Chapter Two
Back in jeans at the ant lab the next afternoon, surrounded by her favorite creatures, Felicia felt her shoulders inch down from where they’d lodged up by her ears since her run-in with the too-charming-for-anyone’s-good Hudson Carlyle. The man and his so-called offer to help her win over Tyler had burrowed under her skin and burned like a fire ant’s bite the whole night.
Being back in the cubicle farm, not so unlike an ant colony, she settled into her chair and waited for her computer to boot up. Just as she took a sip of Earl Grey from her You Had Me at Ants travel mug, her boss Eddie Sledge stopped next to her cubicle, a sheen of sweat making the top of his bald head shiny. Her muscles tensed. A glistening dome always meant trouble—usually from the higher ups.
“There you are, Felicia,” Eddie said, his voice unnaturally loud and his eye doing that weird twitch thing that happened whenever he was nervous.
“What’s up?” Whatever it was, it better not concern her because she had work to do. Not that she’d ever say that out loud. But she’d think it at shouting volume.
Eddie’s left eye twitched. “We have a special guest with us this morning who wants to get a tour of the ant lab in general and of your honeypot ant research colonies specifically.”
The pop of excitement at the idea of someone else who loved honeypots was tempered by the reality of her workload. It wasn’t all fieldwork and data collection. She had to get published—the true currency of power in any scientific field. She may be down to one item on her do-it-by-thirty list, but she was already tackling the items on her to-do-by-thirty-five list, and those included becoming a peer reviewer for the Journal of Myrmecology. To do that she had to get published—and often—so the editors would think of her when they refreshed the review board as they always did in three-year cycles. After that, she’d be one step closer to joining the journal’s scientific advisory board, which was key to moving from researcher at the ant lab to department head someday.
“I’m behind already on the article I’m putting together to submit to the Journal of Myrmecology because of the fundraiser last night.”
“I understand.” Eddie’s head bopped up and down in a staccato beat. “But this guest…well, he could really help out the lab.”
That answer meant only one thing. “He has deep pockets, huh?”
“And you know funding isn’t what it used to be.”
No, it sure wasn’t. As grants became tougher to get, and other funding sources dried up, getting the money to run a stellar program like the Harbor City Museum of Natural History Ant Lab had become a full-time job for Eddie, which explained the rapid hair loss. And God knew she needed the practice keeping her blue-collar opinions to herself when she was around the well-heeled elite if she ever wanted to run the department.
Of course, that wasn’t normally a problem. Last night’s slip had been because of the champagne she’d shotgunned, obviously. Taking a deep breath, she made up her mind not to mess up this opportunity.
“Okay,” she said, setting down her travel mug next to her messenger bag stuffed with notes. “Who’s the sucker?”
“Me,” a deep voice said, filtering from just outside of Felicia’s cubicle.
She froze. That voice. It was one she’d heard all night telling her that he could help her get the man she’d always wanted. Hudson Carlyle. The butterflies in her stomach split up into Team Annoyance and Team Anticipation as she turned and saw him watching her from over the top of her cubicle—the one she couldn’t see over even when she stood on her tiptoes.
“Mr. Carlyle,” Eddie squeaked. “I didn’t realize you were so close.”
“I studied with an elite group of ninjas for years,” Hudson said with a straight face, coming around to stand next to Eddie in the doorway. “Old habits die hard.”
In jeans that probably cost more than her monthly grocery bill, a dark green cashmere sweater that would cover her electric bill—but perfectly set off the flecks of green in his brown eyes—and with his light brown hair artfully messed up, he looked delicious. If Felicia went for that hot rich guy with too much charm, which she most definitely did not. Forget broad shoulders, hard abs—she could tell even if they were covered—and an ass that was made for a beefcake calendar, she cared about what was inside a person, not the sexy facade.
So, you’re admitting he’s sexy, Hartigan?
She wasn’t dead, just smarter than the average socialite he probably banged and forgot about, and therefore she was able to see through his lame attempt to torment her some more.
“You’re the one who wants to learn more about the honeypot ant?” she asked, tight and quiet and trying her hardest to keep her disbelief to herself. And obviously failing, from the way Eddie’s eyes went wide and the shine on his head actually got brighter.
The sexy grin on Hudson’s face transformed into more of a smolder as he gave her a slow up and down that sent Team Anticipation into kamikaze spins.
“Honeypots,” he said, pausing for effect after the word. “have always fascinated me.”
