Downhome Darlin' & The Best Man Switch

by Victoria Pade

  She glanced down and began speaking to the floor Grant began to consider how charming a woman talking to herself could be, when out of the corner of his consciousness he heard a dog barking. Chester, Kay’s dachshund, was who Mitzi was talking to.

  Grant smiled. As he did, Mitzi looked up. Instinctively, he ducked toward an oleander bush. He didn’t want her to think he was standing outside the window gawking at her. He watched as she scurried briskly around the living room, lowering the blinds. Good thing, he thought, feeling protectiveness swell in him. She shouldn’t be alone in a brightly lit house at night with all the windows exposed. Any kind of crackpot could come by.

  Grant moved furtively toward the front door, which had a clear glass pane above the doorknob. Chester was going nuts, and Mitzi crossed the house several times. Were they playing? At one point, Grant saw her talking on the telephone and panicked.

  He hadn’t heard the phone ring. Who would Mitzi be calling?

  Kay had said Mitzi didn’t know anybody in town, so he naturally assumed she would be sitting around the house, lonely. But maybe she did know someone here, or was talking to someone she’d met at the wedding. After the buffet incident, he had seen Mitzi talking at surprising length to Brewster Mewborn. Laughing with him, in fact. Maybe she had even been flirting with him.

  Something like jealousy flared in him. Brewster Mewborn? No way! And yet, the voice of Ted whispered in his ear, women always liked men with money. The Mewborns hemorrhaged money.

  He stepped back and let out a muttered oath. How horrible! First his wife running off with a Saudi oil princeling, and now Mitzi. And Brewster.

  At the same time a deep sigh escaped his lips, a thick, beefy hand clamped down on his shoulder.

  “Okay, bud, stand back!”

  Grant whirled, ready to do battle with anyone who dared to prowl outside Mitzi’s house. His eyes squinted tightly against the blinding beam of a flashlight in his face.

  “Hold it right there!” the same drawling voice barked. “Hands up!”

  Finally able to make out the insignia above the man’s left breast pocket, Grant obeyed. The police! Another officer he hadn’t seen lunged toward him for a frisk.

  Grant scowled. “What’s the meaning of this?”

  The officer with the flashlight replied. “We had a report of a Peeping Tom.”

  They thought he was a prowler? Grant gaped at the man. “You can’t think I—” He faltered for words that would clear him of suspicion. “I know the woman who lives here! I’m not a peeper!”

  The policeman leveled a skeptical gaze at him. “Then what were you doing out here in the bushes?”

  “I was just staring at Mitzi through the windows,” he explained as rationally as he could.

  From the expression on the officer’s face, he knew immediately it had been the wrong thing to say.

  4

  “WE FOUND this man in your oleander, ma’am. Do you recognize him?” When the thickset cop stepped aside, Grant Whiting appeared in the puddle of yellow porch light, managing to look both sheepish and defiant at the same time.

  “The bad-news best man!” Mitzi exclaimed in surprise. After their food fiasco of that afternoon, she hadn’t expect to see him again. “What are you trying to do, scare me to death?”

  She’d been scared enough already. Kay’s house was so much bigger than what she was used to, and there were all those windows. And no bars on them, like the ones on her apartment in New York. Just flimsy little locks. She’d thought Chester would make her feel safe and calm, but instead, all evening his droopy ears had pricked up at the slightest sound, and his liquid brown eyes kept a constant fearful watch on all those windows. More times than she could count, those eyes had sent her scurrying to a window to hunt for the ax-wielding madman she was certain lurked outside.

  Now Chester, the traitor, ran over to her supposed intruder, whimpering and wagging his tail happily.

  Grant lifted his hands innocently, feeling completely ridiculous. This was not the impression he’d hoped to make. “I just came by to see how you were doing. How’s your...?” His blue eyes looked furtively at her shapely backside, which had taken the brunt of her fall that afternoon at the wedding.

  “Hey, watch it, buddy!” The police, who still thought he was a sicko voyeur, were not pleased by his eyeing her butt. “Would you like to file a complaint, ma’am?”

