by Susan Wiggs
Right or wrong, that perception had driven him to excel at everything he attempted. Sports and studies had pulled him closer and closer to the subtle glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. But the truth was, he hadn’t reached the end yet. Emerging as valedictorian from the local high school hadn’t caused him to burst into the light. Nor had getting a full scholarship to Notre Dame. Or medical school at Baylor. Or the partnership in his Denver practice.
Maybe the end of the tunnel would be Lauren DeVane and the life they would one day share—as soon as they decided to talk about the future. Lauren, so beautiful she made the rest of the world look profane, inhabited a rarefied world that glowed with the light of its own brilliance. A world where boys weren’t abandoned by their underage mothers. Where kids weren’t scared of the dark. Where elegance and style softened the sharp edges of life. Being with Lauren made him feel closer to that world—though never actually a part of it.
His plate loaded with barbecue, he took a seat with some of the others, but his gaze strayed to the playground. The equipment had changed. The peeled-log forts and jungle gyms looked a lot safer than the seesaws and nickel pipes they had played on as boys. He recognized Twyla’s son, Brian, on a tire swing. The boy had twisted the chain as far as he could and was now whirling in a full, fast spin, his head thrown back, laughing with wild abandon. Just watching him brought a smile to Rob’s lips.
Lauren didn’t want kids. They had discussed it at length, and both agreed that they loved travel and spontaneity too much to devote the time and commitment it took to raise a family. It was funny, he mused, watching Brian wind up for another wild ride; they had discussed their feelings about having kids without discussing their feelings about getting married. He had never proposed, nor had she. It was a logical next step in their relationship, yet neither felt pressured or in a hurry to take that step.
Brian stopped spinning and staggered to the edge of the playground. One glimpse of his gray-green face told Rob the inevitable was about to happen.
“Be right back,” he said to the others, getting up and walking fast across the playground.
“Gross,” a boy said. “Brian hurled chunks.” A few of the others, being boys, gathered around, echoing a chorus of “Gross!”
“Hey, Brian,” Rob said, taking out a handkerchief. “Got a little motion sickness there?”
Brian stayed bent over, hands on his knees, the back of his neck pale and clammy with sweat. “Uh-huh,” he said miserably.
Rob felt awkward as he put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and mopped his face with the handkerchief. Briefly, he had considered specializing in pediatrics, but he’d opted for pathology instead. He didn’t think he had the patience or the special tenderness it took to deal with little kids. Brian looked completely forlorn, so Rob took him to the men’s room and had him rinse his mouth and wash his hands and face.
“Let’s go find your mom,” he suggested.
On the way to the raffle table, he stopped and got a cup of ice water for the kid. Twyla didn’t see them approach. Standing behind her table, she talked to a long-haired guy in blue jeans and a leather vest. She was smiling as she spoke to him.
There were some obvious reasons why Rob had noticed her and why he’d had an intense reaction to her. A great figure and abundant red hair. It was probably out of a bottle, but since she was a hairdresser, she’d know the best way to make it look natural. Or maybe it was natural. Brian’s fiery red hair had to have come from somewhere.
She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. He’d noticed that right off.
Yet he felt more than a strong physical attraction to her. He had seen more gorgeous women before, had held them in his arms, taken them to his bed. But there was something about Twyla that went deeper than good looks. She had the most expressive face he had ever seen, eyes that hid nothing. When they spoke, he sensed an easy rhythm between them that worked. In one conversation she struck him as funny, sad, irreverent, practical, unassuming and proud. And self-deprecating.
She laughed at something the ponytail guy said. She hadn’t laughed like that for Rob. As soon as the thought formed, he felt like an idiot. What did he care about who made her laugh?
She noticed him coming toward her, and the laughter stopped. Her expression held a peculiar sweetness, and the way she looked down at her son, stroking his hair and brushing her knuckles over his forehead, evoked a strange and haunting reminder in Rob of a distant, dreamlike moment in the past.
