Matt leaned back and eyed her, holding back a smile. Gina actually believed he planned on marrying a stranger. “I suppose you know all about marriage.”
“Actually, I do.” Gina’s lips widened into an all encompassing smile. “I earned my masters in clinical social work, and I specialized in marital counseling at the clinic where I used to work for three years. How’s that?”
That took his mind off his problems for a second. “With that background, why are you running a bridal shop?”
“Because after my husband died, counseling was too depressing.” She took a deep breath.
Matt leaned forward. “How long ago did he die?”
“About three years ago now. Car accident.”
Her smile had fled. Matt wanted to reach out and comfort her, and he frowned at the notion. Was he starting to feel something for Gina besides straight lust? Was it compassion? He wasn’t sure. The feeling was too unfamiliar.
“I’m sorry,” he said instead of touching her, not trusting an emotion he couldn’t remember all that well. “How come you never got married again? And don’t tell me no one ever asked.”
Gina held her breath at the intensity in Matt’s eyes. If she was reading him right, he really wanted to know. She’d reached out to him, and he was reaching back.
“I dated after a while,” she told him, “and finally came to the conclusion that true love never comes along twice in a person’s life. I had my perfect mate, and he’s gone, and slam…” Mimicking cymbals, she clapped her hands together. “That was it. Last chance for romance.”
Matt didn’t think she sounded like she was grieving over her deceased husband, just that she was resigned to not being in love again. He could relate. Having seen how unhappy his parents had made each other, and having dated a few women himself, he’d never felt the least little urge to trust “love.” He was also willing to take her philosophy even one step further.
“I think you’re right,” he said. “I’d even go so far as to say some people probably aren’t destined to ever fall in love at all.”
“I’d prefer to think there’s someone out there for everyone,” Gina said earnestly. “That’s why you should wait, Matt, until she comes along. Please don’t wreck your life marrying someone just to prove something to your father.”
“But I wasn’t planning on marrying for real.” Gina was making such an effort to help him, with no gain for herself, that he had to tell her that much. “Tisha was being interviewed to pose as my wife—for a day.”
Gina’s mouth dropped open. “You two were going to pretend to be married?”
He nodded slowly.
“But that’s awful!”
“Why? The pretense wouldn’t have lasted more than a week, and I was going to pay her,” he said defensively, feeling like he’d said this before. Oh yeah—when she’d confronted him over Frankie. He cursed under his breath. He never defended his actions to anyone. Explained them, maybe. Defended them—never. So why was he bothering with this slip of a woman who had made herself his shadow? “Cold hard cash,” he added when she kept staring at him, shocked.
“Money is not the answer to everything!” Gina threw up her hands. “That kind of thinking is why the world is in such a bad state today. Nobody takes the institution of marriage seriously. Marriage is sacred!”
“Yeah? Go tell that to my father.”
He looked so sad, so lost, like the little boy he must have been when his world fell apart, that Gina grabbed his hand in hers. “I’m sorry, Matt.”
Her touch, and the way he looked at her, spawned a wave of emotion that joined them together. Gina knew that it wasn’t just lust they had in common anymore. But it couldn’t be love that she was feeling for Matt—she barely knpw him for one, and second, she’d been there. She knew what love felt like, and this wasn’t it. It just wasn’t.
She let go of his hand. “I know what your father did was terrible—”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Matt’s jaw went rigid, and before he could stop himself, the words tumbled out. “My brother and I were yanked apart when I was eleven, and no one would tell me where he was going. I got caught when I broke into a judge’s office to find the address of his new placement, and then I got labeled ‘bad news.”‘
“Matt, that’s horrible,” she whispered, taking his hand again. His fingers gripped back like she was his lifeline.
“I handled it,” he said. “What I couldn’t take was that I never saw my brother again, and I can’t find him now. Until just last year when my mother found me, I haven’t felt really connected to anyone.” Until Gina, Matt thought. Why her, damn it? Why was he latching onto a woman who deserved better than a man who didn’t know what love was? He had no business getting her involved in his mess.
