Welcome to Temptation/Bet Me

by Jennifer Crusie

  “Wow,” Amy said when she came up to the porch at noon. “That looks good. It’s even pretty.”

  “Thanks,” Rachel said, but she watched Clea closer because Clea was frowning.

  “We should do the whole house,” Clea said finally, and Amy said, “No, we should not. Are you nuts?”

  “This film is a business expense,” Clea told her. “Tax-deductible. This paint therefore becomes part of that business expense. And I want to sell this house.” She nodded to Rachel. “Do the whole house.”

  “No,” Rachel said. “We can do the whole front porch if you want to film on both sides, that won’t take long. But I do not paint whole houses. I can call the Coreys for you, though. They’ll paint anything.”

  “Are they expensive?” Clea said.

  “It’s a tax deduction,” Rachel said.

  “Let me think about it.” Clea walked out to the edge of the yard to see the porch from a distance.

  Rachel turned back to find Amy grinning at her. “I like you, kid,” Amy said. “You remind me of me.”

  The screen door banged again and a brunette came out, saying, “If you want lunch—” She stopped when she saw Rachel, and Amy rushed to fill in the silence, saying, “This is my sister, Sophie,” to Rachel, explaining Rachel’s ideas and the paint to Sophie, all without ever mentioning the name Garvey.

  Sophie smiled politely at Rachel. “Well, it’s nice of you to offer to help, Rachel, but—”

  Rachel went tense, but Amy said, “Wait a minute. Come here.”

  Amy towed her sister out into the yard, and Rachel thought she’d never seen two more different women in her life, Amy in tight pink and Sophie in loose khaki. Then Amy turned Sophie around and said, “Look at the porch.”

  Sophie folded her arms and studied the porch, and Amy did the same beside her, just like her big sister, and that’s when Rachel saw how alike they were. Same big brown eyes, same curly hair, same full mouth, same incredible concentration, even the same white Keds, although Amy’s had pink shoelaces and were painted with gold spirals. They stood close, leaning into each other a little, and Rachel was struck by how together they were. She’d never stood that close to her sisters, ever, but Sophie and Amy were a team.

  “You think?” Sophie said.

  “I think,” Amy said.

  “Your call,” Sophie said. “The color is wonderful.”

  “Just one thing,” Amy said. “Her last name is Garvey.”

  Sophie started and Rachel thought, That’s it.

  “Give her a chance,” Amy said. “Why should she pay for her father’s crimes?”

  “Hey.” Sophie stepped back. “Don’t pull that on me.”

  “I’ll work really hard,” Rachel said from the porch.

  Sophie came toward her. “I know you will, honey.” She looked at the painted porch rail, gleaming warm in the sunlight, then nodded. “Come have lunch with us. Then you can paint the porch wall this afternoon and help Amy with whatever she needs. But if your father shows up, you’re fired.”

  Rachel relaxed as relief flooded through her. “He won’t ever know. And I’ll be a huge help, you wait and see. I’ll make things so much easier for you.”

  But after lunch, in spite of Rachel’s best intentions, things got difficult because Rob Lutz showed up with his parents. Clea almost had a heart attack when she saw Rob, and Rachel could understand why, since it was hard to see he was a moron when you looked at that face. That was how Rob had talked Rachel out of her virginity, by not talking, just by smiling at her with that face. There was a lesson learned, for sure.

  Clea had said, “This is your son?” to Rob’s dad, Frank, and Frank had grinned down at her like a dork, standing really, really close to her. That made Rob’s mom, Georgia, mad, which Rachel could also understand except that if she’d been married to Frank, she’d have been looking for somebody to take him away. Then Clea put her arm around Georgia and called, “Sophie, meet Georgia.”

  Georgia squinted at the porch where Rachel and Sophie and Amy were standing, and she looked about twenty years older than Clea, probably because she’d been baking her skin into shoe leather all her life so she could be a Coppertone Blonde. That was what she’d said to Rachel every summer since Rachel had started dating Rob: “Come on and lay out with me, honey, and we’ll be Coppertone Blondes. People will think we’re sisters.” Right.

