The Virgin's Revenge (17 page)

This
regular woman didn’t have a prayer of getting the man, so she was determined to get the sex, any way she had to go about it. If that meant letting the catalog out, so be it.

Maybe Cole was on to something about Jackmans not being able to handle losing, because Amanda heard a challenge in Susie’s words and couldn’t make herself give in. She couldn’t quit when she was so much closer to being with Cole than she ever had been before. Sure it was crazy, but really…who was going to know it was her other than someone who’d already seen her naked? And since the point of this whole mess was
because
no one had seen her naked, why not? Most everyone in town only thought of her in jeans and sweaters or T-shirts. When occasion called for it, dresses. No one ever thought of sweet Amanda Jackman as sexy. Or capable of being sexy.

Well, they were all going to find out the truth now, weren’t they?

“Leave me the box.” Amanda put her wine firmly on the table and picked up the catalog to look at it more critically. Tastefully done, beautifully lit, and the lingerie was beautiful. The pictures were risqué but nothing to be ashamed of. Not by her, Susie or her brothers. “I know exactly where to put these.”

Susie’s watery choke was rather satisfying. “What?”

“I said, I know exactly where to put them.” Right next to the free calendars with bikini chicks on custom cars in Burke Halifax’s garage. They’d be gone in no time. No time at all.

Chapter Nine

Cole frowned at the lines of code in the terminal dialogue box. “Now how’d you come up with that?”

“You talking to your program again?” Burke asked as he came out of his office, stopping to glance at the screen over Cole’s shoulder. His black brows drew together, as if squinting his eyes would suddenly break the code for him.

“How else should I get it to tell me its secrets? And you do want to tell me your secrets, don’t you, baby?” Cole spotted the error and replaced the keystroke. Another quick test and—“Yes! Got it!”

“I have no idea how you understand this stuff. Or how you can stare at it for…four hours straight.” Burke lifted his watch for Cole to look at. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“I’m always hungry,” Cole admitted with a grin. “But trust me, four hours is nothing. I’m practically a surgeon with ‘this stuff’. It takes time to do it right.” All the same, he could use a break. “We’ve got the hardware in and now the software’s been uploaded. Did you make that book of UPCs I asked you to?” Every item and service the garage offered needed to be fed into the system, each one categorized for how often the clients repeated the service and which other services they might use.

“This baby is going to take in your clients’ emails and/or street addresses and send them automated notices for upkeep, which isn’t too different from what other systems can do, but this one is going to take into account the rate that your clients return and what services they use. From there, it will extrapolate from the information in the databases when they’ll need a reminder and generate a customized deal from the ones you create in the database that best matches a service they’ll need. So the guy who commutes two hours each way every day is going to be reminded to come in at a different rate than the girl that only drives her car ten minutes to school and back each day, and both of them will have a different special offer on their reminders than your customization clients, who’ll draw from a list of specialty services. This is a big improvement over you yelling at Billy to stuff envelopes every couple of months.”

Burke smiled and clapped Cole on the back almost hard enough to compete with the Jackmans. “And I don’t have to do anything for that to happen?”

“Just have to make sure to ring up every service you provide.”

“They’re used to doing that.” Burke nodded. “You sure this won’t be too complicated for them?” Burke’s staff was comprised of five incomparable mechanics and fabricators. They weren’t exactly technical whiz kids unless it involved making a car do something cars weren’t meant to do. Like dance.

Cole nodded. “That’s the beauty of it. This touch screen interface is simple as possible. All the work is done in the code. It gives prompts when more information is needed and automates everything else. Once we get all the services and their prices entered, we can start training.”

Burke studied the new touch screen with the gleaming eyes of a man who’d found his new dream television. The neat freak, as his wife so lovingly called him, was in technological heaven. He was in a different kind of heaven as well, with said wife and the baby they had on the way. Five years they’d been married, and they’d been friends their whole lives before that. If anyone had insight into Cole’s situation, it’d be Burke. But how the hell did you ask a guy what gave him the balls to make his best friend his wife?

