“I’m not sleeping, I’m eating.”
The older man grumbled. Meanwhile, Grant could see Mitzi glancing surreptitiously at her watch.
“I tried to get you all day yesterday, too,” Horace complained.
Grant paled. The phone calls! After the brouhaha he and Mitzi had created at the wedding reception, he’d completely forgotten about business. “Dinner Wednesday sounds fine,” he told Horace. “I’ll make the reservations.”
“I say, wait just a second there, son,” the man barked.
Who did he think he was, Foghorn Leghorn? “I don’t have time to chat right now,” Grant said, noting that Mitzi’s plate was empty, while his was still heaped with food. At this rate, it would be lunch before he had a chance to eat breakfast, and meanwhile, Mitzi looked ready to bolt. “In fact, I have to go.”
“But you were going to send over a prospectus—”
Damn! He’d meant to do that yesterday. “I’ll get it to you ASAP,” he promised, then disconnected Moreland before he could receive any more orders.
He smiled at Mitzi. “Imagine, calling someone at a restaurant” He couldn’t count the number of times he’d done the same thing.
“Are you always distracted like this while you’re trying to eat?” There was a hint of disapproval in her tone.
He shouldn’t have picked up that phone. He knew it. “Not at all.” Which wasn’t completely a lie. Usually he took meals at his desk at work, in which case he had his secretary hold his calls. He forced a smile and changed the subject. “Well, what should we do today?”
Mitzi grinned at him. “I’m going fishing.”
Grant blinked, momentarily perplexed. “Fishing?”
“With Brewster.”
Grant felt his facial muscles go slack. “Fishing with Brewster,” he exclaimed. “What would you want to do that for?”
She thought for a moment. “For fun?”
As soon as he could recover from the shock, he leaned across the table toward her. “But I thought we would do something together. I thought you had the whole afternoon free.”
“Nope,” she answered. “That’s why I suggested brunch. Brewster asked me out yesterday during the reception. I’ve never been bass fishing before.”
“Oh, it’s very dull,” Grant said quickly. Maybe he could manage to change her mind. “Just sitting and waiting, mostly. I can’t imagine what Brewster was thinking.”
Mitzi laughed. “I think he was thinking he had a little crush on me.”
Great. He couldn’t believe he was being bumped off Mitzi’s dance card by a rich fishing aficionado. “He’ll swamp you with fishing stories. Believe me, I’ve heard them.”
Unmoved by his dire tone, Mitzi smiled. Fishing wasn’t exactly her cup of tea, but she was glad to have some reason to get out of town and away from Grant. It might not hurt him to be forced to take a back seat to Brewster, either.
It was just as well that she bail out on Grant before those blue eyes charmed her into something she’d regret. There was still something about him she couldn’t quite trust, like that mysterious phone call he jumped up to make. She hadn’t been annoyed at first. Luckily she had her camera and could occupy herself taking pictures of the view from the restaurant. But then to discover that all the while he’d had a cell phone in his jacket pocket back at the table!
Where had he run off to, and why had he found it necessary to fib about it? His stepmother’s birthday, for heaven’s sakes. And did he always make dinner dates at the table when he was out with other women?
“I wouldn’t worry, Grant. I’ve had men tell me fishy stories before.”
5
“DOES THIS MEAN we lose our benefits?” April Jones from handbags asked.
“What about our dental plan?” Harry Bums echoed nervously. “My daughter just got braces.”
The group of anxious employees huddled around Grant’s desk just made him more frazzled, and he was already pretty shaky. He’d barely slept at all last night, thanks, in part, to the fact that Mitzi hadn’t been home all evening. Of course, considering that her date was Brewster, a bachelor who thought the ultimate conquest was a twenty-pound largemouth, he shouldn’t have been too worried.
He shouldn’t even be interested in her anyway. Ted was right. Women were the source of most of life’s woes. Hadn’t his own marriage fiasco proved that? The next time he saw her he was going to play it cool. Absolutely cool. Of course, after a day with Brewster, she would probably be dying to go out with someone else. But that didn’t mean Grant had to drop everything and oblige her. After all, he had important work to tend to this week.
