The Fifty-Cent Groom

by Karen Toller Whittenburg

  “Speak for yourself. I went to law school.”

  Surprise restored her voice to full strength. “You’re an attorney?”

  “No, I just went to law school for a year, then I dropped out.”

  “Dropped out?” Her mouth dropped open. “Why?”

  “It lost its appeal.” He grinned at his joke.

  Sara didn’t. “I can’t believe you had the chance to become a lawyer and you blew it.”

  His grin disappeared. “I didn’t blow it, Sara. I got tired of using big words and I chose not to continue.”

  “You dropped out.” She shook her head in disbelief. “What did you do after that? Apply to med school?”

  “Actually, I did that before law school.”

  “You dropped out of med school, too?”

  “I never went. My father wanted me to be a doctor, so I got accepted—just to prove that I could, I suppose. But I never really had any desire to study medicine.”

  “So what did you have a desire to study?”

  “Architecture, but by the time I figured that out I was tired of school altogether, so I went to Australia and worked on a sheep station.”

  “Sheep?” She couldn’t seem to conquer her astonishment. “You sheared sheep?”

  “No. Mostly I cooked.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, stews and casseroles, mainly. Once in a while, something more exotic.”

  “No, I meant, what, as in you’re kidding.”

  “Oh. No. I’m not kidding. I’m pretty handy with food. You’ll have to sample my cooking sometime.”

  Her interest whetted, she studied him with a new wariness. “What happened to that job? Did you lose your taste for it?”

  “No, I developed a passion for soccer and conned a friend into letting me play on his team. I spent as much time on the sidelines as on the field, but I can truthfully say I’ve played professional soccer.”

  “And after that?”

  His forehead creased with the effort of remembering. “Um, a few months crewing for one of those university-at-sea groups. Then a stint as a late-night DJ on a radio station in Honolulu. I worked as a ski instructor in Colorado for a short while. After that, I managed an art gallery in Santa Fe and then a restaurant in Detroit, and sometime in there I flew tourists over the Grand Canyon in a helicopter. I think that might have been before the art gallery.”

  As Sara stared at him, confused by this shift in her perspective, the sprinkler made another round, drenching them from head to toe and feeding the river of silt at their feet. She pushed the wet hair from her eyes and blinked, wishing she could lose all interest in the soggy, sexy man standing before her. But even dripping wet, in the midst of her dire predicament, curiosity got the best of her. “All right,” she said. “Give it to me straight. How many careers have you abandoned because you got bored?”

  He shrugged. “I haven’t kept count. Usually I lose interest in an activity as soon as I’ve proven to myself I can do it. When there’s no further challenge, the risk is gone and so am I.”

  “What kind of time frame are we talking from spark of interest to the last goodbye?”

  He leaned against the van, crossed his arms and considered. “I’ve been doing stunt work for movies and television for the past four years. That’s probably the closest I’ve come to steady employment.”

  “Don’t you think about security? Retirement? Planning for the future?”

  “Security, never. Retirement, only when I’m physically exhausted. Planning for the future? That’s a very recent consideration.”

  His eyes locked on hers for a heartbeat, and her breath deserted her like a fleeting thought. The magic wove through her like a satin ribbon, and she was tempted—oh, so tempted—to let this mystical attraction take her where it would. But Ben was the wrong kind of man, the kind she always fell for—a traveling salesman of dreams. A man with no need for stability or roots. A man who would forever be on his way to the next rainbow.

  Unfortunately for her, he was also a man whose smile took away her breath, whose kisses stole her reason. And right now, she needed both her ability to breathe and to think clearly.

  She was not, under any circumstances, going to get involved with a man who had no better ambition than to follow his attention span wherever it roamed. An uncertain future was exactly what she had known all her life, the very thing she was determined never to know again. She had struggled too hard and planned too well to let a physical attraction overshadow her goals. And no amount of desperate kisses could change her mind.

