Too Sexy For Marriage

by Cathie Linz

  “He gets real huffy if I try and correct his bad manners. He says I should accept him and appreciate him and I shouldn’t be so disapproving.”

  “Well, some experts say men act this way regarding criticism from the women they care about because it makes them insecure. Try telling him how sexy you find guys who have good manners and see where that gets you, Sue. And next we have Val from Vernon Hills. You’re on the air.”

  “Yeah, well, your earlier caller was talking about private investigators. I’m having my boyfriend investigated and I was wondering if he’s going to be upset. I mean, what if he finds out?”

  “What made you hire an investigator?”

  “My boyfriend would disappear for a week at a time and not tell me where he was. At first I tried to check him out myself by getting this book, Be Your Own Dick. But my boyfriend saw the cover and thought it was some kind of perverted sex-therapy book.” Through the booth window, Heather watched as Miguel choked on his coffee. “I got it away from him before he could check it out. But then I hired a professional.”

  “Good luck, Val, and what can I say?” This time Heather chose the sound of a gong. “Sometimes these things are best left to the professionals. That wraps up today’s version of Love on the Rocks, where we keep those relationships stirred, not shaken.”

  Miguel, still wiping tears of mirth from his face, added their sign-off of ice cubes hitting the sides of a glass.

  Taking off her headset, Heather leaned forward to rest her forehead against the edge of the console table. Talk about a wild afternoon! And she had yet to speak to Bud.

  She considered banging her head against the table, but opted for sitting up and gathering her pile of notes and articles on relationships. If there weren’t enough callers, she always wanted to be prepared to discuss some element of romantic relationships, and there were new books or articles being written daily. A lack of callers hadn’t been the problem today.

  The problem today was calling off the bet. The sooner the better. She had to reach Bud before his show started an hour from now. She found him in the break room, where he was making a mess of a Reuben sandwich in between puffs on his stogey.

  “Bud, this is a smoke-free building,” she reminded him, squinting and wrinkling her nose.

  “Go tell it to the exhaust police,” Bud replied, laughing at his own joke. “You think you’re the only one who knows how to be funny? Hah!”

  Waving her hand in front of her face to ward off the stink of his cigar, she reluctantly sat at the table with him. “We need to talk, Bud. About the bet.”

  “What about it?” His voice was muffled because he had almost half of the Reuben sandwich in his mouth.

  “I think we should call it off.”

  “You mean you’re admitting you lost?”

  “No, I’m not admitting I lost. I’m saying we should call it a draw and end the bet now. It was stupid to begin with.”

  Nita must have spread the word about what Heather was planning to do, because within another minute the break room was filled with people—Linda, Connie, Miguel and many others. What Heather had hoped would be a private discussion showed signs of turning into a High Noon shootout.

  “Stupid,” Bud exclaimed. “Hah! If it was so stupid why did all these people put good money on the wager?”

  “I’m not going to argue with you, Bud.”

  “That’ll be a first for a woman.”

  “Come on, just let me have one crack at him,” Nita begged from the sidelines.

  “If you didn’t snag Jason Knight, you lose and I win. It’s as simple as that.” Bud puffed out his chest. “You girls need to learn how to accept defeat like a man instead of acting like a bunch of whining broads.”

  He waved his cigar at Heather and crowed. “You a specialist on romance? Come on! You don’t know the first thing about men. I can tell you why you lost this bet. Because when it came right down to it, you weren’t woman enough to put out.”

  “Oh, I can put out, all right.” Taking his putrid cigar out of his hand, Heather extinguished it in his coffee mug. “There. That’s put out. As I said before, this is a smoke-free building.”

  “What’s going on in here?” Bev asked as she entered the room.

  “We were just discussing the fact that a certain bet is being called a draw and everyone’s money will be returned to them,” Heather replied.

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” Bev agreed.

  “That’s because you were losing,” Nita muttered.

  “Shush,” Heather whispered from beside her. “You’ve still got everyone’s money, right?”