“You got something on your mind, Cole, or you just like staring at me?”

Cole grinned. “Well, you do have a certain ugly charm.”

“Bet your ass I do.” Burke finally looked at Cole sideways. “But something tells me you’re not interested in asking me to dinner.”

“I would, but we both know Cass is the jealous type. She’d skin me alive if I got you a steak and not her.”

“No shit,” Burke agreed. “So does this have something to do with a certain leggy blonde who thinks car makers should consider HEPA filters for their engines?”

Cole laughed. “Tell me she didn’t say that.”

“You think I could make that up?” Burke turned away from the console and leaned his elbow on the counter, a slightly perplexed expression on his face. “No offense or anything, but don’t you usually have these kinds of conversations with those twins you’re always hanging out with?”

“Her brothers?” Cole asked pointedly, and Burke nodded.

“Sorry, I should have thought of that.”

“It’s all right. Truth is, the bigger reason for not talking to them about this is that the two of them are better at making women throw things at them than dating them.” This was it, the moment he decided if he was all in or not.

For her, you’d do anything,
Locke rumbled in his head.
You’ve always done anything for her. Now you know why.

And he was right, damn him. Even wonder if there was some other way to look at his future.

“How’d you know you wanted to be with Cass? You know, that way?”

“The in-bed kind of way or the for-the-rest-of-my-life kind of way?”

Cole bit back a chuckle. “I have the in-bed way figured out.”

“Good, because if you didn’t want to be with her, I’d be really worried about you. Amanda seems sweet.”

“Yeah, most people think that.”

At that, Burke outright laughed. “Sweet is overrated, trust me. Much better to have a woman with spirit. They kick your ass a little from time to time, but believe me, it’s worth it.”

Cole nodded. He knew that. Even without dating her, twelve years with Amanda in his life had gotten that point across almost too well. “But how did you know you loved her enough to promise her the rest of your life? How did you know you could keep a promise like that? That she would?”

Burke gave him the respect of actually thinking about it before answering. “I’ll admit, I was a jackass about it at first, so I know where you’re coming from. Cassie was my best friend, and I was sure she wanted more than I had in me to give. But I’ll tell you something, Cole, something I’ve never told another living soul.”

Cole waited, breath held.

“I
didn’t
know if I could promise her the rest of my life. Things happen to us, we change. All kinds of crap that people smarter than me can make sound good in cards and movies. I was scared shitless that I was going to break her heart and rip out everything good in her. Which would rip out the only good thing about me. That’s what finally decided me.”

“So you did it to keep the only good thing in you…in you?”

“No, stupid. Her.” He said it so simply. An absolute fact. “I’m an asshole, Cole. I know it, you know it. The whole damn world knows it. I’m not nice, I’m not cuddly, and I’ll stick a tire iron up your ass if you piss me off.”

More facts. “Good to know.”

“Cass is the best part of me. If I lose her, I’m lost, period. I can’t think about what a day without her would be like, much less the rest of my life. So if that means spending the next seventy years making her happy to be next to me, that’s what I’m gonna do. Once I finally understood that, promising Cass I’d love her was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Best thing too.”

He completely believed it, Cole could tell. Burke would never be the giddily happy kind of guy, but the satisfied, completely content look in his eyes was impossible to doubt.

“That answer your question?”

Cole nodded. “Thanks, Burke,” he added, his voice so thick he had to clear it with a cough. “Gives me a lot to think about.”

Burke smacked him soundly on the back of one shoulder. “Don’t think too long. Women aren’t the most patient souls in the world when they get an idea in their heads. I don’t know Amanda too well, but even I can tell that’s a woman with an idea or two.”

“Burke, man, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Probably better if you don’t. How about instead we get some late lunch, then you can get started on that training you were talking about.” Burke walked out from behind the counter. “Billy, you’re gonna pick up lunch!”

He stopped when there wasn’t an automatic, “Yes, Boss!” Billy might drive Burke crazy, Cole knew as well as anyone else within earshot of the garage on any given day, but the kid never failed to reply. Not even when he was in enough trouble to wonder if Burke would boil him alive.

