by Ruby Laska
Even her date, her fiancé, was faux.
Not only that—he wasn’t even here, and the party was in full swing.
As if on cue, Miranda appeared from a thicket of laughing guests and gently took Dorothy’s arm.
“He’s here!” she exclaimed brightly. “Mud’s found his way to the party.”
And so he had. Dorothy looked in the direction Miranda indicated with her elegantly arched brow—but not before noting the faint trace of bemusement written there.
Mud stood in an arched doorway, illuminated by gleaming candles in polished brass sconces, flanked by two beautiful women. Even as her heart sank, Dorothy had the sudden thought that he looked like an ad for men’s evening wear; in his tuxedo, escorting the tall, lovely women in their slinky gowns, Mud betrayed no lack of confidence as he laughed obligingly at something one of them said.
He was too far away for Dorothy to be able to make out their conversation, but she could easily imagine what might be being said. Light, witty, banter, the kind that slips easily into innuendo as the evening wears on.
“He seems to have made his own introductions,” Dorothy said, regretting immediately the bitterness she heard in her own voice.
“Indeed,” Miranda said, her hand lingering a moment longer on Dorothy’s arm. “A man like that is bound to attract attention...perhaps without even trying.”
Dorothy reddened at the slight rebuke. “Of course,” she said, forcing a note of cheer back into her voice. “He’s so outgoing. It’s one of the things I love about him. He makes friends wherever we go.”
The brow arched again. Miranda had an entire vocabulary—built into her expressive face, and it was telegraphing loud and clear that she knew something was amiss.
“So I think I’ll join him,” Dorothy mumbled, anxious to flee.
“Of course, dear,” Miranda said. “I’ll join you myself, in a few minutes. I need to have a word with the caterers.”
Dorothy breathed deeply as her hostess made her way through the crowd, closing her eyes and trying to calm her battling emotions. I can do this, she reminded herself. Just this one night.
But when she opened her eyes again, she saw that one of Mud’s companions had drifted off, leaving him pressed up against the wall by a long-maned brunette who seemed very intent on sharing his personal space.
It was all familiar, harking back to a long-forgotten old pain. The first time Dorothy had seen another woman in Mud’s arms, it hadn’t been a woman at all but a girl—the sort of long-limbed, glossy-haired, ripening beauty that grows into the kind of woman who Mud was even now entertaining.
And it had hurt just as much then.
Dorothy took a deep drink of her champagne to fortify herself. She started in their direction, then hesitated. What could she do, come swooping in like a hawk keen on its prey?
She didn’t relish playing the role of slighted lover, but then again, would that be any worse than the role she’d already assumed? Certainly it wouldn’t be any further from the truth.
“Excuse me,” a low voice said behind her. “But I have looked forward all evening to meeting the genius behind GilTec.”
Dorothy turned. “I’m hardly a genius,” she protested. “I can’t imagine who you’ve been...”
Her voice trailed off as she assessed the man who’d addressed her. Tall, well over six feet, and poised in his tuxedo. His blond good looks were vaguely familiar.
“Have we met before?” she inquired.
“Don Sloan,” he said, offering his hand. It was warm and confident, enclosing hers firmly. “Sierra Textiles. We occupy the little corner of the market that GilTec doesn’t already own.”
Dorothy had to smile. “Of course. I’ve seen your picture in the paper. You’re much too kind, of course; I’m well aware of the competition your latest offerings will being providing for our firm.”
“Though word is you may not need to worry about competition in the textile business for much longer,” Sloan said, not unkindly. “Miranda’s been pretty open in her admiration for your talents.
“May I get you some champagne?” he added before Dorothy could reply. “I see you’ve run out.”
Dorothy spun the empty glass she held, and glanced over at Mud. He hadn’t budged, but he didn’t look too uncomfortable, sharing that tiny niche with the lovely brunette.
“Yes,” she said. “I think I could use another one.”
Mud glanced across the room for the hundredth time.
