Mr. Predictable: Mr. Predictable / Too Many Cooks. Carol Finch
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and by the way, Kim and Lisa said to tell you happy birthday.”
“Birthday?” J.T. parroted. Well, damn. Sunday was his birthday, come to think of it. He’d been so intensely focused on creating a spectacular Web site for his new client that he’d forgotten. But birthday or not, he wasn’t spending the next two weeks at some ranch in the boon-docks that was run by this all too cheery, wild-driving female.
“Stop the damn car and turn it around,” J.T. ordered brusquely. “I don’t have time for a forced vacation. I have work to do and a business to run.”
“Everything is going to be fine, Jake—”
“J.T.” he growled in correction.
“Just calm down,” she soothed him. “I’m the recreation director at the ranch and I’ve been trained in stress management. I can tell that you’re entirely too tense.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t be so tense if you’d slow this car down!”
Smiling in amusement—at his expense, he had no doubt—Moriah decreased her speed. “There now, Jake. Happy?”
“Not particularly,” he said, and scowled.
“I understand that you’re feeling a little testy. Stress does that to a person. After you kick back and relax for a few days you’re going to be amazed how refreshed and rejuvenated you feel.”
He glared thunderclouds on her sunny smile. “I am as relaxed as I ever intend to get!”
Her carefree laughter was getting on the one good nerve he had left. “Your voice is rising, Jake,” she pointed out calmly.
“Well, so is my temper!” he all but shouted. “I have a business to run. My employees won’t take work seriously if I’m not there to keep their noses to the grindstone. I have no intention of allowing my shop to go down the toilet.”
“But if you don’t take time to get back in touch with your inner self and break your rigid routine, you’ll be too stressed out to run your business effectively,” Moriah said reasonably. “You might find yourself snapping impatiently at your clients or employees. That certainly wouldn’t be good for business, now would it?”
“My inner self?” J.T. snorted derisively at that. “My rigid routine?”
“Yes, let’s start with that,” Moriah suggested as she hung a sharp right turn and zoomed down a gravel road, taking J.T. farther into the outback of Oklahoma’s wooded hill country. “You’ve become a creature of habit and you’ve forgotten how to sit back and enjoy life.”
“I most certainly have not,” he snapped in fierce denial. “I know how to relax as well as the next person.”
“Really?” she challenged, flashing him another of those annoyingly captivating smiles. “Then let me ask you a few questions.”
“Hell, I didn’t know there would be a test. Do I get time to study?”
Moriah chuckled in amusement, though he was striving for snide and sarcastic. But apparently nothing irritated Miss Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. It made him want to try harder to tick her off.
“What time do you get up every morning?” she asked.
“Six o’clock. Is that a problem?” he said defiantly.
“Only if you do it every single morning. Do you work on your business projects before you leave for your office?”
“Yes,” he muttered grudgingly.
“Do you wake up at night, and also notice at various times of the day—like now—that you’re gritting your teeth and have to force yourself to unclamp your jaw? Do you find yourself tensely knotting your fists—like you are now—and have to tell yourself to unclench?”
J.T. glowered at her as he uncurled his knotted fists and slackened his jaw, but he refused to reply. Okay, so he was a little tense. Who wasn’t?
“Do you eat breakfast?”
“Yes, at 7:42 a.m. I use the drive-through window at the doughnut shop to pick up coffee and a cinnamon twist. So you see, I do take time for breakfast,” he assured her flippantly.
“Cinnamon twist and coffee every morning of the week? No deviation from routine? No variation of food whatsoever? You sound pretty predictable, Jake,” she said as she tossed him a knowing smile.
Uh-oh, J.T. could see where this line of questioning was headed. Moriah was trying to point out that he was a stickler for a strict schedule. Well, so what if he was? When a man ran a business that was as successful as J.T.’s had been the past ten years, he had to organize his time wisely and follow a structured routine. Otherwise, he’d never get anything done—and he had a helluva lot to do, too.
“So…you arrive at your office and go right to work, I presume. What time is your lunch break, Jake?”
He shifted uneasily in the bucket seat. He didn’t bother with a lunch break. Hadn’t bothered in years, he suddenly recalled. But he sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her that!
“I have a gourmet meal catered around high noon,” he lied without compunction.
She shot him a glance that indicated she didn’t believe him. So, what did he care? He didn’t care, he assured himself. And furthermore, she wasn’t going to get another straight answer from him. He wasn’t going to give her the ammunition to analyze him to death.
“You exit your shop at six p.m. and drive home—except for today when your sisters purposely let the air out of your tires and asked me to personally escort you to the resort,” she continued.
J.T. gnashed his teeth. His kid sisters were definitely going to pay for having him shanghaied. Damn it, he’d made one personal sacrifice after another for them for years on end. He’d cared for them, provided for them and consoled them after their parents died unexpectedly in a boating accident during a vacation. The tragedy had changed the entire course of his family’s life, not to mention the excessive pressure put on him to assume full responsibility for Kim and Lisa.
“So, Jake, what do you do every day when you get home from work?” she prompted when he lingered too long in thought.
J.T. was really getting PO’d at the rapid-fire questions, with the entire turn of events that left him Miss Vivacious’s prisoner in this speeding vehicle. Although he did follow a monotonous diet of TV dinners and canned food, he did jog, pump iron and then work on his business accounts in the evening. But he wasn’t going to confide that he ate frozen chicken teriyaki on Monday and canned spaghetti and meatballs on Tuesday—and so on—to Moriah. In fact, he wasn’t going to tell her the truth about himself or his daily habits because it was none of her business.
“I enjoy fabulous meals prepared by my housekeeper and cook. Her name is Stella,” he said, improvising as he went along.
“Mmm,” was all she said in response. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought Moriah had swallowed a snicker.
“Then I shower and change before I pick up one of my dates,” he said, weaving a fairy tale of lies that would throw Moriah off track.
“You date a lot then?” she asked, eyes twinkling, lips twitching.
“Continuously,” he said with a nonchalant flick of his wrist. “Different woman every night of the week. Variety is the spice of life, I always say.”
“And what do you and your dates do for entertainment?” she inquired as she veered down another gravel road that circled around the steep hillsides, taking him deeper into the middle of nowhere.
“We have sex,” J.T. told her outrageously. “Lots and lots of sex. Isn’t that the best form of relaxation for stressed-out businessmen like me?”
He really knocked her for a loop, he thought triumphantly. Her bewitching smile faltered and she cleared her throat. J.T. was so enormously