by Donna Ball
Well, here was a man who was motivated. He was making a commitment. He was putting himself in her hands. Shane Bartlett was the perfect candidate to prove the validity of her methods.
He was also stubborn, opinionated, demanding and filled with preconceived notions—and all that was obvious from a mere five-minute acquaintance with him. Who knew what other undesirable traits were lurking just beneath the surface? She had no idea what she was getting into.
But then again, neither did he. And the bottom line was, did she believe in herself or not?
Her hand tightened on the check. She lifted her eyes to his. "Yes, Mr. Bartlett," she said firmly, "I can find you a wife. But you're going to have to cooperate. You're going to have to give up some of your unrealistic expectations and put yourself completely in my hands."
Shane blinked, a little taken aback. "What do you mean, unrealistic expectations?''
Cassie leaned forward earnestly. "You've got to trust me completely. From this moment on I'm going to be your shadow. I'm going to know you better than your own mother does. You're going to tell me things you wouldn't tell your priest and you're going to listen to me when I tell you what to do. As of this very minute, you're turning yourself completely over to me. Is that understood? One hundred percent cooperation. That's the only way this thing can work. So, if you have any doubts, you'd better tell me now."
There was a fervor in her eyes that overwhelmed Shane, and he wasn't sure he liked her reference to "work"—any more than he liked the idea of being told what to do by a woman, especially when it came to something as touchy as romance. But then again he had to give her some credit for knowing what she was doing, and there were surely worse things than putting himself completely in the hands of a woman who looked as pretty as she did in that green dress.
He shrugged. "No. No doubts."
"Good." She placed her hands palm down on the desk and braced her shoulders. "Then we have a deal?"
"We have a deal."
"Fine." Cassie tried to temper her enthusiasm with professionalism as she reached into her desk and took out a stack of papers. She inserted the papers into a folder and passed them across the desk to him. "Then the first thing you need to do is fill out this personality profile."
Shane managed not to groan out loud. "There must be two hundred questions here," he complained as he flipped through the pages.
"Two hundred and fifty. Better get started."
Shane gave her a rebellious look, but Cassie stared him down. At last he took up a pen and began filling in the blanks.
The first few questions were easy. Age, sex, name. When he got to the part about religion, he looked up. "I was raised in a Methodist's Children's Home. Does that count?"
"You were an orphan, then?" Cassie thought that could explain a lot.
"Yeah." He frowned impatiently. "Listen, what I don't understand is why you have to have all this information about me. I'm the one who's doing the looking. Why can't you just line up some women and let me ask the questions?"
Several retorts sprang to mind, and Cassie squelched them. She replied patiently, "I thought I had explained all that, Mr. Bartlett." She could see another objection forming, so she added, "I have to have the same information on all my clients. After all, I have to make sure I'm not setting someone up with the Son of Sam, don't I?"
“Well..." He seemed only slightly mollified as he flipped through the pages again. "That makes sense, I guess. But this could take the rest of the day."
"At the rate you're going it could."
With a sigh he picked up the pen again. Cassie, meanwhile, took the opportunity to make a few notes of her own.
On the surface, his strongest asset was his physical appearance. He had a lean, athletic build, strong thighs, good hands. Probably a strong libido. If matching people were as simple as breeding horses, she would have no problem at all. He was left-handed, which surprised her. Many creative people were left-handed, and Shane Bartlett didn't seem the creative type at all.
After a moment she inquired curiously, "How long were you in the children's home?"
"Off and on, about twelve years. My parents were killed on the highway when I was two, and I didn't have any other relatives."
"That must have been a hard way to grow up."
"Not really." He continued to fill in blanks as he spoke. "I mean, you hear a lot of garbage about foster homes and such, but I never had any problems— except for moving from one place to another and getting used to new families. I didn't much care for that."
Aha, thought Cassie's psychoanalytical mind. "Were you ever adopted?"
"No, and I never could understand that. I was cute as the dickens."
Cassie tried to hide a grin with the corner of her hand, but Shane saw it and his eyes crinkled. Nice smile, she observed. Warm eyes.
And he surprised her by observing, "You know, you're not half bad when you smile. I'll bet people would be a lot friendlier to you if you did it more often."
Immediately Cassie erased the smile and turned back to her notes. Outspoken, she wrote. Very straightforward, "I'm sure you meant that as a compliment, Mr. Bartlett, but for now let's just concentrate on you, shall we?"
Abruptly he closed the folder. "How would you like to go get some ice cream?"
She looked up at him, startled. "What?"
"There's a place just down the street with benches in the sun. I've got to tell you, I've been inside for almost half an hour and the walls are starting to close in."
"But it's only ten-thirty in the morning."
"Good." He got to his feet. "It won't spoil your lunch."
Cassie hesitated. Maybe, in his case, a hands-on interview would be more revealing, and he could always finish the profile at home. "All right," she conceded. "Maybe we could take a break for a little while. But you still have to fill out the form."
He folded the pages and tucked them into his pocket. "Later," he promised and opened the door.
