“I thought you were looking forward to Kay and Marty’s wedding,” Ted said.
“Of course. They’re my best friends.”
“Uh-huh.” Ted drummed his fingers and eyeballed him closely. “This isn’t about the buyout, is it? Good grief! You can’t even leave the store for one measly day!”
Ted thought Grant was a hopeless workaholic. But then, Ted had the work ethic of a house cat.
“It’s one night and the next day,” Grant corrected him. “I don’t think you realize the gravity of our situation.” He and his brother were at risk of losing their small chain of family-owned department stores, Whiting’s, if they didn’t forestall a buyout bid from Moreland’s, a larger Midwest chain. “This is the biggest business crisis we’ve faced since Herman Little from men’s suits tried to unionize the salesclerks.”
“And what happened?” Ted asked. “We gave everybody a little pay raise.”
“A seven percent pay raise!”
His brother shrugged. “Will you relax?”
“You don’t have Horace Moreland calling you every ten minutes. And now he’s in our territory.”
Horace Moreland was a corporate general who devoured local department stores like a kid devours Halloween candy, and he was here this week to munch down on Whiting’s. Ted and Grant were against a buyout, naturally, but they weren’t in complete control of their destiny. Their uncle Truman, a veteran of Whiting’s himself, still had a quarter share in the business. Uncle Truman was a golf nut who seemingly always needed money to keep up with his club dues—a weakness that left him very susceptible to big money talk from Moreland. The other quarter belonged to Mona, Ted and Grant’s stepmother. Though their father had passed away seven years ago, his last wife still held considerable sway over their lives in the form of her twenty-five percent, and Mona wasn’t just willing to be bought out, she was eager. Champing at the bit, even. Mona was a slave to fashion, and keeping up appearances took money. And wasn’t cash better than ownership in a business so subject to the whims of the economy? In other words, if Moreland was the ruthless enemy general, Mona and Truman were the turncoats ready to greet his tanks with welcome signs and confetti.
“I need to be on my toes in order to stave off calamity. I don’t have time for weddings.”
“You know what I think?” Ted asked. “I think you’re going to avoid that wedding because you don’t want the reminder.”
“Reminder of what?”
“Your divorce.”
Grant winced. “You’re right. I didn’t want the reminder.” He was still shocked that he of all people, he who had watched his father remarry three times and always swore he would be different, was divorced.
“You can’t avoid women forever, you know. Why not get out and enjoy your new bachelordom? Loosen up!”
“That’s what Janice always said.” Janice was his ex-wife.
Ted looked perplexed. “Janice wanted you to go out and meet women?”
“No, she wanted me to loosen up. She called me too stodgy, too rigid.”
“Janice was crazy!” Ted had never liked Grant’s wife. But he had a natural revulsion against anything that smacked of the domestic.
“Do you think I’m stodgy?”
“Well...” His brother shifted uncomfortably. “Maybe not stodgy exactly...serious. Dignified.”
“Stodgy.” Grant sighed. “Janice always complained that we never did anything fun or spontaneous, and that I was too responsible. Too responsible! Is there actually such a thing?”
“Janice was a nut.”
Was she? Grant had suggested they seek counseling. Really, he meant that Janice needed therapy, but he did want to be present when the psychiatrist pronounced that Janice just didn’t appreciate what a sterling husband she had, and that there was positively nothing wrong with their marriage, just as Grant had always claimed.
But before they’d made it to the first session, one morning Grant awakened and discovered his wife had run off with the prince of a thumbnail-size, oil-rich country in the Middle East.
Okay, so maybe there had been something wrong with his marriage.... But needless to say, Janice’s bailing out catapulted their relationship way beyond the realm of your average everyday marital dysfunction.
“The truly disturbing thing is, I was completely blind-sided by Janice’s defection. While I was the faithful hubby, slaving away at the store by day, and even adding on an extra room to our house on weekends in hopes that we would be starting a family soon, Janice was off having secret afternoon love sessions with Prince Omar.”
