The Complete Novels of the Lear Sister Trilogy

by Julia London

  “The fish thing—you know, Pisces. The thing where you bump up against the side of the fishbowl where I am, then swim like hell in the other direction.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  “Oh, yes you do, Rebecca—you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  She put the Rover in drive. “We’ll see you later,” she said as she pressed the gas.

  She saw Matt rear back, then in the rearview mirror, saw him staring after her, and thought the fish analogy was about the stupidest thing she’d heard in a long while, and in fact, her alter ego urged her to say so. So Rebecca circled back around.

  Matt was standing in the same spot she had left him. “Yes?” he drawled when she let the passenger window down.

  “I am not doing a fish thing.”

  “All right. Then what are you doing?”

  “Excellent question. I don’t happen to know at the moment, but if you will kindly step back, I have a forty-five-minute drive to think about it. I’ll let you know.”

  Matt sighed, shook his head. “That’s all I can ask for, I guess. But I gotta tell you, Rebecca, this yo-yo thing is not good. Let’s agree that the ball is officially in your court. I’ve made it clear that I’d really like to explore this thing between us, take it deeper. You’ve made it clear that you don’t know what you want—but I won’t press you. It’s up to you.”

  “Great. Maybe we can start with you not telling me how to participate in this campaign.”

  “Are you serious?” he asked, and leaned over, propped his arms on the window to better gape at her. “Come on, Rebecca, that is a whole different issue—”

  “No, it’s not—”

  “Of course it is! That’s my role in his campaign. It’s nothing personal, it’s just politics.”

  “It’s bullshit,” she said evenly. “You know what, Matt? I think I know what the problem is here. I think you are jealous of my relationship with Tom.”

  Matt just snorted like that was the most absurd thing in the world. “Get real!”

  “Good night, Matt,” she said, and pressed the gas again and headed for the street. And as she drove away, she saw Matt still standing there, one hand on his waist, staring after her in bewilderment.

  He couldn’t possibly be as bewildered as she was starting to feel.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Women! Ya can’t live with ‘em and ya can’t get ‘em to wear skimpy little Nazi outfits . . .

  EMO PHILLIPS

  From almost the moment she had called him cheap, Rebecca Lear had managed to turn Matt Parish, formerly known as the most unflappable guy in the world, upside down and inside out. He did not know which way was up. He was confused about many things, but he knew one thing beyond certainty—he was not jealous of her relationship with Tom. Preposterous.

  Jealousy would imply there was something to be jealous about, which there was not. If Tom chose to spend all his time in the company of a beautiful woman, more power to him. Matt had a job to do, and he could not care less that every other time he came to the offices, Grayson was there with Pat or Angie while his mom was off playing the beauty queen role with Tom.

  Okay, maybe he didn’t give a shit where she was—sort of—but it was beginning to piss him off that the kid had to suffer through her little ego trip. “It’s not all the time,” Angie had said one day when Matt complained about it. “But would you mind watching him? I’ve got to get to the post office again.” Funny how often Angie had to get to the post office. She was out the door before Matt could say anything, so he shouted after her, “It is so all the time!” as she disappeared into the parking lot.

  He and Grayson had stood, side by side, watching Angie take off. “Got any candy?” Grayson had asked once she had pulled into the street.

  Oh yeah, he and the kid were spending a lot of quality time together. Enough that Matt knew that Grayson’s favorite cartoon was SpongeBob SquarePants, and Grayson knew who Kelly Kiker was. Matt had even visited the children’s section of a bookstore to get more suitable reading material than My Pal the Dog, or whatever it was (his pick, The Day My Butt Went Psycho, was hilarious, thank you), so that Gray would have something to do while Matt tried to work on Tom’s campaign. He knew which were Gray’s favorite pants (the cargo ones with the hole in the knee), his favorite food (mac and cheese, hello), and what time he had to go to bed (eight). He knew what Grayson wanted to be when he grew up (a fireman. Or a policeman. Or an astronaut. Or a nanny, for Chrissakes), knew that he missed his nanny Lucy like crazy, and even penned her a touching I-heart-Lucy letter with fangs and dogs and a man who looked a little like Matt. Well, okay, looked like him and about five million other guys. But still.

