Downhome Darlin' & The Best Man Switch (27 page)

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Authors: Victoria Pade

BOOK: Downhome Darlin' & The Best Man Switch
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Mitzi, who wasn't facing the windows, looked at him in concern. “Is something wrong?” she asked, about to whip around to see for herself.
“No!” Grant yelled, nearly upsetting his juice glass in his effort to distract her from turning.
Of all the people to show up at this particular restaurant, Grant thought wildly. Ted! What was he doing here? He was supposed to be charming Mona and Uncle Truman.
He turned back to Mitzi, stiffly, and tried to smile. “I, uh, just saw someone I recognized, that's all. No big deal.”
Mitzi smiled back. He wasn't sure whether it was her beaming face or the idea of his brother being mere yards away that made his heart keep thumping like a rodent's. “Would you like to say hello?”
“No,” he answered quickly. “I'd like to hear more about advertising.” He asked her a few questions about her work, but out of the corner of his eye he kept seeing Ted.
Once he could even hear Ted laughing, which was the last straw. “Mitzi, would you mind if I ran and made a quick phone call?”
She gave him a look of mock worry, as if she'd somehow offended him. “It's me, right? I've criticized your advertising and now you've had it up to here with me. In fact, you probably wish you'd never heard the word
bridesmaid.”
Grant chuckled. “Really, I just need to make a quick one. To my...stepmother. It's her birthday.”
Mitzi sighed and sent him a warm gooey smile that stabbed him with guilt. “How sweet. Go right ahead.”
Silently vowing to actually be more sweet in the future, Grant got up and dashed past the phones, ducked through the kitchen and exited through the employees' entrance. Then he doubled back around the side of the restaurant and picked his way through the dining hordes and planted himself behind a potted ficus next to where his brother was sitting with a female friend. A very beautiful female friend.
“What are you doing here, Ted?” he asked with a huff.
Confused, Ted straightened and pivoted in all directions in his chair, trying to pin the source of the disembodied voice.
His companion, a very tall, very buxom blonde who looked vaguely familiar, nudged him. “Teddy, I think that tree is talking to you.”
Ted finally spotted Grant. “Grant! What are you doing?”
“That's what I asked you! You're supposed to be at Mona's!”
Ted shrugged sheepishly. “You know Mona, she played right into my rich-boy guilt. The minute I mentioned the sale, she started talking about having been a poor waitress. Maybe I should have done like you and worked through college so I could stand up to people like that.”
“Couldn't you have stayed and tried to talk to her some more?”
“I would have, but I was running out of gas. That woman eats like a bird. Cantaloupe wedges! You can't begrudge me a few crumbs of food after all I've done for you.”
After all he'd done? What had he done? “All I asked was one little favor, and you couldn't even stay put for thirty minutes.”
“Hey,” Ted said in his own defense, “I charmed them in record time. In fact, I charmed them more as you than you ever did as you. And then I got hungry.”
“But did you have to come here?”
“What's the big deal?”
“Mitzi's inside.”
“Oh, no!” Suddenly alert, Ted shuddered as he glanced through the glass window.
“Who's Mitzi?” the blonde asked. Now that she was used to it, she didn't seem to think it at all strange that her breakfast date was talking to a plant.
“I don't want her to see you,” Grant said.
“Well, I don't want to see her either, so we're even,” Ted said, buttering a piece of toast.
Grant searched for a way to coax his brother out of the restaurant. What if Mitzi looked up from her paper and saw Ted out here? “I can't let Mitzi know we're identical twins, or she might realize that we switched places at the wedding rehearsal.”
“Why would she care?”
“Because there are two things she hates, and one of them is dishonesty.”
Ted looked shocked. “You're as honest as a judge.”
That's what Grant used to believe. “She might think I was dishonest if she happened to find out I sent you in my place when I was supposed to be best man at my nearest and dearest friends' wedding.”
Ted nodded slowly. The problem was beginning to sink in. “So what's the other thing she doesn't like?”
“Workaholics.”
Ted snorted. “You're screwed.”
“I'm not a workaholic,” Grant protested. “Well, you might think so, but you think everyone who sets their alarm clock in the morning is going overboard.”
Ted puffed up proudly. “I'll have you know that I did an important bit of work for you this morning. You were about to muck up the whole works, but I rescued you.”
Oh no. Grant's heart sank. Ted to the rescue had a definitely ominous ring. “What did you do?”
“You were about to blow off that Joy Moreland chick Mona's so hot about,” Ted gloated, “so I set you up with her for Thursday night.”
A horrified yelp escaped Grant's lips, so that half the restaurant turned to stare at the ficus. More quietly, he said, “You did what?”
“I set you up on a play date, bro,” Ted explained. “Thursday night. Don't forget to ask me for Joy's number.”
Mitzi was here for less than a week, and now he was going to spend one precious night squiring around some dimwit department-store heiress? No way. He would have to think of some way to call off the date by Thursday. Of course, by Thursday Mitzi might want to have nothing to do with him, especially if he didn't hightail it back to their table.
“Could you please just get a take-out box for that breakfast?” He reached into his wallet and pulled out forty bucks. “Here, it's on me.”
Ted had a healthy appreciation for money. “Thanks, bro. Veronique and I'll be out of here in two shakes.”
Veronique?
Grant quickly retraced his steps to Mitzi. When he approached their table, she was putting something in that huge bag she toted with her everywhere. Probably a lipstick or something.
“Sorry about that.” He looked into Mitzi's eyes and forced himself to relax. Ted was gone. Nothing else could go wrong now. “Where were we?”
His cell phone jangled. Grant froze.
“Isn't that you?” Mitzi stared at the jacket hanging on the back of his chair.
It took the control of every muscle in his body not to pounce on the call immediately, as was his custom. What had Mitzi been complaining about yesterday?
The kind of man who couldn't make it through a meal without checking his messages.
Would she think he was one of those pathetic creatures?
Was he?
“Aren't you going to answer that?” she asked.
That was all the permission he needed. He whipped his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out the phone. “Hello?”
“Whiting!” The booming voice of Horace Moreland bellowed tinnily through the little handset. “Where have you been? I've been trying you at the store all morning.”
Grant sent Mitzi a long-suffering smile, then replied, “It is Sunday morning. You know, the day of rest?”
“Rest!” the man shouted in disgust. “I've never known you to rest before. That how you intend to make your millions, son?” Earlier in life, Horace had made a bumpy transition from United States marine to retail magnate, and hadn't worked out the chinks yet. “You can't capture a beachhead by sleeping in!”
“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
“D
OES 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.

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