She had the grace to give him a rueful smile. “Sorry.”
He couldn’t help but smile back. “Well, I’m glad about one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re not insane.” He shook his head. “For a while there you had me convinced you’d lost more than a few screws upstairs.”
“What?” She jammed a fist on her hip and gave him an indignant glare. “You thought I was crazy?” A mischievous smile tickled her lips. “Now I wonder what gave you that idea?”
“Probably when you marched in with fire in your eyes and proceeded to lambaste an innocent man.” He laughed. “For a moment I thought I was in the twilight zone.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I really am. It’s just…I tend to fly off the handle pretty quickly…especially if it has to do with my little sis. I don’t let anybody take advantage of her.”
“Your little sis? I thought she was your twin.”
“She is, but I got here first.” She lifted a hand to push a curly strand away from her face. “So anyway, she insisted that I find you and apologize, so here I am.”
He gave her a crooked grin. “So this apology, it was her idea.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, well. I came, didn’t I?” It sounded like she was done with apologies. Apparently, once she’d said her piece, that was that. “So what’s your answer to my question? What kind of business are you running here?”
Max almost smiled. The more he listened to this woman speak – and now he’d have to stop thinking of her as Suave and remind himself that she was Silken – the more intrigued he was by her. Within the space of mere minutes she had moved from defiant to crazy to seductive to apologetic. And now to demanding. He could see she wasn’t going to give up till he’d given her an answer. “This is my brand new office,” he said. “I’m here in Cupertino to finalize the building of a racetrack.”
Silken’s eyes opened wide. “Shut up. You’re not serious, are you?”
Now his face broke into a smile. He couldn’t help it. So he was supposed to shut up and answer her question at the same time? “I’m serious as a judge,” he said. "The project is already underway. Half completed, in fact.”
She frowned. “Hey, now that you mention it, I did hear something through the grapevine about some big construction taking place just outside of the Cupertino city limits. That’s your project?”
“The same. I think the city could do with some NASCAR Racing.”
“NASCAR,” Silken repeated, her eyes full of wonder, “in my very own town?”
“You like the idea?”
She turned eager eyes on him. “Are you crazy? I love it. Cars are my life, especially fast ones.”
Max almost did a double-take. So far he hadn’t found a woman who got excited in the least about his latest project. Finally, here was one who seemed to share his passion. An idea came to him. He didn’t even think twice before he threw it out to her. “Hey, want to come see the racetrack? I can take you there right now.”
Her eyes sparkled and she gave him a toothy grin. “Take me to it.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“You’re going where? Silken, are you crazy? You don’t even know this man.” Suave’s voice was so high pitched she was almost shrieking into the phone. “You get out of that car this instant, do you hear me? You’ve got to stop acting on impulse. You’re a grown woman, Silken, not a little kid.”
Silken held the phone away from her ear, looked over at Max and grinned. “My sister,” she mouthed to him as the wind whipped her hair around her face. Her very able driver smiled back at her then turned his attention back to the wide-open highway as his Benz sports convertible sped past car after car. He was going at a healthy clip but she didn’t mind. She could see that he was an expert driver. She had no doubt that she was in good hands.
Silken put the phone back to her ear. “It’s okay, sis. I’m just going to look at the site with him and then I’ll head right back. I’ll even take him to the office so you can meet him and see that he's harmless.” She glanced over at Max. He’d raised his eyebrows but he hadn’t said a thing. Actually, she hadn’t asked him first but she guessed he wouldn’t mind it if she dragged him off to meet her sister. That way he’d know for sure that she had a twin and wasn’t just making it up. “I’ll be back soon, okay?”
There were more grumbles from Suave but eventually she calmed down enough for Silken to be able to hang up without worrying that her sister was going to have a heart attack. Suave was such a worrywart – unlike her, always quick to try something new.
Sliding the phone back into her purse, she turned to Max. “How much farther?” She had to yell to be heard over the wind whipping at their faces.
“Ten minutes and we’re there,” he yelled back. “Everything all right?”
“Perfect,” she said and settled back in her seat to enjoy the rest of the ride.
Within minutes they were pulling into a massive parking lot, now totally empty except for Max’s car that was pulling up to the entrance to a stadium that was still under construction. He swung the car into a nearby parking spot then hopped out to open the door for Silken.
“Welcome,” he said with a dramatic flourish. “My latest and greatest project – NASCAR racing at its finest. Coming soon to your town.”
She laughed. “Your latest but surely not your greatest. What about your Davidoff cosmetics empire? I checked you out, you know. I know who you are.”
For a second his eyes narrowed and the smile on his lips hardened. Obviously, he wasn’t thrilled that his identity was no secret, at least not to her. But what did he expect? She’d found him so, of course, she would also have found out who he was. She stared up at him, ready to douse him with a cold dose of reality if he questioned how she knew about him.