Stand-in Groom

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “I don’t know—” He cut himself off as he held her gaze, as he, too, let her see how badly he wanted her. “No,” he said honestly. “No, I wouldn’t be.”

  Time seemed to stretch way out as they looked into each other’s eyes, the truth laid out on the table before them.

  Chelsea was the first to look away. She took a sip of her water, knowing that it wouldn’t help at all to cool her down. “Tomorrow, if you see the Farbers at the beach,” she said, amazed that her voice could sound so normal, “tell them I’ve had too much sun—that’s why I’m not with you.”

  Johnny nodded. “Yeah, all right.”

  The waiter appeared, carrying Chelsea’s salad and his swordfish steak.

  Johnny looked up at him. “Sorry for the inconvenience,” he said, “but can you have room service bring this up to our rooms?”

  “No problem at all, sir.” The food disappeared back toward the kitchen.

  Johnny got to his feet, holding out his hand for Chelsea. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s make it look good for the Farbers.”

  Chelsea stood and he pulled her close, looping his arm around her shoulders. She caught a glimpse of Susan Farber’s knowing smile as they left the restaurant.

  If Susan Farber only knew …

  Chelsea was stepping into the warm water of a bath when the phone rang. Thinking it could only be Moira, she sat down among the bubbles and reached for the telephone’s bathroom extension.

  “It’s about time that you called,” she said as a greeting as she nestled the phone against her ear.

  There was a pause, then a voice that was decidedly not Moira’s spoke. “I don’t know who exactly you expect this to be, but it’s not. It’s me.”

  It was Johnny Anziano. Chelsea nearly dropped the receiver into the bubbly water. She was undressed and in the bathtub, which seemed an utterly inappropriate place to have a conversation with him.

  “I thought you were Moira,” she admitted.

  “Well, I’m not,” he said.

  She stood up, water sheeting off of her as she reached for her towel. But she stopped mid-grab, catching sight of her reflection in the big mirror over the double set of sinks. She was naked, her body glistening in the dim light of the candle she’d brought into the bathroom. But so what if she was naked? Johnny couldn’t see her. And if she got out of the tub to talk to him, the water would be cold by the time she got back in.

  Besides, it would be fun to talk to him, knowing that he’d damn near have a heart attack if he knew where she was and what she was doing. She could just imagine the look on his face. …

  She sat down among the bubbles, smiling at the thought. “What’s up?”

  “You know, it just suddenly occurred to me that we could talk on the phone.” His voice was smoky and resonant—and capable of sending shivers down her spine and heat coursing through her entire body. “You’re over there and I’m over here, and the door’s locked between us, so the whole temptation thing is pretty much taken care of.”

  He was right. They could talk on the phone without running the risk of winding up in each other’s arms. And she wanted to talk to him. She liked talking to him. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “What do you want to talk about?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “You.”

  She opened her eyes. “That’s not fair. How come we can’t talk about you?”

  “We can take turns,” he suggested. “I’ll ask you a question, and then you can ask me one.”

  “How come you get to go first?”

  Johnny laughed. “All right. You go first.”

  “Okay.” Chelsea gazed up at the moisture dripping down the steamy tile walls. It seemed to gleam in the candlelight. She sank down into the water until the bubbles covered all but the tops of her breasts. “Let’s see. … What kind of car are you going to buy with the seventy-five grand?”

  He laughed again. He had a really fabulous laugh. “Who says I’m going to buy a car?”

  “The woman at Meals on Wheels told me you drive an ancient VW Bug,” Chelsea told him, sinking farther into the water, so that the back of her head was wet, careful not to drop the receiver in. “Allegedly, the car’s already died, but both you and it refuse to acknowledge that.”

  “That car’s a classic,” Johnny told her. “I might spend a few hundred dollars getting a tune-up, but no way am I buying a new car.”

  She sat up, squeezing the water out of her hair with her free hand, then reached for the soap. “What kind of man would prefer a museum artifact to a zippy new sports car …?”

  “The kind of man who’s saving all of his money so he can open his own restaurant,” Johnny told her.

  “Is that what you’re going to do with the money?”

  “That’s right.”

  She lathered up her washcloth. “What kind of restaurant?”

  “The best,” he said. “The kind where people drop huge bills for dinner, and leave feeling they got the better end of the deal because the food was so good.”

  “I had no idea,” Chelsea murmured, tucking the phone under her chin as she ran the washcloth up her arm.

  “Are you … splashing?”

  “Splashing?” Chelsea asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It sounds like you’re splashing. Like, with water?”

  The slightly rough texture of his voice seemed to slide exquisitely against her skin, like the sensation of the soapy washcloth against her breasts and stomach. “Really?”

  “There it is again,” Johnny said. “Holy God, you’re in the tub, aren’t you?” His voice sounded odd—choked and tight, as if he were suddenly having trouble breathing.

  She smiled, lifting one leg to run her washcloth from her ankle to her thigh. “I take baths at night to relax.”

  She heard him draw in a deep breath, and when he spoke again, his voice was intimate and low. “So how’s it going? Are you relaxed?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  NINE

  CHELSEA FOUND HER razor on the edge of the tub, and resting her leg along the edge, she began to shave. “Isn’t it your turn to ask me a question? A real question?”

