Messing With Mac

face-lift, slowly over the past twenty years, and had been turned into a gold mine.

As a result, there was never an available parking spot. Swearing, Mac circled the block. Then again. Damn it, he’d had a long day, all he needed was one little spot. Somewhere. Anywhere.

The heat was going to kill him. If Taylor didn’t kill him first, that is. She could do it with just her eyes, those amazing green eyes she thought hid everything from to the world and yet seemed so expressive to him.

Then there was her calm and cool, sophisticated, elegant exterior, which he hated. But he also was be ginning to understand all that was really just a front for a boiling pot of stubborn orneriness, and where there was stubborn orneriness, there was heat and passion.

And damn if he wasn’t a sucker for heat and passion. Oh yeah, he enjoyed a woman who knew what she wanted and how.

Or at least, he used to.

But his and Taylor’s fate was sealed, no matter how explosive he figured they’d be in bed, because she was everything he would never go for again.

And she was hiding something, he knew it. Some thing more than living in the building when he’d told her not to. God help her if it had something to do with this job, which he was depending on far too much for his own comfort.

Damn, letting himself feel again was a bitch.

And what he felt right now was hungry and tired, but attending tonight’s monthly Historical Society meeting was necessary. Rubbing elbows with the powers that be made him want to grate his back teeth into powder, but it had to be done, because though no one would ever admit to it, it truly wasn’t what you knew, but who you knew.

He needed to mingle.

Much to his perpetual disgust, the meetings were always run more like a cocktail party than the gathering and exchange of information they were supposed to be.

He hated cocktail parties.

The “meetings” were held at city hall, a building that could trace its roots to 1876, when it had been built as a grand hotel. In its day, it had housed miners, western settlers and Spanish royalty. Tonight the Spanish-style building was decorated in gold and silver, with froufrou food on platters that made him wish for a beer and a sloppy piece of pizza, New York style. The music came from a live quartet of musicians who didn’t understand that being able to talk was important.

But at least air-conditioning blasted through the place. Early summer in Southern California hadn’t disappointed, the temperature was in the nineties, the humidity off the scale.

In spite of the heat, anyone who was anyone in South Village was already there, schmoozing away. He counted three city councillors, the commissioner and the mayor before he worked his way past the entry hall.

There was a good reason for the crowd. Besides official business, and South Village did take its official business very seriously, the meeting’s true underlying purpose was as a meat market.

The single meat market.

His mouth twisting cynically, he looked around.

Oh yeah, singles galore, mostly hungry-looking socialites, circling the crowd, checking out the potential fixer- uppers-meaning the men they could live with, the men they could make putty in their well-manicured hands, the men whose names and expensive bank accounts they could take and be set for life.

Mac should know. After all, it had been a meeting just like this one when he was doing a little contracting on the side where his ex had scoped him out.

She’d decided his last name was synonymous with money, and without bothering to figure out that Mac lived his own life as he damn well pleased despite his family’s money, Ariel had gone after him with dollar signs in her eyes.

He was still ashamed to admit she’d caught him with little more than a toss of her perfect hair, a come-do-me smile and a crook of her red-tipped pinkie finger.

Damn memories.

Beating them back, he pasted a smile on his face and moved forward, determined to make nice and be seen.

AN HOUR LATER, Mac figured he’d done his job. He’d nodded, talked, even smiled with the board members he knew mattered most-Mayor Isabel W. Craftsman, known as a ruthlessly tough bitch, but widely tolerated because she’d done the city better than any mayor in history, Councilman Daniel Oberman, a man who used to be a builder, and was known for his genuine love of the renovation projects.

And so many others his head spun.

Not only spun, but pounded. It was little wonder, when he considered the hours he’d put in this week, and now that he’d bared his teeth into a smile and played nice, he was out of here.

Or would have been, except that he saw her. Taylor Wellington, current bane of his existence.

She wore a haltered shimmery dress that came to midthigh in the exact color of a summer sky. Her legs were bare and tanned, and longer than the legal limit. She stood surrounded by a group of women who also looked as if maybe they made a career out of looking spiffed up and polished. Each of them could have graced any cover of a glossy magazine, and yet to Mac they all looked plastic.

Taylor, too. He wanted her to be plastic. He really wanted that.

Then she looked up, her eyes unerringly finding his. And in a flash that came so quick he figured he had to be seeing things, she shifted from cool as a cucumber to hot as a wildfire.

His heart clutched. It wasn’t a pleasant sort of clutch either, but the kind that took hold and squeezed.

What was she doing, looking at him like that?

Her gaze stayed locked on his, despite the fact that people were talking to her, despite the fact there were people smiling and nodding at him as they passed. The music, the hum of conversation, everything, seemed to fade away.

Then she controlled that flash of heat, smoothing her expression as if it’d never happened, leaving her cool as rain. She had a real talent for that, for hiding her thoughts.

Good, he decided. He didn’t want to know them.

But she kept looking, every bit as much as he was, and as if he was attached by a bungee cord to her eyes, her body, he started moving toward her, away from the front door he’d been so eager to get out only a moment ago.

She watched him come.

And when he was close, his other senses came back. He could feel the cool air, could hear the sculptured, glamorous redhead on her left say, “I’m surprised to see you here tonight, Taylor. We’d actually heard you’d…how should I put it? That you’d come down on the social ladder a bit.”

“All the way down,” said the perfectly groomed country club woman on her right. “Like to the bottom rung.”

Several of the other women laughed, the kind of laugh that assures everyone you’re only laughing with the person at the butt of the joke, but was really a crock because there was no doubt.

They were laughing at Taylor.

She broke eye contact with Mac to stare at them, her eyes distant and assessing as if she felt far above such mockery.

“We heard about the will,” Country Club Chick said, making an effort to look solemn instead of cruelly gleeful, and failing miserably. “Did your grand father really cut you off without a cent and give everything to your mother?”

Taylor gave her a long stare. “What does it matter?

I don’t need anyone’s money.”

As if she’d told a great joke, they all burst out into collective laughter.

Taylor simply tightened her glossy mouth.

“You’re so funny,” the redhead said. “You always make me laugh.”