Welcome to Temptation/Bet Me

by Jennifer Crusie

  “No.” Clea shuddered. “Did you see him today? What a fathead he grew up to be.”

  “We noticed.” Amy sounded a lot more concerned than the occasion warranted. “You still want to do the video, right?”

  Clea nodded. “All I need is film that shows I’m still bankable. When I talked to Leo, he sounded interested because he has this sequel he wants to make, but I don’t want to do that.”

  “He wants to make a sequel to Always Tomorrow?” Amy asked doubtfully.

  “I thought you were dead at the end of Always Tomorrow,” Sophie said.

  “Not Always Tomorrow,” Clea said. “Look, all you guys need to do is make me look good on tape.”

  “That’s not hard,” Amy said. “As long as we get the light right, you still look great.”

  “Thanks,” Clea said, as if she wasn’t sure that was a compliment.

  “And I’m still up for murder,” Amy said. “Although I think Chet in Iowa deserves it more. Maybe we could go on a spree. We knock off Frank, and then on the way to Iowa to kill Chet, we find Darrin and break his kneecaps.” She stopped, caught by a thought. “You know, that would make a great movie.”

  “Chad, not Chet,” Sophie said. “And that was fifteen years ago. I’m over it.”

  “You’re never really over it.” Clea looked out into the night. “You just learn to live with it.” She sighed. “Don’t you wish you knew then what you know now? Don’t you wish you could go back and fix it?”

  “I’m not sure I’d know what to say even now,” Sophie said. “ ‘Get your finger out of my pie’ doesn’t seem enough.”

  “How about ‘Yes, and he was lousy’?” Amy said. “You could at least make sure Chet didn’t get any more.”

  “Chad,” Sophie said. “It’s all right. Really. I’m over it.”

  “And what would you do if Chad showed up in the path of your speeding car?” Clea asked.

  “I’d run him down like the dog he was,” Sophie said. “And his little best friend, too.”

  “Well, don’t get confused and go after the mayor instead,” Amy said. “At least not until the video is done.”

  “I won’t do anything to the mayor.” Sophie thought of him as she said it, so carelessly confident that he was barely conscious. She found herself gritting her teeth, so she relaxed her jaw, took a deep breath and added, “No matter how appealing that might be.”

  While Sophie was drinking cider punch, Phin had gone home to his mother’s brick house on the Hill and found his little blonde daughter waiting for him on the spacious, empty porch, her hands on her nonexistent hips.

  “You’re very late,” Dillie told him in her precise, Tucker voice as he climbed the white stone steps. “Dinner is waiting.”

  “I apologize,” he said. “Did you take your vitamin today?”

  Dillie sighed with the exaggerated patience of a nine-year-old. “Yes. A Wilma. Jamie Barclay doesn’t have to take vitamins.”

  “Jamie Barclay is going to be sorry about that someday.” He kissed her on the top of her head and let his cheek stay there for a minute before he said, “Who is Jamie Barclay?”

  “Jamie Barclay moved in two houses down across the street on Monday. Jamie Barclay gets to walk lots of places alone. I’m old enough to do that. I could walk from here to the bookstore by myself.” Dill stuck her chin out, and her long pale hair fell away from her odd little pointed face.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Well, when can I walk by myself?”

  “When you get your driver’s license.”

  “You always, always say that.” Dillie scowled at him. “That’s when everything happens.”

  “It’s going to be a busy day,” Phin agreed. Since he wasn’t planning on letting her get her license until she was twenty-one, he wasn’t worried.

  “Well, I already know about babies so we won’t have to do that,” Dillie said. “Grandma told me some stuff a long time ago, but then Jamie Barclay told me a lot more today.”

  Phin bent down to look at her. “Is Jamie Barclay a boy or a girl?”

  “A girl.” Her voice was full of admiration. “She knows a lot.”

  “Wonderful.” Phin straightened again. “I thought I told you not to talk to strangers. And she’s probably wrong, so don’t worry about it.”

  “Okay. I have an idea,” Dillie said, switching gears on him. “A good idea.”

