Billionaire for Valentine

Chapter 2

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-on-parade. 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.

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 long-distance 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 renta- 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 c**k 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 s*x 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 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.