Gettin' Lucky (Love and Laughter) by Kimberly Raye Read Free Book Online

now I have to bring the account current. So it’s a thousand bucks, or no deal.”
    “Okay,” he said after a long moment. “A thousand bucks. One evening. You eat dinner, pretend to be the nanny, spend the night and say goodbye to my in-laws at breakfast That’s it.”
    “What about my cab fare?”
    “A thousand dollars, plus the cab fare.”
    “And I want half my money up front.”
    “For someone desperate, you sure make a lot of demands.” He nodded. “I’ll have to go to the bank.” He glanced at his watch. “You can ride to town with me, and I’ll drop you by Earline’s beauty shop. She can get you fixed up while I take care of things at the bank.”
    “What about your wife? Since I’m playing this little role for your in-laws, don’t you think she might want to give me a look-over before you hire me?”
    “She certainly would,” he replied. “But she passed away a couple of years ago. A car accident.”
    Yes!
    Yes? What kind of morbid person was she? He’d just admitted a tragedy to her. Granted, a tragedy that made him unattached, but still a tragedy.
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
    “You didn’t. Now, first things first, we need to get you out of those clothes.”
    Whoa, baby. Was this guy a mind reader or what? She took a deep breath, tried to calm her raging hormones and fished a stick of gum from her pocket.
    “No gum chewing.” He plucked the gum from her hand and motioned to her pocket. “Give it up.”
    The money. She handed over the gum and tried not to stare longingly. Just think about the money.
    “Do you need to get in touch with your boss and tell him where you’ll be?” Tyler asked, drawing her attention.
    “I don’t have a boss. I’m an independent driver for Speedy Cab. Which means I work when I want to, pay a flat fee from each fare to the cab company and don’t work when I don’t want to.”
    “Won’t someone be worried about you if you’re gone all night? Your family? Husband?”
    “No,” she retorted, wishing his words didn’t bring the familiar ache to the pit of her stomach. “There’s just my granny. No other family. No husband.” Hint. Hint.
    “Good—I mean, it’s good that we won’t be inconveniencing anybody with our little charade.” He smiled, that slow, lazy, naked-stranger smile that made her heart beat faster and her body go from warm to blazing hot.
    Of course, his smiles didn’t mean anything, she told herself a few minutes later as she followed him down the hall toward the guest room. The faded denim of his jeans pulled and tugged at all the right places as he walked and Lucky tried to fix her gaze at a point just above his shoulder. She had no doubt that he flirted with every woman. Some men were like that. They oozed sex appeal.
    Not that anyone had done any oozing in her direction, mind you. Which was all the more reason for her to take the job. Lucky had quite a few things to learn in the man-woman department if she ever wanted to find that special someone, settle down and have herself an honest-to-goodness family. She intended to finish school first, but meanwhile, she could polish her manhunting skills.
    Since Tyler Grant seemed pretty good at attracting the opposite sex, maybe she could learn a thing or two from him while she played nanny to his daughter. How to flirt, at least. He was a master at that, and once she returned to the real world, a push-up bra could only do so much.
     
    FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, after Tyler had showered and changed, he stood in the guest-room doorway and stared at the woman standing near the brass bed. A knock-’em-dead woman.
    The baseball cap lay discarded atop one frilly Victorian-lace pillow. Jeans, sneakers and T-shirt lay in a heap near the floor-length mirror.
    His gaze fixed on the creamy expanse of skin at her ankle, up one sweetly curved calf, then knee, before the image disappeared beneath the hemline of a straight black skirt that hugged every inch of thigh and hip to