~
THREE
It was a bright morning in early June, the streets smelled of gasoline fumes and asphalt and the sky was the famed Texas blue that could be found nowhere else on earth. Cassie loved Dallas, with its combination of new world enterprise and old world manners, its pioneer spirit and brazen pride, its international glamour and small-town friendliness. She loved the smell of the streets and the sound of traffic, the brash new buildings and quaint, intimate gathering places. She loved the way people moved, with purpose but leisure, as though they knew where they were going but were equally confident the world would wait for them to get there. Glancing at the man walking next to her, she decided Shane Bartlett fitted in perfectly here.
“So," she asked as they rounded a corner, "what made you decide to come to Dallas?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, there really wasn't much choice in my mind. Do you remember that old t.v. show, Dallas? I grew up on it. And then, for the last year or so of my last contract, I was so far out in the middle of nowhere the only television reception we could get was a satellite transmission from this Russian station that ran reruns of Dallas every night from eight to midnight. So we’d all gather in the local bar to watch it– over and over and over again. I can quote you every word of dialogue from most of those episodes. Of course I couldn’t begin to tell you what it means.”
Cassie chuckled. “That's one way to learn Russian, I guess.”
“The hard way. Sometimes it was so cold inside that bar the beer froze in the glasses. But none of the guys would miss a night of Dallas–me, included.”
"So you came here expecting fast deals and beautiful women in designer gowns?" All blond, of course, she added to herself.
“Nope." He took her elbow as they crossed the street, which Cassie thought was a nice gesture—old-fashioned and protective. He dropped her arm immediately when they reached the other side. "I came because it looked so warm. Everybody lounging by the pool, having breakfast on the terrace, drinking fancy drinks in frosted glasses. Th
at's what I wanted— someplace warm."
Cassie shook her head a little, amused. "But it's not warm all the time, you know. It's not unusual to see twenty degrees here in the winter."
"Twenty degrees?" His tone was lightly scoffing. "Honey, that's not even nippy. I don't bother to get out my winter coat until it hits forty below."
She laughed and stepped inside the ice-cream parlor as he opened the door. Almost despite herself, she was beginning to like him.
Shane ordered a double strawberry and rocky road cone, and Cassie, though she really wasn't in the mood for ice cream at that hour, ordered a small cup of vanilla. "I knew you were a vanilla person," Shane commented, scooping up a handful of napkins on their way out. "Do you want to sit over there?"
He indicated a courtyard scattered with white iron benches and umbrellaed tables, and she nodded. "What does that mean, a vanilla person?"
"Nothing. Just that you're not very adventurous."
She shrugged. "Ice cream is ice cream."
He looked as though he wanted to respond to that, but decided it was more prudent not to.
Cassie chose a table in the shade of an umbrella, and Shane sat across from her, moving his chair into the sun. He leaned back, pushed his hat away from his face and tilted his face contentedly toward the sun. He reminded Cassie of a sleek, bronzed feline, basking in the desert warmth. Cassie had to remind herself that there was no time to waste, that she wasn't here to admire Shane Bartlett's form. "Let's start with something simple," she said. "What do you like to do for recreation?”
"Eat ice cream."
"Besides that."
His eyes were half closed against the glare of the sun, his face turned at a slight angle away from her, and he enjoyed the ice-cream cone with an aggressive sensuality that Cassie found more captivating than she liked to admit. He scraped his teeth across the top of the mound, then ran his tongue across its breadth. He let the sweetness dissolve in his mouth, then tasted it from another angle, slowly, thoroughly, and with absorbed pleasure. She had never known a man who could give himself over so completely to so simple an experience. It was fascinating to watch.
"Mostly," he answered at leisure, "I like to lie in the sun and do nothing. By the pool."
His tongue circled the ice-cream cone with luxurious delight, making spirals and patterns with long, caressing strokes. Cassie became aware that her own ice cream was beginning to melt, and she picked up her spoon. "No," she said a little impatiently, "I mean, what do you like to do. Surely you must have some interests, hobbies, even an avocation."
He spared a moment away from his worship of the sun to slant a glance at her. "Avocation? Is that like work?"
"Sort of. It could be."
He turned his face back to the light and bit off the tip of an ice-cream spiral. His drawl was slow and lazy. "I've been working since I was twelve years old. Hard work, with sweat and blisters. Twenty years of that was enough for me, and I plan to spend the next twenty sitting in the sun and doing nothing. I don't ever want to hear the word work again. Or avocation, either."
"Look, Mr. Bartlett, you've got to help me out here." Cassie tried to keep the frustration out of her voice. "We don't have a lot of time, and I'm trying to find out—"
"Fishing," he interrupted easily, taking another long swipe at the ice cream with his tongue. "I like to fish. And hunt."
Cassie released a pent-up breath. "Fine. Good. You like outdoor sports. Water skiing? Baseball? Boating?"
"Nope. Just fishing and hunting."
"Is that what you like to do on a date? I'm trying to find out what you enjoy doing with a woman."
He didn't look at her, but the slow, sensual curve of his lips was explicit. "Oh, the usual things."
