Feeding the Fire (7 page)

“I doubt they’ll share a room,” Blake muttered.

“First up,” Allison announced, “Bert Swenson!”

Bert stepped out onto the stage wearing his best black suit and a crimson red tie. His thinning gray hair was slicked back and he’d trimmed his beard to a chic, less wooly length. The older man strutted down the runway as Allison described his major selling points and reminded the audience about his plans of an evening cruise.

Pepper noted a low murmur running through the crowd as Bert reached the end of the runway. Clutching a bouquet of red carnations in one hand, he flexed his biceps with the other.

“Take it off, Bert!” A loud catcall rang out from the back of the room, followed by a rumble of laughter. Apparently he was a favorite with the ladies tonight.

Bert didn’t disappoint, slipping out of his suit coat and slinging it over his shoulder with a seductive arch of his eyebrow. He was really playing this up.

“All right, ladies, let’s get the bidding started. I’ll take the first bid of one hundred dollars!”

Pepper watched a paddle shoot up to her right.

“Two hundred!” a woman shouted from the back.

“Five hundred.”

Pepper turned in time to see Miss Vera thrust her paddle into the air. “One thousand!” she shouted.

A murmur ran through the room, followed by several seconds of silence. Go Vera, Pepper thought.

“Two thousand!”

Every head in the room turned to see Estelle Townsend, the owner of the local bakery, with her paddle raised. She smiled and gave Vera a smug look.

“Three thousand,” Vera snapped without blinking.

“Four!”

The announcer was stunned by the pricey battle. Bert, too, seemed surprised, and a little pleased, to have women fighting over him.

“Five,” Vera said, her voice deadly cold.

At this point, the room had gone eerily silent. Everyone was waiting to see what Estelle would do. Five thousand dollars was crazy. Pepper couldn’t believe it could possibly go higher, but she imagined there was more going on than just a charity bachelor auction. Those two women were going after each other like old rivals and Bert was just the latest prize to fight over.

“Five thousand from the lady in the pink! Do I hear fifty-five hundred? Five thousand going once?”

“Seven. Thousand. Dollars,” Estelle shouted.

Like a tennis tournament, everyone turned back to Vera. She had visibly paled at Estelle’s bold bid. Swallowing hard, her lips pressed into a thin line of irritation. She shook her head, tucking her paddle away. “She can have him!”

Before anyone could change their mind, Allison wrapped up the bidding for Bert at an astounding seven thousand dollars. That certainly heaped an enormous amount of pressure on all the bachelors who came after him.

The rest of the auction wasn’t as exciting. Brian Green, Pepper’s date to the eighties prom last fall, went for eight hundred dollars to one of the elementary-school teachers. Mack, the divorced fire chief, went for twelve hundred to Cheryl Buckman, who ran the ice-cream parlor Scoops. Pepper’s brother, Logan, earned an even thousand from a teller at the bank. Lastly, Simon got a five-hundred-dollar pity bid from Lydia Whittaker and no one outbid her. Poor Simon, Pepper thought. He’d be spending Valentine’s Day with a harpy, but at least she’d be happy. She finally landed a Chamberlain.

After a while, Pepper started looking forward to the end of the night in the hopes that Vera might jump Estelle in the parking lot and she could catch it on her camera phone. That was way more interesting than any other love connections happening this evening.

“We’ve come to our last bachelor of the night,” Allison announced about an hour and a half later. “That’s right, ladies, it’s that bad boy with the big, shiny Harley, the one and only Grant Chamberlain.”

Grant stepped out from behind the curtain to a roar of applause. The minute the lights hit him, Pepper felt her heart skip a beat in her chest like she’d been hit with paddles of a defibrillator. He was wearing a black, slim-fit suit with a black shirt and tie. Even though he was indoors and it was nighttime, he was wearing his trademark Ray-Ban sunglasses. The glasses always seemed to accent the square line of his jaw and the sharp angle of his nose.

His full lips curled into his charming smile, with the slightest hint of a dimple visible on his cheek. It reminded her of him looking at her, just like that, from between her trembling thighs.

Damn him for being so sexy. His confidence made him that much more attractive. And frustrating. And irritating. Her fingers itched to reach for her paddle, but she resisted. She wasn’t going to pay for his time, even when he smiled at her that way.