This very hectic week. Wednesday he had dinner scheduled with Moreland and his cronies. Friday night Mona was throwing a big shindig, no doubt hoping to celebrate the sale of Whiting’s. And now Ted had obligated him to take out that Moreland woman on Thursday. Joy! The name rang in his head with a sarcastic twist.
He wanted to strangle Ted.
Instead of pondering the penalties of attempted fratricide, however, he forced himself to focus on Harry’s daughter’s braces. “You don’t have to worry, Harry. None of you do. This store is not being bought.”
Not if he could keep his mind on the sale and off sex.
The group in front of him breathed a collective sigh of relief. “Those men in the black suits downstairs aren’t from Moreland’s then?” April asked.
Men in black? Grant pictured Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as department-store goons, stalking through Whiting’s cosmetics counters with dark sunglasses and ridiculously oversize weapons. Preposterous. He smiled, but felt an uneasy twinge nevertheless. “I wasn’t aware of any men in black suits.”
Harry nervously stepped forward. The man was normally jittery, today he looked like panic on legs. “One of them told me he was a security man for Moreland’s, and that they had been instructed to study the store’s layout.”
Casing the joint. This was too much. Grant bolted to his feet, almost sending poor Harry into a swoon. “The Moreland Corporation is only attempting to buy our stores.” He didn’t add that half his family was jubilant at the prospect. Moreland had no business scoping out the lay of the land as if it were all a done deal. “You all just go about your business,” Grant instructed the group. “And if one of these security men asks you a question, direct him to my office.”
He led the employees out and to the elevators, then turned and took the stairs down two flights to the main floor. Security men. Already trying to decide where to put in hidden cameras, no doubt. This is what happened when he allowed himself to get sidetracked by a beautiful woman with green eyes. The barbarians barged right through the gates.
He stopped, took a deep calming breath, then scoped out the area for the pesky intruders. The aroma of perfume on the air, the sparkling tile floors, the high ceilings with chandeliers that gave the old flagship building a gracious feel that no mall store could ever achieve, comforted him a little.
He spotted one of the black-suited men in hosiery and made a beeline for him until he caught sight of something that stopped him in his tracks—Mitzi in ladies’ swimwear! The private and the professional impulses warred inside him for a split second before the private declared victory. Grant hotfooted it over to the swimwear department, all the while reminding himself of his vow to keep cool.
As he approached her, Mitzi was lost in the process of picking out a bathing suit. The one she held up was a classic black one-piece, little more than a tiny black spandex strip. As he imagined just what that tiny black sheath would look like on Mitzi’s tall leggy body, he felt himself getting as worked up as Harry had been at the prospect of losing his dental plan.
Stay cool, he reminded himself.
He leaned against the next rack and cleared his throat. The resulting sound was about an octave higher than normal.
Mitzi looked over, and flashed him her million-watt smile. “Hey!”
A day with Brewster had probably driven her out of her mind. That�
�s why she was here—to see him. The bathing suits were only a flimsy excuse. Grant smiled back at her with self-assurance. “You should have told me you were coming here to shop. I can get you a discount.”
His nonchalance did him proud. Especially since he’d noticed that in Mitzi’s other hand, she held a bikini.
“Really?” she said, pleased. “I was going to call you this morning. I got your messages.”
“Oh?”
“All twelve of them.”
Grant frowned. He should have kept count of how many times he’d called her.
She continued to leaf through the hangers. “I would have called you back last night, but I didn’t get in till late.”
No kidding! “How late?”
She shrugged her thin shoulders. “Oh, around midnight.”
“Midnight,” he exclaimed. “I thought you two were going fishing.”
She laughed gaily. “Oh, we made quite a day of it.”
Quite a night of it, too. “What happened?”
“We went to dinner.”
Dinner. Oh. That was no big deal.
Or was it? “Till midnight? On a Sunday night?”
“Grant, I’m on vacation, and Brewster...”
She didn’t have to finish. Brewster, the son of one of the richest ranchers in Texas, was independently wealthy. No reason for him to get up early on a Monday morning. He didn’t have to worry his head about little things like employee benefits and hostile takeovers.