  “Well, there was this great sale at Nordstroms…” Seeing the panicked look on Heather’s face, Nita quickly added, “I was only kidding. I’ve got the money. You guys will take a check, right?”

  “I want cash,” Bud stated.

  “Fine. I’ll go to the ATM downstairs.”

  “With a group of us. I wouldn’t want you welching on a bet by taking off.” He glared at Nita.

  “I’m not the welcher, you are,” Nita retorted.

  Bud smirked at her. “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

  “Speaking of pants on fire, how was that dip in the lake, Bud? I didn’t think the beaches officially opened until Memorial Day.”

  Nita and Bud were still arguing as they left the room, with most of the rest of the staff trailing behind them like lemmings.

  “I’m glad to see that everyone is taking this so well,” Bev noted wryly as she watched them go.

  “I wasn’t trying to cause trouble,” Heather said, feeling miserable. This was all her fault. If she hadn’t agreed to that stupid bet none of this would have happened. She would never have met Jason, would never have fallen for him. She was already missing him terribly after only one day.

  Bev patted her shoulder. “I know you weren’t trying to cause trouble. No hard feelings about my betting on Bud, right?”

  “No hard feelings,” Heather agreed. Her feelings were all reserved for Jason, and they showed no signs of abating. But she was determined to overcome them.

  “I THOUGHT YOU SAID everything was under control with these two.” Wrapping her arms across her ample bosom, Muriel added a disapproving sniff for good measure as she sat atop the fridge in the corner of the conference room.

  “It would be under control if either of them had the sense God gave a goose,” Betty irritably retorted from beside her.

  “It’s the common sense a godmother gave a triplet baby. And you’re the one who gave Jason too much,” Hattie noted while rearranging the pillbox hat she wore.

  Betty looked like she wanted to clunk her sister with her magic wand. “That had nothing to do with them breaking up, Miss Smarty-pants. Heather is the one messing up my plans. How could I know that she’d get a fit of conscience?”

  “It’s not Heather’s fault we made her accept that bet,” Hattie said in her defense. “Or that we made that cab stop in front of Jason’s nightclub.”

  “It’s a jazz club,” Muriel impatiently reminded her.

  “And then we interfered again with the rain…”

  “Rain?” Muriel interjected. “That was a monsoon! Half a dozen waterspouts sprang up on the lake before I got them under control.”

  “You’re just jealous because I got to do the weather magic and you didn’t,” Hattie retorted.

  Now Betty looked like she wanted to clobber both her squabbling sisters. “This bickering isn’t getting us anywhere. We need to focus on what we’re going to do next.”

  “You don’t think we’ve done enough already?” Hattie nervously fingered the tiers of organdy ruffles on her lemon yellow dress while nibbling on the tip of her color-coordinated magic wand. “You know we’re not supposed to interfere.”

  “Uniting someone with their soul mate is sure tougher than it sounds,” Betty stated irritably.

  “So is being fairy godmothers to triplets.” Reaching inside the largest of the many pockets in her photographer�
��s vest, Muriel pulled out an issue of USA Today. “This article says that there’s a boom in triplet births, like we didn’t know this already? I haven’t gotten a full night’s sleep in decades.”

  Ignoring her, Betty said, “I’ll give them a week. If they don’t come to their senses by then, I’ll just have to step in.”

  “Oh, my stars!” Hattie nervously nibbled once more on her magic wand, leaving teeth marks this time. “We’re not supposed to do that. I mean, making it rain is one thing, but what about the rules?”

  Betty shrugged. “Rules were made to be broken.”

  “We’ve already broken everything else,” Muriel acknowledged while smothering a tired yawn. “I suppose we might as well add rules to the list.”

  JASON DIDN’T EAT at this restaurant very often because it was too far from the courthouse. But he’d gotten an urgent call to meet the district attorney here, so he’d come.

  Maybe this was about his promotion. Despite the momentary distraction of that wild woman with the lettered eyelids and hair in the courtroom, Jason had gone on to make a convincing and succinct closing argument. The jury had finally come back with a guilty verdict.

