“Autumn, you are such a fool,” she groaned, tugging down the bill of her cap as she settled behind the wheel of the truck.
“THIS IS RIDICULOUS,” Autumn muttered some five hours later, after she’d changed the channel on the television set for the fourth time in a half hour. Nothing on the small screen interested her, and neither did the thick mystery novel she’d purchased only the day before. She was trying not to think about Jeff Bradford, but her progress so far was lousy.
With a gusty sigh she snapped off the television and roamed into the kitchen of her duplex apartment, remembering that she hadn’t yet gotten around to eating dinner. She burrowed in the cabinets and refrigerator, but nothing looked overly appealing. She finally settled on a sandwich made from the remains of the frozen turkey breast and a handful of frosted animal cookies.
Having finished the sandwich without enthusiasm, she carried the cookies into the modern burgundy-and-dark-green living room, where she dropped onto the boldly flowered chintz sofa and finally allowed herself to think about Jeff.
She curled her bare feet under her and munched on a pink lion, deep in thought until a gentle whine turned her attention to the floor beside her. “Sorry, Babs, did you want a cookie?” she asked the poodle, who was looking hopefully up at her. The dog yipped a reply.
“Elephant or rhinoceros?” Autumn inquired.
Babs yipped again.
“Elephant it is.” Autumn tossed the cookie to the dog, smiling a little as Babs caught it deftly and began to eat with delicate nibbles.
Her gaze on her pet’s amusing greed, Autumn finally gave in to the need to think seriously about the subject preying so heavily on her mind. E. Jefferson Bradford. She’d never reacted to any man this way. He had only to look at her, much less give her one of those smiles of his, to turn her to Jell-O, a new experience for Autumn Reed.
Her cookie eaten, Babs hopped into Autumn’s lap and, standing on her hind legs, planted a wet kiss on Autumn’s chin. Autumn hugged the squirming little body and chuckled. “So what do you think I should do about him, Babs?” she asked whimsically.
Babs wiggled and made a playful growling sound low in her throat.
“Go out with him, huh? Sounds easy enough, but I have a feeling that I’d be getting into something I don’t know how to handle. For one thing, what could we talk about?”
Autumn cocked an eyebrow at the dog. “That’s all very well for you to say,” she muttered as if Babs had actually made a suggestion. “But if we spend an evening not talking, I’ll be in even worse trouble.”
The dog barked sharply. Autumn sighed. “He’s turning me into a basket case. I’m actually sitting here having a conversation with a dog.”
Babs looked hurt.
“Oh, sorry, Babs. I didn’t mean anything personal.”
Babs jumped down to the floor, stopping by the telephone table to scratch her ear on her way to the doggie door in the kitchen that gave her access to the small, fenced backyard of Autumn’s half of the duplex. Taking that as a hint, Autumn sighed and walked slowly to the telephone. “You’re right, Babs. I can’t go on like this. It’s time to take action.”
Jeff’s number was listed in the telephone book. Autumn hung up twice before she could make herself dial it. It wasn’t that she’d never called a man for a date, but she had never called Dr. E. Jefferson Bradford. What was it about him that was so different from other men?
Finally she dialed the number and waited for the ring. She told herself that he probably wasn’t home. After all, it was Friday night. And if he was out, fine. It wasn’t meant to be.
“Hello?”
Well, hell, he was home. “Um, Jeff?”
“Autumn?”
She supposed she should be flattered that he immediately recognized her voice. “Yes. I hope I’m not disturbing you.” Dumb thing to say, she told herself immediately. He’ll think I’m asking if he’s alone. She continued quickly. “I was just wondering…do you really want new lighting outside your house?”
3
JEFF PAUSED FOR A MOMENT, then chuckled. “Well, I have to admit it was a spur-of-the-moment suggestion on my part, but I suppose I could think of something else for you to do if you’d rather.”
“Look, why don’t we just forget the games,” Autumn told him impatiently. “We both know you’re only doing the lights so you can ask me out again, right?”
“I have no intention of asking you out again,” Jeff replied decisively.
