He raised his eyebrows and sent her what had to be the world's sexiest grin. “You're really stuck on that fling thing, aren't you?”
Mitzi felt a shriek building in her throat and just managed to stifle it.
Don't make a scene. You promised Kay.
She turned, hunting for an empty spot at a table. As luck would have it, there was an open chair near the bride. She let out a frustrated breath, gripped her overloaded plate and headed toward her friend. She had a bone to pick with Kay, who had, after all, thrown her together with Grant Whiting to begin with.
The bone, however, would go forever unpicked. In the next moment, as Mitzi thrust one leg purposefully forward, the ball of her foot, encased in its green satin pump with a new slick sole, hit the thin, nearly translucent slice of cucumber she had so nervously flung to the floor moments before. The foot flew out from under her, and before she knew what was happening, Mitzi was airborne.
She felt Grant's hand grab her arm firmly, but the gesture was too late to pull her back. Worse, as Grant stepped toward her, he stepped in the residue of oil and spices in which that tasty, pesky cucumber slice had been marinated, and skated after her, wobbling and thrusting his hand out in huge crazy loops to regain his equilibrium.
But it was too late for him, too. Any efforts they made to right themselves were doomed. In fact,
doom
might be a good word to sum up her first twenty-four hours in Austin, Mitzi thought the split second before she and Grant hit the floor in a spectacular crash of well-dressed bodies, broken china and finger food.
“I TOLD YOU she was bad news,” Ted lectured.
Grant limped to the other side of the pool table in order to get a better shot. His leg was still stiff from his fall that afternoon. “But you didn't tell me she was gorgeous.” He sent Ted's four ball scudding into the corner pocket.
Ted frowned. He had only one ball left, and it was smack in the middle of the table. The eight ball was miles away. He was hosed. Losing didn't make him feel any more kindly toward that Mitzi person. “You call her gorgeous?” he asked in disbelief. “That beast?”
Grant rolled his eyes. Twins they were, but thank heavens their taste in women wasn't identical. To put it kindly, Ted didn't exactly go for the brainy type. To Ted, Susan B. Anthony was right up there with the infamous villains of history.
“She's not a beast, she's a babe, to coin one of your expressions.” Grant remembered flowing dark hair, a body to die for and those eyes, and felt a sigh building. It had been a long time since a woman had affected him that way. Mitzi talked so brash and cynical, but her eyes seemed like windows to a sweet, deep soul. And her body...she moved with an intriguing combination of lilting grace and girlish awkwardness that made her seem blithely unaware of her appeal. Boys had probably teased her about her height. But all Grant could think about was how it might feel to be entwined in those arms and legs, looking into those soulful green eyes...
“Earth to Grant!” Ted barked.
Grant shook his head, shook away thoughts of Mitzi. For a moment, at least.
“Good grief! This woman hasn't gotten under your skin, has she?” Ted looked aghast.
Grant wasn't pleased himself. “No,” he said, scratching his nose subtly to make sure it wasn't growing. “For heaven's sake, I've only seen her once.”
“Once is too much with her.”
“She just caught me off guard, is all.”
His brother laughed. “Tripped you up, you might say.”
Grant grimaced and happily sank Ted's last ball. “You didn't help things,” he said. “I thought I could trust you with a simple task of behaving normally at a wedding rehearsal.”
“It put an end to the matchmaking, didn't it?”
“Of course! No one wants to be matched with a man who would make Ivan the Terrible seem like a knight-errant.”
Ted looked almost proud. “So there. Mission accomplished.”
“Did you have to torment the poor woman?”
Ted's breath caught in defense. “Poor woman?” he squeaked, gesturing with his cue to the bruise on his jaw. “Look at this! Look at you,” he ranted, pointing to Grant's leg. “We're the victims here.”
Though Grant had assured Ted that his own accident hadn't been caused by Mitzi but rather by a marinated cucumber slice, his brother refused to believe him. “You think all women are Eve in disguise.”