  Mitzi was sorely tempted to treat Mr. Whiting to a night in the slammer, but on the other hand, once he was gone, she would be alone again. And Chester would no doubt start staring again out all those windows. Her gaze flicked to Grant’s. He looked so apologetic. More important, with his height and broad shoulders, he appeared so very capable of chasing away predators. And as always, he was sexy as hell, even though he’d traded in his tux for a pair of khakis and a polo shirt just tight enough to accent every pec and ab ripple. The man had a body that would make a nun drool.

  Not that that influenced her one teeny bit.

  She tried to do her best to appear gracious, not desperate. “I’m sure there won’t be any more trouble, Officer.” Although Grant Whiting had his own brand of danger, especially around buffet tables, she was fairly certain that he wasn’t an ax murderer.

  Grant slipped past her into the safety of the house, and gave the policemen a fluttery-fingered goodbye wave. “Nice talking to you gentlemen,” he said. “Thanks for stopping by.”

  Mitzi thanked the cops again—more sincerely than Grant—and closed the door. Chester’s nails clicked across the hardwood floors as Grant, limping ever so slightly, led the way to the kitchen.

  “Make yourself at home,” Mitzi joked to his back as she trailed after them.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I hope Kay has something to drink in the house. Getting frisked has left me parched.”

  He gazed into the refrigerator with a familiarity that made her edgy, as if he was ready to settle in for a while. “What brings you here, Grant? Or maybe I should ask you if you’ve come as friend or foe.”

  “Friend, definitely.”

  Grant wondered if now would be the appropriate tine to confess to Mitzi that she had been dealing with two very different. men who’d had the misfortune to share the same egg. He grabbed a cola, weighing the consequences of coming clean. What if he explained the truth to Mitzi and then she told Kay that he had tried to skip out of the wedding? He didn’t want to hurt Kay.

  “Actually, I came by to apologize for what happened at the rehearsal dinner...and for this afternoon, too,” he explained, putting off a complete confession. “And now I’ve got peeking in your doorway to add to the list.”

  She crossed her arms. “So why were you peeking?”

  Good question. “I was just checking to see if you were home.” Which was as least a fraction of the truth. “It seems that whenever I’m around you, something odd happens.”

  Mitzi raised an eyebrow and leaned against the counter. “Are you sure it’s just around me?”

  He took a swig of soda. “Positive. Normally, I’m the steady sane one.”

  “As opposed to...?”

  “Everyone else in my family,” he replied without hesitation.

  “Kay told me you have a brother.”

  Heat drained out of his face. Could Kay have also told her that they were twins? If so, it might not be difficult for her to put two and two together. “What else did she tell you?”

  From his reaction, Mitzi would have guessed that this brother of Grant’s was a lunatic-asylum escapee. “Nothing. Just that you had a brother.” She grinned. “And that he’s not as nice as you are.”

  He tilted his head jauntily. “Do I wear my halo well?”

  Mitzi chuckled at his attempt at a saintly expression. It was impossible for anyone as sexy as Grant to look goody-goody wholesome. Or maybe it wasn’t only his looks, but the memory of their first meeting, when he’d behaved like such a creep, that kept her from buying the altar-boy pose. Which reminded her, given his changeable nature, she could
n’t really trust him any further than she could shot-put a Buick.

  “Listen,” Grant said. “It’s a beautiful night. Would you like to go for a stroll? We could exercise our bruises, and let Chester have a walk as well.”

  Chester, who had a big backyard to play in, nevertheless was overjoyed to hear his name linked so closely with the word walk. He bounded out of the room in an ecstatic streak of fur in his hurry to get to the coatrack where his leash was dangling. He planted himself by the door, his fat rump wiggling impatiently.

  Mitzi laughed. “Do I have a choice?”

  A half hour later, the three of them meandered down a well-lit side street full of houses not unlike Kay’s. “This neighborhood’s really very safe,” Grant informed her. “In fact, I live not far from here.”

