by Jo Leigh
The knife thwacked through the last of the salami and hit the cutting board with a clack. Lucky thing her fingers hadn’t been in the way. “A woman who’s learned as much about men as I have can’t be afraid of lil’ ol’ you.” She mimicked Charlotte’s accent.
“Prove it.”
“How would you suggest I do that?” She licked her fingers, deliberately goading him. She knew exactly what he’d say. That he wanted to take her to bed. And then she’d tell him-
“Let me be your date tonight. Your grandmother would still be deluded, but at least she’d be happy.”
Eve froze, staring at him, one finger still in her mouth. Then she drew it out slowly, and his gaze dropped to it as though it were a magnet.
“I watched the ‘Meet the Family, Pass the Test’ episode,” he said, and pure challenge flavored that grin. “Or didn’t you mean what you said in your closing monologue?”
“What, that any man who’d subject himself to that voluntarily was a keeper?”
“Exactly. I dare you.”
She lifted her chin. “You’ve got a deal, Mr. Hayes.” She offered him the plate. “Salami?”
7
“SUGAR, YOU LOOK like one of my favorite actors.”
Eve held her breath as her grandmother allowed Mitch to take her hand in his and squeeze her fingers. This was never going to work. No one had ever put anything over on Charlotte Best in Eve’s lifetime. The woman had gone from riches to rags and back to riches again, and what she didn’t know about the stock market, gardening and human nature wasn’t worth knowing.
Eve couldn’t possibly pass off Mitch as a date or even a serious boyfriend. In fact, they’d agreed that the truth was probably the best strategy. Charlotte would see right through anything else.
“And you look like one of my favorite actresses,” Mitch told her. “But Helen Hayes only played women like you. She wasn’t the real thing.”
Charlotte chuckled and glanced at Eve. “You’ll let him sit beside me at dinner, won’t you, baby doll?”
Not on your life, sugar pie. “Now, Grandmother, no stealing my date.”
Charlotte laughed again and patted Mitch’s sleeve. “Mr. Hayes, this is my son Roy, and his wife Anne.”
Mitch shook hands with his host and hostess. “I saw you folks at the Ashmere benefit last night, but we didn’t speak.”
“No wonder,” AuntAnne said with a smile. “You spent the evening dancing with Eve-not that I blame her.”
“Did you, now?” Charlotte said with interest. “The whole evening?”
“Practically. She-”
“Are Karen and John and the kids here yet?” Eve asked hastily. “I have Christopher’s gift in the car.”
“Not yet, but I’m expecting them any minute.” Anne took their coats. “Why don’t you show Mitch around? Roy, that roast needs to be carved before it’s as tough as an old boot. Mama, would you like a cocktail before dinner?”
With the skill of a longtime hostess, Anne shepherded them out of the foyer until they were, Eve had no doubt, exactly where she wanted them.
Not that that was a bad thing.
She didn’t mind having several rooms between Mitch and her grandmother’s sharp gaze. Not to mention her sharp tongue. Charlotte figured she was too old to filter her comments through any screen but politeness. Other than that, the family had learned to expect just about anything.
They walked into the living room and Mitch looked around with a soundless whistle. “Is this how old money lives?” he asked in a low voice.
“No, this is how a developer lives,” she murmured. “We might be an old family, but the money is long gone. My great-grandpa managed to lose it somehow. My grandmother went from having servants and a big mansion to living over a shop in genteel poverty. But Uncle Roy has always been smart about money. They don’t want for much.”
“I can see that.”
“See what?”
Eve turned as Charlotte came in from the dining room, a pink martini in hand. “Can I offer you one of these, darlin’?”
“No, thanks, Grandmother. I’ll have wine with dinner.”
“The same,” Mitch said.
“Good.” Charlotte sipped it with satisfaction while Mitch studied the pictures on the walls.
“Mr. Best has a high regard for family,” he observed. “I’m assuming these are all relatives, right?”
