by Jane Graves
She knew now how he could seduce so many women with just a tiny crook of his finger, because he’d come really close to seducing her. But no matter what he said, she knew the truth. They could go at it like a couple of hormone-crazed bunnies, and still the only qualities of hers he’d be attracted to would be that she was there, she was female, and she was breathing.
She hadn’t been lying. She didn’t do casual sex. And since that was all he ever did, it was good that she’d stopped this thing before it had even gotten started.
A few minutes later, Tony fell into bed with a sigh of frustration. He might not have noticed Heather before, but he was sure noticing her now.
He couldn’t believe he’d said the wrong thing and blown it so badly. All he’d meant was that over the next month, they’d have a really good chance to get to know each other better. What could possibly be wrong with that?
He thought about following her into her bedroom and trying a little seduction all over again. But if he did that, she’d have slapped him senseless, and how much more rejection could one man take? He’d never imagined being in this situation, where his usual plan of attack was useless, where the empty phrases he usually used worked against him because she was too damned smart to fall for them.
But why did he want her so much?
Maybe nothing had changed. Maybe, like before, he just wanted to get laid.
And maybe it was more than that.
No. That was impossible. Intellect and competence and a take-charge attitude had never even been on the list of qualities he looked for in a woman. In fact, he’d always assumed those things would just get in the way of having a good time. But now . . .
He’d never realized just how enticing those things could be. How enticing she could be.
Line up three of your waitresses and me. Which one would you pick?
A week ago, he would have been able to answer that question without even thinking. Now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe he’d pick the one he couldn’t have with nothing more than a sexy smile and a crook of his finger, one he found way more attractive than he’d ever imagined he would.
Chapter 13
At ten the next day, Heather woke to bright morning sun, aching muscles, and the smell of coffee. She put on her robe and shuffled into the kitchen to find Tony slouched at the table, sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. He wore a threadbare Rangers T-shirt and green plaid boxer shorts. His hair was sleep-mussed. His eyes heavy-lidded. His face unshaven. Any other man would have looked shabby and unkempt. So how did Tony manage to look so incredibly appealing?
He turned and slowly looked her up and down, and then smiled. “Good morning.”
For Heather, mornings meant pillow-creased cheeks, droopy eyelids, and her already-wild hair even more out of control. The fact that Tony was staring at her anyway told her he had to be even more desperate for sex than she thought. Unfortunately, every time he looked at her this way, it knocked one more brick out of the mental wall she’d built that was supposed to keep her from giving in to him. And as those bricks disappeared, the only thing that kept her from taking him up on his offer was the knowledge that the moment their annulment was final, his interest in her would fizzle faster than a rain-soaked firecracker.
I’m just admiring my new wife.
What a load of crap that had been. But even though she hadn’t bought it, she had to hand it to him. He was damned good at selling it.
“Good morning,” she said, pouring a cup of coffee.
“Your hair,” he said.
Heather frowned. “What about it?”
“Leave it curly today.”
“Nope. I haven’t worn my hair like this in years, and I’m not going to start now.”
“But I like it.”
“You like anything that’s a mess.”
“Well, yeah, but—”
She faced him. “If you shut up about my hair, I’ll cook you breakfast.”
He mulled that over for a moment. “Okay. That’s a deal.”
Heather pulled out a skillet and a bowl, turned on a stove burner, and grabbed eggs out of the fridge. She whacked one of the eggs, opened it, and dumped its contents into a bowl.
“I thought eggs had a lot of cholesterol,” Tony said.
“They also have a lot of protein. You balance the bad with the good. Of course, I’m saying that to a man who believes Twinkies are one of the four major food groups.”
“They’re not?”
“Your diet is horrific.”
“Keeps body and soul together.”
“I can’t even imagine what the insides of your arteries look like.”
“Sure you can. They’re cream filled.”
Heather made a face of disgust and grabbed a can of nonstick spray from a cabinet. She popped the lid and started to squirt it into the pan.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Tony muttered. He got up, grabbed the can away from her, and dumped it into the trash.
“Hey!” she said. “What are you doing?”
Opening the fridge, he grabbed a stick of butter and handed it to her. “There.”
She looked at the butter with exasperation. “I can’t eat butter. I have to get into a bridesmaid’s dress in a few weeks, and it’s a size too small.”
He looked confused. “Why didn’t you get the right size in the first place?”
“It was Regina’s doing.”
“Okay. So why didn’t Regina get you the right size?”
Heather sighed. “I’d have to go back to our childhood to explain that one. Suffice it to say, my diet from now until then is going to consist of celery sticks and rice cakes.”
“Screw the bridesmaid’s dress. Go naked.”
“Oh, that’d go over big.”
“I’d enjoy it.”
“That’s because you’re a pervert.” She cut off a tiny pat of butter and stuck it into the skillet.
“Don’t get carried away,” Tony said.
“Hush. You’re lucky I’m using any at all.”