  “Okay,” Phin said cautiously. The Tucker porch didn’t have any chairs because the Hill was not the kind of place where people sat on their front porches and chatted, so he sat down on the top step, and Dillie sat down beside him, a featherweight in a white T-shirt and tan shorts.

  “I was thinking,” Dillie said, “that you and I could go live over the bookstore. Where you used to live.”

  “Dill, there’s only one room that’s livable up there. The rest is storage. We couldn’t get all your stuff in there, let alone mine.”

  “I could get rid of some of my stuff.” Dillie stuck her chin out nobly.

  “That would be tragic.”

  Dillie shifted in her chair. “It could be just us. We could be . . .” She stared into space, searching for the right word, narrowing her gray eyes and pursing the cupid’s-bow mouth she’d inherited from her mother, and Phin felt the instinctive parental ache that still took him by surprise after nine years: How was I lucky enough to get this child, and how can I ever keep her safe enough? He hadn’t wanted to get married, he hadn’t wanted a baby, and he sure as hell hadn’t wanted to be a single father. And now he couldn’t imagine life without her.

  “We could be private,” Dillie said finally.

  “We’re not cramped here,” Phin pointed out. “There are fourteen rooms. It’s a wonder we don’t lose each other.”

  “We have to be with Grandma Liz all the time,” Dillie said. “I really love Grandma Liz but I would like it to be just us family. If it was just us, we could have hot dogs. And paper napkins. And dessert when it’s not the weekend.” She put her hand on his arm, and said, “Please?” looking up at him with intense gray eyes, and he looked down to see a smear of purple on his shirt sleeve.

  “Blackberry?” he said.

  Dillie pulled her hand back. “Grape. I had toast ’cause you were late.” She turned her hand to look at the jam-smeared edge of it. “It was goopy.”

  “So it was.” Phin handed her his handkerchief. “Paper napkins, huh?” This wasn’t one of Phin’s priorities, but if it had come to loom large in his daughter’s life, it had to be dealt with.

  “That’s just an example.” Dillie licked her hand to dissolve some of the jam and then scrubbed at it with Phin’s handkerchief.

  Phin sat back and considered the situation. It had made sense to move in with his mother when Dillie was born because somebody had to take care of the baby. But Dillie wasn’t a baby anymore. And it must have taken a lot for his preternaturally polite daughter to say, “I want out.”

  They could rent a house, he supposed, but since he owned the house by the river his mother-in-law lived in, and the bookstore house, and Liz had this semimansion on the Hill, it seemed like a waste of money. And if he and Dillie moved, who’d take care of her during the day while he ran the bookstore? She’d end up back here on the Hill with Liz anyway, which was the way his mother wanted it. “She’ll be a Tucker,” she’d told Phin when he’d brought the baby home from the hospital. “Leave everything to me.”

  Thinking about it now, he could see Dillie’s point. Being a Tucker was often a pain in the ass.

  “Compromise,” he said, and Dillie sighed. “How about if we stay at the bookstore one night a week? Like a sleepover. We’ll have hot dogs and dessert and no napkins. And we can try to put the overstock into two rooms instead of three so you can have your own room.”

  Dillie tilted her head, considering it, looking pensive and delicate in the evening light. Phin knew she was a tough little kid, he’d seen her on the softball field, but still her thinness shook him
. “You looked just like that when you were her age,” Liz had told him. “You were six foot at fourteen and didn’t stop then. She’ll fill out when the time comes.”

  “How about,” Dillie said in her patient, measured voice, “if we try that for a little while and then if I’m good, we always stay there?”

  “How about you take what you can get?”

  Dillie exhaled. “It needs to be just us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I need a mom.”

  Phin went very still. “A mom.”

  “Jamie Barclay has a mom. Jamie Barclay said her mom said I needed a mom, too.”

  “Jamie Barclay’s mom is wrong,” Phin said grimly.

  “I don’t think so.” Dillie’s voice was thoughtful. “I think I need one. I think I’d like it. But I don’t think I want my mom to be Rachel.”

  “Rachel?” Phin’s temper flared. “Who—”

  “Grandma Liz says Rachel is just like a mom when she baby-sits me,” Dillie said. “And Rachel’s mom keeps saying maybe someday she’ll be my grandma and won’t that be nice. But I don’t think Rachel’s practical enough to be my mom. And I really don’t want her mom to be my grandma because her mom is mean to Grandma Junie all the time.” She fell into her maternal grandmother’s southern Ohio drawl as she added, “She’s just naasty.”