  Matt also knew that Grayson loved his mom, but thought she was sort of weird sometimes. The kid was very perceptive that way. “Mom has a lot of shoes, like five or six thousand!” he had confided in Matt one day, all wide-eyed.

  “Yeah,” Matt had sighed. “The sad news is, she’ll get five thousand more, and so will your wife, which you’ll have one day if you go the astronaut path instead of the nanny path like I’m telling you. This is something you might as well learn early on, pal. Women really like their shoes.”

  That obviously horrified the boy, and he had asked in a whisper, “But where will we put them?”

  “You might have to build a barn.”

  Grayson had considered that for a moment, and then asked, “How come you don’t have a barn for your wife?”

  “Okay, I’ve got work to do. Read your book,” Matt said.

  Matt also knew that the dog-loving Grayson had a new one named Tot. But of all the dogs, Grayson loved Tater the best, because his father had given the dog to him. And while the kid spoke of the man in reverent terms, Matt couldn’t help wonder what sort of dad could leave a kid as cool as Gray hanging, but apparently he did. Matt liked to keep an open mind, but based on the evidence thus far, Grayson’s dad was sounding like a humongous prick.

  When Matt wasn’t watching SpongeBob with Grayson, he was working very diligently on getting a meeting with the Hispanics for Good Government, or HGG, which was a grassroots organization that had grown into a voting force to be reckoned with. According to the poll stats Doug and Jeff held, the Hispanic vote was one area where Tom was lacking votes. And while HGG did not like to be lobbied, Doug and Jeff were adamant that Matt finagle a meeting with them for Tom. His opponent had managed it, and they feared that if Tom didn’t get in front of organization, they might endorse his opponent. That would be a critical loss, a potential showstopper.

  What really chapped Malt’s ass was that Tom didn’t seem to care. He was forever off at obscure constituent meetings or working on campaign issues that no one else was privy to. He was not what one might call a hands-on candidate. The only thing Tom did show interest in—intent interest—was campaign contributions. He subscribed to the theory that the biggest purse won the pot, and toward that end, he hounded anyone who might contribute a little something. And it seemed to Matt, being just one innocent bystander, that he was using Rebecca to get those contributions, carting her around and letting her charm the pants off some of the big spenders.

  Rebecca.

  What could he say? He was truly crazy about her, like he’d never been crazy before—which was pretty sad seeing as how she treated him like chocolate one day, brussels sprouts the next. Short-term, long-term, any way he sliced it, he did not see how she could do anything but end up deranging his life in one enormous way or another. Like her referrals to his law practice. The shoe inserts had been just the beginning (the seniors had quite a network), and now Ben was absolutely beside himself, and had reiterated, emphatically, by slapping his hand on top of Matt’s desk a half-dozen times, that he DID NOT WANT TO BE KNOWN AS THE PATENT KING FOR A BUNCH OF OLD GUYS WITH HALF-BAKED INVENTIONS.

  And what about Rebecca’s funky contributions to the campaign? The big giant gala aside, she had lots of really cute, no-place-in-a-political-campaig
n ideas. Like the email newsletter Gilbert had set up, which she thought would be a lot better received if it was more folksy instead of a just a bunch of blah-blah boring campaign news (her words, not his). So she and Pat started attaching recipes to the weekly newsletter, made it sound like they were coming from Tom’s wife, Glenda (who, insofar as Matt knew, didn’t even boil water). In spite of his arguments that a man running for the lieutenant governor’s office really shouldn’t be disseminating recipes, they went out, every week.

