A Bravo Homecoming

by Christine Rimmer

  There was more lecturing on the subject of natural fibers. She would wear cotton, silk, linen and wool. And only cotton, silk, linen and wool. “And no frills. We’ll go for simplicity with you. And some drama. But nothing fluffy or ruffled. Nothing too…precious. Because, darling, you are not the precious type.”

  Of course, he had examples to show her on his laptop. She thought he was absolutely right in his judgment of what should work well for her clothing-wise, so she didn’t give him too much of a hard time during the wardrobe lesson. She listened and did her best to absorb what he taught her.

  At nine-thirty that evening, she was allowed a cup of tea and an orange. He admonished her to hold her teacup just so, to sip without slurping—and never to chew with her mouth open.

  Somehow, he inspired the brat in her. She longed to open her mouth good and wide and stick out her tongue at him before swallowing the section of orange she’d been so cautiously, delicately munching.

  But she didn’t. She kept her mouth shut and she swallowed the orange and she sipped without slurping at her unsweetened tea.

  He gave her a book to read when he sent her to bed: Miss Manners’ Guide to the Turn-of-the-Millennium. She turned the pages with white-gloved fingers because both of her hands were greased up and encased in the special gloves they’d given her at the spa.

  She even laughed now and then. Miss Manners was funny. And most of her advice made sense really.

  Once you got past the strange realization that the way Miss Manners used words was almost identical to the way Jonathan talked.

  The next day was worse.

  It was the shopping. She hated it.

  She’d really thought she had a pretty good idea of the clothing rules Jonathan had drilled into her the evening before. But it wasn’t the same, being out there in some fancy, expensive department store, trying to choose something vivid in color with nice, simple lines—in cotton, linen, silk or wool—when there were racks and racks packed with skirts and blouses and dresses and every other damn thing you ever might consider wanting to wear.

  It made her feel sick to her stomach. Suddenly she was longing to be back on the rig, wearing her boots and coveralls, slathered in drilling mud, hitting the deck as Jimmy Betts swung a length of pipe in her direction.

  Plus she was starving. Frickin’ starving, as a matter of fact—and no, she didn’t say the forbidden word out loud.

  But boy, was she tempted to.

  She needed a decent meal and she needed to not have to shop anymore.

  But Jonathan was relentless. He wouldn’t let her go back to the hotel.

  At noon, he took her to some prissy, ferny downtown lunch place. And he ordered her a salad and an iced tea with lemon. She wanted to kill him. She truly did. Just snap his tiny twig of a neck between her two big hands.

  But then she reminded herself that she was going to do this. She was sticking out this ridiculous crash course in being a suitable pretend fiancée for Aleta Bravo’s precious prodigal son. She needed this, and she knew it. She wanted a chance at a new life.

  And if being waxed and peeled and plucked and starved half to death, if having to shop all day and all night until she finally managed to find something simple and bright in a natural fabric—if getting trained in how to sip tea and sit down at a table with rich people…

  If all that had to be done for her to get a fresh start, well, fine. She would do it. She would not give up.

  She was made of tougher stuff than that.

  So she ate her salad, slowly. Calmly. In small bites, chewing with her mouth shut. She sipped her iced tea.

  And then they shopped some more.

  It didn’t get easier.

  In the end, after hours and hours of lurking twenty feet away, watching her subtly out of the corner of his eye, Jonathan came to her rescue. He started choosing things for her to try on.

  Loaded down with shopping bags, they got back to the hotel at six-thirty. Sam now had five new dresses, six pairs of incredibly expensive shoes, four sweaters, three shirts, two pairs of designer jeans…and more. Much more.

  Jonathan had chosen everything. His taste was just disgustingly great. Even with her chopped-off hair and no makeup and her face still red from yesterday’s peel—she wasn’t getting the hair or the makeup until near the end of her training, he had told her—she could see the difference the right clothes made.

