“But a home with bad memories?”

Her lips pressed together, and Lincoln silently cursed. What was he doing? He was the last person who should go digging into other people’s pasts.

Lincoln was saved from having to apologize as they arrived at their destination.

Daisy looked up and laughed. “When you said ‘dive bar,’ I thought you meant a dive bar, not that that was its actual name.”

“What can I say, I like things literal.”

She snorted. “You do not.”

“Says the woman who’s known me for twenty-four hours.”

“I know you well enough to know that brunette you were dancing with was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, and yet you didn’t seem remotely interested.”

Lincoln was about to open the door to the bar, but stilled at her words, turning to face her. His eyes narrowed slightly. “Meaning?”

She took a tiny step closer, her gaze more level and challenging than it was flirtatious. “Meaning, I think your womanizing reputation is all smoke and mirrors, and I think you like it that way.”

“You know nothing about it,” he muttered, turning away.

She touched his arm. “I know that everyone’s in awe of your ability to keep things friendly with the women you sleep with, even after you supposedly discard them.”

“Supposedly? You think I actually keep stringing them all along, sleeping with them all, whenever I want?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said with a cluck of her tongue as she reached for the door. “I don’t think you sleep with them at all.”

Lincoln stared after her as she swept into the bar, a swish of blond hair and pink dress, without a backward glance.

Well, hell. Maybe the woman did know him pretty damn well in twenty-four hours after all.

Chapter 4

“Tell you what,” Lincoln said as he joined her at the bar, raising his voice to be heard over the Saturday night crowd. “We won’t talk about my sleeping partners and, in exchange, I won’t ask you about your ex.”

Daisy extended her hand. “You’ve got yourself a deal, Mr. Mathis.”

His fingers closed around hers, his grip firm and warm. It was a bit of a pity that she knew herself to be right about his number of sexual partners being a good deal smaller than he wanted anyone to know. It was a shame to let good hands like these go to waste.

She shook her head.

Not where her thoughts should be going.

“What are we having?” Lincoln said, sliding up beside her, and resting both elbows on the bar as he scanned the liquor bottles behind it while they waited for the overworked bartender to see them.

“Jack and Coke.”

He turned his head and lifted his eyebrows in surprise. “I had you pegged for a mint julep kind of girl.”

She laughed in delight. “How did you know that? Emma? Cassidy?”

“Come now, pet, surely you didn’t think every part of my reputation was unearned. I read women like a damned treasure map,” he said.

“And what exactly would the treasure be?”

Lincoln only grinned as he lifted a hand to get the bartender’s attention. “Two Jacks, one with Coke, one without.”

“You don’t have to go all hardcore to impress me,” Daisy teased as the bartender turned the bottle upside down and poured a liberal amount of whiskey into two glasses before squirting a bit of soda into hers. “You know, right, that this won’t be pink or frothy and there’s no sugar rim?”

In response, he accepted the glasses from the bartender, handed her hers. He clinked their glasses before lifting the whiskey to his lips, tossing it back in one swallow.

Daisy’s mouth went slightly dry for reasons that had nothing to do with anticipation of the alcohol. For the first time she got—truly got—what Emma had been trying to warn her about.

The other Lincoln…the one with the one-liners and the flirting and the easy laugh, he’d been charming but resistible to her.

This one, though—the one whose eyes were a little bit hard, knuckles a little bit tense…a man who could throw back whiskey without so much as a flinch. This man was dangerous. This man could make her want.

He lifted a finger to the bartender. “Another.”

“Yeeeeeeah, I’m gonna sip mine,” Daisy said with a laugh.

“I figured you would, Wallflower.” Lincoln nodded thanks at the bartender, but seemed in no hurry to drink round number two. Instead he picked up their drinks, nodding his head for her to follow, as he pushed his way through the noisy crowd.

Daisy followed, noting in bemusement the way nearly every woman he passed broke off mid-sentence and gave him a lingering, appreciative look. She also noted that he didn’t look back.

Emma and her friends were dead wrong about Lincoln Mathis. This was no modern-day rake set on wooing every woman who crossed his path. This was a man rather desperate to look like a playboy.

But why?

A cute blonde in a slinky white halter top with a spectacular figure was bolder than the rest, deftly moving in front of Lincoln before he could reach a recently vacated table in the back corner.

“You’re overdressed, stranger,” the woman said, reaching out and flicking a flirtatious finger over his bow tie. “Buy you a drink, see if we can’t think of a way to get you underdressed?”

Daisy rolled her eyes at the woman’s unabashed come-on. And even though she was facing Lincoln’s back, she somehow knew that he was smiling that slow, panty-melting grin that he handed out for free to anyone with breasts.