Waking Up Pregnant(4)

                Where the hell was he anyway?

                Checking his texts, Jeff cursed seeing it was going to be at least another hour.

                Screw it. He wasn’t interested in watching guys, age twenty-one to ninety-three line up to strike out while Connor wrapped his call with Hong Kong. Flagging another server, he handed her his still full drink then pulled out a few bills for the table.

                He was halfway to the door when feminine laughter, rich and warm, spilled down the hall beside the bar. The full-bodied sound of it snared his senses and had him cranking his head around to catch a glimpse of the source.

                He stopped dead, his eyes locking on the silky blond ponytail streaming over one shoulder. The legs. The hourglass curves, and finally the softest, warmest, twinkling gray eyes he’d ever seen, crinkled at the edges as his cocktail waitress peered up at the ceiling laughing at whatever it was the shorter, redheaded server adjusting her shoe had said.

                Gone was that untouchable, unattainable, disinterested, cold set of attractive features. And in their place was this woman.

                No way.

                And no wonder she’d kept that laugh under wraps. She could barely make it across the lounge as it was without some bozo putting a move on her. If anyone saw her like this...

                Well, hell, their thinking would probably follow the same as his.

                How do I get her to laugh like that for me?

                They’d never leave her alone.

                The redhead sauntered deeper down the hall and the leggy blonde with the killer laugh straightened her apron and turned—pulling up short at the sight of Jeff standing there.

                The warmth and light from her eyes blinked off as she schooled her features back into a mask of utter disinterest. The one that probably would have been easier to take if it were utter contempt because at least then a guy would know he’d made her radar. Damn, she was good.

                Yeah, Jeff wasn’t going anywhere.

                “Another Scotch when you get a minute,” he said, flashing her a grin before starting back to his table.

                It wasn’t like he’d come to Vegas with some plan to score. He hadn’t. Only now the part of him that couldn’t resist a challenge, the part that got off on getting what no one else could have—the fastest time, the highest grade, the biggest trophy, the most successful company—that part wanted to stake a claim on the secret prize so effectively hidden away, he wouldn’t have believed in its existence if he hadn’t heard the seductive, tantalizing sound of it himself.

                And as it happened, he had an hour to kill.

                * * *

                Whatever the deal was with the guy from table twelve, Darcy didn’t have time for it.

                To think she’d pegged him as harmless.

                Not in general, no. He definitely had the whole devastating male magnetism thing happening with those roughed up looks and his buttoned-down suit. Every set of female eyes in the place and probably half the men had homed in on him the second he entered the bar. But he hadn’t been on the make—and she’d clocked enough hours in this lounge over the past two years to be able to tell. So she hadn’t paid him much mind. At least not until she turned around to find him watching her with some half-cocked gotcha grin, looking like he’d busted her with her hand in the cookie jar.

                Because he’d caught her laughing.