  She didn’t need to see him to know he was smiling. “Yeah. I guess I can cross ‘What are you wearing?’ off the list.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Maybe you should run more hot water into the tub,” he told her. “I wouldn’t want you to get cold.”

  She’d turned off the air-conditioning and opened the windows before she’d run her bath-water. It had to be close to eighty-five degrees in there. A bead of sweat ran down her neck and she used her washcloth to cool herself off. “Believe me, I’m in no danger of getting cold. It’s steamy in here.”

  He drew in another deep breath. “I bet. Yow.”

  “I’m still waiting for your question.”

  “My brain is immobilized by the pictures my vivid imagination is creating.”

  “I have a question, then,” she said. “I want to know where you learned to kiss.”

  Johnny laughed. “Would you believe through years of dedicated practice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Actually, when I was seven, my mother and I lived next door to a kid named Howie Bernstein. Howie had a sixteen-year-old sister, and—I can’t remember her name, but she used to lecture us on how to kiss a girl. Apparently, she went out with a couple of boys who had no finesse—they did little more than grab and suck, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I know exactly what you mean.” Chelsea closed her eyes, using her hands to rinse the soap from her skin, letting his voice wash over her as well.

  “So Howie’s sister was determined that Howie not grow up to be an insensitive jerk, so she regularly cornered him—and me with him—and told us that when we kissed a girl, we had to remember to take it really slow—even twice as slow as we thought. She said we had to pay attention to little details and take our time. I was only seven, but I can still
remember her telling us that. So I guess I owe it all to Howie Bernstein.”

  “God bless Howie Bernstein’s sister, whatever her name is.”

  “Howie used to call her Butthead, but I know that’s not her real name.”

  “Probably not.”

  “She was beautiful and funny and smart. I remember wishing I had a sister like her. It got kind of lonely sometimes with just my mother and me.”

  “What happened to your father?” Chelsea asked.

  “He died in Vietnam when I was around three. I never really knew him.”

  Chelsea closed her eyes. “God, I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Johnny told her. “More now than I was as a kid. I mean, I grew up in a pretty tough neighborhood, and a lot of kids had dads that beat the crap out of them—so I didn’t mind not having a father back then. But when I got older, I could’ve used having a guy around the house—you know, like a role model. But all I had were the stories my mother used to tell. About how my father wanted to go to college and become a schoolteacher, but his parents died when he was a kid, and he had no money. So he enlisted in the army, thinking he could sign up and serve for a few years and then go to school courtesy of Uncle Sam. He didn’t factor dying into the equation.”

  “How did he die?”

  “His transport plane was shot down. According to the stories, he was one of about seventy-five men who survived the crash, but he died trying to pull the pilot out of the plane. It was burning, and they could hear the pilot screaming, and my father was the only one who went in after him. The whole thing went up in a fireball, and they were both killed.”

  Johnny paused, but Chelsea didn’t speak. She sat, watching water drip down the tile walls, trying to imagine her father going into a burning plane to try to save the pilot’s life. She couldn’t picture it—because he’d never do it. Oh, he’d have gone in without batting an eye if his money had been in danger of going up in flames, but not for some stranger.

  “But then, after my mother died,” Johnny continued, “I was going through some of her papers, sorting things out, you know, and I found my father’s army records, along with some letters he wrote to her. It didn’t take me long to realize that that story she told me about him wanting money to go to college—that was something of a rather huge white lie. The truth was, he was busted for knocking over a liquor store, and since he was only eighteen and it was his first known offense, he was given a choice: jail or the army. That was right around the time he’d gotten my mother pregnant and married her. He had a wife and kid to think about, so he took his chances in ’Nam. He actually made it through his first tour without even being injured.

  “The way I figure it, he came back and kicked around for about a year before he started to get into trouble again—or at least until he started to get caught. This time he served about six months in prison, and when he got out, he reenlisted. I read a letter he wrote to my mother from Walpole right before his release, telling her he didn’t know what else he could do besides go back to Vietnam. He couldn’t handle the grind of nine to five, and he was a lousy criminal too. The only thing he’d ever been good at was patrolling the jungles of Southeast Asia. So he went back, and he died trying to save some stranger’s life. He was the only one who went into the burning plane to help that pilot. The only one.” He was silent for a moment. “I could never figure out why my mother didn’t just tell me the truth.”

  “Maybe she wanted you to remember him as a hero,” Chelsea said softly.

  “But that’s just it,” Johnny said. “Didn’t she realize that the truth was better than the story she told? I mean, here’s this two-bit criminal, this total screwup of a guy who can’t hold a job, who’s done hard time in Walpole, and he’s the only man—one out of nearly a hundred soldiers—who can’t just stand there and listen to another man burn to death. My father didn’t go into that plane because he wanted to die. He wasn’t trying to be a hero. He probably went in there cursing that pilot to hell and back. But he did go in. He couldn’t keep himself from trying to save that guy. Everyone thought he was some good-for-nothing lowlife, but inside, he was a better man than all of them. To me, it makes him even more of a hero, since he wasn’t a hero to start with.”