Ted's eyebrows knit together. “Eve who?”
Grant rolled his eyes. “Eve from Adam and Eve, you dumb cluck.”
His brother puffed up in mock offense. “Hey, don't ride me. That's a long book. I never got that far into it.”
The trouble was, a year ago, when his marriage had blown up in his face like a trick cigar, Grant wondered whether Ted wasn't right to remain ever-vigilant. Janice had deceived him so thoroughly, he wasn't sure that all women weren't like her. Funny how the minute he'd looked into Mitzi's eyes, his brother's training had flown out the window.
The long-suppressed sigh finally issued from his lips.
“Grant, snap out of it,” Ted said, putting away their cues. “It's over. Poor Mitzi will be fine, and at the end of the week she'll fly back to where she belongs and the whole incident will be forgotten.”
“It's not the incident I'm worried about.”
It was Mitzi. She was going to be at Kay's all alone for a week, in a strange city. Would she call him if she was in trouble? They hadn't parted on the best of terms. Not that he hadn't tried to smooth things over, but after she'd been extracted from the buffet debris, she didn't look eager for his company.
“I forgot to tell her to ask me if she needed anything,” he said aloud, taking up the Good Samaritan pose with gusto.
Ted groaned. “You're not going to call her, are you?”
Grant thought about it, then shook his head. She'd probably slam the phone back down the minute she heard his voice.
“Put it behind you,” Ted counseled. “You've got enough on your plate with the buyout bid, remember?” He looked worried, as if he didn't feel comfortable having his brother distracted from business, which was understandable. That might mean he would actually have to do some work.
Grant himself was startled that he had forgotten about the store for even a day. Then again, maybe that's why he'd been so taken with Mitzi. He had been so obsessed with staving off Moreland, naturally his brain wanted a rest. She was just a diversion from his troubles. She was just...
Adorable.
He glanced unseeingly at his watch. It could be eight o'clock or one in the morning for all he knew. “I'd better head home,” he said quickly. “It's been a long day, what with the wedding and reception and everything.”
Surprisingly, Ted followed him out to the parking lot. Usually he would linger at Tom's, one of his favorite haunts, to nurse a beer. “Are you sure you're okay?” he asked, looking genuinely concerned.
Grant stopped at his car. “Sure. Fine.” As if to reassure him, he forced a smile and said, “I'll see you at work tomorrow.”
Ted appeared more alarmed than ever. “Tomorrow's Sunday. Don't you remember? You were going to have brunch with Mona and Truman tomorrow. To talk to them about the buyout.”
“Of course, of course,” Grant said. “I'll probably go into work tomorrow, too.”
Maybe he should go there right now. Get his thoughts together.
But when he pulled his car out of the parking lot, he knew he wasn't headed for the store, or even home. Without making a conscious decision to, he was driving to Kay's house, where Mitzi was staying. Just to check up on her, he told himself.
He felt strange, out of control. Maybe this was what spontaneity felt like.
A short while later, Grant reached Kay's street. Hers was a corner house, nestled on a dark, quiet street. Grant parked one house down and strolled up the walkway, wondering what the hell he was doing.
But then he came upon the house, so thoroughly and brightly lit that it practically glowed. And when he looked inside the large picture window and saw her, every self-protective reflex he'd developed since Janice left him vanished.
Watching Mitzi, he had to take a deep breath, so deep he nearly became dizzy from the thick night air. She was wearing a slouchy T-shirt and jeans, but somehow he'd never appreciated just what a pair of faded dungarees hugging just the right derriere could do to a man. Her legs looked even longer and more amazing than they had appeared in his imagination. A clip held her hair back loosely, but a strand or two spilled out of its confines, making his fingers fairly twitch to reach across the yard, through the windowpane and across Kay's living room to put them to rights again.
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 Iâ” 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
“W
E 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 againâmore sincerely than Grantâand 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 couldn'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 trampolinesâall that family stuffâwith 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 typesâyou 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.