He stepped back, frowning. This he didn’t need. Trips down memory lane had never held any appeal for him. He had to stay focused on his goals and his future. The sooner he got this auction thing over, the better.
“Hey, sport,” Twyla said, all her attention on Brian. “Did something happen?”
“I hurled,” Brian said glumly, sipping his water.
She glanced up at Rob. “And the medical term for this would be…?”
He was intrigued that she seemed to know he was a doctor. Apparently she’d looked over his bio. “Acute temporary emesis. Induced by vertigo.”
“Otherwise known as…?”
“Spinning on the tire swing until he puked. He’ll be fine. Have him sit in the shade for a while.”
“Are you going to bill me for this?”
He grinned. “Only if I don’t win the blanket.”
“Quilt. It’s a quilt.”
“We’d better get going, Rob,” said the guy with the ponytail.
It took Rob a few seconds to recognize him as another former Lost Springs resident. “Hey, Stan. Good to see you here.”
A wail of electronic feedback obscured Stanley Fish’s remark. Rob shaded his eyes in the direction of the arena. “They’re ready to start.”
“I think you’re right.”
He felt a sudden, idiotic jolt of nerves. How had he let Lauren and her old school pal Lindsay talk him into this? He made himself look nonchalant as he nodded to Twyla. “See you around,” he said. “Brian, no more spinning tire swings, okay?”
As he and Stan walked away from the table under the spreading oak tree, he said, “So you’re here for the meat market, too, right?”
“Nope, I came to cover the event.”
“Cover—”
“I work for Clue Magazine.”
“Great. You mean this is going to show up in a national magazine?”
“Hey, why not? It’s human interest. People live for stories like this. Mystery dates. Lost boys making good. Women getting into bidding wars over men.”
“Then do me a favor. If you quote me, call me an ‘unnamed source.’”
Stan scribbled something in a pocket notepad. “You wish.”
A young woman draped in camera equipment and wearing a vest with rows of pockets joined them. “Hey, guys.”
“Rob, this is Betta, my photographer.”
Rob greeted her. “So what do you think of a bachelor auction?”
“Sounds like a hell of a good time to me,” she said, pulling down the bill of her baseball cap to shield her eyes from the sun. “I always did like shopping.”
“Rob, I’m going to put you down as the reluctant bachelor. Hey, that’s got a nice ring to it.” Stan scratched in his notebook. “So why’re you here?”
“Because the place was home to me for eleven years.” Rob didn’t elaborate. But whatever love and esteem he’d gotten in those years, he’d gotten right here. And as much as that was, it had never been enough. “I came back as a favor to a friend of a…friend.” No point in dragging Lauren’s name into this. The press knew who she was because of her family.
“So, you looking forward to being sold off as a dream date?”
“Like a root canal, pal. Like a root canal.” He went toward the arena where the auction would take place. Rex and Lindsay ran around with clipboards like a couple of soccer coaches. Lindsay’s uncle, Sam Duncan, a retired coach and counselor, waved his cowboy hat in an attempt to round up the bachelors. A huge crowd filled the open-air risers—mostly
women. Some of the guys were already present, seated in folding chairs around the auctioneer’s podium. They laughed and joked and punched one another in the shoulder, remembering old anecdotes from their days here. Rob took a seat by Cody Davis. He looked out at the busy, babbling audience and leaned over to say, “Are you as freaked out by this as I am?”
“Oh, yeah.” Cody hooked his cowboy boots around the legs of his chair and balanced it on its hind legs. “Where’d all these females come from, anyway?”
“All over, I’m told.” From behind his shades, Rob scanned the rows of bleachers. “Damn, that’s a lot of women.” They came in all shapes and sizes, all ages and persuasions. There were women in skin-tight Western-cut jeans, some of them whistling and hooting good-naturedly as a couple of the guys postured for the audience, flexing their muscles and goofing around. A tall blonde woman in jeans and a denim work shirt looked as if she had just stopped in and wasn’t certain she wanted to stay. Another sat with two small children, pointing at the risers and appearing to have a serious conference with the kids. A pregnant woman clutching the bachelor auction brochure to her chest sat alone—now there was a scary prospect.