  Then, Rebecca took Tom along to Eeyore’s birthday party. Now, anyone from Austin knew that the annual Eeyore’s birthday party was the opportunity for a bunch of aging hippies to hang out in strange costumes. Rebecca, who had only recently moved to Austin, mistakenly thought it was a good opportunity for Gunter to shoot Tom with lots of frolicking children. Gunter got Tom with frolicking children, all right, but most of them were in their forties. Worse, the local paper shot him in a staggeringly huge top hat, standing arm in arm with a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Of course Matt had tried to educate Rebecca about how that was going to play. “They’ll take those pictures of him and make him look like an idiot.”

  “Who will?” she had asked, genuinely surprised.

  “The Republicans. Heard of them?”

  “Only in passing,” she said with a cheerful smile, and continued stuffing envelopes (hand-addressed, of course) with the latest campaign literature. “Besides, you’re so particular about everything; it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s just another of your weird idiosyncrasies.”

  “My idiosyncrasies?” Matt echoed in disbelief, but Rebecca ignored him. So he put his hand on top of the stack of envelopes, leaned across the table so that she had to look at him—which she did, with those dancing blue eyes that always managed to get him right in the gut. “They’re not idiosyncrasies, Rebecca. I’m just practical, and you have to admit I have a little more experience with this sort of thing than you do.”

  “Oh really?” she asked, happily wrenching the envelopes free of his palm “And how many campaigns have you worked on?”

  “That’s a mere technicality—”

  “How many did you say?”

  “None,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, smiling pertly.

  “The point is, I’ve been around campaigns, I routinely work with elected officials, and I know how this thing goes down. You, on the other hand, have been too busy running up and down the runway blowing kisses to the crowds to know that Eeyore’s birthday is not the sort of venue where we want our candidate!”

  “Ah. So you’d have him down at the courthouse with all your cronies?”

  “I prefer to think of them as elected officials with statewide contacts.”

  “I see,” she said thoughtfully, and, Matt thought, she was finally getting the picture as she picked up her envelopes and carefully straightened them into a perfect stack. “Did I tell you?” she asked, standing up. “We got a very generous contribution from Judge Gambofini at Eeyore’s birthday party. He said to tell you hi.” She flashed a proud little smirk and prissed out of the staff office.

  Dammit.

  It was obvious that Rebecca was enjoying his frustration, and maybe, just maybe, getting a little too big for her britches. She was taking advantage of the fact that he had, in spite of all the heretofore improbable, if not impossible, emotions bubbling to the surface (which could only mean an increasingly likely possibility of a major devotion, for Chrissakes), gone and done something insane and confessed he was nuts about her. Matt had taken his big old dusty heart and laid it out, salted and peppered it, and served it up to her on a platter. And just when he thought there was hope of getting close to the object of his great affection, she’d find a reason to be mad at him again, and they’d go round again. It was almost enough to make a grown man cry.

  What was funny, particularly since Matt didn’t know it, was that this was precisely what Rebecca was thinking of him. He could be so terribly charming and witty, so very sexy. She would believe there was really the possibility of something between them—taken, of course, in baby steps—and then he’d bug her about some little thing she had done. He seemed to think he was the Central Authority on All Things Campaign, giving her a hard time about silly things, such as how she was wasting time hand-addressing the campaign envelopes (but did he volunteer to generate labels? No). She was taking Tom to all the wrong events (Eeyore’s birthday party was for hippies . . . and distinguished judges, apparently). She couldn’t possibly pull off a bigger gala than The Party was organizing, so why waste her time (but he didn’t actually have any of the details of A Big Party fundraiser, did he?), and he thought Grayson was in the campaign offices too often. He had actually said to her, and these were his exact words, because there was, apparently, no end to the list of topics about which Big Pants was an expert: “Grayson is really bored. Don’t you think he could use a friendlier after-school environment?”

  Augh!

  She had politely but firmly informed him that Grayson was fine, and politely but firmly ignored the little voice in her head that said Matt was right, because she hated when he was right.

  The confusing part about Matt was, when he wasn’t trying to mow everyone down with his ideas, he was really great to have around. Like the day he helped her, without any smirking or sarcastic remarks, put up drawings of America Grayson’s preschool class had made for Tom and they stood there, side by side, admiring the drawings and laughing like old friends. Matt even pointed out that Grayson’s drawing had a monster in it, which he said made Grayson’s stand out from all the rest.