But Cassie was in no mood for games. Despite the shade of the umbrella, she was warm, though it might have had more to do with watching Shane soak up heat with the same greedy sensuality with which he caressed the ice-cream cone than the temperature of the day. She slipped off her jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. "Mr. Bartlett," she demanded carefully, "have you ever been out with a woman?"
"Of course I have."
"All right, then, what did you do?"
He flattened the top of the cone with his teeth. "Well, generally, we'd meet at Sophie's—that's a bar— for a beer, then go back to her place. Or, if I happened to be in a city, we'd take in a movie and then go back to her place.”
“And?"
"And what?"
"And what then?" Cassie dug her spoon into the half-liquid ice cream and took perverse pleasure in goading him. "I mean, that's a pretty short evening. Not much time for developing social skills. You have a drink, you go back to her place, and... talk? Play pinochle? Knit sweaters? What?"
He slid his gaze toward her, eyes that were sun-gilded and heavily lidded, and murmured, "Lady, if you don't know what happened then, I'm definitely going to have to find myself a new matchmaker." He turned his attention back to his ice cream. "Kept warm," he said. "We kept warm."
Cassie arranged her spoon across the rim of the cup and dabbed her lips with a corner of the paper napkin. "I'm afraid, Mr. Bartlett, that the young women of Dallas will expect a somewhat more sophisticated form of entertainment than that."
He smiled, secretly and with infuriating confidence, to himself, but said nothing. Cassie, watching him devote himself to the ice-cream cone again with decadent abandon, had no difficulty picturing images to go along with that smile. Raw, animal sexuality, she observed with what she thought was admirable detachment. An unmitigated sensualist in every way. He must have had a lot of practice "keeping warm," and if all he had wanted was a date, this would have been the easiest assignment she had ever had.
He noticed her staring at him, and a glint of amusement came into his eyes. He held out the ice-cream cone. "Want a bite?"
For some reason, and to her great annoyance, Cassie blushed. "No thanks," she said curtly, and busily wadded up her napkin and stuffed it into her cup of melted ice cream. "We have quite a bit of ground to cover, and I'd appreciate it if you'd try to be a bit more cooperative."
Shane finished his ice-cream cone in three deliberate bites, then wiped his fingers on the napkin. For a time the so-called interview had been entertaining, even amusing, but he had a feeling Cassie Averil didn't think so. He didn't think he had ever met a more uptight woman, and he wondered if that was a result of city life, or just a normal part of her personality.
"Look," he said, "if you ask me, you're making this a lot harder than it has to be. I've told you before, all I want you to do is let me tell you what I want, and you supply the woman to fit the bill."
Cassie felt her shoulder muscles tighten with frustration. How many times did she have to explain this to him? "Mr. Bartlett," she said with exaggerated patience, "if it were that easy, you wouldn't have come to me. You could have found what you were looking for by yourself."
"If I had twenty or thirty years," he agreed, "and if I wanted to spend them squiring around one woman after the other only to find out she's not the one, after all. The thing is..." And for the first time he was uncomfortable, perhaps because for the first time he was forced to tell her something personal about himself. Perhaps it would have been easier to fill out the form, after all. "I'm not very good at that sort of thing. Playing games, impressing people. And I don't like it."
Cassie nodded thoughtfully, unsurprised. "You've spent most of your life alone."
"All of it," he corrected simply.
There was a moment of brief vulnerability in his gaze, then he looked away. And in that moment, brief though it was, Cassie experienced a twinge of empathy she had never expected to feel for him. Suddenly he was more than a challenge, more than the fee that would save her business, more, even, than the enormous gamble he represented. In that moment she was determined to succeed—not just for herself, but for him.
Making a concerted effort to keep her tone detached, she said, "Obviously, you're not happy being alone. Do
you have any idea why you've been unable to find a woman you were willing to commit to before now?"
His eyes glinted with low-key amusement. "Because the ratio of men to women in Alaska is approximately sixteen to one?" he suggested.
Cassie's brows knit slightly in annoyance. She hadn't expected an answer that simple. "Because," she said, hoping to override his logic with her conviction, "you don't really know what you want as well as you think you do."
He laced his fingers together and stretched out his arms before him, seeming unimpressed. Cassie watched his shoulders tighten against the pliant leather of his vest, and the muscles of his upper arms flex and lengthen beneath his shirt. Nice form, she observed again. Very nice.
"How would you know?" he inquired without much real interest. "You won't even listen to me when I try to tell you what I want."
"Because," Cassie informed him, "that's my job. Between the profile form and this interview, I'll know things you would never think of telling me, and those are the keys to making a match—the things that even you aren't aware of."
Shane looked at her suspiciously, not liking the sound of that. "What if I don't fill out the form?"
Cassie hesitated. "That would make it more difficult, of course, but in the long run it doesn't matter. Within a week I'll know you better than you know yourself." The blatantly skeptical look in his eyes pushed her to add, "As a matter of fact, by the end of the day I'll be able to tell you things about yourself even you won't believe."
"What are you, some kind of mind reader or something?"
She smiled. "No. Just good at my job."
He seemed to consider that for a moment, then dismissed it with a shrug. "In the first place, I don't believe you. In the second place, it doesn't matter. You don't need to know about me. You need to know about her."