“Mm-hmmm,” he murmured distractedly as Tiffany continued her long monolog about physical trainers, or aerobic workouts, or whatever it was she was prattling about. She’d made it darned impossible to escape; every time he tried to interject she was off on another tangent.
Ordinarily he’d forgive the vapid conversation considering the lovely way it was packaged. Tiffany, and her friend for that matter, were undeniably gorgeous. Models for Finesse sportswear, they were the sort of woman Mud had once found perfect for a temporary romance, the kind that burned hot but brief.
At the moment, though, a different sort of flame was beginning to catch in his gut. He watched as the tall skinny jerk slipped a hand around Dorothy’s waist and steered her out of the crush of partiers in the room, into a corner that was bound to be quieter, more conducive to conversation...or whatever it was he had on his mind.
Mud clenched his jaw hard, making his teeth ache.
Jealousy was not an emotion with which he’d had much experience.
He could feel the heat rising in his veins, barely resisted the urge to clench his hands into fists.
“Mud? Hello? Honey, you seem a million miles away.”
“What?” Mud snapped his gaze back at Tiffany, who’d somehow managed to insinuate her lithe body even closer to his own, so that her hip brushed against him. “Oh. Tiffany. Look, there’s someone I need to see, all right?”
Her lips curled into a practiced pout, and she gave his lapel a gentle tug. “Business, tonight? Can’t it wait? We’re having such a nice time.”
“Indeed,” Mud said, carefully extracting himself. “Maybe I’ll catch up with you later.”
He strode across the room, nearly taking out a passing waiter in his determination. Blondie spotted him coming and smirked, then murmured something in Dorothy’s ear. She turned, and Mud stopped in his tracks.
It was almost like one of those commercials where everything goes slow motion. Her eyes widened and her lips parted, and the short flared skirt of her dress sailed prettily around before fluttering gracefully back against her thighs.
She reached a hand to her nape, a gesture he’d come to recognize as a dead giveaway for uncertainty, all the more charming because it was so rare in Dorothy.
And then the moment was over. The low roar of the party rang in his ears and Blondie stepped forward, hand extended, a thousand-watt smile baring capped white teeth.
“Haven’t had the pleasure,” Blondie said. “I’m Don Sloan, Sierra Textiles.”
“Mud Taylor.” Mud glared at the outstretched hand for a moment before he seized it and shook. A little too hard, perhaps—Sloan winced and withdrew his hand.
“Whoa, easy there, big fella,” he chuckled. “Quite a grip. May I introduce the guest of honor—”
“Oh, no need,” Dorothy interjected, and stepped forward. Mud noticed with surprise that her step was a little unsteady. And her voice was slightly thick, like she was speaking through layers of gauze.
She’d been drinking.
She lurched again and both men held out their hands to steady her. Dorothy regained her balance on her own, then looked back and forth from one man to the other—and laughed.
“S’really too funny,” she said. “Don, Mud and I are old, old friends. Aren’t we?”
Mud closed the distance between them, and slung an arm around her. He felt her lean into him, swaying a little on her high heels. The smell of her perfume mixed with the heady aroma of champagne, and for a crazy second he longed to drink the elixir wi
th her, from her, trickle it over her skin and trace its path down her glorious body...
“Sugar, looks like I shouldn’t have let you out of my sights after all,” he said. And then, meeting Don’s gaze full on, he added, “Dorothy and I are engaged.”
Sloan raised his eyebrows. “You don’t say?”
“No. No.” Dorothy pushed herself clumsily away from Mud, losing her momentum and steadying herself only when he seized her wrist and held on. “That is not entirely accurate. Is it. Mud.”
She frowned at him, but some source of mirth bubbled up and spilled out in a fit of giggles.
It was worse than he’d first realized. Mud couldn’t remember any occasion where he’d seen Dorothy drink more than a glass or two of wine, and clearly more than that had been served tonight.
“Dorothy, don’t you think we ought to find you a place to sit down ?”
“I was just about to sit down, actu-actually,” Dorothy stammered. “With Don.”