“While you were doing the handy-hubby number, she was doing the dance of the seven veils,” Ted quipped.
“How can I ever find a woman to trust after that kind of deception?”
Ted waved away that concern. “Forget trust. Think legs.”
Grant wished he could be a dyed-in-the-wool bachelor like his brother. “I don’t want to get married again.”
“Good!”
“I don’t even want to think about it.”
“So don’t. Find yourself a babe and have yourself a time.”
Ted’s advice was all well and good, but at this wedding he would have to stand through a long ceremony, hearing the words that he’d spoken so solemnly himself to a woman who apparently hadn’t given much thought to the “till-death-do-us-part” part. He just wasn’t sure he was up to it. And then there was the small matter of the maid of honor....
“What else is wrong?” Ted asked.
“It’s Kay,” he said. “The bride.”
“The woman with the mutt!” Ted exclaimed in disgust.
Kay was one of Grant’s friends from business school, and had only met Ted once...but once had been enough. At a backyard cookout at Kay’s house, her dachshund, Chester, had earned Ted’s enmity by peeing on his prized pair of genuine wallaby-hide boots imported from Australia. Man and beast had been sworn adversaries ever since.
“This has nothing to do with her dog,” Grant assured him. “It’s just...well, Kay is one of these mother-hen types, and now she’s getting married, and I’m the best man, and she naturally has been nagging me about getting married again.”
“Women!” Ted, who loved women—at least, he loved leggy blondes—always became defensive when the subject of matrimony was being discussed. “They’ll never be happy until every man on the planet is snagged and strapped down with a wife, a mortgage and kids.”
Grant nodded. “That’s Kay all over.”
Ted tapped a pencil against his thigh in annoyance. “Let me guess... Kay thinks her maid of honor would be just perfect for you.” He finished the sentence in a high feminine trill.
Grant grinned. “How’d you guess?” In fact, Kay had mentioned her maid of honor several times. Matchmaking was definitely afoot.
“Oh, they’re so predictable.” Ted leaned back, parked the pencil behind his ear and shook his head philosophically. “Women engineer these weddings to have their own momentum. First one woman gets married and then another one gets the urge, and before the poor sap she’s going out with knows it, he’s marching down the aisle, and on and on. The whole wedding thing is like a pep rally for matrimony, whipping females into a bridal frenzy. And unless you’re on guard, brother, you’ll get sucked into it, too, just like one of those cows getting sucked into a tornado in Twister.”
Grant smiled ruefully. “If only you’d given me that speech five years ago, I might never have married Princess Janice.”
Ted’s forehead creased with wrinkles—he did feel guilty for not indoctrinating his brother into staunch bachelorhood earlier. Though Lord knows he’d tried. He’d been on guard against the opposite sex ever since their father married for the fourth time when they were fourteen. He still blamed himself for letting Janice get through the defensive line.
Grant had paid dearly for that lapse. And now look at him—still vulnerable. Easy pickin’s for any wily female. It made Ted furious just to think about it.
“L
isten, bro, of course I’ll do the switch. In fact, I see it as a solemn duty, like pulling my weight here at the store.”
Grant choked on a sip of coffee. Ted was essential to Whiting’s, especially when it came to entertaining buyers; he could impress executives with his college-football-hero stories. But he weaseled out of the more stressful day-to-day operations of the store in favor of perfecting his tan out on his precious boat. Or, when pressed about his absenteeism, he might show up and play Nerf hoops in his office for a couple hours.
But Ted took pride in being the older brother by twelve minutes, and for being infinitely wiser, at least when it came to women. “Clearly, you’re still not equipped to deal with this what’s-her-name that Kay has marked you as a target for.”
“Mitzi,” Grant said, prepping him. “The maid of honor’s name is Mitzi Campion, a friend from Kay’s high school days.”
“Mitzi. Gotcha.” Ted narrowed his eyes contempla-tively. “Mitzi... You know what that name says to me?”
“No, what?”
“It says perky. It says pushy.”
Grant laughed.