Mitzi turned her attention to another rack. “Anyway, Brewster brought me home and we talked for a while...”
“You mean, Brewster stayed around to talk? What the hell were you talking about?”
Cool, stay cool, a little voice reminded him as soon as the heated words were out.
If Mitzi detected his nerves unraveling, she didn’t let on. “We had to plan our trip.”
“Trip,” Grant repeated numbly. “Where are you going?”
“To Brewster’s lake cabin. Doesn’t that sound neat?”
Neat! It sounded way too intimate, was what it sounded like. And Brewster’s cabin was hours away. “You’ll have to be there overnight.”
She nodded eagerly. “I haven’t spent a night out in the wilderness since I was a Girl Scout.”
“Is that why you’re here, buying bathing suits for your expedition out to the middle of nowhere with Brewster?” He glared at the scrappy little bikini with new antagonism.
Mitzi sighed in exasperation. “Yes. but I hate buying them.” She held up a little green number that gave about as much coverage as pasties and a G-string. “It’s sheer torture.”
He felt like the thumbscrews were on right now, just picturing Mitzi in that little thing, and then remembering it was Brewster who was actually going to see her in it.
Brewster! Grant wanted to howl at the injustice of it.
“Here, maybe I can help out.” He turned to a rack of more modest styles and rifled through the suits there. “It’s always best to stick with the tried-and-true. Like this one.” He held up a navy blue suit with a little red anchor embroidered on its high, high neckline. The bottom was a modest skirt in blue-and-white stripes.
Mitzi laughed. “I think I had one like that once. When I was five.”
“That’s what I mean. It’s a classic.” Better still, it was about as sexy as a heart attack.
“No kidding. My grandmother probably would have loved it, too.”
Grant frowned. “But you can’t go out to Brewster’s cabin with a bikini.”
“Why not?”
“Because you hardly know him.”
She giggled dismissively. “Oh, Brewster’s harmless.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Grant warned. “You’re not a Girl Scout anymore. Brewster might seem harmless now, at a restaurant or at Kay’s, but just when you’re in that remote cabin in your bikini—”
Mitzi stopped him. “I’ll only wear the swimsuit while I’m swimming.”
“Even so, once you get back to that cabin at night, you’ll have been fishing all day with him,” Grant argued. “Maybe even have a piscine odor clinging to your hair. Something like that’s bound to drive Brewster over the edge. What if the man turns wolfish?”
She laughed. “Brewster? That’s ridiculous. He’s a kind, sensitive, family-oriented man. Has he told you that he belongs to the Big Brother program? He just got back from taking the boy he mentors out to Lake Travis. He’s very sweet.”
Family-oriented? No one was more family-oriented than Grant. Wasn’t he trying to save the family business? And he loved kids. A dozen wouldn’t have been too many for his taste. As for sweet—hell, he was sweet!
Mitzi tilted a concerned glance in Grant’s direction. He was tearing through the rack of bathing suits like a man possessed. More odd behavior.
She refused to believe that Grant could be jealous of Brewster. That was too preposterous. Like Tom Cruise envying Drew Carey. And it would make even less sense because Brewster’s one topic of conversation, apart from fish, seemed to be their mutual friend, Grant. Brewster had assured her that Grant was a hell of a guy. Not nutty at all. And yet, he was acting so strange.
“Grant? Are you telling me you think I shouldn’t go?”
Grant blinked. Maybe he was being a tad overbearing. “Of course not,” he replied stiffly. “It’s just odd that you’re dropping everything and running off with him. What about...” He strained to find some reason for her to stay in Austin. Besides the fact that he wanted her there. “...Chester?”
“He’s coming, too,” Mitzi assured him. Then she laid a hand on his arm and beamed a calming smile at him that had the opposite effect. “Don’t worry, Grant. I’m just following the advice you gave me—for once in my life, I’m loosening up.”
Had he mentioned he wanted to strangle Ted? “That wasn’t such great advice. In fact, it was terrible.”