Four women had planted themselves in the center of the front row. The two older ones wore spangled jogging suits and shiny sneakers. Another had golden hair teased high and was smoking a cigarette, and the petite Asian woman next to her looked completely enthralled with the entire situation.
Rob leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “You know,” he observed, “there really is no such thing as an ugly woman.”
Davis nodded readily. “That’s a fact. That is a fact.”
In a trained, booming voice, the auctioneer greeted everyone and laid out the rules of the event. Rob barely listened. There was a sense of absurdity about the whole thing that made it feel not quite real, as if this were a world set apart from everywhere else.
In a way, Lost Springs had always been that. A group of homeless boys whose families had failed them. This was the place where they had come together, where they had fought and cried and raged and laughed and learned. The ranch stood for hope and healing. Letting it close was not an option. That was why he was here. That was why he had agreed to go through with this lunacy. This was a place worth saving, because without it, boys like the boy he had been would have nowhere to go.
Lauren was adamant about doing charitable works. Fifty years ago, her family had created a foundation for their charity. The DeVane Foundation employed a dozen staff members, and Lost Springs had been on their list for years. Rob had met Lauren at another Lost Springs fund-raiser, that one a fairly tame charity ball. The DeVanes were acquainted with the Fremonts of Lightning Creek, and Lauren had gone to boarding school with Kitty Fremont and Lindsay Duncan.
It constantly amazed him that Lauren seemed so drawn to him, for they couldn’t be more different. The heiress and the orphan. Oliver Twist and Princess Grace. Every once in a while, Rob felt an unbidden twinge of discomfort. It was hard to define, but the feeling was there, tangible yet hidden, like a pebble in his shoe. Lauren had always been proud of his success and his prospects. But he suspected that deep down she wished he’d been born with real class.
He dismissed the feeling. Sure, they came from different worlds, but they were smart enough to minimize their differences. She was exactly what he had envisioned when the organizers had made him specify the ideal woman for the auction brochure: an “educated city girl with a high-powered, socially responsible career.”
Spying an upswept crown of blond hair in the audience, he felt his heart give a momentary lurch. No, it wasn’t Lauren, but a part of him would have been ridiculously pleased to discover she couldn’t stand for him to be auctioned off to a stranger and had come rushing up here to buy him for herself.
That would have been pure fantasy and so completely unlike Lauren that it was ludicrous.
“Who do you want to bid on you?” Davis asked. “Got any preferences?”
Before he realized what he was doing, Rob looked directly at the back field, where a tall spreading oak tree nodded in the summer breeze. Twyla McCabe stood by the breeze-stirred raffle quilt, hands on her hips, watching the proceedings with mild bemusement. Then he caught himself and focused on the bleachers. “No preference. Like I said, all women are beautiful. It’s for charity, anyway.”
“…do this in alphabetical order, I guess,” the auctioneer was saying. “So, ladies, put your hands together for our first bachelor, Dr. Robert Carter.”
Damn. With jerky, mechanical movements Rob made himself stand. Okay, this was his turn to help out the boys ranch. There was no place for bashfulness or seriousness in this.
From somewhere deep inside, he summoned a wide, welcoming grin and took Lindsay’s hand, gallantly bending over it and lifting it to his lips. A chorus of sighs gusted from the audience, and he laughed.
The auctioneer gave a rundown of Rob’s bio, making him sound a lot more interesting than he was, eliciting oohs and aahs at his achievements in sports and academics. He’d filled his bachelor questionnaire with facts about his pathology lab, but they hadn’t used any of it. Apparently isolating lethal viruses and staving off epidemics wasn’t considered “sexy.”
“And here’s a little something extra, ladies,” the auctioneer said. “He’s got the soul of a poet.”
Rob frowned. Where had that come from?
The auctioneer took out a yellowed piece of wide-ruled writing paper. Rob craned his neck to see. The page was covered in painstakingly neat penciled lettering, and at the top, a gold foil star gleamed. “This was provided by Mrs. Theda Duckworth, former third-grade teacher of Lander Elementary.”