“Just think Mitzi Gaynor,” Ted explained, all seriousness. “Just think South Pacific. That little nurse she played was full of perk—and what happened?”
“She danced a lot?”
Ted rolled his eyes. “She got married! And to some poor French guy who was just sitting on his island, minding his own business before she barreled into him.”
“I thought he was a lonely old murderer with two kids...”
His brother sneered. “They just threw that stuff in to make the woman look good.”
Grant steered Ted back on topic. “This Mitzi is being flown in and is going to house-sit for Kay next week while Kay and Marty are having their honeymoon, so naturally Kay wants me to squire the girl around and—”
Ted, who’d been absorbed in the briefing, suddenly gestured for Grant to stop right there. “No, no, no. Don’t think of this Mitzi character as a ‘girl.’ In confirmed-bachelor lingo, she’s a predator, and before the end of that rehearsal dinner Friday night, I’ll let her know what we think about squiring.”
Grant chuckled.
“Oh, laugh now, if you want,” his brother drawled. “You’ll thank me when it’s over. Believe me, Grant old boy, after this wedding, perky Mitzi will know better than to fly to strange cities trying to entrap men.”
Grant smiled. Overprotective “big” brothers definitely had their good points. For the first time since his marriage fiasco, Grant was beginning to feel in control again. Now he would be able to concentrate all his energies on saving the family store, and with it, his sanity. Best of all, he could forget about weddings and marriage vows and women....
“Sic ’em, tiger,” he said to his brother.
1
“YOU’RE GOING to fall in love with Grant Whiting!” Kay gushed from the front seat of the car on the way to the wedding rehearsal. “He’s such a dreamboat!”
Mitzi Campion gritted her teeth and smiled at Kay and Marty as if she just couldn’t wait to meet this remarkable love god that Kay had talked about nonstop all afternoon. “He sounds great, Kay, really, but right now Chester is my ideal male.”
“Oh, Mitzi, you don’t mean that.”
She sighed, looking forward to a week of leisure and dog-sitting. “You bet. He’ll keep my feet warm while I watch videos, and look soulfully into my eyes as I pig out on salty junk food. And it’s a cinch that he’ll be more faithful than any of my past boyfriends have been.”
That was no joke. In the past three years she’d been involved in three relationships, all of which had ended in heartache, not to mention heartburn from the Oreo binges she’d indulged in to make herself feel better. The strange thing was, in all three cases, everything had seemed great—the men had been good-looking, gainfully employed and seemingly well adjusted. But all three of them had run for cover when they’d discovered that Mitzi actually wanted a future that included marriage, kids and mortgage payments. In fact, just mentioning the word baby had sent Mike vaulting into the arms of a Sears model, showing Mitzi the softer side of being dumped. A year later, the vaguest hint of marriage had panicked her boyfriend Jeff, so he abandoned her and galloped off with a female jockey he’d met one weekend at Belmont Park.
Finally, there was Tim. Brother Tim now. That was just too humiliating to think about.
Kay shook her head reprovingly, like an elementary-school principal. Which she was. “You can’t meet Mr. Right watching videos with Chester.”
“I’m through looking for Mr. Right. Apparently nothing makes the urban, workaholic man more jittery than the idea of a woman with marriage on her mind—he’s terrified that she’s going to have a dozen babies and then abscond with his 401K. No, I’m afraid my Mr. Right is already someone else’s happily married hubby.”
“You shouldn’t be so negative,” said Kay.
Easy for her to say, standing with one foot down the church aisle.
“I have to face facts,” Mitzi replied. She was nothing if not a realist, except on those occasions when she was a hopeless romantic. “I’m the Typhoid Mary of romance. Three men lost in three years. That means I’m out of the game. If a racehorse had my record, he would have been put out to pasture, or shot in the leg, or whatever they do to the ones who are surefire losers.”
Kay, who was so in love she would have been disgusting if Mitzi didn’t like her so much, looked over at Marty, her future husband, and winked. “Won’t they be perfect?”
Marty laughed.
Mitzi’s curiosity flared. “You mean Grant Whiting is among Cupid’s casualties?”
