Wife Wanted

by Christine Rimmer

  Looking down at the long, khaki-clad legs that stuck out into the galley, Natalie suggested airily, “You two just enjoy yourselves. I’ll power up the Lady Kate and get us back home.”

  From his cramped quarters in the cabinet, Rick heard the woman and the dog leave the cabin. A few minutes later, he heard the anchor being drawn up, and then the engine began to rumble.

  Rick crossed his arms tightly over his chest—the only place they would fit—and tried not to crush the small body that was pressed against the inner wall of the cabinet.

  “Do you feel safe in here, Toby?” he dared to whisper, though he knew there would be no answer.

  Dr. Dawkins had told him not to be too concerned when Toby chose to hide, that confined spaces sometimes equalled safety to a troubled child. Every time it happened, Rick reminded himself of the doctor’s words—and then felt worried as hell anyway. This time was no different from the others—except that now, having joined his son in the tiny space, he also felt like a damn fool.

  But Natalie had suggested this. And Natalie seemed to have a sixth sense about Toby.

  With a sigh, Rick settled in to endure the ride back to shore. Halfway there, Rick felt the touch of small fingers in his hair. It took him a moment to realize that his son was trying to take his head in his little hands. Rick did his best to move where Toby pushed him.

  A moment later, his head was cradled on a pair of skinny knees. Rick put a lot of effort into keeping his weight off his son’s fragile legs, and that gave him a stitch in his neck. But he didn’t care. Not one damn bit.

  When the boat finally came to a stop, Toby grunted and gave Rick’s shoulder a shove. Rick twisted his way out of the cabinet and then scooted aside. Toby crawled right out behind him, with no need for coaxing at all. Of course, his small face was impassive. But so what? For a few moments, in the darkness of that cabinet, Toby had dared to reach out.

  “Everything okay?” It was Natalie, standing in the door to the deck.

  “Everything’s terrific,” Rick answered.

  The sky had clouded over during the return trip to shore. As they docked the boat and carried the picnic basket back to the house, the first few drops of rain were falling. Rick tipped his head up to the rain and thought again that Natalie Fortune really was magic. And he was damn glad she’d be hanging around for the next two weeks.

  And hell, he might as well be honest with himself. He was interested in her. Really interested. He wanted to get closer to her.

  That surprised him. He’d been telling himself for four years now that he wouldn’t be taking a chance with a woman for a long time to come. There had been too much bitterness in him, after Vanessa. But Natalie was not Vanessa. In fact, Natalie was unlike any woman he’d ever met. He wanted to know her a hell of a lot better.

  True, she’d pulled away from his kiss out on the water. But he’d been pushing it a little fast, he realized now. He’d take his time, approach her more slowly.

  After all, time was on his side.

  Who could say what might happen in two weeks of being together, day in and day out?

  Five

  But just as Rick was consciously deciding that he wanted to get closer, Natalie was determining that a certain distance was going to have to be kept. As soon as she was safely in her own upstairs rooms, Natalie called her aunt Lindsay.

  Lindsay Fortune Todd was a doctor who lived on the other side of the lake with her husband and two children. Their big, comfortable house wasn’t too far from the family estate. Aunt Lindsay worked long hours at Minneapolis General Hospital as a staff pediatrician. Usually when Natalie called on the spur of the moment, her aunt turned out to be at work. But today she got lucky. Lindsay answered the phone.

  “Nat,” Lindsay said with great fondness. “Where have you been lately?”

  Natalie pushed aside her guilt. Since she’d decided to change her life, she’d been avoiding situations involving the family. But right now, all the troubles in the family seemed like nothing to worry about when compared with the tender look in a certain pair of blue eyes.

  “Why don’t you come on over?” Lindsay asked. “Frank’s barbecuing burgers tonight. If the rain clears off, we’ll eat out on the deck.”

  It was exactly what Natalie had hoped her aunt would say. “I’d love to. I’ll be there in an hour or so.”

  “My aunt Lindsay invited me for dinner,” she told Rick a few minutes later. He was sitting in the great room, thumbing through a magazine while Toby watched television, with Bernie at his side.