  She turned abruptly, moving away from the promise of soul-stirring passion and toward the gate. “I wonder if there’s a release somewhere that allows this to be opened manually.”

  “Good thinking, Sara.” He moved past her to investigate. “And here it is. A manual release—and it’s secured with a padlock. Ridgeman must be a fanatic.”

  “He’s very careful, that’s all.” Defending West wasn’t anything she felt particularly compelled to do, it just seemed better than not defending him and tacitly agreeing he was a bit of a fanatic. “I like caution in a man.”

  Ben’s gaze caught hers in the damp and dusky dark, and his brief silence teemed with a challenge she half hoped he’d issue. But he stooped to examine the padlock instead.

  Aware of a sharp twinge of disappointment, she turned her head and met Cleo’s softly accusing eyes through the van window. “Ah, are you tired of being cooped up in there?”

  The moment Sara opened the door, the Lab bounded out and trotted to the gate, stopping only long enough to shake off some water after the sprinkler passed over.

  “She’s feeling better.”

  Ben didn’t answer. He glanced at Cleo as she took a position beside him. “I’m working on it,” he said to the dog, as if she had demanded to know why he hadn’t opened the gate for her.

  There was affection there, between the dog and the man. Sara could see it, no matter how much Ben claimed there was no love lost. She wondered if it had evolved from their separate relationships with the other woman…or if it had grown from their mutual respect for the other’s independence. Choosing the latter—because she did not want to think about Ben and that woman—she started to close the driver’s side door before the next pass of the sprinkler. But a streetlight, refracted through the spray of water, caught her attention and she paused.

  The wall really wasn’t that high. A pole vault athlete could probably clear it easily. Of course, she didn’t have a pole and her body wasn’t Olympic material…but she had the next best thing to a stepping stool. All she had to do was push the van away from the gate and line it up beside the wall.

  Her spirits improved as she assessed the possibility. “I have an idea,” she said. “Help me move the van.”

  Ben barely glanced at her. “What did you say?”

  “I’m going to push the van back and roll it close to the fence. That way we can climb up and jump down on the other side.”

  Man and Labrador turned in unison to stare at her.

  “Oh, don’t be so negative,” she said. “This will work. Trust me. All you have to do is push.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “All right, Doubting Thomas, you get in the van and steer while I push.” She moved to the front fender, which was flush against the gate, and gave it a hefty shove.

  “Unless you want to be paper thin in about two seconds, I’d suggest you stop trying to defy the laws of gravity.”

  “What do you know about laws?” she said smugly as the van moved a bit. “You dropped out of school.”

  He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her away from the front of the van. “Not before I learned that if you roll something uphill, it’s going to roll downhill again.”

  Sure enough, the van retraced the few inches gained and clanked into the gate. Ignoring the warm, safe feeling his protectiveness evoked in favor of a fierce determination to prove her point, she concentrated on how to accomplish her immediate goa
l as quickly as possible. “If you’d been in the van, as I asked, it would have turned easily, and we’d be halfway home by now.”

  He frowned at her. “There’s another way—”

  “Don’t say it. If there was another way out of this place, I’d have found it by now. Just humor me. Get in the van and steer.”

  There was a moment when she thought he was going to argue, but she lifted her chin to suggest the futility of such an action, and he simply shrugged. “I’ll help you on one condition. I’ll turn the steering wheel and we’ll both push. Agreed?”

  “That isn’t necessary,” she began, but she knew it probably was. “All right. If you insist.”

  He nodded. “I do. And, just as another matter of natural law, it will be more effective to push on the opposite fender.”

  She immediately saw the logic in that, although she maintained an indifferent expression. As he climbed inside and set the wheels, Sara dashed around the van, past the crumpled A Vice side panel, to reach the right front fender. Realistically, she knew her strength alone probably wasn’t up to the task. But as an example of her determination, one push couldn’t hurt.

  It didn’t hurt, actually, but only because she landed, splat, in a puddle that somewhat cushioned the blow to her backside.