She narrowed her eyes, fingers tightening on the dark red plastic receiver. “You don’t?” she asked, her disbelief obvious in her voice.
“No, ma’am. A man can only take so much rejection,” he drawled.
Oh, Lord. First a Southern gentleman, now an Old West cowhand. “Are you doing anything tomorrow night?” she asked bluntly.
“That depends. Why are you asking?”
She thought seriously about slamming the phone down in his ear but controlled herself. “Would you like to go out to dinner with me? Maybe we could go dancing or something afterward.”
“Gee, I don’t know. This is so sudden.”
Autumn tried very hard not to be amused. “Dammit, Jeff, yes or no?”
He laughed, the sound warming her even through the telephone line. “I really need to study your technique for asking for a date,” he told her. “Such charm. Such tact.”
“Jeff…” Her voice informed him quite clearly that he was about to find himself talking to a dial tone.
“Okay, you’ve talked me into it. What time are you picking me up?”
“How’s seven grab you?”
“Seven grabs me just fine. Thanks for asking.”
Autumn did hang up then, and none too gently.
“I hope you’re happy,” she told Babs, glaring at the innocent-looking animal who’d just come back into the room, happily wagging her tail as she looked up at Autumn. “I just made a first-class fool out of myself. Why do I let him do that to me?”
Babs gave a poodle equivalent of a shrug and settled herself into a lazy curl on the carpet, signifying her desire for a nap. Autumn sighed and picked up her book again. The sad part was, she decided as she unenthusiastically opened it, that she really had wanted to ask Jeff if he was alone.
JEFF LAUGHED when the phone went abruptly dead. Autumn Reed was really something, he mused as he replaced his own receiver, more gently than she had. Although he’d chewed Pam out but good earlier for interfering, he was actually glad that she’d taken the initiative to call Autumn to the clinic. If she hadn’t, Jeff would have eventually. Besides, if Pam hadn’t told him, he still wouldn’t know Autumn’s last name.
He was doubly glad now that he hadn’t asked Autumn out at the clinic. By doing the unexpected and leaving it up to her, he had stumbled upon exactly the right strategy for the stubborn, defiant woman. He had to pause for a moment to ask himself exactly what it was about her that attracted him so strongly, but the answer wasn’t hard to come by. He was enthralled with her. He’d never met anyone quite like her.
She tried so hard to be tough, invulnerable. She probably even believed she succeeded. But Jeff had seen her wet her lips in an unconscious gesture of nerves, had felt her tremble in his arms, had seen the color stain her cheeks when she was embarrassed. She wasn’t so tough. She’d been nervous during that phone call, despite her snippy manner. He wondered who had hurt her so badly that she’d felt it necessary to erect such a brittle shell around her inner softness.
He’d dated a few women who had really been hard, who had completely eliminated that inner softness. Autumn wasn’t one of them, thank God, no matter how she might try to appear to be. Those wide green eyes of hers gave her away. She was a witch, a sorceress, but there was vulnerability behind her skillful spells. Jeff intended to find that vulnerability.
Though she wouldn’t appreciate it one bit, something about her brought out the protective instincts within him. He was caught in her spell—so well trapped that he had no desire to free hi
mself. Perhaps this was only infatuation that he felt for her, nothing more than fascinated desire, but it was a powerful emotion. Like nothing he’d ever felt before. How could he turn away without finding out exactly what it was that possessed him?
When he pursued, she ran.
It seemed that he was going to have to be the pursued.
Jeff grinned and tugged his gray sweatshirt over his head, moving toward the bedroom. The sooner he went to bed, the sooner the next day would come. And the sooner he would be with Autumn again.
GRINDING A CURSE OUT between clenched teeth, Autumn jerked the striped dress over her head and threw it on her bed, where it landed in a slither of color on top of a pile of similarly discarded garments. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” she wailed, shoving her hands through her auburn mane as she stared into her closet.