Internally, she rolled her eyes and fought to keep her words steady and firm. “I’m sure there are plenty of places where you can study up.”
“But none quite as good as the natural history museum,” Eddie said in a rush, narrowing his eyes at her. “Our facility is head and thoraxes above other research facilities. Aren’t we, Dr. Hartigan?”
Eating her groan at his horrible ant pun, she nodded in agreement. “Without a doubt.”
“Then I can’t wait to discover all of your secrets.” Hudson held out his hand toward Eddie, who shook it. “Thanks for helping to set this up, man. I really appreciate it. I’ll be sure to put in a good word for the lab at the next Carlyle Foundation meeting.”
Eddie swallowed the promise hook, line, and sinker, the poor optimist. Unless her IQ and powers of observation, which had been honed out in the deserts of Arizona while watching honeypot ants for days on end, had failed her, Hudson had probably never been to one of his family’s foundation meetings in his life. The air of the lazy and bored rich clung too heavily to his designer clothes for that. Too bad there wasn’t any avoiding this uncomfortable tour.
“Well then,” she said, pasting on her snooty scientist smile that probably made her look a bit deranged, but it was her go-to defense mechanism when she was nervous. “Let’s not delay in enlightening you further.”
“Looking forward to it,” he said, stepping to the side and allowing enough room for her to pass him, but not so much that she missed inhaling the woodsy musk of his cologne.
Team Anticipation flat passed out in her belly, and she tripped over her feet. Hudson’s arm shot out, and he caught her, his fingers curling around her elbow. A tingling awareness zipped through her before settling with a quiet buzz between her legs.
“Careful there,” he said, his voice grittier than the playful tone he’d had just a moment ago.
Oh no. This isn’t allowed. Deviating from the plan only meant disaster, and the plan began and ended with Tyler Jacobson.
“Thank you.” She slid her arm free. “Let’s get on with it.”
“You’re the boss,” Hudson replied, the teasing timbre back. “Show me the way.”
Ignoring the wink he gave her, and the prick of disappointment that came out of nowhere, Felicia strode toward the glass-encased honeypot ant colony that formed the heart of her life’s research.
…
Turns out, the honeypot ant was disgusting.
Hudson took a step back from the eight-by-ten glossy close-up photo of an ant with its middle so engorged it looked like someone had glued an ant head and legs onto a yellow marble. If he never saw that in real life, he’d die a happy man.
“So,” he said, turning back to Felicia, who wore a twisted sort of glee on her face, obviously enjoying playing up this part about her ants as they toured the public portion of the ant lab. “It drains itself whenever someone else in the colony is hungry, and then that ant eats it?”
“When necessary, yes.”
And she looked like a regular human being. Sure, her jeans were rolled up at least three times at the ankles and her T-shirt was so loose he—again—had almost no clue what was underneath, but there was no hint that underneath her french braid lay the brain of a gross-out queen. What else were people missing when they saw her? There had to be more. No one knew the art of the con quite like him. She was good, but not good enough to fool him. Matches was hiding something, and he needed to know what.
“And you study these things voluntarily?” he asked, moving on to look at the glassed-in colony, thankfully with no engorged ants visible to the naked eye.
“I’ve even gone out to Arizona and done field research, counting the colony’s foragers, nest maintenance, and protector ants before excavating the nest and taking the ants back to a research facility.”
He took a long look at the colony; it took up a good chunk of the wall. “How do you excavate an entire colony?”
Her blue eyes gleamed. “With a backhoe.”
Turning back to her, he tried to imagine her in the hot desert sun, sweaty in an almost see-through tank top and short shorts (what could he say, he was a dude) digging up an entire colony of unsuspecting ants. Part of him zoomed in on the picture of her in those shorts, but the rest of him couldn’t help but picture the unmitigated joy of being in her element that would show on her face. It would be hell to get it just right on a canvas, but if he could, it would stop a gallery walker in their tracks—a real only-a-Hughston-painting moment.
“So, you’re like an alien who lands on a foreign planet, studies the creatures, and then destroys their home before taking them back onto your spaceship for further study?”
Her narrow shoulders tensed, and the pointed chin of her heart-shaped face went up a notch. “That’s one way to look at it.”
“How do you look at it?” he asked, loving how easy it was—despite her quiet voice and deep blushes—to get her all sparked up for a fight.
