world.” He cocked his head. “I’d say…advertising major. You scored a job with Leo Burnett and are about to move into your first apartment in Chicago, a quaint and overpriced two bedroom in Wrigleyville that you’ll share with your roommate over there.” He nodded in the direction of Rae, obviously having noticed which table Rylann had been sitting at.
She rested her arm on the bar. “Is this ‘guess my major’ routine your typical opening line or something you break out only on graduation weekend, hoping most women are too drunk to notice how generic it is?”
He looked offended. “Generic? I was going for confident and perceptive.”
“You ended up somewhere around cliched and smug.”
He grinned, revealing two small dimples that added a hint of mischief to his angular jaw. “Or maybe I was just so dead-on perceptive that it scared you.”
The bartender pushed the six drinks Rylann had ordered in front of her. She handed over two twenties and waited for her change. “Not even close,” she said to Smug Dimples, happy to prove him wrong. “I’m a grad student. Law school.”
“Ah. You’re putting off the real world for another three years, then.” He casually took a swig of his beer.
Rylann fought the urge to roll her eyes. “I see. Now you’re going for cliched and condescending.”
Smug Dimples looked her over slyly. “I didn’t say there was anything wrong with putting off the real world, counselor. You inferred that part.”
Rylann opened her mouth to respond, then shut it. Okay, fair enough. But he wasn’t the only one who could make quick assessments, and she’d bet that hers would be a lot more accurate than his had been. She knew his type—every woman knew his type. Blessed by an abundance of good looks and a corresponding amount of overconfidence, guys like him typically compensated by being short on personality. It was nature’s way of keeping things fair.
The bartender handed back her change, and Rylann grabbed two drinks to make her first trip back to the table. She was about to throw out a sassy parting remark to Smug Dimples when Rae suddenly appeared at her side.
“I’ll help you out with those, Rylann.” With a wink, Rae skillfully grabbed four drinks with both hands. “Wouldn’t want you to interrupt your conversation on our account.”
Before Rylann could utter a word in protest, Rae had already begun to ease her way through the crowd back to their table.
Smug Dimples leaned in closer. “I think your friend likes me.”
“She’s known for her exceptionally poor taste in men.”
He laughed. “Tell me how you really feel, counselor.”
Rylann glanced at him sideways. “It’s not ‘counselor’ until I graduate and pass the bar, you know.”
Smug Dimples’s eyes met hers and held them. “Okay, we’ll do first names instead. Rylann.”
She said nothing at first as she looked him up and down, coming to one inescapable conclusion. “You’re used to getting your way with women, aren’t you?”
He paused for a second. “Far more than I’d like, actually.”
He suddenly looked serious, and Rylann wasn’t sure what to say in response. Perhaps that was her cue.
She tipped her glass with a polite smile. “I think I’ll head back to my friends now. It’s been a pleasure…not quite meeting you.”
She walked back to the table, where her friends were engaged in a heated debate over the scope of the Fifth Amendment’s right to counsel during custodial interrogations. The guys in their group, including Shane, kept right on arguing as Rylann squeezed by, either not having noticed—or not caring about—her interaction with the guy at the bar. Rae, however, practically yanked Rylann into her seat.
“So? How did it go?” she asked eagerly.
“Assuming you’re talking about Smug Dimples over there, it didn’t go anywhere.”
“Smug Dimples?” Rae looked ready to smack her upside the head. “You know who that is, right?”
Surprised by the question, Rylann stole a glance back at Smug Dimples, who’d already joined his friends over at the pool table. Well, she’d had a theory up until that moment. Judging from the no-fuss jeans, flannel shirt, and work boots, along with the slightly too-longish hair, she’d pretty much assumed he was a townie, likely one of those guys in his twenties from Champaign who hung out with his friends at campus bars looking for easy pickings among the co-eds.
But now, given Rae’s implication that he was somebody she should know, she needed to rethink that assumption.
An athlete perhaps. He was tall enough, easily over six feet, and certainly had the body—not that she’d paid attention to that, of course.
Maybe he was the Fighting Illinis’ new quarterback or something. Rylann had been living in the insular world of law school for the past nine months and, frankly, didn’t have much of an interest in college football, so that could easily be the case. Although he seemed a bit older than she would expect for an undergrad.
“All right, I’ll bite. Who is he?” she asked Rae. She prepared to be wholly unimpressed.
“Kyle Rhodes.”
Rylann stopped her drink midway to her mouth. Well. She actually did know that name. Virtually everyone at the university knew that name.
“The billionaire?” she asked.
“Technically, the billionaire’s son—but yes, the one and only,” Rae said.
“But Kyle Rhodes is supposed to be a computer geek.”
Rae shifted her position to check out the object of their discussion. “If that’s the new face of computer geek, sign me up. He can push my keyboard buttons any day.”
“Nice, Rae.” Rylann resisted the urge to look over again. She wasn’t familiar with all the details of his story, but she knew enough from the Time, Newsweek, and Forbes articles she’d read about his father, a Chicago businessman hailed as the epitome of the American dream. From what she recalled, Grey Rhodes had come from modest roots, graduated from the University of Illinois with a master’s degree in computer science, and eventually started his own software company. She didn’t remember much about his career, except for the one detail that really mattered: about ten years ago, his company had developed the Rhodes Anti-Virus, a software security program that had exploded worldwide to the ultimate tune of over one billion dollars.