Rob’s mind careered back through the years. He remembered Mrs. Duckworth as stern, down-to-earth, loving. Big on penmanship. But he couldn’t for the life of him recall anything he had written for her.
“It’s something Rob wrote when he was just knee-high to a grasshopper, and here’s what that boy had to say. ‘When I grow up I want to be someone’s daddy. I’m told this is not hard to do, but I don’t know for sure.’”
A ripple of amusement swept the audience. Rob’s grin froze. If this sort of thing was supposed to up the stakes, they were nuts. Who wanted to hear the naive ramblings of a nine-year-old kid?
“‘The father in the family fixes things,’” the auctioneer continued. “‘Mostly the car, but stuff in the yard and the house, too. Every father is real strong. But it takes a mother and the kids to make him into a father. This is something I better think on a lot more.’”
The women in the bleachers laughed and clapped and “awwwed” at the nauseatingly cute story. Rob tried not to let his chagrin show. He tried to appear relaxed and friendly as the auctioneer opened the bidding.
“Who’ll give five hundred dollars for this fine specimen of a man?”
A hand shot up in the bleachers.
“Five hundred dollars, I have five. Who’ll bid six?”
Jeez, Rob thought as the auctioneer droned on. Hadn’t slave auctions been outlawed by Lincoln?
More hands flashed up so quickly he couldn’t tell who was bidding. The bids climbed fast and steep, the women laughing and hollering as they egged one another on.
“Twelve hundred dollars! Do I hear thirteen?”
Rob broke out in a sweat.
His attention darted from one bidder to the next. The denim-shirt girl. The big-hair lady. The mom with two kids. The pregnant woman. A New York-type all in black. The lizard-boots-and-Rolex-watch woman. The silver-haired old lady. Damn, old lady?
Rob wished for a beer. Bad.
The money soared to unreal heights. Nine thousand, ten, twelve. Rex and Lindsay sure knew some freewheeling folks. Denim Shirt kept outbidding Big Hair. One of the Fremonts made a bid. Then there was a lightning exchange between Lizard Boots and Silver Hair.
Rob wondered if praying would help. He caught himself glancing, somewhat desperately, in Twyla’s direction. He found no sympathy there. She rol
led her eyes and laughed at the whole idiotic thing. But it calmed him, somehow, catching her eye. She was like a serene center of sanity in the midst of madness. But she kept laughing at him.
“Going once, going twice, going three times…sold,” the auctioneer barked, “to Sugar Spinelli, right there in the front row!”
Twyla McCabe, who had been laughing, staggered back against her folding table and clapped her hand over her mouth. Even from a distance, Rob could see her face go pale.
His jaw dropped as the winning bidder gave a shout of victory. Thunderous applause sounded. The bidder and her friend stood up and hugged each other. Spangled jogging suits—one pink, one lavender—flashed in the sunlight.
Rob blinked with disbelief. In his wildest dreams, he hadn’t expected this. The highest bidder for his charms…was a gray-haired grandma.
CHAPTER FIVE
ROB FELT COMPLETELY buoyant with relief as he left the dais. Behind him, the auctioneer chose a new victim and started describing his charms while the hooting and hollering of the audience started up again. Rob’s part was over. But he still wanted that beer.
The jogging-suit ladies went to settle up with the auction officials, so he made his way to the concession stand, savoring a cold beer from a keg. Then he took out his phone and dialed Lauren’s number.
When she answered, he couldn’t contain his laughter. “I think you’ve lost me forever.”
“You mean the auction is over? So soon?”
“My part, anyway.”
“So tell me.” He could picture her curling up on her black suede sofa and wished like hell he could curl up with her. “I want to hear everything.”
He took a sip of his beer. “Okay, they made me go first.”
“Because you’re worth the most, darling.”
“Because it was alphabetical,” he said with a wry smile. “Anyway, the bidding went round and round, but you’ll never guess who I ended up with.”
“I don’t want to guess. Just tell me.”