  “Couldn’t you have waited for me to come around here to help?” Ben asked a minute later as he extended a hand to her. “You didn’t even give me time to get my foot off the brake.”

  Her dignity was bruised but not defeated, and Sara accepted his assistance in cool silence. Resisting the idea of shaking off the wetness with an all-over shudder, like Cleo would have done, Sara reached behind her and tugged on the tails of her shirt. The mudplastered fabric peeled away from her skin with an embarrassing smacking noise and left a layer of gooey moisture across her back as thick as wallpaper paste. “If there’s a law of nature about how many catastrophes can occur to one person in an alloted amount of time, I’d like to hear it.”

  Ben, wisely, did not smile. “That must have been covered in one of the classes I missed.”

  “Yes,” Sara said. “For me, too.”

  TWO MINUTES later, the van rolled into position, scraping paint a good fifteen feet or so along the brick wall, yanking the last sprinkler head out of the ground, and uprooting a sapling before it stopped and sank to the hubcaps in the newly-forming Ridgeman Swamp.

  “I can’t believe this,” she said, examining the new ruts. “I have never done anything so destructive in my life.”

  “It was an accident,” he said.

  “I don’t have accidents,” she countered just as quickly. “At least, I never did before I put on that dumb dress.” Hands on hips, she surveyed the damage she’d left in her wake. Then she sighed with regret. “West will never speak to me again.”

  Following her gaze across the lawn, Ben figured her concern was unfounded. West Ridgeman, Attorney at Law, would be talking to her quite soon and probably none too quietly, either. But Sara, being Sara, remained focused on her plan—getting over the fence and out of Ridgeman’s jurisdiction before she made any final decisions about what apologies to make and what reparations to offer.

  He watched her as she climbed onto the roof of the van and prepared to boost herself up onto the wall. “Come on up,” she called down. “You can’t hurt this van, believe me.”

  He believed her, all right, but from this angle, he had an outstanding view of her legs, could even see the line of silk at the base of her hips. “Sara,” he said. “There’s something I should tell you.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.” Lifting his gaze, he met her eyes with absolute sincerity. “I want you to know that not once during this entire evening did I wonder what color lingerie you were wearing.”

  “They’re mud brown, at the moment. But thanks for telling me. It’s good to know that you, at least, are a gentleman.”

  He resolved, then and there, never to confess the truth—that he’d had no reason to wonder. He’d known the color from the moment he unbuttoned the wedding dress in the van. “Be careful,” he advised, as she swung one leg up and levered herself onto the wall. “Lower yourself first, then drop on the other side. Don’t jump.”

  “You’re the stuntman. Shouldn’t you show me how it’s done?”

  “I have to get Cleo out. Besides, I know you’re determined to do this your way, no matter what.”

  A look of concern replaced her smile. “I didn’t think about Cleo. How are you going to get her on top of the van?”

  “I’m not.”

  Sara sat on the wall, scooted around and started to ease over the other side. “You can’t leave her here.”

  “I don’t intend to.” Ben strolled over to the gate, wincing as he heard the snap of branches, a muffled ouch and then a thud.

  “Oooch.” Sara limped into view. “I should have looked before I leaped. There are shrubs along the outside of the fence. You’ll want to compensate for that when you drop over.”

  Extracting a compact knife from his pants’ pocket, Ben stooped and picked the lock on the manual release. A moment later, he and Cleo walked through the open gate to join Sara on the other side.

  “I TRIED TO TELL YOU, but you said, and I quote, ‘If there was another way out of this place, I’d have found it,’ end quote. I rest my case.” Ben kept his pace steady with Sara’s as they approached a cross street. “Cleo, don’t play in traffic.” The dog didn’t acknowledge his command, but she stopped at the curb nonetheless. He checked for traffic in both directions, but the streets weren’t heavily traveled at this time of night. “Coast is clear,” he said.