She also knew that Grey Rhodes made generous donations to his alma mater, at least, she assumed that was the case, since the university had named an entire section of the campus after him—the Grey Rhodes Center for Computer Science. With his billion-dollar empire, he was easily the most wealthy and famous of the school’s alumni. And thus Kyle Rhodes, a grad student in computer science and the heirapparent, was also a name people knew.
So Smug Dimples had a name now, Rylann thought. Well, good for him.
She watched surreptitiously as Kyle Rhodes leaned across the pool table to take his shot, the flannel shirt stretching tight across his broad, seemingly very toned chest.
“You could always go back over there,” Rae said slyly, her eyes trained in the same direction as Rylann’s.
Rylann shook her head. Not a chance. “Didn’t your mother ever warn you about that kind of guy, Rae?”
“Yep. On my sixteenth birthday, when Troy Dempsey pulled into my driveway and asked if I wanted to go for a ride on his motorcycle.”
“Did you go?” Rylann asked.
“Hell, yes. I was wearing a denim miniskirt, and I bu
rned my calf on the exhaust pipe. Still have the scar to this day.”
“There’s a lesson to be learned there,” Rylann said.
“Never wear a denim miniskirt?”
Rylann laughed. “That, too.” And stay away from bad boys.
They moved on from the subject of Kyle Rhodes and joined their friends in the Fifth Amendment fracas. Before Rylann realized it, over an hour had passed, and she was surprised when she checked her watch and saw that it was after midnight. She caught herself glancing in the direction of the pool table—her treacherous eyes seemed to have a will of their own that night—and noticed that Kyle Rhodes and his friends were gone.
Which was just fine with her.
Really.
Two
THE BAR LIGHTS came on, a signal that it was time for everyone to clear out.
Rylann checked her watch impatiently, saw that it was a quarter past one in the morning, and wondered what could be taking Rae so long in the bathroom. She didn’t think her friend was sick—sure, they’d both had a few drinks that night, but they’d spread them out over several hours.
When another person, the third in the last five minutes, bumped into Rylann in the half stampede/half stumble of drunk patrons to the door, she figured she should check on what was keeping Rae. Moving against the herd, she waded deeper into the bar. Without warning, a guy slammed into her from the left, spilling his beer down the front of her black V-neck shirt.
Rylann cringed as the cold, sticky liquid trickled between her breasts and down her stomach. She glared at the culprit, a guy wearing a Greek-lettered baseball cap low on his forehead. “That’s just great,” she said dryly.
He managed a lopsided grin. “Sorry.” He turned around and pushed his friend. “Look what you made me do, asshole!”
As Asshole & Co. made their way out of the bar without another glance in her direction, Rylann shook her head. “Undergrads,” she muttered under her breath. No more campus bars, she decided. Sure, the drinks were cheap, but they clearly needed to find someplace with a more cerebral crowd.
“Now, now, counselor. Not so long ago, that could’ve been your pledge-dance date.”
Rylann recognized that teasing tone. She turned around and saw Smug Dimples, aka Kyle Rhodes, relaxing against the bar, his long legs stretched out in front of him.
She walked over, resolved to remain cool in the face of such undeniable attractiveness, and tried to decide how annoyed she was that his assessments of her were getting more accurate. She had been in a sorority and had, in fact, gone to pledge dances and several other functions with inebriated frat guys in baseball caps who inevitably ended up spilling beer on her at some point in the night. Good times.
She stopped alongside Kyle at the bar and pointed to the stack of cocktail napkins behind him. “Napkin, please.”
“You’re not going to tell me that I’m wrong about your pledge-dance date back there?”
“It was a lucky guess.” Rylann held out her hand and repeated her request. “Napkin.”
Kyle looked her over, then turned to the man standing behind the bar. “Think we could get a towel, Dan?”
“Sure, no problem, Kyle.” The bartender opened a cabinet underneath the bar and pulled out a fresh towel. He handed it to Kyle, who passed it over to Rylann.
“Thank you. They seem to know you around here, Kyle.” She pointedly repeated his first name so that she didn’t need to feign cluelessness if he offered it. For some reason, she didn’t want him to know that Rae had told her who he was.
“The manager is a friend of mine.” Kyle gestured to his two friends, who were playing pool in the corner of the bar. “He gives us free drinks. Can’t beat that deal.”
Rylann bit back a laugh. She wouldn’t have thought that a billionaire’s son would care about getting a deal on drinks. Then again, having never met a billionaire’s son before, she really didn’t know what they cared about.
She dabbed at her wet shirt with the towel, grateful that she’d worn black and didn’t have to worry about see-through issues. She half-expected Kyle to make some kind of smirky remark about the way the material clung to her chest, but he said nothing. And when she’d finished with the towel and set it on the bar, she looked up and found his eyes on hers, not zoned in on her boobs.
“So where are your friends?” he asked.