Mitzi shook her head. “Last night when Brewster proposed the overnight trip, I hesitated. Then I thought, heck, why not follow Grant’s advice? I’m only going around once, so to speak. Why not cut loose?”
Cut loose. God, that sounded good. How wonderful it would be to leave Ted, Mona, Truman and the Morelands behind and run away. Especially if he was cutting loose with Mitzi. When he looked into her green eyes, it all seemed so easy. Something about Mitzi made him see his whole life differently. Before, he’d been the serious-minded one, the drone. Janice had always complained that he never did anything unexpected.
So why, whenever he was around Mitzi, was he pulling down buffet tables and being hauled out of bushes by policemen? Why did her green eyes make his feet, which had always been firmly rooted to the ground, instinctively want to do a little tap dance? Just one smile from Mitzi seemed to unleash a reservoir of goofiness inside him he never guessed existed. Before, he’d never known jealousy, either. Not even when Janice had run off with her prince. Oh, sure, he’d been angry, and felt betrayed, but he couldn’t say he envied Omar. But with Mitzi, he was a miser. He wanted to hoard her every smile, her tinkling laughter, her funny comments, all to himself.
Why should Brewster be the lucky dog cutting loose with her? he thought, feeling some last thread of sanity inside him snapping.
In a swift motion that took them both by surprise, he pulled Mitzi to him and brought his lips down just as hers parted in astonishment
Mitzi could barely believe what was happening, and yet, when their mouths met, the kiss was exactly as she’d dreamed it would be, seemingly a thousand times. Grant’s lips were possessive and strong, yet with a hint of tenderness that caught her off guard. She felt completely enveloped by muscle and male brawn, but fully free to exercise her own feminine curiosity by tasting her fill. Which she did with pleasure. She wasn’t kissing Mr. Hyde, that was for sure.
More like Mr. Right. Because while she stood under the fluorescent lights of the swimwear department, with heaven knows how many people looking on, her belief in Mr. Right, so long extinguished in her mind, flickered back
to life in the heat of Grant’s embrace. Niggling doubts vanished as romantic optimism reconstituted itself in the flood of desire he sent swirling through her, from her fingertips that kneaded softly the corded muscles of his neck, right down to her curled toes.
She wasn’t thinking anymore, just feeling. Just reveling in the first horns-blowing, fireworks-exploding, confetti-flying kiss she’d ever received. She’d thought things like this only happened in movies, to gorgeous women like Grace Kelly. But as Grant began dipping her back, Rudolph Valentino-style, she felt as if she could be on a movie set, or in a quiet hideaway all their own.
Grant hadn’t meant to do it, hadn’t planned it. But this kiss seemed so obvious, so natural. Mitzi’s lips were warm and soft and giving, her scent an intoxicating mixture of perfumed soap and toothpaste that made him dizzier than the strongest, sexiest French perfume would have.
Suddenly, he realized this was exactly what he’d wanted to do since that morning when he’d first laid eyes on her in her lime-green dress. Before he’d messed things up. And as he held her in his arms, luxuriating in the soft pliant feel of her body against his, he vowed not to foul things up again.
As that determination crossed his mind, he felt Mitzi lean backward, then back some more.
He opened his eyes in time to see Mitzi’s green eyes widen in a shock that mirrored his own. They were moving through space, as in a dream, still attached at the lips, each reaching out but finding nothing to cling to but each other. In the next second, they were splat on the floor, landing against the bathing-suit rack they had toppled over. Nylon and spandex rained down on and around them as the rack collapsed.
Yet as he untangled himself from the sea of plastic hangers, helped Mitzi to her feet and reassembled the rack, he didn’t feel awkward, even when he saw Leanne Cummings, the sportswear clerk, come running over. Instead, he felt liberated.
“Oh, my,” Mitzi breathed, tearing her gaze away from his to start picking up stray swimsuits. Then she looked back at him, her green eyes heartbreakingly liquid and beautiful.
Which made it all the more surprising when her eyebrows knit together and she suddenly barked out at him, “Are you nuts? What was that for?”
Downhome Darlin' & The Best Man Switch Page 24