  Then Clea said, “Georgia and I graduated together, Sophie! Isn’t that something?” and Sophie said, “And neither one of you has aged a day,” and glared at Clea to make her behave, and Rachel liked her more.

  Clea just laughed and called back to Rob, “Why don’t you come up on the porch?” and that must have been the first time Sophie saw him because she said, “Oh, Lord.”

  “What?” Amy said.

  “Look at the way he’s looking at Clea,” Sophie said.

  Amy nodded. “Like she’s whipped cream and he has a spoon.”

  Well, that was Rob for you. Always looking for sex. Rachel didn’t know if sex in general was bad or it was just bad with Rob, but as far as she was concerned, Clea could have him.

  Sophie moved to the top of the steps and called, “Come on up to the porch, we have lemonade,” and when she had Clea, Frank, and Georgia settled on the right side of the porch with a warning to stay away from the blush-painted wall, Amy began to shoot.

  Rachel handed Rob a scraper and said, “We need to scrape the other side of the porch,” and Rob said, “Cool.” As he worked, he kept his eyes on Clea, who sat perched on the porch rail looking adorable. Clea watched Rob from the corner of her eye while Frank sat opposite her, laughing and flirting, and Georgia sat between them on the porch swing, looking like a Coppertone Toad.

  Sophie had gone out into the yard to talk to Amy, and she looked concerned. Even after a few short hours, Rachel knew Sophie liked things calm and organized. So when Phin Tucker walked up behind her and said something, and she jumped a mile, Rachel could have told him that was a bad move. He and Wes had parked behind the Lutzes’ van, and Wes had said something to Amy and gone in the house, but Phin went to Sophie and stayed. So he wanted something—three guesses what—but he was doing it all wrong. Well, he’d figure it out. Phin got everything he wanted sooner or later.

  “Hey,” Rob said behind her. “Get busy.”

  “Right,” Rachel said, and crossed her fingers that Phin would do his usual good work.

  Her future depended on it.

  “I’m a little worried about Clea,” the mayor had said to Sophie out in the yard. “I had nine stitches because of her. She could put Frank in the hospital.”

  Sophie watched Frank making a fool of himself on the porch in front of his wife, who looked homicidal. “Clea’s not the only one who could hurt him.” She turned back to the mayor. “How did she give you nine stitches?”

  “I looked down her blouse and fell off my bike.”

  Sophie looked at him with contempt and he said, “Hey, I was twelve. She leaned over. Not my fault.”

  He was as immaculately handsome as ever in the sunlight, and it was even more annoying now that she knew he’d been a pervert at twelve. She started to tell him so and decided she didn’t want to get personal, she just wanted to get rid of him. “Did you say you wanted to look at the electricity?”

  “No,” he said. “I said Amy wanted me to look at the electricity.”

  “Right this way,” Sophie said, leaving Amy to handle the mess on the porch. Five minutes later, she was in the dark farmhouse basement, wishing she was back on the porch. At least in the sunlight she could see what the mayor was up to. “Uh, what are we doing, Mr. Tucker?”

  “Phin,” he said. “And this is your fuse box. We’re looking at it to see if it’s going to burn your house down.”

  “Where are the little switches?” Sophie squinted around his shoulder in the dim light. She’d expected to get a whiff of some expensive cologne as she leaned closer, but instead he smelled of soap and sun, clean, and she swallowed
and concentrated on the fuse box.

  There were no switches, just little round things that looked sinister.

  “Switches would be circuit breakers,” Phin said. “For which you need circuits, not fuses. This is the old way.”

  “Is this better?”

  “No. But it’s more exciting.”

  “I don’t want exciting.” Sophie took a step back. “I want functioning, nonshocking, neat little switches. I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers. You do it.”

  “That’s the problem with you city folk. No sense of adventure. Let me explain how this works.”

  “No,” Sophie said firmly. “I don’t want to know. I want switches. I know how they work.”

  “You can’t have switches. Get over it.”

  Sophie shook her head. “I’ve heard about these things. You stick pennies in them, and they shock you.”

  “You do not put pennies in them.” He sounded as if he were trying not to laugh. “If you put pennies in them, you deserve to be shocked. Not to mention have the house burn down. Do not put pennies in them.”

