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“Here you go. Do you want a plate, too?” Carly scooped up the carton of Lo Mein and paused, chopsticks hovering over the glossy noodles.
“I take it you’re an eat-from-the-carton kind of woman.” He gestured to the container in her hand.
The look on her face said it all. “Guilty as charged.”
“Doesn’t that mess with the food experience?” Jackson asked, poking through the carton of beef broccoli with the fork she’d given him.
“For takeout, it kind of is the experience. There’s something fun about it, you know? A little indulgent, a little forbidden.” Her eyes went wide before zeroing in on the food in her hands. “But you’re welcome to a plate if you’d like.”
Forget takeout. The innuendo was sweet enough to eat all by itself, even though he suspected she hadn’t heard it until after it had left her lips. “No, thanks. Eating from the carton’s fine by me.”
“I didn’t even know Pine Mountain had a Chinese restaurant,” Carly said, shifting the subject and lifting a perfectly rolled bite of noodles from her chopsticks to her mouth. Jackson forced himself to focus on the carton in his hand, spearing a stalk of broccoli with so much enthusiasm that he nearly punched through the cardboard behind it.
“Are you kidding? Aside from the resort, there’s the Sweet Life Bakery, the diner on Main Street and the Double Shot. That’s pretty much it for Pine Mountain, proper. If you want Chinese food, you have to go to Bealetown, although the place in Riverside’s better.”
Carly laughed. “Wow. You drove to Bealetown for this? I’m honored.”
“I drove to Riverside for this,” Jackson corrected, tipping his head at her. “I told you, the food’s better.”
“You take your Chinese food pretty seriously.” A smile teased at the corners of her mouth, which sent Jackson’s appetite due south.
“I take all food pretty seriously. Along with a few other things.”
Carly’s head snapped up, dark locks tumbling over her shoulders. “A few other things?”
Jackson was going to be in for one hell of a long night if she kept biting her lower lip like that. He nodded, willing himself to stick with the plan for the evening.
“What do you say to a little friendly competition?” Jackson asked, reaching for the box he’d tucked away on the side table when Carly had been unloading the Chinese food.
Carly’s face creased in confusion for a second, but the ear to ear smile that followed it told Jackson that he’d been right on the money in appealing to her headstrong side.
“I’d say you’d better gear up. I’m about to kick your ass.”
14
After five stress-filled days of back and forth with her attorney and six shifts at a restaurant where the dining room was filled to the gills, Carly thought nothing could brighten her tapped-out mood. But as she eyeballed the faded box Jackson had opened up over her coffee table, she realized she was wrong.
“I’ll have you know I never lose at Monopoly,” she said, stopping to snag a bite of the beef broccoli before she put the carton on a tray next to her Lo Mein. The spicy tang of ginger sauce danced across her palate as she chewed. Jackson hadn’t been kidding about the food being good. It was easily on par with what she’d grab from her favorite place in Chinatown.
“Prepare to go down in flames, sweetheart,” Jackson retorted, but his words were more teasing than threatening. “What do you want to be?”
Carly made her way to the living room with the tray and slid it to the carpet next to the table. “Oh, nice. You have an original set.” She plucked the tiny silver thimble from the box and put it on GO. Jackson chose the race car, grinning at her as he placed it next to the thimble.
Yeah. Sexy or not, he was still goin’ down.
“Yeah, I’m old school. Those special editions are fun, I guess, but nothing beats a classic.” He started sorting through the stack of brightly colored bills in the bottom of the box. “This is the set my brother and sisters and I played with when we were kids. I figured it would be more fun than watching a plain old movie.”
She nodded over her shoulder as she returned to the kitchen for a couple bottles of water. “We played Monopoly a lot, too. My brothers used to cheat and give me twenty dollars instead of two hundred for passing GO. They were ruthless.” Carly grinned. God, she hadn’t thought of that in ages.
“I thought you said you always won.” Jackson put a neat stack of bills on her side of the board before starting to count out his own.
“My father caught my brothers short-changing me every time I passed GO. But instead of punishing them once, he taught me how to strategize and work the board instead. After that, none of my brothers could beat me no matter how hard they tried.”
“It sounds like your dad is a smart man.”
A tiny pinch of sadness stuck in Carly’s throat, but she swallowed it with a bittersweet smile. “He was. He died five years ago.”
Jackson’s eyes flickered darkly. “I’m sorry.”