  “Have a good time.” He smiled at her, and her silly heart gave a sweet, scary lurch inside her chest.

  He didn’t seem the least upset about her going, and yet she felt like a rat for leaving him. All the more reason, she told herself, that she had to be very careful around him.

  The rain stopped and the sky began to clear as Natalie drove around the lake to her aunt’s house. When she pulled up in the drive, she noticed a sports car she’d never seen before parked by the front walk.

  Wondering who’d stopped by, Natalie strolled up the walk and rapped on the door, which was instantly pulled open. Natalie blinked as she found herself eye-to-eye with a bargain-basement version of Aunt Lindsay, complete with hair that had seen one perm too many and impossibly long red fingernails. Natalie was looking at Tracey Ducet, the woman who claimed to be Lindsay’s missing twin. Over Tracey’s shoulder, she could see the woman’s sleazy boyfriend, Wayne. Lindsay and Frank were there, too.

  “Nat, how are you?” Tracey gushed, as if they were long-lost friends and not mere acquaintances. She grabbed Natalie in a hug, and Natalie got a powerful whiff of expensive perfume laid on way too thick. “I just dropped in to say hi to my twin.” Tracey cast a wounded-looking smile over her shoulder at Lindsay.

  Wayne, who was tall and blond and dressed in white duck trousers and a shirt with an alligator on it, forked wheat-colored hair back from his forehead. “Yes. But we really must be on our way.” His accent was as affected as Tracey’s was down-home.

  “Yeah, we gotta go. Ta-ta!” Tracey swept out the door, Wayne in her wake.

  The silence in the foyer after their departure said it all.

  “What was that all about?” Natalie asked at last.

  “What do you think?” Frank muttered grimly. “A five-letter word that starts with m.”

  “She wants money,” Lindsay explained. “A small loan from her twin sister, until everything’s cleared up and her inheritance comes through.”

  “Lord.” Natalie cast a glance at the ceiling. “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her no,” Frank said.

  “Mom!” It was Carter, Lindsay and Frank’s six-year-old, calling them from the other room.

  “Coming!” Lindsay hooked an arm through Natalie’s. “Come on. Let’s open a bottle of wine, barbecue our burgers, and forget what just happened.”

  Out on the back deck, Natalie helped eight-year-old Chelsea set the table while Frank barbecued hamburgers on a big gas grill. They drank their wine and ate their food to the hissing accompaniment of the electric bug-zappers Frank had mounted around the deck as a defense against the mosquitoes that could eat a person alive on summer evenings at the lake.

  After the meal, Frank took Chelsea and Carter into Travistown for ice cream. Since the housekeeper had taken the weekend off, Lindsay and Natalie cleaned up the kitchen.

  The talk, as Natalie had pretty much expected it would, turned to the problems in the family. Lindsay was worried about her big brother, Jake.

  “Whenever I call him, he tells me not to drop by. He’s too busy. Or he’s just going out. Any excuse to put me off. But I saw him in Travistown just yesterday, Nat. He walked right by me.” Lindsay bent to put another plate in the dishwasher. “I had to call to him three times before he heard me. And then, for a minute, he looked at me as if he was wondering who I was. And he looks terrible. Red-eyed, hollow-cheeked. As if he hasn’t slept in days.” She leaned against the coun
ter and folded her slender arms over her chest. “I know he hasn’t handled the transition well, since Mother’s death. He’s made some really bad decisions for the company. And this thing with Monica Malone and the stock he’s passed to her…” Lindsay shook her head. “And you know your father. Closed up tight as a bank vault. Thinks he has to handle it all by himself. Your father is and always has been a difficult man to know. But lately, he’s impossible. I just hope he’s going to be all right.”

  “Me, too.” Natalie pulled out the top tray of the dishwasher and began loading glassware. She’d heard all of this before. And she had nothing to add, nothing helpful to suggest.