  “Not a problem. I’m not going near that thing.” Sophie started up the stairs. “Thank you very much, but no.” When she realized he wasn’t following her, she stopped. “You can come up now. The electricity lesson is over.”

  He grinned at her in the light that filtered down the stairs from the kitchen. “Quitter,” he said, and her pulse skipped a little at the challenge in his voice.

  “Only on the stuff that will get me electrocuted,” she told him. “I believe in safety first.” She escaped back up the stairs and put on Dusty in Memphis to calm her nerves.

  Phin followed a few minutes later.

  “They’re all working,” he told her, washing his hands at the sink. “If you have trouble, yell, and Wes or I will come out and fix it.”

  Sophie blinked at him. “That’s extremely nice of you.”

  “We’re extremely nice people.” Phin smiled at her, and Sophie had a brief moment where she thought he might be a good guy after all before he said, “So tell me about this movie,” and she took a step back.

  “I told you, it’s just an audition tape,” she said. “It was Clea’s idea, and she hired us because we did such a good job filming her wedding. Amy’s shooting it on the porch because it’s easier to light.” Even as she said it, the lights in the kitchen went out, and she heard Amy out on the porch say, “Oh, damn.”

  “If there was a switch,” Sophie said, “I could go throw it now.”

  “But there’s a fuse instead.” Phin pointed at the basement door. “So you can go replace it. Like an adventurous adult.”

  “Not in this lifetime,” Sophie said, and Phin sighed and went downstairs, shortly after which the porch lights evidently came back on because Amy called, “Thank you!”

  “You do very nice work,” she told him when he came back upstairs, trying to be nice since he wasn’t Chad. Exactly. “For that, you get lemonade.”

  “You know, a little adventure in your life wouldn’t kill you,” he said as he sat at the table. “Especially if it’s just replacing a fuse.”

  “I had enough adventure as a child,” Sophie said firmly as she poured. “I’m having a staid adulthood to make up for it.”

  “That’s a waste,” Phin said. “Do you make staid movies, too?”

  Sophie slapped a glass of lemonade down in front of him so that some of it slopped out on the table. “What is it with you and this movie?”

  “What is it with you and this hostility?” He got up and pulled a paper towel off the roll by the sink and mopped up the spill. “You’ve been tense from the minute I said hello.”

  “It was the way you said it,” Sophie said. “And I’ve told you. The movie is a short, improvised film for Clea which Clea asked us to do because she likes Amy’s work.”

  “Not your work?” Phin sat down and sipped his lemonade. “This is very good. Thank you.”

  “Don’t patronize me, just drink it,” Sophie said. “Clea wants Amy because I don’t do improvised. I shoot all the necessary parts of the wedding and manage the business, and Amy gets the weird stuff around the edges and cuts the video. She’s the artist.”

  “ ‘Weird stuff’?” Phin said.

  Sophie folded her arms and leaned against the sink. “People can get the stuff I shoot from any video company, but they can’t get the stuff that Amy finds. But if they only got what Amy shoots, they’d be mad because people like things like their vows in their wedding videos. So we work together.”

  “And why is Clea making this video?”

  Sophie scowled at him. “Why do you care so much about this movie?”

  “As long as you’re out of here before Wednesday, I don’t.”

  “Well, we’re out of here on Sunday.”

  “Fine,” Phin said. “And I wasn’t patronizing you, the lemonade really is good.”

  “Thank you,” Sophie said, feeling slightly anticlimactic.

  “And for whatever I did in a former life to make you so damn mad, I apologize.” Phin smiled at her, clearly used to charming everyone in his path. “Now, will you please stop spitting at me?”

  “Considering that former life, an apology is not nearly enough. ‘My name is Inigo Montoya’ on this one.”

  “Who?” Phin said.

  Sophie picked up the pitcher and said, “Lemonade?”—sounding more threatening than she meant to.

  Phin pushed his glass back. “No, I’ve had enough, thank you.”

  He got up and went back to the porch, and Sophie felt a little guilty for taking her frustrations out on him. She put his lemonade glass in the sink and went out onto the low, wide, back porch to calm her nerves. If she could get just get rid of that constant feeling that something awful was bearing down on her—

  Something furry brushed her leg and she looked down and screamed.