  “Rachel’s not going to be your mom,” Phin said. “You can stop worrying.”

  “Well, I don’t know.” Dillie sighed and straightened. “That’s what Grandma Liz wants, and if we stay here, that’s what’ll happen because we always end up with what she wants.”

  “Trust me, Dill,” Phin said. “There’s not a chance in hell that Rachel will be your mom.” He heard his mother call, “Dillie?” and he raised his voice and called back, “We’re out front.”

  Liz came around the house from her garden, her gloved fist clenching blue-violet roses, her pale hair refusing to move in the summer breeze. The Tuckers did not let nature push them around. “Why are you sitting out here?”

  “Because it’s nice,” Phin said. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  Liz stopped at the foot of the steps. “I want you to spend more time with Stephen Garvey instead of turning your back on him and rushing off like that. You’ll never build a consensus giving him the cold shoulder.”

  “I don’t want to build a consensus, I want to run a bookstore,” Phin said. Dillie poked him and he added, “And eat hot dogs with my kid. Dillie and I are going to have a sleepover at the store tomorrow night.”

  “What?” Liz frowned at them both, two ridiculous children. “She can’t. Her piano lesson is at six and then there’s dinner, and she has to be in bed at eight-thirty. There’s no point in her sleeping there.”

  “Friday, then,” Phin said.

  “Ballet,” Liz said. “I don’t understand this at all.”

  “What night don’t you have a lesson?” Phin said to Dillie.

  “Mondays,” Dillie said glumly.

  “That’s the only night?” Phin turned back to Liz. “When did that happen?”

  “You stay at the bookstore past six most nights,” Liz pointed out. “She’s not missing quality time with you. And we want her to be well-rounded.”

  Phin looked down at his angular little girl. “She’s rounded enough. We’re staying at the bookstore on Monday.”

  “That’s the first day of school so it would be impractical—”

  Dillie looked at him anxiously and he broke in. “We like impractical. Dillie and I live on the edge.”

  Dillie beamed at him, joy radiating from every cell in her body, and he thought, I have to spend more time with this kid. She’s the best.

  Behind Dillie, Liz opened her mouth again and Phin met her eyes. “Monday we stay there.”

  “Very well,” Liz said, clearly thinking it wasn’t. “Just for this Monday, though. We have to be practical about school nights. Come on, Dillie, let’s go get changed for dinner.”

  Dillie took one yearning look back at him, which would have wrenched his heart if he hadn’t known what an actress she was. “All right,” she said plaintively, and took her grandmother’s hand, dragging her feet as she went up the stone steps.

  “For heaven’s sake, Dillie,” Liz said, and Phin laughed.

  Dillie jerked her head up and grinned at him, pure kid again, and then she went inside with her grandmother to go without dessert because it was a weeknight.

  Diane would have given her dessert for breakfast, he thought, and then stopped, surprised that he’d thought of Diane at all. They’d been together for so short a time, he wasn’t sure he could remember what she’d looked like. Round, he remembered, because that was what had gotten him into trouble in the first place. That, and she’d been so warm. Warmth had been in short supply at the Tuckers’, especially when he’d come home to help his mother cope with his father’s second heart attack and his father cope with his own mortality.

  Then one night he’d gone to the Tavern to get away from all the manufactured optimism at home, and Diane had sat down beside him. “So you’re Phin Tucker,” she’d said. “Heard about you.” He closed his eyes and tried to call up her face, guilty that he’d cared so little for her that he couldn’t even get that back. Warm brown eyes, he remembered, and dark tumbling hair, and that cupid’s-bow smile that Dillie could use to twist him around her little finger. He tried hard to put the features together, but instead of Diane, he saw Sophie Dempsey, who didn’t look like Diane at all, her brown eyes wary and her dark hair twisted in that tense curly knot on top of her head. And her mouth was full and lush, not bowed like Diane’s—

  He felt a flush of heat thinking about her mouth and stood up, wondering what the hell was wrong with him that he could forget the woman who’d given him a daughter and get hot for a woman he didn’t know and didn’t like.