  “And I feel…so bad, about the Ducet woman.” A painful laugh escaped Lindsay. “See? I find it difficult to call her by her first name. And yet…she does look just like me. She really could be my lost twin. But, Nat…”

  Natalie looked up and met her aunt’s troubled dark eyes. “Say it.”

  “She’s so…”

  “Cheap?” Natalie suggested, thinking of the bad perm and the vermillion fingernails.

  Lindsay sighed. “You said it, I didn’t.” She wrinkled her aquiline nose at Natalie. “Am I just a just total snob? Is that it?”

  Natalie pushed in the top rack. “No. You are not a snob. You have every right to feel however you want to feel about Tracey Ducet.”

  “I feel she’s a fake,” Lindsay said with heavy irony.

  “So does everyone else in the family. Dad has to be having her background investigated.”

  “You’re right. He is.”

  “I knew it.” Natalie remembered the detective Aunt Rebecca had found to look into Grandma Kate’s death. “By Gabe Devereax, right?”

  “Right. And Gabe is doing what he can. But Tracey has not been helpful. And the couple who raised her are both dead. Gabe can’t even come up with a birth certificate on her. She claims she never had one.” Lindsay let out a disgusted little snort. “I mean, really. How could any woman reach the age of thirty-seven without having had to produce a birth certificate at least once or twice, to prove who she is?”

  “It sounds to me like all you have to do is wait,” Natalie said. “Eventually Aunt Rebecca’s detective will find out the truth about your supposed long-lost twin.” Natalie bent to close the dishwasher, then rose to her height. “And in the meantime, don’t give her any money.”

  “I won’t. Don’t worry. Frank won’t let me.”

  “Good. Now, look.” Natalie took her aunt by the shoulders and pointed her at the open bottle on the counter. “I think there’s more wine in that bottle.”

  “Hmm…” Lindsay said, “I think you’re right. Just about exactly two glasses, I’d say.”

  “Perfect. You pour them. And we’ll go back out on the deck and stare at the lake and listen to the bug-zappers offing the mosquitoes and wait for Uncle Frank and the kids to come home.”

  Lindsay turned back to Natalie and smiled. “Besides being one of my favorite nieces, you’re also a damned good friend.”

  “Hey, you know me. Everybody’s confidante.”

  Lindsay brought out clean glasses and filled them both with wine. “So how’s the tenant hunt going?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? I found him.” She thought of Rick and wondered, though she knew she shouldn’t, how he was getting along back at the house.

  “Him?” Aunt Lindsay asked.

  “Yes. He’s already moved in. Rick Dalton’s his name. A single dad. With an adorable little five-year-old named Toby. Naturally, Toby loves Bernie. And vice versa.”

  Lindsay picked up one of the wineglasses and took a small sip. “Okay, so the kid’s adorable. And the kid loves the dog and the dog loves the kid. But the question is, what about the single dad. Is he adorable?”

  “Give me my wine. The lake and the bug-zappers are waiting.”

  “I sense romance in the air.”

  “Don’t say that. Don’t even think it.”

  “But, Nat, why not?” Lindsay handed Natalie her glass. “You’re a total romantic. All your life, you’ve been looking for true love and a family of your own.”

  “All my life, I’ve been boring.”

  Lindsay sipped from her own glass. “That rat Joel Baines really hurt you big-time, didn’t he?”

  “It wasn’t only Joel. It’s…everything.”

  “Like?”

  Natalie thought of Grandma Kate, gone forever now. And her own parents, separated. And all the trouble with Fortune Industries. And her once rock-steady father, who seemed on the verge of some kind of major breakdown. “Let’s just go outside. Please?”

  “You really don’t want to talk about it?”

  “Right.”

  “All right. But you know I’m here, any time.”

  Natalie thanked her aunt and changed the subject.

  Lindsay was scheduled to be at the hospital early the next morning, so they called it a night soon after Frank and the kids returned. It was a little after eight.

  Natalie cast about for something to do until ten or eleven. She was hoping that if she stayed out late enough, Rick would be in bed when she got home. But nothing came to mind, beyond finding a bar and ordering a drink, which didn’t hold a lot of appeal.