“The lucky lady with the winning bid will go with Grant to a romantic dinner at Brio’s in Birmingham and if she likes, he’ll take her on an exhilarating ride down a windy country road on the back of his motorcycle.”

Pepper could almost see all the wild fantasies rushing through the heads of every woman in the room. It was a nice thought—hair blowing in the wind, thighs clamped around Grant’s narrow hips, arms wrapped around his waist. Even she could imagine the hard feel of his abs beneath the thin cotton of his T-shirt and the vibration of the engine against her most sensitive parts. There was a rumble of approval as they readied their paddles and sized up their competition.

Good luck to them, Pepper thought.

“This sexy Chamberlain is a chip off the ol’ block. Let’s cut to the chase and start the bidding at a thousand. I can tell from here that this young stud is worth every penny.”

At her bold assessment, Grant turned to look at the MC with wide-eyed surprise, but he didn’t get long to react. The bidding had begun.

Like a beach ball bouncing around the room, the bids flew fast and furious. Unlike Bert, who had two determined bidders, there were fifteen or so women bidding in smaller increments. It still shot up to quite the amount, though. Before long, they’d topped three thousand.

Suddenly Pepper felt awkward. Even though she and Grant weren’t dating, she didn’t exactly want to sit around and watch other women battle for him. Looking around the room, she spied Adelia Chamberlain coming back to her table with a glass of ice water. Maybe another drink would help. Or perhaps it was the right time for a restroom break. She could beat all the other women who would rush the ladies’ room when the auction ended.

Pepper slipped her purse onto her shoulder and picked up her paddle so she could dump it in the bathroom trash can. “I’m going to get some air,” she whispered to Ivy, then started to get up.

The ambush was sudden and unexpected. When they first came in, Pepper had noticed the cable that the A/V people had taped to the floor, but the room was much darker now. Adelia didn’t see it and caught the toe of her shoe on it. She didn’t fall, thank goodness, but she did stumble, slinging her full glass of ice water into Pepper’s lap.

With a cry of surprise and alarm, Pepper leapt out of her chair, holding her arms high to avoid the water that practically covered her from neck to knees.

“Four thousand!” Allison Price announced from the stage.

The MC’s words were an even larger shock to Pepper than the water. She turned her head toward Grant and the action onstage. He was looking straight at her with a wide smile of confidence across his face. He winked at her, and Pepper felt her stomach sink into her boot. Allison was pointing in Pepper’s direction, trying to coax a higher bid out of the audience.

Yes, please, she screamed in her head. Make it forty-five hundred. Hell, make it four thousand and one penny. Just outbid her. She was answered with deafening silence. The only one in the room making a sound was Allison up onstage. It seemed that suddenly, all the battling women had given up. Even Grant wasn’t worth that much, and she agreed.

“No!” Pepper shouted, but there was no stopping it.

“Going once . . . going twice . . .”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Sold! To the lady in the blue sweater, paddle twenty-two!”

Pepper looked down at her dark blue sweater, suddenly made even darker by the spreading water mark. Her damned paddle, the one she never wanted to begin with, was still in her hand. She watched as it slipped from her fingers, clattering to the ground in slow motion as the gravity of the situation caught up with her. Four thousand dollars. She’d just bid four thousand dollars. Because of well-aimed ice water.

“Oh, Pepper,” Miss Adelia fussed, dabbing her with an inadequate cocktail napkin and shaking off the well-meaning hands of the folks who were more concerned about the older woman nearly falling. “I am so sorry. I didn’t even see that silly cord,” she said. “Is your dress okay?”

She couldn’t respond. Not to the people patting her shoulder, not to Adelia, not even to Ivy. All Pepper could do was close her eyes and try to keep the tears of frustration and aggravation from rushing down her cheeks.

How long had she saved to work on her house? Her vacation started today and the work was supposed to begin in earnest tomorrow. She’d have to call and cancel the electrician. With only a thousand dollars, she’d be hard-pressed to get any serious work done. Maybe some Sheetrock work. Maybe all she could do was get the bedroom floor reinforced. She could buy some paint and some caulk. But she was as far from her goal as she was when she bought the run-down old house.