Mud turned stiffly to Sloan, who stood, arms folded, smirking.
“I appreciate your help,” Mud growled, “but I believe I’ll look after my fiancée from here on out.”
“The lady seems to think otherwise,” Sloan said evenly.
Mud took a good look at the lady. The mirth of a moment ago had dissipated, and she was now regarding him with a look of open chagrin. Her brows knit together, and her lips rounded into a pout which, if it weren’t entirely becoming to her, he would have been tempted to kiss away.
“You’re not really my fiancé,” she mumbled. “Might as well ‘fess up.”
“Dorothy, that’s enough,” Mud hissed. What had gotten into her? This was the big night, the night the two of them were to put on the performance of a lifetime. Instead, she was acting like a dizzy coed at her first college party. “You’ve had a little too much champagne, I think.”
Dorothy shook her head slowly, dejectedly. “Jush a little bit. Doesn’t matter though. This has all been a big, fat, lie.”
As the last bit of energy seemed to leave her, Dorothy yawned daintily, closed her eyes, and leaned into Mud. He wrapped his arms around her, glared at Sloan, and cast about for a snappy exit line.
He didn’t have a chance to use it, though.
Miranda Purcell materialized out of nowhere, with a very perplexed expression on her face.
“A lie? Would someone mind telling me, please, what this is all about?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Thanks,” Dorothy sighed, accepting the glass of seltzer water. Even reaching for the glass sent the room tilting at crazy angles. “I suppose I have to sit up to drink it, though, right?”
“Still got the spins, do you?” Mud’s voice above her was rich and warm and familiar as an old blanket, and Dorothy had to resist the urge to grab him and hang on, hold on to the support he offered on the worst night of her life. “How’s your stomach holding up?”
“Ugh. A little better and then...”
“Feels like you got someone in there tossing boulders around, right?”
Dorothy didn’t have to lift her gaze to know that Mud was grinning. It was in his voice.
“Don’t worry; if you haven’t lost your cookies yet, chances are you won’t. Probably come out of this with just a miserable headache and a craving for a bacon double cheeseburger.”
“Spoken like a pro.” Not nice, Dorothy chastised herself. Especially after Mud had extricated her from that awful scene with Miranda. The thought sent a fresh wave of nausea.
But Mud didn’t seem to take offense.
“I’ve been there more times than I care to admit. Not any more, though. It doesn’t generally pay off, in the long run. Best to behave.”
“You were a regular Boy Scout tonight.” Dorothy closed her eyes and draped a hand over her eyes. “Looks like you went home with the wrong girl, though.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Only that it looked like you had a sure thing there. Instead of playing nursemaid, I bet you could be doing something a lot more interesting right now.”
“Huh? Oh, you mean Tiffany?”
Tiffany. Naturally.
“I suppose. If Tiffany is that underage nymph who was draping herself all over you in the alcove. Not that you seemed to mind.”
No answer. Dorothy waited as long as she could stand it, then forced her eyes open a crack, curious.
Mud was staring down at her with a look in his eyes unlike any she’d seen before. Part amusement, part reproof, and part something soft and sad and vulnerable and wholly unfamiliar.
“You’re jealous.”
It wasn’t a question, or entirely a rebuke. Mud reached out one hand, and his fingertips grazed her arm. Even in her current state of champagne-induced misery, the roughness of his skin combined with the gentleness of his gesture to lift the fine hairs on her arm in a sensuous shiver.
“Move over, big girl. I think it’s time for a little talk.”
Dorothy didn’t so much make room for him on the couch as allow herself to be rearranged. Mud slid a strong forearm under her limp limbs, tucking her back among the down pillows create a space for him to sit. He carefully tugged the chenille throw over her legs, lingering only a second at the hem of her black dress before floating the cozy throw down over it. Or maybe she imagined the way his fingers slid along the silk, dipping down to graze the bare skin of her thigh.