“Maybe he already went off to find something?” Cole asked, putting his tools into his bag. Nothing like the big bag Locke had stuffed under Amanda’s kitchen sink, of course. His own tools fit in a small case, with a special hole cut into the foam for the box of precision screwdrivers. The hardware had been a simple install, and now that everything had cleared the first debug, he was looking forward to testing out the various levels of information.

Burke moved out from behind the register counter and followed the L-shaped waiting area to the seating where clients could watch the work going on in the garage. He barely got past the turn before coming to a disgruntled stop.

“Boy, what are you doing on the floor?”

Cole looked up, all thoughts of the new system stopped dead.

“Peacock?” Burke asked, voice echoing through the small corridor, while Cole’s heart leapt. And not in the good way. “What the hell does a peacock have to do with you being on the floor?”

There was another murmuring sound, something Cole couldn’t quite make out as he circled the counter, getting more concerned by the second. He headed over to where Burke stood staring into the hallway. The sight was just as Cole had seen the day he’d gone to Amanda’s house. Billy Anderson toes-up on the ground. Only this time, instead of a sexy blonde kneeling next to him, he was alone.

Cole spared a glance at Burke, but he didn’t see any understanding on the other man’s face.

“She said it would all be in the catalog, but I didn’t believe her,” Billy said softly, awed, from the floor.

“Believe who?” Burke walked over, Cole right next to him.

“Her, the girl of my dreams.” Billy held up a shiny black booklet of some kind. It took a second for Cole to register what he was seeing, and then finally, he recognized the stunning blonde woman on the front. The naked one.

His
naked one.

It was all Cole could do not to scrub his face with his hand. But that would give things away.

“You fainted looking at underwear?” Burke demanded, stomping over and pulling the booklet out of Billy’s hand. He made a disgusted sound before reaching down to grab Billy by the shirt and lift him forcibly to his feet.

“There’s no underwear on that picture,” Billy said dazedly. “And you’ve never seen her in peacock feathers.”

“Yes I have. It’s on page three.” Burke put the booklet back on the stack—holy shit, there was a
stack
!—on his table of promotional material at the end of the small hall. “I checked out the whole thing before I let Amanda put it in here for Susie this morning.”

“Amanda brought those in?” Cole asked, trying to keep the strangled note out of his voice.

He must not have done very well because Burke frowned at him. “Yeah, Susie’s expanding. She figured a lot of the guys in town aren’t too keen on walking into the Suite Shoppe, so this was a good way to get their attention.” Burke glanced down at the booklets again and shook his head. “I almost feel bad for Emil’s calendar. Since she put this out, nobody’s picked up a single one. The place has had so many people coming in for it I was thinking of charging for the copies. Didn’t you notice all the people coming and going?”

No, but an elephant could walk in while he was working and he wouldn’t notice. Cole frowned at the two stacks. There appeared to be equal copies of both the catalog and the calendar. Then he remembered who he was dealing with. “You’ve been refilling it, haven’t you?”

Burke nodded, the persnickety bastard. “Can’t seem to keep them on the table.” He glared at Billy, who was still too many shades of red to really notice. “Boy, we really need to get you a date.”

“Yes, Boss.” Billy smiled, his gaze losing focus. “I know just the girl to ask.”

“Don’t even
think
about it,” Cole snarled, his hands in fists at his sides.

Billy’s eyes went wide.

Burke’s narrowed into suspicious slits. He looked down at the booklet again, tilting his head before rolling his eyes and mumbling, “Son of a bitch!” He looked at Cole. “Told you they get impatient. Guess it’s safe to say you didn’t know anything about this.”

“You think it would
be
there if I knew anything about it?” Cole replied, not liking the tight feel of his own skin or the loud roar happening in his ears. Where was that coming from? “How many of those have gone out?”

“Well, this is the last of them, and the box she gave me had about two hundred—”

“Two…” Cole turned and stalked for the front door of the shop. He was already starting down the road when he heard Burke yelling after him.