  There was an animal there—a big one, it came halfway up to her knee—and it had matted red-brown fur on its barrel-like body and short white legs with little black spots on them, and Sophie had never seen anything like it in her life. It was crouched now that she’d screamed, in the attack position she was sure, and when it moved, she leaped back against the wall of the house and screamed again.

  Phin slammed the screen door open as he came out onto the porch. “What?” he said, and Sophie pointed down. He let his shoulders slump. “You’re kidding. You scream like that for a dog?”

  That’s a dog? “They bite,” Sophie said in her own defense. It seemed feasible.

  “Some do,” Phin said. “This one appears not to.”

  Sophie followed his eyes down to the dog, which had rolled over on its back with its four stumpy white legs in the air. “It looks weird.”

  “It’s built like a Welsh corgi.” Phin craned his head sideways to get a better look at the prostrate animal. “And a few other things mixed in to keep it interesting.” He squinted at it. “God knows where the black spots came from. It’s probably a highway dog.”

  “A highway dog.” Sophie looked down at the dog, which was now looking up at them from its back. It was splashed with mud and quivering, possibly the ugliest living thing Sophie had ever seen. Its huge, black-ringed brown eyes stared at her pathetically, and she felt bad for thinking it was ugly.

  But dear Lord, it was.

  “People dump the dogs they don’t want along the highway,” Phin said, a thread of anger in his voice, neatly repressed like everything else about him. “They think the dogs will be free and wild, but most of them get hit right away, looking for their owners’ cars.”

  “That’s terrible.” Sophie stared down at the dog, outraged, and the dog stared up at her, upside down with those huge, melting brown eyes, comic and pathetic. “Is it hungry?”

  “Probably, but if you feed it, you’ll never get rid of it.”

  But there were those eyes. Sophie watched the dog for a minute while it watched her back, still upside down, and then she went into the kitche
n to get some ham.

  Five minutes later, Sophie was sitting on the back-porch steps, cautiously feeding ham to the grateful dog. “I never had a dog,” she told Phin.

  “We always did.” Phin leaned against the porch post. “My dad never turned a highway dog away. If we had too many, he found homes for the ones we couldn’t keep.”

  Sophie held out another piece of ham, and the dog took it gently. It looked up at her with the ham dangling from its mouth like an extra tongue, and she laughed because it looked so funny and sweet with its brown snout and black-ringed eyes. “Too much mascara, dog,” she told it, and the dog opened its mouth and barked at her, dropping the ham. “Goofus,” she said, and fed it again while the dog looked at her adoringly, completely ignoring Phin. Sophie held out another piece of ham.

  “That dog’s a real politician,” Phin said. “Goes right to the pork barrel and hunkers down.”

  “Maybe I could keep him a couple of days, until we leave.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Just don’t name it. That’s always fatal.”

  “Okay,” Sophie said. “Here, dog, have some more ham.”

  Phin’s voice was casual when he spoke again. “So do you take care of the whole world, or just dogs and Amy?”

  “Just Amy and my brother.” Sophie fed the dog again.

  “And who takes care of you?” Phin said, and Sophie looked up, startled. “You’re here because Amy and Clea want to do the video, and you’re feeding ham to a dog you’re not sure you like. Who takes care of you? When do you get what you want?”

  “I take care of me,” she said, scowling at him. “I take very good care of me, and I always get what I want.” Back off, buddy.

  “Of course you do.” Phin straightened. “Lots of luck with the dog.”

  He went back to the front porch, and Sophie felt guilty for driving him away again, but then the dog nudged her hand with his nose, and she went back to feeding him. When the last of the ham was gone, Sophie patted the dog gingerly on the top of the head and the dog looked at her as if to say, You’re new at this, aren’t you? “I never had a dog,” Sophie told it, and it sighed and settled in next to her, smearing mud on her khaki shorts. She patted it again and then went back into the kitchen and opened her PowerBook to block out a plan for the video now that the Lutzes were creating some story conflict on the front porch. The dog sat outside the screen door and watched her, and she sat behind her PowerBook and watched it back.