“As though I am obtaining evidence about ant colonies so we can better understand them and their place in the world. So perhaps one day we don’t take them for granted and lose another species important to our planet’s ecosystem.”
Okay, it made sense even to him. “We’re all in it together.”
“Yeah, we are.” She gave him a considering look, her eyes narrowing behind her glasses. “I didn’t expect that coming from someone like you.”
The words were no more out of her mouth when she shoved up her glasses with a shaky finger, and a mottled red creeped up from the crew neck of her T-shirt. Obviously, she hadn’t meant for those words to exit out her sweet mouth. He wanted to give himself a little pat on the back for guessing correctly that she was a tell-it-like-it-is kind of woman, but her words stung a little.
How many times had he heard it before? It had to be at least a billion. “Like me?” It wasn’t that he didn’t encourage everyone to think there was nothing going on behind his pretty mug, but coming from her, it settled uncomfortably across his shoulders. “Oh, I see,” he said, closing the distance between them in two long strides. “Is it the deep pockets or the hot bod that throws you off?”
The red went all the way up to her chin with one giant splotch on each cheek. “I…I…”
“Let me let you in on a secret,” he said, stopping just out of arm’s reach because all he wanted to do was touch her. “I never had a choice about the money or the looks. I’ve had them both since I was born. You know what I also have? A fully functioning brain.” Fuck it. Another step, and he was close enough to brush the silk of an escaped strand of hair behind her ear. “I would have thought that someone who believes in evidence-based science would have waited to make some more observations before developing a hypothesis, but what do I know?” He pulled back from the edge before he cupped the back of her head, threaded his fingers through her braid, and held her where he wanted her. “I’m just the handsome, rich dilettante.”
Where in the hell had that come from? He was usually cooler than that—especially when he was the one who wanted people to think there wasn’t anything more to him than a cocky grin and a well-earned reputation for debauchery. He didn’t know what it was about the diminutive ant researcher, but she got him right in the soft underbelly that he hadn’t even realized was unguarded. He didn’t like it. Fuck that. He hated it, but he couldn’t ignore it any more than he could pretend not to see there was more to Felicia Hartigan than she let the world see, too.
His words hung between them as the ants went about their business not giving a shit about how the museum air suddenly smelled like it did before a summer storm—electric and full of possibilities. Inches of open space, that was all that stood between his mouth and hers. Her lips parted, and the tip of her pink tongue wet the bottom one. The pulse point at the base of her neck thrummed, drawing his gaze to the long, creamy column.
“All right, children, stay together,” a chipper female voice called out. “Don’t get separated from your buddy.”
Hudson and Felicia both turned as if in a trance. A group of about twenty kindergartners in blue blazers and plaid skirts, walking two by two, wandered into the ant lab, heading straight toward the man-made ant mound big enough to crawl through. They didn’t even look at Hudson and Felicia, but it didn’t matter. By the time he’d turned to look at her again, her eyes had cleared, her pulse had slowed, and the moment was gone. He shifted his stance to accommodate for the fact that his pants were tighter than they’d been when he’d left his apartment this morning.
“You’re right,” Felicia said, straightening her glasses with hands that no longer trembled, her low voice steady. “I made up my mind about you before we’d even spoken.” She exhaled a deep breath and met his gaze head on, her cheeks still pink. “It was wrong. I’m sorry.”
For once, he didn’t have a quip or a sly remark. In the world he’d grown up in, direct confrontation was frowned upon. And admitting you were wrong? Practically unheard of. He didn’t know how to process it, so he fell back on what he knew best.
“Are you saying that just because I could fund your entire lab?” He kept his tone light and teasing but couldn’t miss the way Felicia’s intent, observant expression didn’t falter.
“No. When I’m wrong, I admit it, and I was wrong.” She held out her hand with its clear, close-clipped nails and delicate, tiny tattoo of a honeypot—not the ant, an actual yellow pot that said honey—inside her wrist. “Will you accept my apology?”
He took her smaller hand in his. Her handshake was firm and professional, but that didn’t stop a sizzle of awareness from making him wonder once again what she was hiding under all of those baggy clothes. Yellow underwear to match her tattoo? Soft rose that matched how he imagined her nipples? His cock thickened against his thigh. Shit. He needed to stop thinking like this in a crowded lab with a bevy of kindergartners nearby.
“Apology accepted,” he said.
She smiled up at him, and his dick did more than twitch in his pants. Fuuuck.