She should call and cancel, she decided. She could tell Jeff she was sick. Or in jail. She wouldn’t tell him the truth—that just over an hour before their date, she’d regressed to adolescence. She had somehow been transformed from a modern, competent woman to a silly, dithering teenager, and damned if she could figure out a way to change back. She didn’t know what to wear, she wasn’t sure what to say or do when she saw him, she was even starting to worry about the goodnight kiss. “Maybe it’s a regressive brain disease,” she mused aloud, causing Babs to look at her with interest. It just had to be biological. Surely a simple Saturday-night dinner date wouldn’t do this to her!
Her doorbell distracted her, and she frowned as she wrapped herself in a terry robe. She wasn’t expecting anyone. She decided it must be her neighbor, Emily, with whom she had become friends during the three months that Emily and her son, Ryan, had occupied the other half of the large duplex. Crossing her living room, she glanced perfunctorily out the peephole and groaned. “What are you doing here, Webb?” she asked as she opened the door.
“Thanks, Autumn, I’d love to come in.” Webb Brothers grinned lazily at her as he strolled past her, hands in the pockets of his jeans. Tall, lanky, sandy-haired Webb was the son of Autumn’s boss, Floyd Brothers, owner of Brothers Electrical Company. It had been Webb who’d convinced his skeptical, traditional father to give a woman electrician—Autumn—a chance to prove herself. Webb had been her champion, her co-worker and her friend ever since. He also took great pleasure in teasing her, and it was that particular trait that had her eyeing him warily now. She was determined to hide her current emotional state from his all-too-perceptive eyes. He’d never let her live it down.
“So, my love, you want to take in a movie tonight?” he asked, tilting his light brown head in a stance he’d carefully copied from Robert Redford because someone had once told him he resembled the attractive actor. Autumn thought he looked a bit like the young Redford, but she would never tell him so. Webb was in no need of ego strokes.
“I’m not your love, and I can’t go to a movie with you tonight. I have a date.” In barely an hour. And she still didn’t know what she was going to wear. Swallowing a moan, she narrowed her green eyes at him. “What are you doing free on a Saturday night, anyway? Don’t tell me that Webb Brothers couldn’t get a date!”
He grimaced at her and dropped into a burgundy-and-dark-green striped armchair. “Maybe I just wanted to do something with you.”
“If you’d wanted to do something with me, you’d have mentioned it at work yesterday,” she pointed out, perching on the edge of the sofa and trying to hide her impatience to get back to her dressing trauma.
Webb scooped an eager Babs into his arms and began to scratch behind her long fluffy ears, apparently in no hurry to leave. “Okay, so my date canceled out,” he admitted. “She was called out of town on a business crisis. I thought since I was free, I’d see what you were doing.”
“Ever heard of the telephone, Brothers?”
He shrugged good-naturedly. “This is more fun. I can watch you dress.” He gave her a suggestive leer, part of the teasing flirting that had developed between them over their year-long friendship.
“Wrong.”
“Then I’ll wait and check out your date when he gets here.”
“Wrong again. I’m picking him up.”
“Well, hell, Reed. You take all the fun out of everything.”
“Sorry.” She wasn’t, of course, and her smile told him so.
“So who are you going out with tonight? Terry? Rick? Dwayne?” he asked, naming her three most common escorts, men she liked and whose company she enjoyed, though her relationship with each of them was light and platonic.
“None of the above.”
“Oh?” Autumn fancied that Webb’s ears perked up with interest, as Babs’s did when she heard an unusual noise. “Someone new?”
“Yeah.”
“Do I know him?”
“I doubt it.”
Webb sighed loudly. “This is like pulling teeth. What’s his name, Autumn?”
“His name’s Jeff Bradford,” Autumn returned in resignation, even the sound of Jeff’s name making her shiver. Lord, she was still doing it!
“Jeff Bradford, the doctor?” Webb asked with a lifted eyebrow.
Oh, no, not a friend of Webb’s, Autumn thought with a mental groan. “Yes. Do you know him?”
“Yeah, I’ve known him a few years. We belong to the same health club, and we’re in the same Jaycees chapter, though he’s not quite as active in it as I am. His work keeps him too busy.”