She was never going to get out of her livbedoset.

“Winning bidders, please report backstage to meet with your bachelors and pay the cashier. Thanks to everyone who joined us tonight for a great cause.”

People started getting up and exiting the gymnasium, but Pepper couldn’t move her feet. All she could do was stand there, freezing cold, and watch everything she had planned slip through her fingers.

“Pepper, are you okay? We’ll figure something out, all right? Like I said, I’ll loan you the money. No problem.”

She could hear Ivy’s voice, but she knew if she opened her mouth to answer, she’d cry in front of half the town. She couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t. Just like she wouldn’t borrow money from Ivy. It would hurt her pride way too much.

Instead, she shook her head, bringing one trembling hand up to cover her mouth. She took a deep breath, hoping the calming powers would make her feel better about what just happened, but it was pointless.

She had just paid four thousand dollars for a date with Grant Chamberlain.

Chapter Six

When the auction ended, Grant returned to the backstage area they had set up for bachelors and their winners. The other men were gathered around the ten or so high-top cocktail tables that were draped with red tablecloths and had small centerpieces of flowers and candles in the center.

“Four thousand!” Simon shouted, and most of the other men applauded. Logan was the exception, glaring at him from the back of the room as though Grant had any control about whether his sister bid on him.

“I didn’t beat Bert, though,” Grant replied as he slapped the older man on the back. “You’re an old dog, Bert.”

Bert smiled sheepishly and shrugged. “Who knew?”

“Well, you did better than me. There was a second there when I thought no one would bid at all,” Simon complained.

“That’s just because you’re young, Simon,” Bert said. “The ladies in town feel dirty bidding on a youngster such as yourself. They’re friends with your mama.”

“Who ended up winning you, Simon?” Mack asked.

“Lydia,” he groaned. “My brother Blake’s stalker paid five hundred bucks for me. I feel like a consolation prize.”

A couple of the men laughed, and eventually Simon cracked a smile, too. “Now I have to spend a whole weekend in Chattanooga with her! She’s awful.”

“At least she’s pretty,” Grant said, trying to make him feel better. “She’ll look good on your arm, and maybe the other girls in town will pay you more notice if they think a woman like Lydia was into you.”

Gloria Everett, the Rosewood principal and member of the Tornado Fund committee, rushed backstage, clipboard and cashbox in hand. “Gentleman, your attention! Your lucky ladies will be coming back here momentarily. This is your chance to chat with them, charm them, and make them glad they’re paying all that money for you. We have a rose for each of you to give your winner. Please pick one up from the container over here.”

Grant walked over and examined the roses. They were in an assortment of colors. Red was the obvious choice, so he plucked a peach-colored rose with hot pink tips. The peach color reminded him of her skin and the pink color, of her lips and the flush on her cheeks. He wished he could drag the rose’s silky petals slowly across her bare skin. Perhaps he’d get the chance, considering how much she’d paid for him.

He’d been surprised, really. Stunned. Considering she’d pepper sprayed him a week ago, he was beginning to wonder if maybe he’d been wrong about her. He knew she wanted him, he could see it in her reactions to him. She always flushed when he came near, her breath coming rapid and shallow, her pupils dilated just enough to make her look wide-eyed and innocent. The night they spent together, she responded to him easily, every touch met with a gasp of pleasure. But Pepper was fighting with herself. He’d been confident that eventually he could address any reservations she had.

Now, maybe that wasn’t necessary. It was hard for him to see the crowd from the stage with all the lights in his eyes, but he saw Pepper leap out of her chair and raise her paddle high in the air. It was an enthusiastic movement, not the timid bid of a woman who wasn’t sure this was what she wanted.

Thank goodness. If any woman could bid on him tonight and win, he’d wanted it to be Pepper, but he knew she didn’t have a lot of money to waste on that sort of thing. Maybe she’d decided to support the good cause. He hated the idea of spending Valentine’s Day alone, and maybe she did as well.

“Now, if they ask,” Gloria continued, “we take cash, checks, and credit cards for their payments, but they do have to pay tonight.”