  At the hotel, he ordered quail for dinner—two of them each. Two tiny plump birds with a side of slivered carrots, which were drizzled in some heavenly sauce. She wanted to fall on those dinky birds and shove them, whole, into her wide-open mouth. She wanted to devour them, itty-bitty bones and all.

  But she waited, hands and napkin in her lap, for his instructions.

  He surprised her. “One eats quail with one’s hands,” Jonathan said. “Some foods are simply too small, or too bony, to be eaten any other way. In fact, the bones themselves are quite delicate and flavorful. Eat them, too, if you wish. But please, crunch in a quiet manner. And eat slowly, as always, savoring the tastes and textures, avoiding any unfortunate displays of grease or bits of meat on the lips and chin.”

  Then, as she chewed the heavenly little things with her mouth closed and tried not to listen to her stomach rumbling, he told her that there would be more shopping. And she would get better at it.

  She didn’t tell him he was frickin’ crazy, but she thought it.

  After the meal, there were more lessons. In polite conversation. In how to sit in a chair properly, for cripes’ sake.

  By the time she finally had her bedtime snack—an actual glass of milk and one slice of lightly buttered toast—she only longed to escape to her own room.

  Alone, she took a shower and brushed her teeth, greased up her hands and feet and put on the booties and the gloves. She climbed into bed and started to reach for the Miss Manners book.

  But then she just couldn’t. It was bad enough listening to Jonathan all day. She didn’t need more of the same in her nighttime reading.

  She tossed the book to the nightstand.

  It was a big book and it slid off and hit the plush bedroom carpet with a definite smack. She didn’t even bother to get out of bed and pick it up. Instead she grabbed the TV remote and pointed it at the television—but no. Forget TV. Forget everything.

  She threw the remote down to the carpet, too. And she gathered her knees up with her greased, white-gloved hands and she put her head down on them.

  And for the first time in eleven years, since way back when that rotten jerk Zachary Gunn broke her heart and she swore off men forever, she burst into tears.

  She was so miserable right then that she didn’t even have enough pride left to stop being a baby and suck it up. Great, fat, sloppy tears poured down her face and she let them.

  Her nose ran. She didn’t care. She let it happen, only controlling the flood in the sense that she tried her damnedest not to make a single sound. She gulped back her sobs because apparently she did have some pride left after all.

  And she didn’t want Jonathan to know how frickin’ stupid and awkward and foolish she felt. She could do a man’s job in a man’s world—and do it better than most guys. She’d reached the top of the food chain on an offshore rig at an age when most men would have been proud to simply be holding their own as roughnecks. But when it came to being a woman, well, that was turning out to be a whole lot harder than it looked.

  She cried and cried, really letting go, feeling very, very sorry for herself, biting her lip to keep from snorting and sniffling.

  And then her cell rang.

  She decided not to answer it. She kept on crying. In three rings, the call went to voicemail and again she was alone with her tears and her misery.

  Then the room phone rang. She tried to wait it out, but the minute it stopped ringing, it only started again.

  And she knew that if she didn’t pick it up, Jonathan would be tapping on her door, asking her what was the matter, hadn’t she noticed her
phone was ringing?

  Oh, she could just hear him now. When one’s phone rings, Samantha, it is customary to answer it.

  If she let it get to that, she would have to reply and he would hear her clogged, teary voice and know that he had gotten to her, big-time.

  No way was she letting him know that. She’d held her own against some burly, badass roughnecks in her time. How could she let bird-boned, big-haired Jonathan get the better of her?

  She grabbed the phone. “What?” she demanded in a soggy, broken whisper.

  “Sam?” It was Travis. “Sam, what’s going on? You didn’t answer your cell. And I called the room twice.”

  “Yeah, I noticed.” A sob got away from her, followed by a watery hiccup.

  “Sam, are you all right?”

  She clutched the phone harder, feeling ridiculous and needy and weak and hopeless and sad. “I’m, uh…” She put her hand over the phone, swiped at her eyes and then groped for a tissue with her white-gloved hand.