  “Not for you, it isn’t.” Sara’s shoulders were back, her chin was high, and her bedraggled appearance had an almost haughty dignity. “And don’t try any of that reverse psychology stuff on me. At this point, getting hit by a car would be anticlimactic.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re still angry. Four blocks ago, I understood. Even two blocks back, I could feel some sympathy. But we have now walked eight full blocks from the Ridgeman estate, and frankly, it’s time to change the subject.”

  “Easy for you to say. I’m hobbling and you’re not.”

  “I have shoes and you don’t. That isn’t my fault, either. Look, Sara, I love the way you attack problems. I love the fact that you would rather do something the wrong way than stand back and do nothing at all. Or wait for someone else to do it for you. I respect your independent spirit, and I believe it would be both presumptuous and wrong to try to stop you from solving your own problems in your own way. Now, can we talk about something else?”

  “Only if you promise that the next time I’m about to jump over a fence, you’ll stop me. Agreed?”

  She intrigued him with the hint of a smile, teased him with a toss of her wet hair, stole his heart with the daredevil glint in her eyes. “Agreed.”

  “You have to promise.”

  Ben knew he shouldn’t, but the words pushed right past his better judgment. “I promise.”

  “Good. Now I don’t have to think about that anymore.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it.”

  “I just have to figure out where the nearest phone booth might be.” She didn’t even stop at the curb, just vaguely glanced in both directions and kept walking. “Oh, geez, I should have remembered to get my purse out of the van. I don’t have any money. Do you know if I can call collect from a pay phone or do I still have to put in a quarter first?”

  “I’ll loan you a quarter.”

  She nodded and stopped limping.

  “THANK YOU for coming to get us,” Ben said.

  “No problem. I can’t sleep, anyway.” Gypsy made another adjustment to her seat, giving her big belly more room behind the steering wheel and further cramping Sara, who was hunched down in the cargo section of the two-seater hatchback next to Cleo, who took up more than her alloted space.

  “It doesn’t make any difference whether I lay on my back or my side,” Gypsy continued.
“The baby kicks and keeps me awake. And to be perfectly honest, I’ll take any excuse to get behind the wheel. I’ve always had a love affair with this car and Kevin won’t let me drive it until after the baby’s born. This way he’ll never even know I was out of the house. You okay back there, Sara?”

  “Fine.” She wasn’t, but there was no point in saying so and then having to describe every humiliating detail of the evening to Gypsy’s satisfaction. “Just fine.”

  “What happened to your dress?” Gypsy angled herself in the seat and pressed the clutch, then angled the other way to press the gas pedal. The car lurched forward, shuddered and died. She twisted in the seat and started the procedure over again. “You know, the wedding gown? The one that twinkled at you.”

  Sara winced. “I took it off. You know, Gypsy, you and Ben have something in common. He was a cook at one time.”

  “Really?” Her blond head bobbed in Ben’s direction as the transmission caught in first and the car edged forward. “You don’t look like a cook.”

  “You don’t look like a chauffeur.”

  Gypsy giggled. “I look like a Sumo wrestler, but that doesn’t mean I am one.” She shifted into second and then quickly into third. “I’m actually not much of a cook, either.”

  “You’re just being modest,” Sara offered from the back in the interest of keeping the subject rolling. “She’s made some very unusual dishes.”

  Gypsy sighed. “Yes. Tonight, for instance, I fixed torched chicken.”

  “I’ve never heard of that. Was it good?”

  “Well, the firemen loved it.”

  “Firemen?”

  “I was over at Sara’s house, you see, trying to unbutton the wedding gown so she could get out of it, and when I went to wash the Popsicle juice off my fingers, I saw the flames and knew dinner would be delayed.”

  “Did you set the house on fire?” Ben asked with concern.

  “No. After the first fire, Kevin installed a smoke alarm with a direct wire to the fire station. My torched chicken was thoroughly foamed before I could waddle across the yard.”