by Ren Benton
Hector gave them a bucket of balls and a couple of clubs and shooed them toward the target green.
Griff studied her intently. “Is there anywhere you haven’t been?”
His choice of eatery was sometimes out of her league, but it was their lowbrow overlap that concerned him. “Aw, did you overlook me here, too?”
One dark brow lifted. “Did you ever notice me in any of the places our paths should have crossed?”
She would have remembered. He would have starred in her X-rated fantasies for a while. “My view was probably blocked by a wall of women.”
“Or maybe we missed each other by minutes a hundred times.”
She lined up three tees and placed a ball on each. “I’m eighty-seven percent sure that’s the plot of a John Cusack movie.”
“I bet he got the girl in the end.”
“Well, yeah. He’s John Cusack. When was the last time you killed the president of Paraguay with a fork?”
“All this time, I was under the impression that a boom box was the key to a woman’s heart.”
“Weak.”
She hit the first ball with a satisfying crack.
“Lame.”
Whack.
“Trite.”
Smack.
“Between red roses and diamond earrings on the lack-of-originality scale.”
“Does anything less than assassination impress you?”
She set up her tees again. “Four-inch screws.”
She knocked the next ball into orbit. Griff grabbed the club at the end of her swing and used it to spin her toward him. He cupped her chin with one hand and kissed her.
She sobbed against his mouth and stepped into his warmth. She had missed this. Missed him. Missed being touched. Why hadn’t she insisted on the quickie?
Because she was trying to be good. Molesting a man in a public place was not appropriate behavior for a woman seeking guardianship of four children.
She unlocked their lips with a gasp. “PG-rated, remember?”
“Your legs aren’t wrapped around my head, are they?”
She moaned as each tiny muscle lining her vagina clenched. Every inch of her felt swollen and tender, like the aftermath of sex. Without the accompanying release, it was torture. “I don’t know how to make this work, Griff.”
And that failure made her eyes sting.
“Neither do I.”
Her hope that he had a brilliant solution had been holding back the tears. When he put an end to it, her eyes overflowed.
He thumbed a tear from her cheek. “I don’t know how we work, but when I want something, I figure out a way. I want you. Give me a little more time, and I will find a way for us.”
He spent one afternoon with four kids and two backup adults and enjoyed the novelty of the experience. Now he thought he could tolerate it on a regular basis. A rookie mistake, but she couldn’t tell him no, not with his taste on her lips. Let him figure out on his own that they couldn’t work. “Take all the time you need.”
Make it last a little while. Leave me with as many memories as possible.
“If we leave now, there will be enough time for a leisurely goodbye kiss.”
Her enthusiasm for that suggestion helped to banish the gloom from her response. “Sure, get me even more wound up and turn me loose on clients.”
“Oh, are you wound up?” he asked innocently as he collected their gear and headed for the exit. “Good thing you work around stiffs.”
She laughed for him and was rewarded with a big, strong hand on her butt hurrying her toward the parking lot.
Their departure was thwarted by the approach of Mitch Rafferty. “Are you stalking me again, Dunleavy?”
It wasn’t surprising to find the billionaire at the public golf course. He hadn’t become a billionaire by hieing out to the country club in the middle of the workday when he could hit a few balls minutes from his office and be back in time for his one o’clock meeting.
Griff shook his hand. “We’re on our way out again, sir.”
“Uncanny timing you have.”
Ivy’s lips curved. “We were discussing his predilection for near misses earlier.”
Rafferty bowed his head toward her. “A pleasure to see you again, Miss Miller.”
“Likewise, Mr. Rafferty. I’m flattered you remember me.”
“I’m not likely to forget paying for an education that’s not benefitting me.”
He seemed genuinely grumpy about it. “Your HR department is fond of a five-year related-experience requirement for corporate entry-level positions. After five years elsewhere, starting over at the bottom is a tough move, even if it is the bottom of Rafferty International.”
“I can see how that would be the case.” His office was too far above the recruitment level to have any view of what went on that far below. “I’ll have someone look into the matter. I look forward to seeing you at dinner next week.”
She shot a look at Griff, who appeared equally nonplused. For clarification, she asked, “Pardon me?”
“I won’t have Griff giving me indigestion with business at the table. We’ll bring you ladies and talk like civilized human beings.”
“Ivy may not be able to make it.”
She squeezed Griff’s hand. “Or I may be. This is the first I’ve heard of it, so I’m not sure how it fits into my schedule.”
“We can move it to a night you’re free,” Rafferty offered, taking for granted she would have such a night. “As long as it’s not Tuesday. My granddaughter’s in-laws-to-be are descending on us for another whoop-de-do about the engagement, and we’re putting on a display of affable affluence for their benefit.”
Her inner consultant leaned forward attentively. Does she have a dress yet?
No. This was Griff’s client. She would not interfere with another agent’s pitch. “Neither affability nor affluence should be a challenge for you. Give my congratulations to your granddaughter and her fiancé.”
What about the dress?
“I don’t want to encourage more wedding-related nonsense. Junie married me at the courthouse, and that’s been good enough for us for sixty years.”