Tony sat back down and eyed her carefully. “You know, I wouldn’t have thought it, but there’s something really satisfying about having a little woman in the kitchen, rattling those pots and pans.”
She turned around with a look of exasperation. “I cook because I like decent food, not because I was born with ovaries.”
“Fine. If you refuse to accept your natural-born role as a woman, then don’t expect me to kill spiders.”
“Fortunately, that doesn’t take balls.” She poured the eggs into the pan and started whipping them with a fork. “I’ve been thinking about the grand opening. When do you want to do it?”
“Hold on.” He went to a kitchen drawer and pulled out a small calendar. “How about Saturday the twelfth?”
“That’s the night before Regina’s wedding.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Shouldn’t be, since the rehearsal dinner is on Thursday night. They were going to do it Saturday night before the wedding on Sunday, but Jason’s mother couldn’t get their country club that night.”
“So Saturday’s good?”
“Yeah. Assuming that leaves us enough time to do all the planning necessary.”
“I don’t want to wait too long. Once you’re my ex-wife, people will think it’s kind of weird if you’re still hanging around to help me.”
“Good point. So let’s aim for the twelfth. I’ll start planning today.”
“That’s good for me, but are you sure you don’t have something else you need to be doing?”
Well, she had plenty of things she could be doing. On most Saturday afternoons, if she wasn’t cleaning, she was clipping coupons, taking her car for inspection, shopping for groceries, paying bills, or doing any number of other things that were absolutely necessary but deadly dull.
But helping a new business get off the ground? That was exciting.
“If I stay home today,” she told Tony, “I’ll only end up washing windows and cleaning behind the re
frigerator. Would you rather I do that?”
“God, no.”
“Okay, then. The first thing I’ll check into is ordering a new sign. I’ll also have some cards printed up that we can leave on the tables at the bar. Get customers to give us their information so we can send them an e-newsletter letting them know what bands are going to be playing, what specials we’re running, that kind of thing. If we keep in touch, they’ll keep coming in.”
Tony gave her a look of amazement. “That’s a good idea. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you’re a big-picture kind of guy, and I’m a detail-oriented kind of girl. I’ll start setting up a database today. Do you have addresses for your friends and relatives?”
“Yeah. My address book is in my bedroom.”
“Get it. We can talk about it while we’re eating.”
While he was gone, Heather popped a couple pieces of bread into the toaster.
Tony came back a few minutes later. “Sorry it’s a little tattered,” he said as he put the address book on the table. “And my handwriting isn’t the best. I’ll decipher anything you need me to.”
Heather filled their plates and brought them to the table. Tony flipped through his address book.
“I have mostly women in here,” Tony said.
“There’s a surprise.”
“I’ll mark the ones you should send invitations to.”
As they ate, Tony flipped pages, checking almost every name. If there were people he knew had moved, Heather told him to make a note and she’d find their new addresses. By the time he was halfway through the book, she estimated he’d checked over forty names.
“You know a lot of people,” she said.
“That’s because I’m a friendly guy. I lived all over the world when I was a kid. I learned how to make friends fast. It was the only way I ever had any.”
“That’s right. Your father was in the military.”
“Yep. Sometimes I didn’t even finish out a school year before we had to move again.”
“That’s too bad. I bet it was hard to make friends.”
“Nah, not really. People warm up to the class clown pretty quickly.”
“You? The class clown? Now, there’s a surprise.”
“That was only in grade school and junior high. When I got to high school,” he said with a sly smile, “I achieved rapid popularity in a different way.”
“With the girls.”
“Uh-huh. I did the whole bad-boy thing. Worked like a charm.”
“Bad-boy thing?”
“Just kid stuff. Graffiti. Street racing. You know.” When she looked surprised, he said, “Sorry. I guess valedictorians don’t know much about that stuff.”
“I bet your father loved that.”
“It drove him straight up the wall. But the girls loved it.”
“They liked being with a juvenile delinquent?”
“Oh, yeah. As long as I layered a little bit of tortured soul on top of it. High school girls love drama.”
Heather stared at him dumbly. “You’re lucky you’re not rotting in a foreign prison.”
“Nah. My father always got me out of trouble. Otherwise, I would have been an embarrassment to him, and nobody embarrasses Commander McCaffrey.”
“Speaking of your father,” Heather said, “it’s too bad he lives in Fort Lauderdale. Do you think he’ll be able to fly in for the grand opening?”
“My father? No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not inviting him.”
Heather sat back, surprised. “Why not?”
“I haven’t spoken to him in three years. This is not the time to start again.”
“Three years?”
“Yes, Heather. My family isn’t like yours.”
“Well, I guess if he lives out of state—”
“He lives in Plano.”
Heather blinked. “Wait a minute. You told my parents he lived in Fort Lauderdale.”
“That’s because I didn’t want your mother getting any big ideas about wanting to meet him.”
“He lives here, but you never see him?”
“My father and I still don’t see eye-to-eye. It’s best for both of us.”