  “You’re right, but I can see it from your mother’s point of view too,” Chelsea told him. “I could see how she wouldn’t want her son growing up knowing his father had done time in prison. Didn’t you tell me that she was a doctor?”

  “Yeah. She went back to school to get her degree about four years after my dad died. It took her that long to deal with it. My old man may not have been able to hold a job, but he was one of those guys that charmed the socks off of everyone he met. Everybody loved him.” Johnny laughed. “My mother had this note written to him by the warden up at Walpole, wishing him the best of luck upon his parole, can you believe it? It was in with his letters and stuff.

  “Anyway, she never really got over his death, but she finally reached a point where she had to move forward with her own life. I remember when she sat me down and told me she was going back to college—that she was going for a medical degree. I was eight that year, and she gave me my own key to the apartment, because I was going to have to let myself in after school, while she was in class. That was when I first learned to cook.” He laughed. “I had to, or I would’ve starved to death. My mother almost never got home before eight-thirty for about six years. I started cooking her dinner.”

  “You must’ve been scared—eight years old and alone for all that time every day.”

  “I was used to it. It was no big deal.”

  “When I was twelve, I spent three days totally by myself—and it was a very big deal,” Chelsea said. “And necessity wasn’t the mother of invention in my case. I didn’t learn to cook—I just ate junk food the entire time. You know—and this is something you should know about me, seeing as how I am your wife—but I still can’t cook. I’m the kind of person who can burn water.”

  “Maybe I could give you a few lessons.”

  Chelsea closed her eyes, not wanting to think about the kind of lessons she wanted Johnny Anziano to give her. “I don’t think so. If I learned how, then I’d have to cook all the time. As it stands, I’ve got a great reason for ordering takeout.”

  “I love to cook. I loved it when I was eight too. I’d much rather cook my own dinner than eat out. I’m too critical of other people’s cooking.”

  “Do you really know how to cook?” she asked. “Really cook?”

  “Isn’t it my turn to ask a question?”

  “No, I think it’s still my turn,” she told him, knowing full well that she was wrong.

  “No way! You just asked me about fourteen questions in a row,” he told her. “It’s definitely my turn. And I want to know why you spent three days by yourself when you were twelve.”

  Chelsea stretched her foot toward the faucet, and with her toe she lifted the toggle that opened the drain, letting some of the cooling water out of the tub. “I was in some really intense negotiations with my parents about trying out for the middle-school field-hockey team. I didn’t want to do it because Sierra had played and won Field Hockey Goddess of the East Coast, or some major award like that. The way I saw it, Sierra was Miss Perfect, and this was just going to be another way that I would fail to live up to her glorious standards.”

  She closed the drain with her toe, but then scooted forward to add more hot water to the tub. She raised her voice to be heard over the rush of the water. “So after they told me that I would play on the team—I didn’t have a choice in the matter—I counternegotiated by packing up my things and moving out.”

  Johnny laughed in surprise. “Are you saying that you ran away from home?”

  “Yep. And you want to know the really stupid thing?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Johnny said. “I get the feeling this is going to be good.”

  “After I left, nobody missed me.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Chel
sea shut off the hot water. “Nope. I happened to run away on the weekend of the big Harvard/Yale game. My entire family spent all of Saturday preparing for the game, all of Sunday tailgating in Cambridge, and all of Monday recovering. Everyone just assumed I was home, pouting.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “I drove out to our beach house in Truro—on the Cape.”

  “You drove?”

  “Yep. Took Daddy’s Jaguar and headed for Cape Cod.”

  “I’m assuming that wasn’t the first time you’d been behind the wheel of a car.” Johnny paused. “Of course, I realize that with you, I probably shouldn’t assume anything.”

  “No, you were right the first time. Troy taught me to drive when I was ten. I was kind of like his pet monkey—it amused him to teach me to do all sorts of grown-up things. That same year he tried to get me to drink beer and smoke, too, but I was a smart kid. I hated the taste of beer, and I knew smoking would give me cancer.” She swirled the water around in the tub, trying to mix the cool with the hot. “But I loved to drive. I had to sit on about three pillows and pull the seat all the way up so I could reach the gas pedal. Troy used to take me out a couple times a week. Sometimes he’d even wake me up in the middle of the night so I could get a chance to drive on the highway without anyone around to see me and call the cops. By the time I was twelve, I was an excellent driver. I’d probably already clocked a few thousand miles.”

  “Driving, smoking, drinking … I guess what Troy couldn’t teach you, his good friend Bent did, huh?” Johnny asked.

  “Is that your next question?”

  “No, I was just marveling at the irony. So back to this story: You took Daddy’s Jag, and you actually made it all the way out to Truro without getting stopped?”

  Chelsea put her head back and watched the flickering candlelight reflecting off the moisture-laden walls. “It was off-season. No one gave me a second glance. At least not until I’d been at the beach house for three days. That was when I was nabbed—by a patrol cop who knew there wasn’t supposed to be anyone staying at the Spencer cottage that week. He brought me down to the police station and called my parents—who still didn’t even know I was gone.” She laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “What a joke.”