“Oh, Matt.” Her eyes filled with tears.
“Anyway,” Matt said, taking a breath and gaining control, “that’s what my father did by simply walking out.” Reaching over, he wiped her cheek with the edge of his finger. He heard the subtle intake of her breath when he touched her, and felt the almost electric wave of energy in the air. Not wanting to look into her eyes for fear they would hook him forever, he let his gaze drop. Big mistake. The cleavage he saw that promised much more hidden beneath her top jolted him again.
He hadn’t been this unable to control himself since he’d gone through puberty, for criminy sakes. Common sense told him he ought to be running from this woman. So why the hell was he just sitting here, hoping that he could work up the courage to ask her to come to bed with him?
“Don’t worry, Gina. I’m not a kid anymore.”
“I noticed,” she said, a smile breaking through the clouds.
Matt put his hands up as if to shield himself. “Oh, no, she’s flirting with me.”
“I am not,” Gina protested, but she wasn’t fooling either of them. With a shake of her head that set her dangling silver earrings jiggling back and forth, she said, “You should get some real counseling.”
“This doesn’t qualify?” he teased.
Gina’s breath caught. “Contrary to what you might think, you are weird, and I don’t want to have a thing to do with you. I only came here to make sure you weren’t a bad element in the neighborhood. Now that I know you aren’t, we never have to see each other again. Besides,” she added, making no move to get up from the chair, “I’m a marriage counselor.”
“I don’t need anybody telling me I’m crazy for being angry,” he said. “As soon as I prove something to my father, it’ll be easy to push the past behind me where it belongs.”
Gina knew he was lying to himself, but she didn’t point that out to him. She was too busy concentrating on the way he seemed to focus on every word she said, and the way his wavy hair looked so soft…She cleared her throat. “So you haven’t been in prison,” she said. “You’ve been in the air force.”
Remembering Gina thought he was an escaped prisoner, Matt grinned. Women loved a man of mystery, didn’t they? If he teased her, let her see something in him to like, maybe she’d stick around for a while—for tonight, anyway. No longer than that. “The air force,” he repeated, nodding. “That was a good cover, wasn’t it?”
“Matt—”
“You couldn’t expect me to tell Tisha anything about what I did, could you? I mean, if she heard I’d escaped from prison, she might have turned me down flat.”
Gina stared at Matt speculatively. Was he teasing her? Feeding her another line? She couldn’t read him. The man was a total challenge to her. Maybe everything he’d said to the Blond Breadstick was a lie.
No, she decided. What he’d just told her about his childhood was the truth. There had been too much heated emotion behind his eyes for it to have been a lie. She doubted he even knew how much feeling he had buried inside him. “How are you going to continue to pretend to be married, living in the same town as your father?”
Matt was grinning, but the question made him stop. “I’m only here until I show my father how ha
ppy I am, Gina.”
A huge wave of disappointment flowed over her at that news. “Well, now that I know you aren’t a menace and that you’re beyond help, I guess it’s time I left you to your own destruction,” she said, rising. He was leaving town, and she didn’t care. She swore she didn’t care at all.
“Please stay.” Matt rose, too, and reached out to touch her arm. When his fingers brushed her skin, and the heat of his palm melded with the warmth of her forearm, she stared at him, her rosebud-shaped lips parting.
Matt wanted to kiss her, lose himself in her body, her breasts, her hips…her sweet caring. Lord, he’d never met a woman who cared about things like she had, to the point of following him all over the place to make certain he wasn’t a threat to her neighbors.
“Marry me,” he said suddenly.
Feeling a sexual awareness of the man so acute her arms got goose bumps and her nipples hardened under her tank top, Gina had to think about what he’d asked for a minute.
“You mean, pose as your wife, don’t you?” she asked.