Just then, the curtains parted and twelve women made their way backstage. Grant broke into his brightest, most charming smile and clutched the rose to present to Pepper.

All the other women flowed past him, greeting their bachelors with hugs and muted laughter. Then there was Pepper. She was the last of the women, and nowhere near the most enthusiastic. Her face was far from the peachy tone that inspired the rose; it was red, blotchy, and tear-streaked. There was also a large dark stain down the front of her sweater.

Grant frowned. This was not the reception he was expecting at all.

Pepper stopped at the table where he was standing and dropped her purse unceremoniously onto it. Without so much as greeting him, she started digging around inside her bag, finally pulling out her checkbook. He watched her hand tremble as she attempted to make out the large check, a tear falling onto the paper and smearing the date at the top.

That’s when it hit him. She didn’t want him. For some reason, she’d paid all that money for him, but she still didn’t want him. That didn’t make any sense.

“Pepper?” he said as she ripped the check from her checkbook.

She looked up at him for the first time. Her pink lips were pressed into a hard line and her jaw was tight like she was trying to keep something in.

“Thank you for bidding on me,” he said with a smile. “If I could’ve chosen any woman in Rosewood to spend Valentine’s Day with, it would be you.”

Pepper just glared at him and swallowed hard. Grant held out the rose to her and she accepted it reluctantly. She brought the rose to her nose and sniffed delicately. Instead of smiling, he could see the tears start welling in her eyes again.

“Have you ever been to Brio’s?” he asked, trying to shift the subject to something more pleasant.

“No.”

“It’s really nice. The food is amazing. I made reservations over a month ago because it’s so hard to get in there on Valentine’s Day.”

“Grant . . .” she started, then her voice faded out. “Valentine’s Day isn’t really my thing.”

That was a first. Grant had dated a lot of women in his time, and even if they claimed that Valentine’s Day wasn’t a big deal for them, it was usually a lie. He always took the holiday very seriously and it hadn’t steered him wrong yet.

“Well, we could do something different if you like. I am at your mercy. Whatever you want, I can make it happen.”

She looked up at him, her dark eyes dry, but still red. “Whatever I want, huh? You don’t happen to be a Sheetrock guy in your spare time, do you?”

Grant’s brow furrowed. “Sheetrock? Uh, no, I’m not. Why do you—”

Pepper turned on her heel and walked away before he could finish. She handed over her check to Gloria, got her receipt, and marched out of the room without another word to him or anyone else.

That’s when he realized what was going on. She’d told him last week that she was saving up to work on her house. For some reason, she’d just bid the majority of it on him and she wasn’t happy about it. That didn’t make any sense at all.

“Did you hear Grandma Dee tripped and dumped a whole glass of ice water in Pepper’s lap tonight?” Simon asked.

Grant closed his eyes, the final piece falling into place. The tears, the wet sweater, the Sheetrock . . . she hadn’t meant to bid on him. She’d had no intention, whatsoever, of laying out a penny for Grant, much less four hundred thousand of them.

This was his grandmother’s doing. Sure, she’d tripped, but he could feel in his bones that she was meddling. Grant would gladly accept any help to melt Pepper’s icy reception of him, but this wasn’t the right choice. Her house was so important to her. She needed that money to fix it up.

Without answering Simon, Grant whipped open the curtain and found his grandmother talking with a few people in the gymnasium. “Grandma Dee, may I have a moment, please?”

She appraised him with an arched brow, then politely dismissed herself from the conversation. “Yes, Grant?”

“Did you do that to Pepper on purpose?”

“Do what to Pepper on purpose?” she asked.

“Did you dump water in her lap so she would bid on me tonight?”

Adelia sighed and considered her answer. She knew how big Grant was on being honest, so lying was pointless. Finally, she gave him a curt nod. “Yes, I did. She wasn’t going to bid on you otherwise.”

There wasn’t an ounce of shame on the older woman’s face. In her mind, she’d simply done what needed to be done.

“Grandma Dee, she couldn’t afford that. Four thousand dollars? That’s nearly everything she had saved to work on her house.”

She watched him for a moment and then sighed. “That’s unfortunate. If only there were a strong, handy man in her life who could help her work on the house . . .”

