Nervous tension filled her as his gorgeous eyes gave her body the once-over. When they reached her face, she had the feeling that he’d checked her out and found her wanting.
Too bad!
She’d planned this down to the smallest detail, and she’d make him help her.
“And what can I do for you, miss?”
Oh, the promise in his tone was what women’s wet dreams were made of. She knew he spoke to every woman this way. She’d studied him, read about how effortlessly he flirted — how women fell at his feet. With one snap of his fingers, females young and old were panting, their salivary glands in overdrive.
“Haley Sutherland,” she said a little breathlessly as she stuck out her hand.
After a slight pause, he grasped her fingers and squeezed, then slowly lifted their entwined hands to his mouth and ran his lips across the top of her knuckles, his warm breath brushing over her skin.
“This!” Haley practically shouted as excitement filled her.
Crew’s normal cool seemed to be shaken; he stared at her in confusion. The expression on his face was almost comical as he stood frozen with his lips only a couple of inches from her skin.
“I want you to teach me how to seduce someone. I have been reading about you, studying the way you flirt, how you can have any woman you want. I want you to teach me how to get a man, how to make him want me so much that he can’t see straight, how to make him drop to his knees.”
“Ummm…are you drunk?” Crew asked after a long pause as he dropped her hand and took a retreating step. Haley had no doubt he thought she was crazy. Perhaps she was at the moment.
However, now that she was warmed up, she couldn’t hold back. She followed his steps, not realizing what she was doing until he bumped against the outside wall of his resort and her hand was pressed against his chest.
“I know this seems weird, and maybe I should have eased into it, but I am in love with a man who doesn’t know I’m alive and my psych professor suggested that I ask him out as a way of getting over my fears, but I get all tongue-tied around him, which just can’t happen. I want you to teach me how to make him want me — desire me — need me! I have money. Lots of it. I’ll pay you any amount you want if you will agree to be my teacher.”
Haley didn’t feel a trace of fear as she gazed into Crew’s eyes. All she felt was exhilaration. She knew he could do it — he could turn her from the wallflower she’d always been into a seductress who would get her man.
“Let me get this straight. You want to pay me to teach you how to seduce a man?”
“Yes!” she gasped, relieved he was starting to get it.
“I honestly don’t know what to say.” His tone of voice didn’t alert her at all to what he was thinking.
“Say yes.”
Chapter Four
Crew couldn’t remember a time in his life when he’d been rendered speechless, not even when his father had given him and his siblings that horrendous ultimatum a couple of years earlier.
This wisp of a woman, who looked a bit too much like a teenage girl, was asking him to teach her how to be a seductress. If it were dark out, he’d think he was dreaming. Was she a kid, and was he being punked? Or was she a crazy person who’d escaped from a mental hospital?
Whoever she was, she couldn’t be serious. Who walked up to a stranger and asked such a thing of them? Certainly not a rational person, someone with full brain functionality.
As he stalled to try to figure out how to make her go away, she pulled her hand back and leaned to her right, her other hand propping on her hip, giving him a glimpse of the curves beneath her baggy blouse. Her foot began to tap, and he noticed her slim ankles, and the smooth skin of her tanned shins.
Giving Ms. Haley Sutherland a bit more of a thorough evaluation, he decided she couldn’t possibly be a teenager. There was a woman’s body hiding behind all that fabric, and sparks were radiating in her misty eyes, such a pale color of green that they were almost translucent.
Her hair was tied back in a very sloppy bun, but tendrils of her long blond hair floated about her face. She was pretty, he decided, but obviously crazy, too, which could be a key reason this man she was in love with avoided her at all costs.
It was too bad, really, since she was enticing enough to drop a man to his knees if she knew how to put away the crazy talk and maybe choose another outfit. His inner thoughts amused him, and a smile broke free. He hated to disappoint any person of the female persuasion, but it looked as if this was one damsel in distress he wouldn’t be able to help.
“Well, are you going to just stare at me all day, or are you going to give me an answer?” she huffed, then before he could say anything, she held up her hand. “And before you think I’m insane, I guarantee you, I’m not. I am just tired of sitting in a corner, tired of being this invisible person. This is one assignment that I’m determined to get an A on, even if it’s not for credit. You wouldn’t know what it’s like to always be invisible, since you’re gorgeous and wealthy and have women drooling over you, but I am all too aware. It’s lonely and disappointing and I just want a new life for myself.”
Crew held up his hand to cut her off. Man, could the woman talk, and talk, and talk. To his utter surprise, her babbling was actually getting through to him on some insane level in his brain. He was intrigued by her request.
How was he supposed to teach her how to catch a guy, though? It wasn’t as if there were books out there on how to seduce a man. Or maybe there were. Hell, he didn’t know. After all, he’d never had to learn the art of seduction. It just came naturally to him, he thought proudly.
“Why would you think I’d even consider doing such a thing?” he finally asked, surprised he was in fact leaning toward accepting her wacko proposal. He didn’t have time for this. There was no way. He had a resort to run, and then to sell. When this project was safely locked in the hands of someone else, he had to start all over on his next project. He didn’t have time for crazy females with even nuttier requests.
“Because I’ve learned about you. The way you flirt with women is simply effortless. If you teach me how to be one of those women you’d want to be with, then I know I can win my guy. He won’t even know what hit him.”
“How far exactly do you want this to go?”
“What do you mean?” By the innocent expression on her face, he could see she really had no clue of what he was talking about. With quick movements, he decided to show her.