  “Dad, dinner,” Dillie said from the doorway behind him, and he went inside, dropping another kiss on the top of her head when he reached her.

  “You are my favorite woman in the whole world,” he told her, and she said, “I know,” and led him into his mother’s immaculate, air-conditioned, dessert-free dining room.

  Chapter Three

  On Thursday morning, Rachel Garvey went out to the Whipple farm, a woman on a mission: She had to get out of Temptation before she went crazy and became her mother.

  Her plan was simple; she was going to offer Clea Whipple her services on the movie, and then she’d make herself indispensable, so that when Clea left, she’d take Rachel with her. Her mother was always telling her what a treasure she was, so now she’d be Clea’s treasure. Rachel felt no guilt at all about deserting her mother. Her two older sisters were still in town and they could be treasures after she was gone. It was way past time for their turns anyway.

  When she pulled up to the porch, Clea was sitting on the top step, beautiful in the sunlight. More than beautiful. Drop-dead, sky-eyed, magnolia-skinned beautiful. So when Clea said, “Hello?” in a voice that sounded like music, Rachel said, “God, I’ve never seen anybody as gorgeous as you.”

  Clea smiled and became more gorgeous.

  Good start, Rachel thought, and went toward her. “I’m Rachel Garvey,” she began, holding out her hand. “And I was thinking maybe you could use—”

  “Garvey?” Clea lost her smile. “Any relation to Stephen Garvey?”

  “I’m his daughter,” Rachel said. “Um, I came out to see if you could use some help.”

  Clea shook her head, but before she could say anything, the screen door slammed, and Rachel looked up to see a redhead in tight jeans and a pink T-shirt knotted above her belly button.

  “Hi.” The redhead looked at Rachel with naked curiosity. “I’m Amy.”

  “I’m Rachel. I came out to help.” Rachel held out her hand and then noticed that the redhead’s hands were full of paint scrapers. “You’re painting?” she said, hope rising.

  Amy jerked her head to the right side of the porch.
“Just the porch wall white for a background.” She handed one of the scrapers to Clea, who looked at it as if she’d never seen one before.

  “No,” Rachel said. “First of all, the paint’s almost off that wood, so it’s going to suck up the first six coats of white paint you put on. You need a coat of primer.”

  “Oh.” Amy squinted at her. “Listen, we don’t want this to be a good paint job, we just want a nice background.”

  “Then you don’t want white, either. White isn’t very flattering.” Rachel smiled sweetly at Clea. “You want something warm that will bounce color back at you.”

  “She’s right.” Clea reexamined Rachel, head to toe, and Rachel stood with her smile fixed, thinking, I don’t like you, but if you take me to Hollywood, I’ll learn to deal with you.

  “So what do you suggest?” Amy sounded wary, and Rachel turned back to her, figuring she’d be easier to charm, anyway.

  “I can get you a great deal on some peach paint,” she told Amy. “We ordered a lot for a project that got changed in the middle. I’ll get it for you at cost, and I’ll help you for free. I just want to learn to do what you’re doing.” Rachel smiled up at Amy again, grateful Amy was on the top step so it was easier for Rachel to look small and innocent and appealing.

  “You’re hired,” Amy said, and handed her the other scraper.

  Rachel handed it back, sure of herself now. “You scrape, I’ll go get the paint.” She turned to go before Amy could argue, and Amy called, “Wait, do you need money?”

  “Oh, no,” Rachel said. “I’ll set up an account for you at the store.”

  “Fantastic,” Amy said.

  “That would be Garvey’s Hardware, right?” Clea said deliberately.

  “What?” Amy said, and Rachel waved and left, determined to be such a treasure that Amy wouldn’t dream of letting her go.

  The peach paint turned out to be too dark for the porch, but mixed half-and-half with the white Rachel had brought, it was perfect, so pale it was more blush than peach. Rachel primed the wall, and while Amy and Clea talked out in the yard about reflectors and camera angles, she listened and learned and began to paint the porch rail. Peach for the posts and rails, blush for the spindles, white for the detailing.