“Understatement of the year,” Eve murmured. “There’s a reason the walls are all painted white.”
The ceilings in the house were high, which meant there was a good ten feet of wall space on which to hang more pictures than anyone should see outside of a gallery. When she’d first moved here, Eve had wondered how Anne could stand it, but then she’d realized there were as many from her side. A cluster of their immediate family hung over the sofa. Portraits marched up the wall next to the staircase, forming their own staircase pattern up to the second floor. There were black-and-white pictures on either side of the windows, and over the sideboard, and flanking the wall unit that housed a flat-screen television.
“There’s nothing wrong with having a little pride in one’s heritage,” Charlotte said.
“Does he know who all these people are?” Mitch asked.
“We all do, young man. They’re our family. In fact, if you’d like to-”
“Grandmother, I’m sure Mitch doesn’t want to be introduced to every person in the room,” Eve put in.
“That’s the second time you’ve interrupted,” her grandmother informed her crisply. “Where are your manners?”
Eve blinked. “I’m sorry.”
“As I was saying, Bests have been in these parts for nearly a hundred and fifty years. It’s quite natural that Roy would want to preserve as many reminders of where he comes from as he can. Of where you come from, lovey doll.” She looked at Eve over the rim of her glass. “I look forward to the day when I can tell your children the stories attached to these pictures.”
She was not going to get into that discussion with Mitch standing there.
“Do you like children, Mr. Hayes?”
Oh, God. Somebody stop her.
“I have to confess I haven’t given it much thought. I have nieces and nephews, but I don’t see them very often.”
“Eve is going to have beautiful children,” Charlotte said with satisfaction. “Roy’s eldest girl married young, only eighteen, and hers are lovely. You’ll see them when they get here. That Christopher reminds me of Roy when he was a boy.”
“Grandmother,” Eve said desperately, “I’m going to show Mitch the upstairs.”
“Don’t get up to any monkey business,” Charlotte warned. “Your cousins will be here any minute.”
It took the entire trip up the staircase under the watchful eyes of people in top hats and crinolines before the scalding blush faded from Eve’s cheeks. “I’m sorry about that,” she said to Mitch. “She’s a handful. Says what she wants when she wants.”
“Nothing wrong with that. If, as you say, she lost everything, it’s natural she’d value what she’s got left-her family. And their pictures.”
“I meant about the monkey business. Honestly, I think she thinks I’m still thirteen and playing spin the bottle.”
He grinned and pulled her into one of the bedrooms. “You have a problem with spin the bottle? Because let me tell you, you are amazingly kissable when you blush like that. You can spin in my direction anytime.”
“I am not blushing.”
“Are so.” With the pad of his thumb, he brushed the arch of her cheekbone. “Right here.” He touched the other cheek. “And here.”
“Why are you doing this?” she whispered.
“You took me up on a dare.”
“We agreed. We can’t go down there and pretend to be a couple.” His touch on her face was mesmerizing. In spite of herself, anticipation built as his fingers skimme
d her jaw. “They’ll see right through it. Especially Grandmother.”
“Who’s pretending?” he breathed, and kissed her.
And there they were, right back under the ivy at the benefit. His mouth, so soft and yet so assured, coaxed hers open as she allowed the dammed-up desire that had been cooking inside her all day to burst free. She melted against him and slid her arms around his neck, pulling him closer, hauling him against her so that his big, hot body was fused to hers.
It was only for a moment. In just a moment she’d stop kissing him, stop falling into this fog of need that seemed to blow up between them and blot out reality.
Dimly, she was aware of noise below, but her senses were so filled with the scent of Mitch as his temperature rose, with the touch of his hands as they slid urgently down her back, with the taste of his lips and how they seemed to stoke the fire deep inside-
“Eve!”
Something small and hard rammed into her legs like a freight train and she gasped, jerking out of Mitch’s arms. Stupidly, she stared at the dark-haired boy wrapping her leg in a hug.