She shouldn’t be surprised that Webb knew Jeff. Tampa wasn’t that large a city, and Webb got around. Still, Autumn wished that he and Jeff were total strangers. If she was going to make a fool of herself over Jeff Bradford—and she pessimistically suspected that she was—she preferred to do it in total privacy. She had toyed with the idea of throwing herself into a crazy affair with the attractive young doctor until she’d worked out her foolish infatuation with him, at which time she would cheerfully tell him goodbye and return to her sane, carefully controlled life, with no one the wiser but her and Jeff. Now she had an audience. The smartest thing to do was to keep Webb from finding out the strange effect that Dr. Jeff Bradford had had on her from the moment she’d met him.
“So how’d you meet Jeff, anyway?” Webb asked curiously.
Autumn explained briefly, then tried to change the subject by adding, “I’ll be glad when you and the rest of the crew finish up that shopping mall remodel. I’m getting all the small, one-person jobs these days.”
Her diversion seemed to work. “That reminds me,” Webb commented, setting Babs on the floor, “you’ll be working with us for the next couple of weeks. Chuck’s going to take over the stuff you’ve been doing.”
“How come?”
Webb shrugged and made a face. “He can’t seem to get along with the property manager who’s supervising the remodel. The guy’s a jerk, but Chuck needs to learn when to keep his mouth shut. Okay with you?”
“Sure. Uh, Webb, I really need to start getting ready for my date now,” she hinted broadly, hating to bring up the subject again but anxious to get dressed—if she could ever decide what she was going to wear.
“Don’t mind me. I think I’ll have a beer.” Webb pushed himself out of the chair and headed for the kitchen.
Autumn sighed. “Just make yourself at home,” she muttered.
He threw her a grin over his shoulder. “I’ll do that.”
Shaking her head in exasperation, she walked into her bedroom. She hadn’t closed the door yet when Webb appeared behind her. “I forgot to ask,” he said, “do you want one, too?”
“No, thanks,” she answered quickly, turning to hustle him out of the room.
Too late. He was standing in exaggerated open-mouthed astonishment, staring at the pile of clothing strewn across her bed. “If I didn’t know better, I would swear this is my sister’s room prior to a date with one of her college jocks,” he marveled. He looked at Autumn with a questioning frown. “Tell me that you haven’t been trying on everything in your wardrobe for the past half hour.”<
br />
She exhaled slowly. “So I’m having a little trouble deciding what to wear,” she admitted belligerently. “What of it?”
Webb leaned back against the doorjamb and laughed. Heartily. “This,” he said when he could speak, “from the woman who wore a baseball cap and sweatshirt to a wedding shower? Who considers herself really dressed up if her jeans have a name on the back pocket?”
Autumn glared at him. “Okay, so I’m not on the best-dressed list. Most of the time I wear jeans and shirts because I work at a blue-collar job and I like to be comfortable. I think women who spend a fortune on clothing and follow every fleeting dictate of fashion are in bad need of something productive to do. But I still want to look halfway decent on a date, and I don’t see anything to laugh about!”
Webb shook his brownish-blond head in amusement. “I’m not laughing because you want to look nice. To me, you always look nice. You dress casually, but you’ve got a style of your own. I was laughing because you look so harried and nervous. That’s not like you, Autumn. Don’t tell me that you’ve fallen for Jeff Bradford.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! I hardly know him.”
“Mmm. So how come you’re blushing?”
“I am not blushing!” She threw her hands up to cover cheeks that felt suspiciously hot. “Oh, hell, I am blushing.”
Webb laughed again. “Kind of like the guy, huh?”
She sighed. “Yeah, I like him. But,” she added quickly, “that doesn’t mean there’s any big romance developing between us or anything like that.”
“Of course not,” Webb agreed gravely. “I know your policy about serious relationships—if there’s the slightest fragrance of orange blossoms or hint of wedding bells in the air, you head for the hills. Figuratively speaking, of course.”
“Isn’t that very similar to your own policy?” Autumn inquired crossly, knowing that Webb was every bit as antimarriage as she.
“Of course it is. That’s why you and I are such good friends. And why I’ve never tried to put the moves on you.”
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