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That would mean she had a spectacular imagination. She did when it came to solving countryside dilemmas and putting on plays to win an award. But she was just not worldly enough to have created them out of her head, even if all her faculties were in proper working order.
They were real. Because she could still smell the scent of their cologne in her nostrils, it made her skin spike with unexplained heat.
How could they walk around looking like that as if it were legal to be that freaking gorgeous? Where did they get that right from? But she knew the answer. They were billionaires, potent, and powerful, and they ruled the world so they could do anything they wanted to do. Be anyone they wanted.
Still, why did they have to look like that?
She couldn’t afford to be distracted by their insanely good looks. She had too much going on to be sidetracked by Trey Marshall’s commanding gray eyes. His perfectly structured jawline and the stern, serious lines etched into his extraordinarily handsome face made his dominance all-encompassing and eternal.
She wasn’t going to start being fascinated by Isaac Glover’s warm blue eyes, which invited her into his world, and she freely stepped into. He seemed all calm and gentle, but there was a darkness in him. She saw the darkness in the short time she knew him in Trey and in Chance as well, and it made her shiver.
Not as if she were cold, but as if the nerves under her skin had been set alight and zapped with powerful electrical pings that raced down her spine into her limbs, made her heart beat like a racehorse, and most curious of all, swelled her flat uneventful nipples into hard-aching pebbles, and the folds between her legs heated up as a drizzle of dew seeped onto the material of her underwear.
And then Chance Clark made her heart spin and her brain melt. His stunning killer smile went perfectly with his sexy hazel eyes, and she was lost in his charm without him even trying.
She wasn’t accustomed to being around men as tall as they were. JT, their resident giant, didn’t count because when she saw him, he was always sitting down at meetings.
But these three men were the epitome of power. It wasn’t fake or imagined. They were as dangerous as they could be charming, except for Trey, whose charm was to be blatantly grumpy, or maybe it was just the small-town aura that made him that way.
Nope. She had to start thinking of them as being in their sixties, with stuffy suits and not the kind that accentuated every part of them as if they were gods made of pure raw muscle.
Okay, she could do it.
She just had to get her body from doing that weird thing like making her panties wet and her nipples swell.
“Jenny, the judges are here,” she said again, certain the woman didn’t understand her the first time.
“What?” Jennifer cried, then told her sister, Tilly, the judges were there, leaving Kalista on the line while having a conversation about the black SUV since apparently everyone and their mother thought Kalista had taken a lover from the city and the vehicle belonged to him.
It amazed her how quickly the town caught fire when it wasn’t anything even remotely salacious. In this case, she wished it were something as simple as a lover from the city.
Was it going to help her course if she admitted she didn’t even notice the vehicle?
In her defense, she had been talking on the phone, answering for the tenth time questions about the stage that Sid and JT repeatedly asked her about because she had put them in charge of sprucing up the backdrop that they’d used last year.
She then had to talk to their seamstresses about what she wanted Celeste to wear for the lead role in the play. They could put her friend in a garbage bag, and she would win the award for them all the same.
So the SUV could have been a dinosaur, and she still might not have noticed it.
She and the committee had spent the rest of the day in the town hall trying to create a showstopper in three days. When they started to panic, get overheated, and overwhelmed by the amount of work they had to put in, she assured them that everything fell on Celeste and all they had to do was show up. She used that line on herself too, and it worked every time.
“But the judges were supposed to arrive in three days. Not today. It's only the fifteenth today.”
She wasn’t the only person to have messed up the dates. Everyone on the Events and Recreational Committee had seen the invitation, and not one of them thought that eight in eighteen was actually a five for fifteen.
“It’s the fifteenth, Jenny. We looked at the date wrong,” she explained.
“Oh, fudge on a stick. What are we going to do? We’re nowhere near ready. It’s going to be a disaster. A real—”
She hated to be rude, especially when she would like nothing more than to have a meltdown with Jenny; that luxury wasn’t hers.
“Jennifer, we can do this. First, we need food. Lots of it. Can you arrange it? We have to set up some sort of welcoming thing in the backyard. In fact, get everyone over here with a dish to welcome the judges.”
Her cupboards were bare, she’d decided to shop on the morning of the day they were meant to arrive, except now everything had been thrown into a loop of chaos.
“We have to make it lively, and it has to look as if we planned it all along. They can never know we got the date wrong. Wine. Crates of wine, Jenny, don’t hold back, okay?”
Her backyard was designed for entertainment with its great big barbecue and tables and benches scattered around the lawn.