  That was another obvious and huge selling point—Matt seemed genuinely interested in her son, which was very cool, particularly since Bud wasn’t.

  And not only was Matt’s concern for the underdog real, but well known. He had been overly modest when he told her about his involvement with Children’s Aid Services. Gilbert told her about Matt’s reputation for taking on some difficult and heart-wrenching cases and said he’d once read that Matt donated several thousand dollars of his own money to the Children’s Aid Society.

  That made her heart skip just a little.

  She had to admit that he was unusually chipper about the string of seniors that were still calling after the bingo bash. He was a good sport, too, would always laugh when she messed with him. One day he asked her about the stars she was lining up for the big to-do he was so adamantly against. “So, do you have the Dixie Chicks lined up?” he’d asked.

  “No,” she had sighed wearily, glancing at him. “I could only get Lyle Lovett.” That, of course, was a lie.

  Matt had chuckled, his eyes glimmering with amusement. “Only Lyle Lovett? That’s a tragedy. How’d you manage?”

  “A friend of a friend of a friend,” she had said, waving her hand dismissively.

  His smile had brightened then—he was on to her—and he walked closer to where she was standing next to the bulletin board where they posted all the news. “What about Renée Zellwegger? A friend of a friend?” he had asked low, his breath skimming her ear.

  “She wasn’t available.”

  “Tom will be crushed.”

  “Oh no, he was okay with Sandra Bullock.” That was not a lie.

  Matt laughed low; Rebecca turned partially around to look at him. His eyes crinkled appealingly in the corners with his appreciative smile, and his gaze fell to her lips. For a moment, Rebecca toyed with stealing a kiss from him, just taking it . . . but she was too indecisive. Matt was already walking away, chuckling softly. “Can’t wait to go to this shindig,” he said cheerfully as he walked out the door.

  She was attracted to him. Very attracted. Weak-kneed-butterfly-belly attracted. That was a confusing place to be, because true to his word, Matt had left the ball in her court. He didn’t press her; he didn’t make her even remotely uncomfortable like so many men in her life had done. But sometimes, she would catch him looking at her, his eyes as soft and
deep as the river, and he’d smile as he turned away.

  Thankfully, Rebecca continued to convince herself (with help from Protecting the Inner Child While Searching for the Exterior Woman) that she didn’t need to be involved with any guy right now. After all, she had just come out of a long-term, toxic relationship, and lest she forget, that toxic guy had been terribly charming at first, too. Worse, she feared that Dad could be right about her, that she was too afraid to be alone.

  So the ludicrously topsy-turvy upshot of all this was, when she saw Matt, her heart did a funny little dance. She had a raging desire to see him, talk to him, and touch him that she felt, for the most part, completely at odds with the universe. But she was not so numb that she didn’t recognize that slowly and surely, she was falling like a shooting star, falling fast and headlong into that lovely chasm, at which point she’d slap a big mental red circle and line on him. The practical Rebecca understood why; the real Rebecca often wondered if she wasn’t just completely nuts.

  After several days of dancing around their mutual attraction, Matt was growing weary. He did everything he knew how to do to get her to cross over to his side. And while she showed signs of wanting to make that leap, she’d quickly back off. Actually, he couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her. He’d never really suffered the pangs of love, but he figured Rebecca must have suffered them to death. Rather than allow himself to feel the pangs of rejection—that sounded like a root canal to him—he focused his attentions on getting a face-to-face with HGG. He was bound and determined to make it happen, and he hounded that group, called in all the chits he could think of. So when he finally got the call, he was ecstatic. He called Tom’s capitol office, told him that the meeting was on, at four-thirty at the Four Seasons.

  “Today?” Tom had asked.

  “Today. That’s the only time they would give me. This could be a huge boost toward getting the Hispanic vote, you know,” he reminded him.