Can we get back to the dress, please?
“Has Ashley picked out her dress yet?”
She blinked rapidly to dispel the hallucination that Griff’s lips had formed the words on her mind.
The corners of Rafferty’s mouth drooped. “That’s the source of half the nonsense.”
“Ivy can offer some relief. That’s one of her many areas of expertise.”
Rapid blinking wasn’t helping her reconcile that the man who had joked about her mortuary gig minutes ago knew the truth about her job, and Rafferty would think she had some kind of ophthalmic condition if she didn’t stop.
The elderly man transferred his full attention to her. “She’s been threatening a week-long shopping trip in Paris with half the family and a gaggle of friends.”
“I can’t compete with a week in Paris on almost any level,” she admitted, “but Swann’s has most of the same gowns straight off the runways, and I guarantee she’ll be treated like royalty in her hometown.”
“Do you have a card, my dear?”
She had deliberately not prepared for this eventuality for fear Griff would have need of a Band-Aid and find evidence in her purse of the secret job he apparently already knew about. “Not on me, I’m afraid.”
Rafferty gave her one of his cards instead. “I’ll tell my secretary to expect your call with your store’s information and confirming our dinner engagement.”
She was still reeling from the encounter as Griff drove her back downtown. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“Tell me landing Ashley Rafferty as a client wouldn’t be a coup for you.”
“Of course it would. It was killing me not to shove my thousand-dollar commission in line ahead of your multimillion-dollar deal.”
“Are you sure it was professional courtesy rather than not wanting to reveal your
super-secret job?”
“The two aren’t mutually exclusive. How did you find out?”
“I saw you on the news. Why is it such a big secret?”
He had the gall to look genuinely perplexed, while that one piece of missing information cleared up every wisp of her lingering confusion. “You saw me on the news, immediately stopped speaking to me because you decided I had wedding fever, and wonder why I didn’t tell you?”
His expression turned grim. “That’s not quite what happened. It is, I believe, understandably alarming when the woman you’ve been seeing tries on wedding dresses when you haven’t mentioned marriage. Particularly when you know she has another offer pending.”
“An offer you know very well I declined,” she reminded him. “Twice.”
“Third time’s the charm. Maybe he came back with the correct playlist to convince you he was the one.”
“Wow.” Flabbergasted barely began to describe her feelings. “I’ve been pitying myself because being good and nice and on my best behavior is exhausting and unrewarding, so I suppose I should be flattered you’re so quick to believe I’m a shitty human being.”
“I never said—”
“No, you never said anything. You just assumed. So let me clarify the situation for you, Mr. Dunleavy.” Her temper when Jared had come slumming in her parents’ kitchen had nothing on this. “If I like you enough to agree to a first date, I don’t hedge my bets lining up other men in case you don’t work out. If I’m fucking you, it’s because you’re better than masturbating, which I excel at.”
His hands twisted on the steering wheel. She hoped discomfort was sitting hard on his lap. It was no less than he deserved.
“You are not a substitution. You are not my way of killing time while I wait for someone else to download better music, you ass. You are ‘the one’ until it’s over.” She flung her hands in the air. “And probably for a decade after because who the hell is going to intuit I’m turned on by strike plate reinforcement and individual weaponized sports in order to compete with you?”
As if she didn’t already know monogamy-by-default was the epitome of oatmeal, he had to point out, “You’re not very good at being a bad girl, Duchess.”
“I told you it was an act.” She crossed her arms over her churning stomach to prevent her sick feeling from spreading further. “I can’t believe you think I would do that to you. You could have given me a chance to explain. Unless you’d been waiting for an excuse to escape.”
He raked a hand through his hair. “You’re too good to be true. I was waiting for your dark side to show, and I thought I saw it. I would have been less freaked out if I’d known you were promoting the store that employs you. It was a shock, and I handled it badly. I should have called you, but I didn’t want to hear you say I was right.”
“Are you sure it was that rather than not wanting to hear you were wrong?” she mocked his earlier question to her and immediately felt like a child — or something less, since Blake, a child, had forgiven him after his admission of wrongdoing. In her defense, though, there was a world of difference between being wrong about a door fastener and being wrong about her.
“Nothing makes me as happy as being wrong about you. Every time you surprise me is a gift.”
And the difference was that human beings were infinitely more complicated than a door fastener, so much so that they didn’t know what they were doing themselves much of the time, and as such, it was unfair to expect anyone else to figure them out. “Add that to the list of things that impress girls: admitting you were wrong. Bonus points for doing it poetically.”
She sighed as he pulled into the parking lot behind Swann’s. “I should have told you about my job. In the beginning, I didn’t think you’d be around long enough to get to know me. I didn’t see the harm in making the abridged version you slept with more interesting.”
He slipped the car into the space beside her minivan. “I wouldn’t criticize your morgue humor for all the gold in Dangereusia, but I recall your wedding humor being vastly more entertaining.”
“I have more material to work with. Do you remember the woman who recognized me at the hotel?”
“Mrs. Crenshaw, to whom I offered my condolences.”