“Eve, it’s my birthday! Did you bring me a present?”
Mitch stepped back and sanity flooded in. Behind him, Emily, Eve’s cousin and Roy’s youngest daughter, hung in the doorway with the earphones of her iPod around her neck. She looked as embarrassed as Eve felt.
“I couldn’t stop him,” Emily said. “He came barreling into my room and then saw you guys across the hall.”
She hadn’t even noticed that Emily had been in her room. What if she and Mitch had gotten carried away, as they always seemed to do whenever they let themselves be alone together? Both Emily and Christopher might have gotten an eyeful that would have warped them for life.
Chris jumped up and down. “Present, present, present-”
“All right, all right, little man,” Mitch said as if he’d known the boy all his life. “The present’s in the car. I’ll get it. And happy birthday, by the way.”
Eve hugged Emily and followed Mitch and Chris downstairs. Now all she had to do was figure out how to keep the kid quiet-or at least distracted. Because what he’d interrupted certainly qualified as “monkey business.”
IN FORTY HOURS of digital TV footage, Mitch had not seen Eve as uncomfortable as she was now. She sat opposite him at a table laid out as artistically as a painting-Anne Best’s work. The lady might not be whipping out fouettés in Swan Lake any longer, but she sure knew how to bring art into daily life.
It was too bad that the whole scene reminded him of one of the photographs behind him on the wall-beautifully posed, with no indication of the emotion rolling around underneath.
“So, Mr. Hayes, where did you meet our Eve?” Charlotte Best asked after neatly cutting up her slab of roast beef.
“At the station,” he replied. “I was there on business.”
“What kind of business?”
How to put this without giving away too much? “I work for a network. We think her show can reach a wider audience, so I had some proposals for her.”
Emily snickered, and her mother frowned at her across two place settings.
“How long ago was this? Since we saw you at the benefit last night, I’m assuming it was before that.”
“That afternoon, in fact,” he said, just as Eve kicked him under the table.
“You only met yesterday?” Charlotte’s plucked eyebrows rose. “My, my. What a fast worker you are.”
“He was kissing her,” Christopher said around a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “Gross.”
“Chris!” His mother, who had been introduced to Mitch as Karen, tried to hush him.
“Well, he was,” Chris said.
“You don’t need to point it out,” Karen’s husband, whose name Mitch had forgotten, told him. “Eve might not have thought it was gross.”
“I certainly wouldn’t have,” Charlotte mused. “The next best thing to Pierce Brosnan.”
“Mother!” Roy looked up from his own plate. “You’re embarrassing our guest.”
“Am I embarrassing you?” Charlotte looked at Mitch, and he lost control of the grin twitching at the corners of his lips.
“Not at all.”
“You’re embarrassing me,” Anne informed them. “Can we direct the conversation away from Eve, please? She doesn’t need to be in the spotlight when she’s with her own family.”
Mitch shot a glance at Anne. The words were measured and considerate, but with all that stripped away, what lay underneath? Could this elegant woman be jealous? Of what? As far as he could tell, her life wasn’t tied all that tightly to Eve’s.
“She isn’t in the spotlight,” Charlotte said in a tone as crisp as the baby romaine leaves she speared with her fork. “I was merely trying to get a rise out of her young man. No need to be embarrassed, Anne.”
“Mama, please. Can we discuss something else?”
“I think Eve’s career is worthy of discussion. I hardly ever get to see the girl. So Eve, are you going to take Mr. Hayes up on his proposals? The ones relating to business, of course.”
“I can’t talk about that here, Grandmother.”
“Why on earth not? We’re your family, and obviously you’ve talked about it with Mr. Hayes.”
“As you might expect, any negotiations about the show are confidential.”
“It’s not likely we’ll say anything, is it? Roy’s got no connections to television, and Anne never talks about you anyway. Silent as the grave, that girl. No fun at all.”
Mitch almost felt sorry for Anne Best. She sat so straight in the ladder-back chair that you could draw the proverbial ballerina’s line from her earlobe to her hipbone.