“But you’re opening a business. That’s a big event. Surely that means something.”
“Sweetheart, coming from where you do, I know this is hard to understand, but sometimes seeing your family members only once every three years is a good thing.”
“But he’s your father.”
“Not so much, really. He’s Commander McCaffrey, and that’s about it.”
“So he was hard on you growing up?”
“It was a classic case of a demanding father and a slacker son. He wanted me to ‘make something of myself,’ and I wanted him to go to hell.”
“I bet he thought ‘making something of yourself’ meant going into the military.”
“Oh, yeah. He hammered me about it from the time I was twelve. But he wanted me to get a college degree first. I lasted one year. That was when the real fight started. I skipped out of school and got a job as a bartender. That went over big. Looking back, I think I did it just to piss him off.”
“What would he think of you buying McMillan’s? There’s a big difference between being a bartender and owning the place.”
“I don’t know. And I don’t care.”
But Heather knew he did care. He had to. All sons cared what their fathers thought, particularly those who had never felt as if they quite measured up.
“I still think you should invite him.”
Tony looked at her in disbelief. “Did you not hear a word I just said?”
“I think he’d be proud of you.”
Tony’s shoulders heaved with a silent sigh. “Look, Heather. It isn’t as if I didn’t wish I had some kind of relationship with my old man. If I thought anything had changed, it might be different. But the older he gets, the more set in his ways he becomes.”
“Sometimes the older people get, the more they realize what’s important. And family is the most important thing.”
“Three years ago, we saw each other over the holidays. For a while, things weren’t too bad. Then he started in on me, asking me why I was a repossession agent. Why I had a job where I mostly dealt with deadbeats. Why I didn’t do something bigger with my life.”
“Maybe McMillan’s is the kind of thing he was talking about?”
“Trust me, Heather. No matter what I do, it still won’t be enough. So when you’re making up that guest list?”
“Yes?”
“My father’s name is the last one I want to see on it.”
He popped the last bite of toast in his mouth and took his plate to the sink. He helped her clean up the kitchen and then went to take a shower.
Heather sat down at the kitchen table and opened the address book again. She flipped to the Ms and saw the listing for Don McCaffrey at an address in Plano. Tony had put a great big X through it.
Heather didn’t get it. So they’d had a little discord when he was a teenager. Okay, maybe a lot of discord. But sometimes, too, people got caught in a circle of old behavior they couldn’t get out of, and because of that, they kept each other at arm’s length for the rest of their lives. Tony said he had no other close relatives, so if he and his father were estranged, who did he turn to when he had nobody else?
An hour later, Tony was at McMillan’s, stocking the bar, when Heather strode purposefully through the door. Her wild cascade of hair was pulled to the back of her neck in a barrette, but several strands escaped to curl down her cheeks.
She stopped in front of the bar, her fists on her hips, her voice low and angry. “Okay. Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” he said.
“My flatiron.”
Tony shoved a bottle of Johnny Walker Red onto the shelf. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It was in the drawer in my bathroom. And now it’s gone.”
“You must have misplaced it.”
“No, Tony. You may misplace things, but I don’t. It’s gone.”
“And you think I took it?”
“I know you took it.”
“Come on, Heather. When would I have had the chance to take it?”
“When I was cooking breakfast and you went to get your address book.”
Tony paused. “Oh, yeah. I guess there was time then, wasn’t there?”
Just then, Kayla came out of the kitchen and stopped short, her eyes going wide with surprise. “Heather. My God. What did you do to your hair?”
Heather spoke through gritted teeth. “This is what it looks like when I don’t do anything to it. Tony hid my flatiron. The man is weird. He likes my hair this way.”
“Well, yeah. He’s not blind.”
“What?”
“It’s gorgeous.”
“Oh, please.”
“No, really! Do you know how much it costs to get hair that looks like yours? Hundreds of dollars. Believe me, I’ve checked it out. It takes all these weird perm techniques, and you have to sit there for hours.”
“I’ll trade hair with you any day.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.” Kayla flicked her own hair. “Look at this. It’s thin. Lifeless. I’d kill to have hair with as much body as yours.”
Heather turned to Tony. “You know I’ll just buy another one.”
“And I’ll hide that one, too.”
“I will get you for this,” Heather said, and headed for the ladies’ room.
Tony couldn’t get over how different that hair made her look. Instead of uptight and repressed, she looked like the kind of woman who was wild and free and knew how to get crazy. Of course, before she could do that, she’d have to get over being pissed at him.
“She doesn’t see it, does she?” Kayla said.
“Nope.”
“Did you really hide her flatiron?”
“Yep.”
Kayla shook her head. “Bless her heart. She didn’t have a clue what she was getting into when she hooked up with you.”
Tony smiled. And he didn’t have a clue what he was getting into when he hooked up with her.
Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, Heather pulled the elastic out of her hair so she could reposition it to incarcerate as much of it as possible. The instant she released it, curls cascaded around her face and tumbled over her shoulders.