Abruptly, he released her hand, stretched out his fingers to get rid of the tingling sensation in them, and mentally marched on with the real reason he was here and not the whatever that was snapping between them. “So, show me something less disgusting, and then let’s talk about how I’m going to get you what we both want.”
She cocked her head to the side. “What’s that?”
“Tyler Jacobson, of course.”
Her eyebrows went up high enough to be seen over the top of her glasses, and she honest-to-God laughed at him. “No offense, but while I’m sure there are a lot of people who think you’re devastatingly attractive, I doubt Tyler is one of them.”
“You think I’m hot, huh?” he asked, latching on to the one part of her declaration that made his pulse quicken.
He counted. One. Two. Three. And there it was. The color in her cheeks that suddenly appeared made him think of pink lemonade and cotton candy. Judging by the way her jaw tightened, she wasn’t as much of a fan of her body’s reaction.
“And that brings our tour to an end.” She started walking back toward the door marked Staff Only.
“While you’ve been studying ants and observing their behavior, I’ve been doing the same with people,” he called out, his voice easily carrying over the chatter of the school kids’ giggles. “I can help you.”
Her step faltered, then slowed. That’s it. Turn it over in that big brain of yours. Finally, she stopped and pivoted to face him.
“How?” she asked.
“We’d start with the hair.” It was a silky dark brown, almost black color that naturally caught the light. “You should wear it loose more.”
“A makeover?” she scoffed. “What is this, some dumb movie where the girl takes off her glasses and then everyone falls at her feet?”
He took another look at the worn sneakers, baggy jeans, and loose-fitting T-shirt. “No, we have more work than that ahead of us. This is more of a My Fair Lady project.”
“You’ve seen that movie?”
“It’s my mom’s favorite, and I’ve been forced to sit through it a time or two hundred.” And he’d sat through it every time she wanted to watch it after his dad died unexpectedly. It had been a rough three years of mourning for his mom, and he had done anything he could think of to make Helene smile—or at least not look quite so lost.
“Does that make you the professor?” Felicia asked.
“Exactly.”
“No way.” She shook her head. “I don’t believe in changing myself for a man. I’m a scientist. A girl from across the harbor in Waterbury. I don’t do false lashes, fake boobs, or a knock-off personality.”
“Good.” The mental image of her like that put a foul taste in his mouth. “You wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if you did. What I’m talking about is”—he searched for the right word to pull her in—“an experiment. You don’t like my hypothesis that with a little visual tweaking you could catch Tyler’s attention so that the real you could reel him in for good? Fine. But you see it all the time in the animal kingdom. I bet even your ants do things a certain way to attract a mate. It doesn’t make them bad or shallow or any less genuine. But if you want to make Tyler really wonder what he’s been missing all these years, you need to shake things up a bit—not change, but tweak. So, what do you say?”
She crossed her arms and pursed her mouth, the move making her nose scrunch up, and he held his breath. He’d made his case. All she had to do was say yes, and everyone would win. Felicia would land Tyler, he had no doubt about it, and she’d be happy. Or, even better, she’d realize when she actually had a choice of Tyler or no-Tyler, she was definitely better off no-Tyler—the guy was way too much of an idiot for someone like Felicia, who, let’s face it, probably only wanted Tyler because she couldn’t have him. So he’d help get her the thing she wanted most, and he’d hope like hell that at the end, she’d want someone else—him, at least for the moment. He wanted her on his canvas and in his bed until he figured out what it was about her that was so damn captivating. He wouldn’t deny it. Not to himself anyway.
Felicia would be happy he set her free of her childhood crush to find a man who was better than either himself or Tyler to share her life with. Then, Captain Clueless could find himself a woman. Any woman but Felicia.
He couldn’t stop the grin overtaking his features. Sometimes, he was just too fucking brilliant.
“Nice try.” She lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. “But not in this lifetime, which means this is the end of your tour.”
Hudson’s grin melted into a frown as he watched her walk away, not exactly sure what had happened to him, the supposed legendary charming Carlyle. Being turned down for the second time within twenty-four hours by the same woman was a new experience for him. He couldn’t remember the last time he was turned down even once. Felicia was anything but usual, though. Fascinating? Stubborn? In desperate need of his help? Yes, to all of the above. Turning the problem over in his head, he lingered in the ant lab trying to understand how such small creatures—or people for that matter—could pack such a big punch.