Even the memory made her wheeze. “I nearly gave myself a hernia holding that laugh in. I couldn’t believe she got through the whole conversation without outing me.”
“Would it have been so awful if she had?”
“You tell me.”
He weighed his options and chose not to choose. “Do people really expect you to be straining at the gate because you’re always the bridal consultant, never the bride?”
She looked up at the building where much of that judgment took place. “Every day, strangers quiz me about my marital status, looking for openings to talk about themselves and rub it in some poor unwanted slob’s face that they have a ring.”
Friends and family were less subtle. “Jen and Cam want me hitched to someone so I’m no longer the third wheel. Aunt Shelley called after seeing my ‘wish-fulfillment party’ on the news and tried to make me feel less terminally pathetic about it.” She’d had quite the opposite effect. “Did you know that many spinsters in this day and age are symbolically marrying themselves?”
He pursed his lips. “Is that right?”
“If she starts a gift registry for me, are you in? I could use some new towels.”
“Sure. You have to mop up all those bitter tears with something.”
He made her laugh — no easy feat lately. He also made her furious and weak and achy. She never felt nothing when he was around.
“How did Aunt Shelley dodge a botanical name?”
“By being Byron’s sister.”
“Byron and Shelley.”
“Mm-hm.”
“I feel slighted by my parents’ lack of investment in the name department. Did they even love us?”
“Doubtful.” Only love would make a parent bestow upon a child the default icebreaker of a name that had to be explained thousands of times.
His gaze sharpened abruptly. “Blake. Is Cole’s middle name Ridge?”
She raked her teeth across her lower lip. “Richard. I lacked the conviction to go all the way with that one. I wasn’t sure if the romantic poet had to be English or if Walter Scott was on the table, and the records clerk was breathing down my neck, so I half-assed it. He’s lucky he’s not named Wordsworth.”
“You named the kids, too. I thought it was out of character for Holly to uphold family tradition that way.”
“She did it once.” Symbolically, if not legally. After she surrendered her first baby to the adoption advocate, she lost interest in subsequent parenting efforts.
Her family situation was her other big, unsexy secret. “I didn’t tell you about the kids for the same reason. I thought you’d be long gone before the ‘How many kids do you want?’ stage.”
“How many kids do you want?”
Oh, had they arrived there? She hadn’t recognized the route. “I already have four. I’ve done everything but the pushing, and from what I’ve seen, that part doesn’t add anything vital to the parenting experience, so I’m not compelled to complete my womanly journey by breeding. You’ll have to beget your heirs with a different uterus.”
“I sense a nerve has been struck.”
This was the hill where relationships went to die. “Nice men” — she used the term loosely in this case — “vet potential life partners for compatible goals by broaching the subject early. For some reason, they all seem to want three. When I mention I’m already raising four, they pat me on the head and explain they mean three of their children. I tell them under no circumstances am I raising seven kids, and then they don’t understand my math because they said they want three. Mine are irrelevant, erased in this imaginary future to make room for the precious fruit of self-important loins.”
Erasing a woman’s children put a date in the grave real quick. “That is not my future.
When you want your gray-eyed, raven-haired babies with unlimited naming possibilities, you’ll have to deposit them elsewhere.”
“Are you finished?”
She stared out the window and tried not to sulk. I told you this was pointless. “Yes.”
“I’m trying to see the shape of our future, not chop yours down to fit into mine, which I actually don’t have planned down to my burial arrangements. I was afraid you were going to say you wanted a reality-show number of kids or a record-breaking multiple birth, which would be a strain on me, to be honest. I’m basking in relief, not looking for a curb to kick you to.”
“I’m sorry I shouted at you.” She felt small and weak and silly after an outburst toward him, like a nervous little dog making a lot of noise, when the big, scary man was only trying to pet her.
“You didn’t shout. You defended the kids. They need someone to do that, and you wouldn’t be you if you didn’t.” He squeezed her hand to show there were no hard feelings. “If you were the one who set up the news segment, why did the woman with the fangs get the spotlight?”
Because she’s a backstabbing bitch. Satisfying as it would be to say out loud, it was unfair. They wanted the same promotion, and her opponent was a slick competitor. “She maneuvered our positions, and I let her because I’m a wuss. I care more about results than credit, so I gave up the starring role to be an extra in the show I conceived, organized, promoted, and catered.”
His thumb stroked the back of her hand. “I would have taken horrible advantage of you on group assignments in school.”
“You wouldn’t have been the first. That was the only time I wasn’t invisible. Bringing up a jock’s grade was the closest I orbited to popularity.”
“I bet they were orbiting in hope of getting in your pants. Studious chicks are hot.”
She gave him a wry look. “Fat chicks aren’t. I didn’t get my first kiss until sophomore year of college.” She didn’t remind him of her educational delay and age herself further. “And that turned out to be on a bet.”
“What’s his name? I have salad forks, dinner forks, serving forks...”
The offer to avenge her was sweet, but her thirst for blood had waned. “You went to State, right? Surely we overlapped at some point. You might have been the one who dared him.”