  And really, she couldn’t spend all her time inventing ways to be somewhere other than her own house. She should either make other arrangements for the next two weeks, or work things out with Rick.

  Perhaps a frank talk was called for.

  She cringed a little at the thought. She’d spent one afternoon with the man. Surely they hadn’t reached the stage of frank talks.

  But then she remembered the things they’d said. The subtle electricity in the air when he was near. The kiss that had almost happened.

  Yes. The time for a frank talk might be upon them.

  He was watching television in the great room off the kitchen when she got home. He looked up and gave her a wave. “Did you have a good time?”

  “Yes. Great. Where’s Toby?”

  “Off to bed.”

  He went back to his program, leaving Natalie standing in the entrance to the central hall, wondering idiotically whether she felt relieved or disappointed that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be going on here. Bernie, who’d been stretched out at Rick’s feet, got up and came over to greet her.

  When the dog had been petted, Natalie noticed that there was a message on her machine, which she’d moved to the kitchen now that Toby was in the study. She pushed the play button and there was Joel: “Natalie, all right. If you refuse to give me another chance, well, that is your decision, and I guess I’ll have to learn to live with it. But I do have a little problem. Remember that blue Hawaiian-print shirt of mine? Well, I can’t find it. I wonder if maybe you could check and see if somehow it ended up with you. I really did love that shirt, Natalie, so I hope you’ll be gracious about this and—”

  She punched the stop button and reset the machine, silently cursing Joel and his blue Hawaiian-print shirt. Then she shot a quick glance at the back of Rick’s head. He seemed oblivious, all wrapped up in his television program. Had he been there, listening in, when Joel called? He’d brought his own cellular phone and answering machine with him; she’d carried the machine into the house when she helped him unload his car. So there was no reason he’d be listening in to her machine.

  Unless he’d just happened to be standing nearby when Joel called. She could just see him, standing at the sink, peeling carrots or potatoes or something healthful for his and Toby’s dinner, and hearing the machine beep and then Joel’s voice—

  Natalie scrunched her eyes shut and silently shouted, Enough!

  She was being truly, disgustingly, ridiculous. And she was stopping it. Now.

  “Come on, Bernie,” she said, and slapped her thigh. The dog got up from the kitchen floor. “Good night,” she called lightly to Rick.

  “Good night,” Rick said, not turning from his program.

  As she climbed the stairs to
her own rooms, Natalie decided that a frank talk was the last thing she and Rick Dalton were going to need.

  Just to be fair to Joel, before she went to bed, she looked through her closet for his blue Hawaiian print shirt; it wasn’t there.

  The next day, Sunday, Rick decided to take the Lady Kate out again after breakfast. He invited Natalie. She thanked him, but refused.

  He asked if maybe he could take Bernie.” You know how Toby is about Bernie.”

  “Sure. Bernie loves to go out on the boat.”

  “Great. Thanks,” Rick said, and that was that.

  So Natalie spent the day in the house alone, trying not to think of how lovely it probably was, out on the water. It rained in the afternoon, and she found herself looking out the back windows a lot, expecting to see the Lady Kate sliding up to the dock. But two hours passed, the rain stopped and the sun came out, and still the houseboat didn’t appear.

  Around four, when Rick and Toby had yet to return, Natalie decided to make her favorite chicken-and-broccoli casserole, just to do something constructive with her time.

  The casserole was in the oven when the Lady Kate appeared at last. Natalie stood at a window in the great room and watched as the houseboat slid into the boathouse.

  Ten minutes later, Rick entered through the back door. He looked windblown and suntanned, and Natalie told herself that her heart did not skip a beat at the sight of him. Toby and Bernie trooped in at his heels, headed straight for the central hall.

  “Wash your hands, Toby!” Rick called to his son’s retreating back. Then, after smiling a greeting at Natalie, he set about putting away the remains of the lunch he’d taken on board with them.

  Natalie watched him for a moment, then proposed, very casually, “I’ve made dinner for all of us, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Sounds terrific—” he sniffed the air “—and smells like heaven. What time do we eat?”

  “Forty-five minutes?”