Imogen suddenly remembered that Ty had come to the party with Nikki.
That was enough to send her stepping back three feet and grabbing her wet sweater off the railing to use as a shield. How could she have forgotten for one minute that Nikki Borden intended to follow the six steps to marrying a race car driver and that her target was Ty?
Nikki and Ty were dating.
And he was playing with Imogen.
Elec went back into the house and Imogen turned toward the front steps, rain be damned. She needed to go home and take a hot shower.
"Where are you going?" Ty grabbed her elbow.
Feeling mildly insulted and majorly disappointed in both herself and the fact that she was not going to get to experience a kiss, Imogen paused on the top step, still under the porch overhang. "I'm going home.
Please give my apologies to Tamara and Elec for leaving early, and to Nikki for monopolizing your time."
"It's not what you think, Emma Jean. I had every intention of breaking up with Nikki after we left tonight.
I should have done it two months ago."
Imogen frowned. Now that had the same ring to it as male statements like "I am going to leave my wife, I promise," and, "You feel so good with a condom, I just want to feel you without one." She may not have a lot of experience dating men like Ty McCordle-okay, she had none-but apparently a man was a man and they were all just full of it.
"Okay," she said.
Now he frowned, still gripping his T-shirt in his hand. "Okay? What the hell does that mean?"
"It means okay. Break up with Nikki or don't. It's irrelevant to me." With a deep breath and a wince, Imogen rushed down the steps in the pounding rain and left Ty standing on the porch.
CHAPTER TWO
EXCEPT that Ty had followed her. Imogen couldn't believe it. After running through the rain, beeping her car doors open, and sliding in, wet and miserable, she had barely gotten her own door shut before the passenger side opened and Ty climbed in.
He was sitting in her car.
"What are you doing?" she asked in disbelief.
"I'm dripping, that's what I'm doing." He shook his head and ran his fingers through his shaggy wet hair.
"Damn, that's a lot of rain."
And he was still shirtless.
Ty was sitting in her car wet and bare-chested.
"Why are you in my car?" Hadn't she made it completely clear that she was leaving the party to go home?
Yet he looked at her like she was the one overlooking the obvious. "So we can talk."
"About what?" Imogen considered herself a fairly bright woman, but she was having troubling following Ty's train of thought.
Without answering her, Ty pulled his T-shirt out of the interior crotch of his jeans. He saw her staring at him with what she was sure was an expression of total horror. He winked. "Kept it dry down there." As he dragged the wrinkled shirt on over his head, Imogen tried not to succumb to the physical attraction she felt for him. Too late. Her hormones were alive and well and doing a sexy samba. She was undeniably aroused by him, despite the fact that he had a girlfriend, which she found incredibly distressing. It seemed that her intellect should be able to instruct her animal nature that Ty was not a viable candidate for mating.
Well, it was instructing, but most of her wasn't listening. So she was going to have to be careful. She could not complicate her thesis by flirting with a man she actually did find attractive. She had to use Nikki's marriage Bible only on race car drivers she had no interest in so that she could stay in control and objective.
"Why did you run through the rain?" she asked, still having a little trouble with that.
"Because I wasn't done talking to you before you cut out on me."
"I didn't cut out on you. It was an appropriate time to exit the conversation." They'd been interrupted.
He had a girlfriend. It had definitely been time to leave.
"Exit the conversation? That's a polite way to say you ran away." Maybe. But she had done what was necessary.
Ty turned slightly in his seat, his T-shirt sporting wet spots in random locations from where he had dried her hair, his own light brown hair dark and disheveled from the soaking he'd taken. He shifted his knee so his legs had more room, then glanced down at the floor. "Damn, I'm sorry. I knocked your bag over and spilled your stuff."
Imogen knew what was in that bag-half a dozen dating manuals and the incriminating How to Marry a Race Car Driver in Six Easy Steps . Feeling a blush steal over her cheeks, she frantically reached over between his legs and tried to feel around for the books to shove them back out of sight. If he spotted the titles and thought she was reading them in an attempt to snag a husband, she would be mortified, and she had no intention of explaining her thesis to him because she had a feeling he would mock it.
"Whoa." Ty lifted his arms out of the way. "I could have just put them back, but I like this better." That made her freeze. She was effectively draped across him, her face by his kneecap, her breasts perilously close to his thigh. "Sorry they were in your way," she said, then realized she actually had nothing to apologize for. He was the one who had entered her car without an invitation.
"It's not a big deal. In fact, I'm enjoying this," he drawled.
God, that Southern accent did outrageous things to her neutrality. Imogen was determined to follow the dating rules only for the purpose of her thesis-she was not supposed to allow herself interest in any of the men of stock car racing she intended to flirt with. Least of all Ty. She had intended to leave him out of the equation altogether when embarking on this bit of unscientific research to jump-start her thesis.
So how exactly she had wound up groping around between his legs while his voice raised goose bumps on her spine was beyond her.
She crammed the last book back in the bag and sat straight up. "Not everything needs to be turned into a sexual innuendo."
"Well, of course everything doesn't need to be about sex. But it's much more fun when it is."
"This conversation isn't about sex."
"It isn't? Well, that sucks the fun right out of my night." Hers had been sucked out the minute she had realized that she was nothing more than a game for him-a time filler while he avoided his girlfriend at a dinner party. She was probably quite simply the challenge of a different type of woman than Ty was used to dating.
"So leave, then. That's what I'm trying to do." She looked pointedly at him and then the passenger door.
"It's early still. You don't want to leave. And I have a few questions for you."
"I don't have any answers for you." That she could say with total honesty.
He continued like he hadn't heard her. "Do all women want to get married? Do you want to get married?" His expression was curious and maybe mildly puzzled.
Imogen was confident he was actually asking a genuine question, because he had asked her that once before, at Tamara and Elec's wedding. Clearly the issue of marriage and why women wanted it was weighing on him. Maybe it was the age. Men and women reached thirty and everyone around them seemed to think they either should be married or should be trying to get married. Imogen wasn't opposed to marriage, per se, but she definitely wanted to hold out for her version of Mr. Right, so Ty's question immediately brought to mind Beatrice in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing .
"‘Not till God make men of some other metal than earth,' " she quoted to Ty.
Ty looked at her blankly. "What?"
Imogen had always loved Beatrice's witty replies to prying and often insulting questions, so she continued to use her words, getting into the monologue, despite the clear incomprehension on Ty's face. "‘Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust? To make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I'll none.' "
"It sounds pretty when you say it, but I have no clue what the hell you're talking about."
"It's Shakespeare," she said.
"Well, I was pretty sure it wasn't Kenny Chesney. Still doesn't tell me what it means, though." Imogen shifted in her seat, her damp sweater and hair uncomfortable, her attraction to Ty McCordle even more so. He didn't look annoyed with her, just bewildered and, maybe, a little amused. She really didn't understand what he was doing sitting in her car, but since he was there, she figured she might as well enjoy the picture of manly perfection he presented, even if he had put his shirt back on.