  As if the presence of Austin’s Peeping Tom should be reassuring. “Isn’t this neighborhood rather downscale for a tycoon like yourself?”

  She’d meant the question as a joke, but Grant answered her in dead earnest. “I used to have a bigger place, a lot bigger after all the work I put into it.” His mouth turned down. “I couldn’t stay there after the divorce.”

  “Too many memories?”

  “Just the opposite. That was the house Janice and I moved into after we were married. I envisioned us being in it for decades, raising a family, having barbecues in a backyard packed with swing sets and trampolines—all that family stuff—with me starring in the role of the perfect dad. I had the role of superdad all figured out. Seems I forgot that I needed to be superhusband first.

  “After Janice bailed on me, I was left shambling around that big house, haunted by the future that could have been.” He half laughed, half sighed. “So I guess you could say it was the memories that didn’t happen there that drove me away.”

  All Grant’s talk about hopes that didn’t pan out tugged right at her most sensitive heartstring. How well she understood that feeling. And his wistful dreams of frolicking with children in a big backyard tempted her to leap into his arms right then and there and offer him an egg. How many times had she dreamed of finding a man who wanted to father kids? A man who even gave a second’s thought to backyard trampolines and barbecues had to be as rare as a billionaire bachelor. What woman in her right mind would have let this one go?

  Of course, she remembered that until thirty minutes ago she’d thought he was an egotistical oaf and would have been almost willing to pay him to leave her alone. Then again, his recent heartbreak over the end of his marriage might have something to do with his slightly erratic behavior. Maybe she’d judged him too quickly, and too harshly. Maybe to get to know Grant, a woman had to do more than scratch the surface.

  She looked at his handsome six-foot-plus build as he ambled along behind Chester. But what an enticing surface he had to scratch!

  His smile made her heart flip-flop. “So now that I’m all whined out, how about you? Do you have a boyfriend waiting in the wings?”

  That was a laugh. “My last swain rang down the curtain and hoofed it out of the theater quite some time ago. I guess you had me pegged right that first night.”

  His smile remained plastered on his lips, but his eyes fogged with confusion. “I did?”

  “You said that all my efforts at long-term romance are destined to fail. I keep falling in with these workaholic types—you know, men who can’t make it through dinner without checking their messages. I, on the other hand, become consumed with engineering the relationships. Then, after all my hard work, they realize marriage is on the horizon and bolt, sometimes with women that had never registered on my radar as rivals.”

  He nodded his head in recognition. “The unseen enemy.”

  Was he thinking of his wife’s Middle East oil sheikh? Mitzi tried to divert him from unhappy memories by making light of her own amorous misfortunes. “Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised when things turn out badly. I’ve never had a trouble-free relationship with the opposite sex. The first time I was ever kissed was a genuine calamity. Poor Eddie Lumas...”

  He looked at her curiously. “What happened to him?”

  “Hospitalized,” she said flatly. “Broken tailbone.”

  “What?”

  “The porch swing we were kissing on collapsed,” she explained. “Actually, for once in my life I was lucky. I walked away with only a neck brace and a chipped tooth.”

  “That’s terrible, like the stories you always hear about kids who get their braces tangled together.”

  Her hand shot up in the air like a star pupil with the correct answer. “That happened to me! With Robbie Cooper that time. Unfortunately, when that particular calamity struck, it was the summer my parents sent me away on Outward Bound.”

  “Good grief!” Grant looked horrified. “Didn’t your folks realize you were accident-prone?”

  “Maybe they hoped a month roughing it in the wilderness would be a kind of cure. They learned their lesson, though, when Robbie and I had to be airlifted out of the Canadian Rockies and rushed to the nearest orthodontist.”

  “How awful.”

  She shrugged. “None of that was as bad as what’s happened recently, psyche-wise. Three near misses in three years. But at least I know what kind of man to avoid. The dishonest workaholic type. Or maybe I shouldn’t avoid them so much as I should heed your advice and not take these things so seriously.”

  “Oh, well...you shouldn’t listen to me when it comes to romantic advice.”

