Page 4
“You submitted your drawings to Owen the same day I did,” he’d argued.
Owen. His cousin. Like she would have had a prayer of winning the bid to redesign the chic coffee shop’s interior. True, a win was a win for Cameron Designs, and normally they were on the same team. But her competitive nature had flamed hot during that contest. Losing to Marcus had stung.
She’d wanted Hawaii.
Hell, she’d wanted to win.
On my own. With no one’s help. Emmett’s smarmy face popped into her mind again. Why had she been thinking of him so much lately? Maybe because this was the first time she’d felt her spark in a long while. Marcus had fed the flicker, and now she was alight.
She crossed her arms and refocused on her goal.
“What’s the matter?” she teased, baiting him. “Too scared to put Hawaii on the line? Afraid you might lose?”
That shouldn’t have worked. It was immature and childish… But his jaw had ticked in challenge, and she’d found herself tamping down the smile dying to produce itself on her face. Simply say the word “scared” to Marcus Black and he’d break his neck trying to prove he wasn’t.
“You’d have to stay the entire night,” he said.
Ha! She had him. “Done.”
“Alone.”
“Done.”
“This Friday,” he added. “The thirteenth.”
She’d swallowed with an audible gulp, but managed, “D-Done.”
CHAPTER TWO
Halfway back to her car, her phone buzzed from the pocket of her joggers. She knew who it was without looking. Sure enough, a text message from Mr. Wonderful read, There yet fraidy cat?
Ignore him, a mature, self-reliant voice asserted.
After debating for two seconds, she keyed in the word Jerkwad and sent the text.
She’d never been good at listening to reason. Obviously. She angled her head up to the second story, where filthy windows clouded with dust and decay seemed to transform into yawning faces with soulless eyes. The human brain often put together random shapes into an order it could understand. There were no actual faces gaping back at her from the upstairs window, just her overactive imagination seeing things where it shouldn’t.
She closed her eyes and then reopened them. Nothing but dirty glass and yellowed lace curtains. A shudder snaked up her spine anyway.
She spun on the heel of one sneaker, went to her trunk again, and dragged out a giant tote filled with bedding, a shiny new Coleman lantern, and a few hundred dollars’ worth of supplies from the local sporting goods store. Then she hauled her booty up the short staircase to the door and kicked it open.
Marcus would laugh his tight butt off if he saw her lugging all this crap in to stay one night. But “roughing it” wasn’t part of the bet.
They’d finished their beers and game shortly after the dare had been made. Marcus had won pool, further fueling her desire to win the trip.
“When you succumb to white-hot terror and run screaming into the hills”—he’d tugged his brown bomber jacket over impossibly wide shoulders, and she’d tried really hard not to admire the way the chest muscles rippled with the movement—“what do I get?”
“What, my terror and abject humiliation aren’t enough?”
“Satisfying, but no.”
She’d pressed her lips together to keep from smiling and then asked, “What did you have in mind?”
He hadn’t hesitated. “The annual RSD dinner.”
“I go to that every year.”
“Yes, but in this case, you’ll be going as my date.”