Was that what he’d meant? Matt blinked and let go of her. Yeah, of course that’s what he’d meant. He nodded.
“You could ask me that after I just told you that I think marriage is sacred and you shouldn’t be playing around with your life like this?” She shook her head. “Matt, you must be either desperate as all get-out or crazier than I thought. In a word—no.” Turning, she walked away from him toward the exit.
“I am not desperate,” he protested. When she didn’t acknowledge she’d heard, he added silently, No, not desperate. But maybe he was getting a little crazy—crazy-in-lust to have even considered asking a woman that so attracted him to pose as his wife. He was opening himself up for trouble he didn’t need.
To heck with Gina. He had nothing left to do but go all out to find a wife. It was time to ask the one person who knew everything and everybody, for help.
The next morning, in his kitchen, Matt stared at his landlord, who was unscrewing the cap on the beer he’d bought to bribe him with. How on earth had his life come to the point where he’d been forced to ask an eighty-year-old man for help in finding a woman? To say that he was getting desperate was putting the matter lightly.
“I asked you over here, Mr. Tuttle,” he said, sitting backward on a chair, “because I have a problem.” He waited until Tuttle sat, too, and dived in. “I need a woman.”
“Heeya!” Tuttle guffawed and slapped his knee. “I knew the second you moved in you were gonna be fun, boy, and sure enough, I was right. Where should we go looking? One of those swinging places like the Lotta Lust? We can pick up a quick fix there, one for each of us and then—”
“Uh, no, sir,” Matt said, sticking up his hand like a school crossing guard to halt Tuttle’s stream of ideas. That was all he needed. A night out in a strip joint with an eighty-year-old man who was trying to pick up twenty-something-year-old women. They’d probably get arrested and make the front page. Then his father would find out everything, and worse, Gina would probably bail them out and have a field day saying “I told you so now get out of town.”
“The truth is,” he clarified, “I was thinking more along the lines of something like a wife.”
“Oh, that.” Tuttle sounded disappointed. “Wives aren’t any fun.”
Matt wondered if Tuttle knew about his friend Jeb’s wife painting his old shed. Probably not, since even Tuttle had mentioned how pitiful it was that vandals kept running around making decent peoples’ lives miserable.
“Not a real one,” he told Tuttle. “I want to get someone to pose as my wife for a while. A woman from out of town preferably, so not many here would recognize her. I’ll pay well.”
Tuttle studied him with squinty eyes. “Maybe that Gina next door is right.”
Matt’s insides tightened. “How so?”
“She claims there’s something strange goin’ on with you. She’s worried you might even be escaped from prison because of those scars on your arm and how you want to keep your affairs private.”
“I gave you my references.”
“Hell, boy, the only thing I checked on about you was that your twenties weren’t counterfeit. You think I’m gonna waste good money calling long distance to make sure you really are in the air force? Not on your bottom dollar. Besides, even if you escaped from the big house, I know character when I see it. You ain’t gonna wreck my house. You just plain ain’t the type.”
The people in Bedley Hills were bizarre, Matt thought. “If you think Gina might be right about me being an escaped con, why aren’t you more worried about it?”
Tuttle chuckled. “Did some time myself back in Georgia in the forties. Doesn’t mean you’re dangerous.”
Tuttle had been in prison? Did Gina know? Matt grinned at the possibilities. “I’m not dangerous,” he told the old man. “I wasn’t really in prison.”
“Ri-i-ight,” Tuttle said in an I’ll-keep-your-secret tone of voice. “What were you in for? Bad checks?”
“Honestly,” Matt said. “As for the scars, I got them when I was a kid rescuing my brother.”
“Ri-i-ight,” Tuttle said again.
Laughing, Matt gave up. “So do you know anybody?”
Tuttle took a long swig of beer and his gray eyebrows knitted together as he considered. “If you don’t want that little girl next door, I think I can come up with somebody just as good.”