She wasn’t used to being like this. Intoxicated. It was certainly strange. She felt curiously numb to some things, like the short trip back to the guesthouse, when she’d practically let Mud carry her as her feet seemed to have forgotten how to walk. Forgetful, too; after the exquisitely awful look of betrayal on Miranda’s face, the scene that followed was thankfully reduced to a merely unpleasant blur.
But other of her senses seemed to have been perversely heightened. Even as the couch seemed to float in an ebbing, dipping whorl in the middle of the room, Dorothy found herself focusing on the most exacting details. The scent of Mud, for instance. It was a mixture of lingering cologne, Scotch, a trace of her own perfume, and the cool of the night that had attached itself to him somehow, starlit and dew-dampened.
Even if a girl hadn’t had a little too much bubbly, that scent alone could well intoxicate her.
“Mmm,” Dorothy sighed. “Talk away.”
“Well, things didn’t go so well in there.”
“Disaster,” Dorothy agreed. “Miranda will probably never speak to me again, much less offer me a job.”
“Yeah, she seemed pretty steamed. Got to give her credit for putting it all together so fast, though. She figured out the whole deal.”
Indeed. Dorothy vaguely remembered the words “reprehensible pretense” being used before Miranda stalked off in an elegant swish of silk.
Dorothy concentrated hard to keep Mud from drifting apart into two carbon copies of himself. When she had him put back together, she focused on his eyes, which were practically charcoal in the soft light of the single lamp that Mud had lit in the guesthouse.
“Awfully thirsty. Do you think...” She lifted the glass she still held.
“No problem, Dot.” Mud helped Dorothy sit up and took the glass gently from her fingers, then held it to her lips. She drank deeply, gratefully, the cool water sluicing down her parched throat.
Mud took back the glass and set it on the floor, and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, pulled Dorothy into his arms and nestled her there. She lay back against his chest and felt his heart beating, strong and slow, through the starched cotton of his tuxedo shirt. Even if she’d had the strength to extricate herself, she wasn’t sure she would have had the will.
“I was not jealous of—Tiffany, by the way,” she mumbled, even as she slid a little further into his embrace, dropping her head back under the comforting pressure of his chin.
“Hah. What were you doing with old Pearly Whites, then?”
Dorothy struggled to affect a suitable degree of offense. “Just because
another man takes interest in me—”
“Not your type, Dot.”
Irritation flashed briefly, only to be quickly overcome by the sleepy, delicious pleasure of being nestled in his arms.
“Who made you the expert?” Dorothy demanded half-heartedly.
“I am the expert. I’m your type. Come on. You’ve had more fun with me in thirty seconds than you’d ever have with that guy. Think he’d ever let you ride on the handlebars of his dirt bike? Huh? Think he’d play Marco Polo for three straight hours out in the middle of the lake?”
Mud’s hand casually riffled through her hair, then rested there, tracing slow circles down to her nape.
“Think he’d let you borrow his all time best bass lure on the finest fishing day of the entire summer?”
Dorothy let her mind be carried along by Mud’s words, and in the strange, unfamiliar stream-of-conscious turn the evening had taken, the memories he invoked brought others, dozens of them.
Her cheeks suddenly felt flush with the strong afternoon sun of a Wisconsin summer; Mud’s hand in her hair was the same one that had freed her once-long braid of its elastic and then unraveled it. The arms that held her were the same ones that had drawn her to him, and his breath on her neck was the same warm, sweet breath that had heralded that first kiss.
“You should never have kissed me,” she whispered, more in regret than anger.
In seconds she was asleep.
Mud listened to her deep, even breathing and envied her the release of sleep, no matter how terrible she was going to feel tomorrow.
His hand stilled in her hair, then slid down her neck, her shoulder, along her arm, until he circled her and clasped his hands loosely around her. It felt good, holding her like this, her body surprisingly light against him, her curves nestled perfectly into him.
Cherie Walton. That was the girl to whom he’d fled after that first kiss with Dorothy. Cherie with the halter tops and crayon-colored shorts and perfect white tennis shoes. Cherie with the the lips that tasted like cherry lip gloss.