  “Sam, talk to me. Please. What’s the matter with you?” He sounded so worried, so…scared even. For her.

  He was worried for her.

  That meant a lot.

  And then he said, “Sam, I’m coming over there. I’m coming over there now.”

  “No!” The word escaped her trembling mouth on a sob. “You can’t. Uh-uh.” She ripped a tissue from the tasteful beige box on the nightstand. “You know you can’t. You can’t even see me. Not until my final test.”

  “Forget the test,” he said and really seemed to mean it. “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters if you’ve had enough. It’s not a big deal. We can call the whole thing off right now.”

  Call the whole thing off. He wouldn’t mind or be mad at her if they called the whole thing off.

  She could, she realized. She could do that. Call an end to this torture, give it up. There was no law that said she had to stick it out.

  She could give it up and head straight for her private hideaway in San Diego. Walk on the beach, soak up some rays.

  And then sign up for a new job on a different rig, go back to the challenging and profitable life she had made for herself.

  “What about—” another sob escaped her “—your mother?”

  “I’ll find some other way to get her off my back. Don’t worry about that. Just say the word, Sam. And you’re off the hook. I mean that. Sam? Did you hear me? Sam? Are you there?” Travis seemed really worried that she might have hung up on him.

  But she hadn’t. She was sniffling. And thinking…

  And coming to realize how very much she wanted this, how seriously invested she was in seeing the whole thing through.

  “Damn it, Sam. Say something.”

  And she did. “No, I don’t want that. I don’t want to give it up. I want to…get through this. I want to make good at it because it does matter. It matters a lot. And that’s why you can’t come over here. Because Jonathan wants it that way. And that’s fine with me. I am doing exactly what Just frickin’ Jonathan tells me to do.”

  “Uh. You are?”

  “Yeah. I am—and don’t you dare tell him I said the word frickin’. Got that?”

  “Absolutely. I won’t. Whatever you say. But—”

  “I can do this. I will do this. I am sticking with this program and I am going to get some serious girly going or I will die trying.” She blew her nose, good and hard. By then, well, it didn’t seem to matter all that much that Travis would figure out she’d been crying. “Sam.”

  She sniffed, shamelessly that time. And it felt kind of good, really. It was kind of a relief. To let go. To cry and not care that someone might know it. “What?”

  “Are you…crying?” He asked the question in a kind of awed disbelief.

  “So what if I am, huh?” She grabbed another tissue and scrubbed her soggy cheeks. “So what if I am?”

  “But you never cry.”

  “Well, I’m crying now. Or I was.” She ripped out yet more tissue. “But at this point, I’ve moved on to mopping up the mess.”

  “So, uh, what’s happened?” He sounded totally flummoxed.

  She tried to explain. “Nothing. Everything. This is even harder than I thought it would be.”

  “It is, huh?” His voice was gentle. Understanding. “Listen. I meant what I said. If you want to back out—”

  “Uh-uh. No way. I’m not giving up. I’m going through with it, no matter what.”

  “If you’re sure that’s what you want…”

  “I am sure, yes. So stop asking me.” She settled back against the pillows, gave one last sniffle. “I guess I kind of expected to be bad at this. I just didn’t expect to care so much.”

  “Who says you’re bad at it?” He seemed honestly puzzled.

  “I say. And I ought to know—oh, and Jonathan, too. He thinks I suck the big one. He looks at me in that pained, superior way of his….”

  “Wait. Jonathan told you that you suck?”

  “He didn’t have to tell me. It’s written all over his snooty, pointy little face. As far as he’s concerned, I can’t do anything right.”

  “But that’s not what he said to me.”

  She snuggled back into the pillows. “Huh? Said to you when?”

  “When he called me a few minutes ago to let me know how you were getting along. He said you were making great progress and he was really impressed with you, that he hadn’t realized at the beginning how much potential you actually had.”