  Yesterday, she would have thought that no truer words had ever been spoken. Today, she wasn’t so sure. “In my book, any man who dreams about kids and swing sets must have some important thoughts about romance.”

  As they waited for Chester to pay his respects to a fire hydrant, their gazes met and held. In the moonlight, Grant was even more devastating than ever. But for the first time, she wasn’t puzzled by her attraction to him, and she certainly wasn’t fighting it. In fact, in her head she was already running across that proverbial field of daisies with arms spread wide.

  “Are you doing anything tomorrow?” he asked her suddenly, his voice a sexy, husky rasp in the rich night air.

  She snapped out of her Grant-induced trance. “Why?”

  He looked surprised. “I... thought we could go out.”

  “You mean on a date?”

  He tilted his head and answered cautiously, “Something like that.” Then, as he saw the dismay register on her face, he added quickly, “But I wouldn’t call it a date. No, not really.”

  She breathed a sigh of relief. “I hate to sound defensive, but with my romantic history, even the slightest step toward intimacy is like taking a leap into the arms of doom.”

  He laughed. “I could tell you were the cautious type when you asked me to have a fling with you.”

  “That was rash,” she said. “And really very unchar-acteristic. Actually, I think we should start small.”

  Grant nodded. Small was fine. Better than all-out fling.

  Okay, maybe not better. But fine.

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” she said. “How about brunch?”

  Brunch.

  Grant froze in shock and indecision. Brunch! The sinister word jolted him rudely out of Mitzi’s magical spell and tossed him back down to planet Earth. He’d already promised Sunday brunch to Mona and Uncle Truman, to try to dissuade them from backing the takeover.

  “Did I say something wrong?” Mitzi asked.

  Her eyebrows were knit together and her green eyes glittered in concern. The gentle night breeze teased her long, wavy hair. Her funny face was so beautiful in the moonlight that he didn’t even notice that her eyes were too far apart, or that her nose had a comical lump in the middle of it, or that an undignified smattering of freckles graced her pale, otherwise flawless cheeks. She was a picture of near perfection, and somehow, against all odds, he had managed to make her forgive him for his blunders of the past two days.

  So how could he possibly explain, when she’d just told him that she hated workaholic men, tha
t he already had a business appointment on a Sunday? He might try to pass it off as a family thing, but the fact that he was so embroiled in business even with his family made that seem almost more pathetic. He couldn’t cancel brunch with Truman and Mona. But he couldn’t stand to turn down Mitzi.

  “Brunch sounds great,” he lied.

  She looked at him doubtfully. “Are you sure you don’t already have plans?”

  He chortled. “Of course not. What time should I pick you up?”

  “How about ten?”

  Ten! Good grief, he was supposed to be at Mona’s at ten. But then, maybe he could push that up to nine-thirty...

  “Ten it is,” he said, smiling.

  And then, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, as if he hadn’t just promised to do something that was physically impossible and was bound to bring troubles raining down on him like cats and dogs, he allowed himself to be tugged down the sidewalk by Chester with a lighthearted skip.

  “WITHOUT WHITING’S we might as well change our names to Smith or Jones. That store is our lifeblood!”

  There! Ted thought proudly. That sounded exactly like something tedious and schoolmarmish Grant might say. Of course, the reason was that Grant himself had written the phrase “store is our lifeblood” across Ted’s palm.

  But when he looked up, he discovered that all his eloquence in defense of keeping Whiting’s in the family had succeeded only in putting Uncle Truman to sleep; and Mona, bored beyond tears, was now on her fifteenth extra-long, extra-nicotine menthol cigarette.

  “Grant dear,” she explained in her throaty drawl, “you know I never think about business, especially when it comes to that store.”

  Truman jolted awake. “Poor?” he bellowed. His hearing-aid batteries were running low on juice again. “Of course we’re not poor! But no one’s rich enough that they should turn their nose up at a gold mine, young man.”

  Ted shook his head. “But don’t you think—”

  Truman wagged a thin, knobby finger in his face. “You’d feel differently if you’d suffered through the Great Depression, mark my words!”