Kay turned toward the back seat and put a hand on Mitzi’s shoulder. “It’s so sad. He’s the nicest man, but a little over a year ago his wife left him.”
Warning sirens rang out in Mitzi’s head. “Okay. What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing! Janice just never appreciated Grant,” Kay said with the vehemence of someone defending an old friend. “Anyway, she met this oil sheikh, and...well, you can guess the rest.”
Boy, could she. The old dumparoo. Mitzi began to feel a grudging kinship with Mr. Dreamboat.
“The guy was a Middle East oil sheikh,” Kay elaborated. “In fact, I think he was actually a prince or something.” She shrugged. “Grant’s ex-wife might be living in a tent in the desert somewhere, but she could now buy and sell several small countries before lunch and think nothing of it.”
“Thrown over for a prince.” Mitzi sighed. At least she’d never had to compete with royalty. “That would be a tough thing to get over.”
Kay patted her arm. “Janice’s folly is your good fortune.”
Mitzi screwed up her lips in a patient smile. “Even if I hadn’t already decided that love is a delusion, I doubt I could fall head over heels in one short week, Kay.”
“Don’t be so pessimistic. Just look at Marty and me.”
Mitzi stared at her best friend, uncomprehending. In fact, even Marty looked puzzled.
“You two knew each other in college,” Mitzi pointed out. “It was thirteen years before you got around to going on a date.”
Kay nodded. “That’s right—thirteen years, and then wham! One day it hit me that I was completely, madly and totally in love. It just goes to show.”
Mitzi sank against the velour of the back seat, taking little comfort from her friend’s example. If it took thirteen years to fall madly in love at first sight, she was in deep trouble. The only man she’d known for even close to that amount of time was Stanley the doorman at her Manhattan apartment building, and he was seventy-two and had false teeth that clicked like castanets.
Marty turned a corner downtown and pulled into a parking lot next to a large old stone church.
“How pretty,” Mitzi exclaimed. With her photographer’s eye, she could imagine how the scene would look the next day, with the morning sun beaming bright and shiny through the dappled shade of the sweeping live oaks, a summer bre
eze blowing at Kay’s flowing wedding dress. And the bridesmaids....
Mitzi frowned at the one spectacular blight on the Hallmark-card scene, trying to block the memory of that afternoon’s dress fitting from her mind. Tomorrow was Kay’s day, she reminded herself. A bride was entitled to make her nearest and dearest friends wear whatever hideously ugly bridesmaid gowns her heart desired.
“Look!” Kay exclaimed, pointing and waving at someone in the parking lot. “There he is! Oh, good. I was worried he wouldn’t get here on time.”
“Grant practically lives at that store of his,” Marty explained.
A workaholic type, Mitzi thought immediately. That didn’t bode well. All the men she’d gone out with before were workaholics. She, on the other hand, worked hard at her advertising job but didn’t want to make it her entire life. It wasn’t as if she could be considered a shooting star of Madison Avenue anyway. So far as a junior ad exec, she’d developed one winning campaign...for canned ham. It wasn’t the kind of success that made careers soar. Besides, what she really wanted to be was a professional photographer, but sometimes that seemed as much of a pipe dream as her desire to have a perfect loving husband and her American dream allotment of 2.5 kids.
Still perched forward, looking at the view, she realized her mouth was hanging open in astonishment. Her appreciation wasn’t so much for the view of the church anymore as the dreamboat just in front of her.
Leaning against a white truck that was practically the size of a semi stood a grade-A Adonis. His casual stance emphasized his impressive height and broad shoulders, his short hair was a mass of sandy curls and his skin was tanned to an Olympian bronze. He had the kind of chiseled jaw and white even teeth that advertisers dream about, and as he saw the bride and groom, his dazzling blue eyes lit up in recognition. Mitzi felt her breath catch, and turned a reproachful glance toward Kay.
“This is a man you refer to as nice? Maybe knowing someone for a decade gives you a different perspective...”
Downhome Darlin' & The Best Man Switch Page 17