Shit! Rae. Rylann had completely forgotten about her after Frat Boy had dumped the beer down her shirt. “That’s a good question.” She looked around the bar and noticed that it was empty except for a few stragglers. Neither Rae nor her other law school friends were among them.
This was starting to get odd.
“She was supposed to meet me by the front door after she went to the bathroom, but she never came back…Excuse me for a moment.” Rylann left Kyle standing at the bar and strode into the ladies’ room. A quick check of the stalls revealed they were all empty.
After exiting the ladies’ room, she headed toward the wide wooden staircase that led to the second floor. A bouncer promptly cut her off at the pass.
“Bar’s closed,” he said. “You need to make your way to the door.”
“I’m looking for my friend who said she was going to the bathroom. There’s one upstairs, right?”
“Yes, but there’s no one in it. I just checked,” the bouncer said.
“Is there anyone still hanging out by the bar? Tall girl, light brown hair, wearing a red shirt?”
The bouncer shook his head. “Sorry. The whole floor’s empty.”
Kyle appeared at Rylann’s side as the bouncer walked off.
“Okay, now I’m worried,” she said, more to herself than to him.
“Does she have a cell phone?” Kyle asked.
Rylann frowned. “Yes, but I don’t.” She caught Kyle’s look and went on the defensive. Rae, and pretty much everyone else she knew, had been nagging her to get a cell phone all year. “Hey, those plans aren’t exactly cheap.”
He pulled a black cell phone out of his jeans pocket. “It’s called ‘free evening minutes.’ Welcome to 2003.”
“Ha, ha.” Rylann thought about leveling him with a withering stare but decided against it—she really could use that cell phone. The sass could wait.
She took the phone from Kyle, realizing that this was the second time she’d accepted help from him in the last five minutes. Common courtesy meant this obligated her to be at least somewhat pleasant to him.
Crap.
She dialed Rae’s number and waited as the phone rang.
“Hello?” her friend answered in a perplexed tone.
Rylann breathed a sigh of relief. “Rae, where are you? I’m standing here like an idiot waiting for you to come out of the bathroom. But you’re not in the bathroom.”
“Carpe diem.”
Rylann scooted a few feet away from Kyle. “‘Carpe diem’? What do you mean by that?” She had a funny feeling she wasn’t going to like whatever her friend was about to say next.
“It’s Latin for ‘Don’t kill me.’ “
Oh boy.
“What did you do, Rae?”
“Okay, here’s what happened: when I came out of the bathroom, I saw Kyle Rhodes at the bar, checking you out,” Rae said. “I decided that if you aren’t going to treat yourself to a little fun after the long year we’ve had, then I’m going to make the fun come to you. So I grabbed the guys, and we all sneaked out the back door.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. He’s the son of a billionaire, Rylann. And he’s gorgeous. You should be thanking me, actually. We’re already a block away from Shane’s apartment, and I think I’ll hang out here for a while. Give you some space.”
Rylann lowered her voice further. “This goes against the woman code, Rae. We never leave one of our own behind. Now I have to walk home by myself.”
“Not if everything goes as planned…” Rae sounded very evil genius-like before her tone turned coy. “Whose phone is this, anyway?”
No way was
Rylann going to answer that. “Come to think of it, I am going to kill you. And then I’m going to steal the black Manolos you bought last winter and dance in them at your funeral.” She hung up the phone with emphasis.
She walked over to Kyle and handed the phone back to him.
“So?” he asked.
Rylann quickly thought up an excuse. “One of our friends got sick, so Rae and the others had to get him home fast.”
“Or maybe she left you here so that you’d be stuck with me.”
Rylann threw up her hands. “Okay, that’s freaky. How would you know that?”
Kyle shrugged. “I heard the ‘carpe diem’ part and guessed. I have a twin sister. I’ve seen how her and her friends’ scary matchmaking minds work.”
Rylann blushed. “I hope you know that I had nothing to do with this.”
Kyle seemed more amused than bothered by Rae’s schemes. “Don’t worry, counselor, I won’t have you charged as a co-conspirator.” He nodded toward the door. “Come on. I’ll walk you home.”
Rylann began making her way toward the exit. “Thanks, but that’s not necessary. I only live eight blocks away.”
Kyle scoffed as he followed her to the door. “Like I’m going to let a woman walk home by herself at one thirty in the morning. My mother raised me better than that.”
“I won’t tell her if you don’t.” Not that it was Rylann’s first choice to walk home alone, but she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t made similar late-night treks across campus as an undergrad. Besides, Kyle Rhodes was a virtual stranger himself. Who said he was safe?
Kyle stopped her just as she reached the front door. “It’s not only what my mother would say; it’s what I think. My sister is a grad student at Northwestern. If I found out that some jerk let her walk home alone this late, I’d kick his ass. So it looks like you’re stuck with me. Like it or not.”
Rylann thought through her options. The speech about his sister seemed genuine enough. From what she could tell, Kyle Rhodes was cocky and trouble, but not that kind of trouble. “All right, fine. You can walk me home.” She paused. “Thank you.”
“See? Was it that hard to be nice to me?”