  Thinking about distractions naturally got Jason thinking about Heather. He could have sworn that she was as honest as the day was long. And he was sure she’d wanted him. Why else would she have responded to him the way she had? Her response didn’t indicate she wanted someone else. Was she on the rebound?

  He wasn’t the kind of man to waste time daydreaming about a woman. He was too practical for that. When he wanted a woman, she was usually his for the taking.

  But there was nothing ordinary about Heather. At first glance there was nothing special about her. But her voice had made him take a second glance that first time they’d met at Muddy’s. And he’d liked what he saw.

  His previous relationships had been tidy and convenient. Not wild and passionate. He wasn’t accustomed to dealing with women who ended up ankledeep in key lime pie and tried to take him on a Ferris wheel ride. Heather’s joy for life made him wonder what he’d been missing all these years.

  He knew he was already missing her. And he wanted her back, wanted her more than ever. She’d been like a breath of fresh air in his orderly life.

  When he heard her voice, he thought it was coming from a radio somewhere. Then he realized it was coming from the other side of the tall planter separating his booth from the next. Her agitated voice carried through the thick proliferation of leaves.

  “I told you that bet was a bad idea,” Heather was saying.

  Another woman replied, “You could have won that bet and snagged Chicago’s Sexiest Bachelor if you hadn’t gotten cold feet.”

  Snagged? Jason felt the icy chill of anger envelop him as the blood froze in his veins. Someone had bet Heather that she couldn’t snag the city’s sexiest bachelor? He remembered her asking him about how he felt about betting. He hadn’t thought anything about it at the time, but now…

  “You already accomplished steps one and two, dinner out and in-line skating,” the woman continued. “The only thing you had left to do was making out on the Ferris wheel, and you were on the verge of doing that when that rainstorm hit and shut everything down.”

  Jason remembered all too clearly Heather’s insistence that they head over to Navy Pier and the Ferris wheel. He’d thought it an example of her spontaneous nature. Instead it was an example of her deviousness.

  All this time he’d been thinking that Heather was different from the women who saw him as a hunk of raw meat. He thought she had something to teach him about life. Oh, she’d taught him, all right—that he was an idiot and that she was a liar. It wasn’t a lesson he was about to forget. Or forgive.

  “Instead you and Jason go back to your place and make out on your couch, which may have been great for you, but it didn’t mean diddly-squat as far as the bet was concerned,” the other woman was saying.

  Jason couldn’t stomach anymore. He’d been set up, in more ways than one. Had Heather laughed when she’d talked to her cohort about the intimate details of what had taken place on her couch?

  Another thought occurred to him. Did Heather have something to do with him being at this restaurant? Had she wanted him to hear her bragging about snagging him to her sister in crime?

  The only reason Jason was here was because he’d gotten a message on his voice mail supposedly from the D.A. with a request to meet him here for lunch. Only his boss never showed. Now he knew why.

  Had he been a betting man, he would have bet that the D.A. had never made that call. But Jason wasn’t a betting man. And he wasn’t a man who forgave deception easily. He hated being made a fool of. Hated it with an intensity caused by years of being the butt of his brother Ryan’s practical jokes.

  Tossing enough bills on the table to cover his check he stalked out of the restaurant. Instead of a business lunch he’d ended up getting an unpalatable helping of reality.

  The second shoe dropped when he got home later that night to find his father waiting for him…with an overnight bag beside him.

  8

  JASON WARILY EYED his dad and the incriminating suitcase. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Your mother and I had a fight.”

  Jason swore under his breath as he belatedly recalled that he’d forgotten to speak to his father, as he’d promised Anastasia he would.

  His father had gained some weight since retiring from the Chicago Transit Authority a few months back, and his thick hair was now entirely white, but Tom Knight was still a formidable figure of a man. As a kid, Jason had thought his dad looked just like a picture of Zeus he’d seen in a book at the library. Tom also had a great hook shot and a belly laugh to rival Santa’s, but he wasn’t laughing at the moment. “You don’t mind if I stay here tonight, do you?” his dad continued, shoving up the sleeves of his Chicago Bulls sweatshirt.