“Just because some of us don’t believe in gossip-” Anne murmured against her wineglass.
“Bosh,” Charlotte snorted. “You like a good gossip as well as any of us. But I suppose we should be grateful that someone gives us an example of discretion to follow.”
“I’m discreet, Grandmother,” Emily said. “I never talk about Eve or her show, even though all the kids at school know I’m related.”
“I should hope not,” Anne said. “Half of what goes on in that show should be rated NC-17.”
“What?” Eve choked on a green bean, and Mitch clapped her on the back. “You can’t watch it anyway. It comes on before you get home from school.”
“I have TiVo,” Emily informed her smugly. “I tape it every day.”
“You do?” her mother asked.
“Plus they post the episodes on YouTube, so if I forget I can watch them there.”
“Emily, I hardly think that rainbow parties and finding out if your man is a keeper are the kinds of things you should be watching.”
“Why not?” Charlotte wondered aloud. “I’m sure the halls of the junior high ring with exactly that kind of thing.”
“Emily,” Eve said, her face pale, “maybe you should consider your mom’s feelings and watch something else.”
“Why? I’m fourteen. It’s a little late for the parental guidance now, and rainbow parties are so yesterday. Besides, you’re my cousin. I learn all kinds of things from you.”
Silence.
Mitch shifted in his seat and watched Anne. Half of him wanted to get Eve’s coat and hustle her into the car. Half of him was fascinated by the veneer of politeness cracking over what was obviously a very sore subject.
“You can ask your mom and dad if you want to know about the things we talk about on the show,” Eve said quietly.
“At least you talk about them,” the girl retorted. “Mom and Dad don’t talk about anything. Except what’s for dinner and who’s who in all these dumb pictures. Not about relationships and boys and stuff that’s important.”
“Emily, that’s not true. And that’s enough out of you. You’re being very rude,” admonished her mother.
“Now I can’t talk to my own co
usin?” Emily threw her napkin down. “First you want me to stop watching her show, and now you want me to stop talking to her?”
“That’s not what I said.”
Mitch could see that Roy was hanging on to his patience for the sake of his guests. “Please sit down and apologize.”
“I didn’t do anything except tell the truth.”
“You have no idea what the truth even means,” Anne snapped. Then she took a deep breath and looked at Mitch. “Can I offer you some dessert, Mr. Hayes?”
“She’s right,” Charlotte said to Anne. “How can she know the truth if you don’t tell her?”
“Would you like some dessert, Mama?”
“You’re still not going to say a word, are you?”
“Fine, Mama. If no one would like dessert, then Roy will make some coffee. I’m afraid I’ve got a terrible headache. I’m going upstairs to my room. I’m so sorry, Mr. Hayes. Perhaps another time you’ll find us better behaved.”
And Eve’s aunt left the room like the Snow Queen exiting the stage, leaving Charlotte angrily staring at her plate, Emily in tears and Eve as white as the walls behind her, proudly displaying the endless generations of her family.
8
EVE SPENT SUNDAY regretting Saturday. The only bright spot in the whole disastrous evening had been Christopher’s shrieks of delight when he’d torn the wrapping off his presents-especially the dinosaur.
So, okay, Mitch had a good handle on what four-year-olds liked. That did not negate the fact that they’d left as early as possible and she still felt as though she’d left a conversation unfinished. She wasn’t sure with whom, though. Emily? Auntie Anne? Grandmother Best?
Grandmother was the worst of them all. Eve should never have brought Mitch along under false pretenses and gotten her hopes up. It wasn’t as if she’d never been attracted to anyone before, and Grandmother knew it. She could hop on a MARTA train, for Pete’s sake, and by the time she got downtown, she’d have seen any number of likely candidates for some fun between the sheets. So why did her family have to overreact like this?
Hmm. She might be able to work with that for the show. “Found Flings,” they could call it. “Single on the Subway.”