  Now she sat up straighter. “He didn’t. You’re lyin’, trying to make me feel better.”

  “God’s truth, Sam.”

  She gave a very unladylike snort—the kind of snort she wouldn’t have thought twice about making just a few days before. “And you think it would kill him to say that to me?”

  Travis snorted right back. “Come on, you know how you are. The madder you get, the harder you work. Maybe he’s figured that out about you.”

  She fiddled with the phone cord, twisting it around her gloved index finger. “Well, then why are you telling me he said nice things about me? Maybe I’ll get lazy now I know he’s only pretending to look down on me.”

  “Not a chance. You haven’t got a lazy bone in your body—and it was pretty clear to me you needed encouragement.”

  She pulled her finger free of the coil of cord, feeling better about everything, feeling ready to face tomorrow. Feeling she could even handle the awful, disgusting shopping that would happen the day after that. “You’re a good man, Travis Bravo. Thanks.”

  “You need me, you call me.”

  She made a soft sound low in her throat. “I think I can make it now.”

  “I’m here. Just remember.”

  He said goodbye a few minutes later. She hung up the phone thinking that she was a lucky person to have a friend like Travis.

  Turning off the light and pulling up the covers, she lay on her back in the dark with a smile on her face. Jonathan had said he was impressed with her. Travis had been there to talk her down when she needed it.

  She knew now she could make it. In only a few days, she would be ready.

  She would go with Travis to San Antonio and play his bride-to-be for his family. Yes, it was a big lie and she didn’t believe in lies.

  But no one was going to be hurt by the deception. She was just giving Travis’s mom an excuse to take a break from her never-ending matchmaking, giving Travis a break, too. For a while, anyway, he wouldn’t have women thrown at him constantly when he wasn’t interested in anything like that.

  He’d loved Rachel Selkirk, loved her deeply and completely, the way only a good, true-hearted man can love his woman. And he didn’t want to go there again, didn’t want to take the chance of being hurt like that again. Just like Sam didn’t want to be hurt.

  Sam folded her hands on top of the covers and stared up at the dark ceiling above and thought about how, maybe, after she got through the week with the Bravos, after she found her new job, she just might consider maybe g
oing on a date again. She might consider giving love and romance and all that stuff another chance.

  The thing with Zach had been so long ago. Maybe it was time she let it go, got her girly on in more ways than just her clothes and learning to sip tea without slurping.

  Hey, a woman needed love in her life.

  And Sam Jaworski knew now that she was just like most other women. A little taller and a lot stronger maybe. With a different kind of job history than most women had.

  But with the same hungers in her lonely heart.

  She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.

  And dreamed of Travis.

  It was a hazy, indistinct sort of dream. When she woke up the next morning, she didn’t remember much about it. Except that she and Travis were together.

  And in the dream, she’d started to feel sad because she knew it was all a lie and it wasn’t going to last.

  Because the honest truth was, she never wanted it to end.

  Chapter Four

  She got through the next day without once wishing she could wring Jonathan’s neck.

  Even though he pushed her constantly to do better, to try harder, even though he remained as snooty and superior as ever, well, she was okay with that. If Travis hadn’t told her what her coach really thought about her, she never would have guessed that Jonathan believed she was doing well.

  But Travis had told her, and his telling her had boosted her confidence enough that she threw herself into her training with new enthusiasm. She worked even harder than before.

  And that second shopping trip on Thursday?

  It wasn’t easy, but it was better. She discovered she was getting the hang of what to look for, getting an eye for spotting the finds in an endless sea of different fabrics, colors and styles.

  They went back to the hotel that day with more shopping bags than the time before. Jonathan couldn’t help smiling at how well she’d done.

  And she laughed. “I know you’re proud of me, Jonathan. I can see it on your face.”

  “Ahem. Well. Don’t get too confident. We have a lot more to do.”

  She nodded. “I know. And I’m ready for whatever you can throw at me.”