Okay, Grant thought. Now he understood what was going on here. She was a tricky thing. Tricky, tricky, tricky. But it wouldn’t work out the way she envisioned it. His grandmother didn’t know Pepper and how stubborn she could be. “Even if I did—”

“You want her, this is your chance,” she said, cutting him off. “If Pepper wants to fix up her house, then you help her make it happen. Spend time with her doing something important to her, as opposed to you just throwing cheesy pickup lines at her. You’re a great young man, Grant, and I’m not just saying that because you’re my grandson. You have a lot of qualities that are charming, but most of that goes to the wayside when you’re acting like the town’s sexy bad boy. You’re big on honesty, so be genuine with her and I guarantee you’ll make progress.”

Be genuine? That was something Grant wasn’t entirely sure how to do. He was honest, always, but when he hit puberty and realized he had a gift for charming women, his honest words always had an underlying agenda: a means to seduction. He learned early on that he had to stand out from his brothers. He wasn’t a great athlete like Blake, or a brilliant student like Mitchell. But women wanted the alluring bad boy who would say all the right things, touch them the right way, and then roar off into the distance on his Harley. He could be that, and built his reputation on it.

But if he cast off the motorcycle, lost the sunglasses and the bad-boy machismo, what was left? He didn’t know. And he doubted Pepper would like whatever was left over.

“I mean it,” his grandmother warned as she placed a hand on his cheek. “Just be yourself and it will work out. I’m giving you a gift, Grant. Make the most of it.”

He wasn’t sure if being himself would be enough to crack her hard exterior. “She’s furious. I doubt she’ll want anything to do with me.”

“In her situation, your offer of help is one she can’t refuse. She bought you, whether she wanted to or not. Let her use you for manual labor and get every penny back. It’s the least you can do after your poor, clumsy grandmother got her into this pickle.”

Adelia patted him on the shoulder and turned to walk out of the gymnasium.

She was right. This was his chance to break through her defenses. He wanted Pepper. He had no clue why, but he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He needed to make the most of this opportunity.

He’d start first thing in the morning.

Sunday morning, Pepper opened her eyes and stared up at the ceiling of her living room. For a minute, she reveled in the joy of a lazy Sunday morning, knowing she had an entire week of vacation ahead of her.

And then she remembered.

Rolling over, she smothered her face in her pillow and screamed as loudly as she had wanted to last night at the auction but couldn’t.

With that out of her system, she threw back the blankets and got out of bed. Screaming was nice and all, but it didn’t change anything. She needed to brew a pot of coffee, get out her notebook of chores, and see what she could still get done with a week and a thousand dollars. Even after two cups of coffee and some creative accounting, it wasn’t much. If she opted to use the money to reinforce the floor in the one bedroom, she could fake the window by caulking the shit out of it. That wasn’t the bedroom she wanted for her room, but the electrical problems in the other room would just be too pricey with her current budget.

She could recover from this, it would just take time. If she could get one bedroom done, at the very least, she could get her bed out of the living room. Then she could save up to do the rest. She was picking up more of her own clients and was hired to do the hair and makeup for a wedding in a few weeks. That was good money. And maybe if Adelia started having her hair done at the salon more often, she’d draw in more clientele with high-end hair needs. That meant higher commissions and, hopefully, higher tips.

All was not lost. It just felt that way in the moment.

Then the doorbell rang. At first, Pepper reached for her phone, thinking she had a text, then realized it was her doorbell. No one had ever rung her doorbell before, so she hadn’t been entirely sure it worked. One less thing to fix, she supposed.

Getting up, Pepper peered out the peephole to see who was outside. It was Grant, looking quite spiffy for this early hour on a Sunday morning in a pair of khakis and a blue polo shirt. She doubted he’d come from church. He had something in his hands, but she couldn’t tell what it was through the tiny spyglass. It didn’t matter.

“Go away!” she shouted. She wasn’t letting him into her house. For one thing, it was a mess and would be for longer than she’d hoped. For another, she was wearing flannel pajama pants and a thin, cotton tank top with no bra. Her hair was up in a messy bun. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth yet. Never mind the fact that she was mad at him, although he’d done nothing wrong.

“Let me in, Pepper,” he said. “We need to talk.”