“Gina’s out. Can you get this into motion fast?” Matt asked.
“No problem.” Tuttle grinned, showing his perfect white dentures. “But it’ll cost you.”
Of course. Matt nodded solemnly. That was always something he took for granted—everything had a price.
5
Gina was fuming again, but this time, it wasn’t about Matt Gallagher. After checking out that there was a Luke Gallagher in the phone book, she’d driven by the address on her way home from work and spotted a man who resembled Matt sitting on the porch reading a newspaper. So it was very possible Matt was in the neighborhood to do exactly what he claimed, and as far as the vandalism, she no longer thought that he had any part in it.
No, she was furious because she’d come outside to do more gardening after dinner and the two baby spider plants she’d just potted were gone. Poof. Just like that.
The thing was, she would have gladly given the plants away if someone wanted them that badly. No one had to steal from her. After Mac had died, she’d given her heart to this neighborhood, just so she had a place to call a real home and people who accepted her. Now someone was taking advantage of that kindness, and that was one thing she didn’t stand for. She felt used.
Chantie still believed children were behind it, but Gina wasn’t certain she agreed, especially now that Babs Tywall had confessed to painting her own shed. Still, the neighborhood kids were always outside, and it wouldn’t hurt to ask them if they’d seen someone in her yard.
Walking out her patio door, she glanced at the hole in the bushes and wondered if Matt had found a “wife” yet. Since the restaurant episode last night, she’d been arguing with herself about posing as his wife just so she could try to help him iron out his difficulties with his father. He was obviously so unhappy, and that made Gina want to reach out to him, just as she’d reached out to people all her life.
But she had to face it, the man had nothing going for him except for his great body, his sexual magnetism and his profession—which, depending on your perspective, could be called glamorous. Great if you were shallow, but she was looking for character. Matt was too deep to be lighthearted, and too closemouthed for her tastes. On the surface, if that description were written on paper, she would have scratched him out long ago as a prospective match. He’d make her miserable if she got involved in his life any more than she already had. So why was she still obsessing about him, especially since she wasn’t even looking for a man?
Because she kept thinking of a frightened elevenyear-old boy whose parents had both walked out on him. She’d
secretly feared the same thing all her childhood—that if she couldn’t keep her parents happy together, they would both leave her, too. She’d been lucky. Matt hadn’t, but he’d pulled himself up and made something of himself, anyway.
That was why she wanted to help him, she realized. She respected him. But he was a man who had buried his feelings for years, and he would have to dig them up himself. He didn’t seem to have the least little inclination to do so—and Gina didn’t want a man who possessed no warmth and tenderness.
Reaching the sidewalk, she stared up and down the empty street. No one was outside, which was strange, because early evening in the summer usually meant kids playing outside until dark. Turning right, she glanced into Matt’s yard. Nothing stirred there, either, but for some strange reason, she got the feeling someone was watching her. Matt?
Quickening her step, she hurried toward the corner, eager to get out of Matt’s range of vision and thinking that the kids could be around on the side street. Even continuing three blocks to the woods, she saw no one, not even Mr. Tuttle, who was usually puttering in his yard.
Shrugging, she started back in the direction of her house. Maybe some new action adventure had premiered on television or something. Maybe aliens had come down and swooped up everyone in Bedley Hills while she was in the shower. Maybe—she’d try again tomorrow.
As Gina approached Matt’s house, a dark blue sports car pulled up into his driveway and a woman with honey-colored hair got out, killing Gina’s alien theory—but then, Gina thought, looking at her, you never knew. She grinned. The woman paused to look at the house, and then at a paper in her hand, before continuing gamely up the drive.
Not an alien, Gina thought—another wife candidate. Apparently Matt hadn’t listened to her when she’d tried to reason with him last night. Stubborn, she added to her list of his deficits. But maybe she hadn’t presented her argument correctly. Maybe if she went over there and gave him some other ways to help himself—
The One-Week Wife Page 6