  “Sure. I mean no, I don’t mind. Sure you can stay. Uh…” Jason didn’t know what to say. His parents argued, but never to this extreme before, never to the point of having an overnight bag packed. Although he’d never felt comfortable discussing emotional issues with his father, he felt he had to make the offer. “You want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  Relief shot through Jason. He wanted to help his dad but with the way his luck was running lately, he’d no doubt just screw things up even more. “Okay.” Opening the door to the loft, Jason ushered his father in ahead of him. “Did you eat dinner?”

  “Not yet, no.” Tom dropped to the couch with a sigh, wincing when it didn’t give way with the same softness as his favorite recliner at home. Jason had offered to buy him a new chair, but his dad had refused, saying there was plenty of life left in the old one yet. He’d said the same thing when Jason had offered to buy his parents a condo.

  “You want Chinese or pizza?”

  “Chinese, but nothing too spicy. Heartburn, you know.”

  Jason nodded and reached for the phone book he’d left on the coffee table. “Right.”

  “Not that your mother helped my digestion any by siding with that woman on the radio.”

  Jason stopped in his tracks, the phone book dangling from his hands. “What woman?”

  “That Love on the Rocks woman. She said men don’t communicate.”

  Jason frowned, trying to keep up with his dad’s rambling story. “Mom said that?”

  “No, the radio woman did, but your mother agreed with her. Said I never talk to her. Things escalated from there. You know your mother. She’s got a temper.”

  “Yes, but she’s never kicked you out before.”

  “She didn’t kick me out,” his dad denied indignantly. “I just said I wanted some peace and quiet to watch the Bulls game. Told her I’d come here to watch it with you. Then she said ‘While you’re there you might as well stay the night because I don’t want you coming back here and grunting at me.’ Grunting. Can you believe it? She claims I sound like that guy from the movies.”
/>   “Billy Bob Thornton?”

  His dad scowled at him. “How did you know which actor I meant? Has your mother been talking to you about me?”

  “No.” Jason knew the actor’s name because he’d noted the similarities, too, as far as grunting went. Even so, that was no reason for his mom to react the way she had, and she probably wouldn’t have reacted that way if Heather hadn’t gotten her all riled up.

  Heather had a way of stirring up trouble. The woman should be banned from the airwaves. And she should be banned from public restaurants as well. Disasters seemed to follow her like night followed day. She’d waltzed into his life and created havoc. She’d made a fool out of him. She’d kissed him with a mind-blowing passion that totally rattled him and then tossed him out on his ear with a pile of lies.

  Enough was enough. It was time to turn the tables on her for a change, see how she liked having her life turned upside down. Time for him to use this supposed sex appeal of his to regain control of the situation—and make Heather rue the day she’d ever decided to try and “snag” him.

  “OOPS, HATTIE MURMURED as she perched on top of Jason’s entertainment center.

  “I don’t believe this!” Muriel was pacing across the track lighting fastened on the wall. “We turn our backs for one second and this happens.”

  “Well, we can’t be expected to watch over them every moment of the day. I mean, we do have other triplets that need our attention.”

  Betty, who was slumped over a chrome piece of sculpture that matched her dejected demeanor, spoke for the first time. “I thought it was so clever to arrange it so Jason and Heather would both appear at the restaurant. I thought they’d see each other and come to their senses. How was I to know that Heather would take it into her head to drag Nita along at the last second? Or that the two of them would then blab about the bet?”

  “It was clever,” Hattie reassured her. “But I do confess to being concerned about this thirst for revenge Jason has. What are you doing, Muriel?”

  “Counting the days until our retirement.” She used her magic wand to flip through the calendar pages too fast for even a fairy godmother to see. “Only 2,643 months to go. I can’t wait”