Downhome Darlin' & The Best Man Switch

by Victoria Pade

  Kay laughed. “Okay, he’s gorgeous. Just remember—he’s our best friend in the world...and he’s completely available.”

  Mitzi looked back at Mr. Available and actually felt her heart flutter, which hadn’t happened in months. Though her heart palpitations did have a rusty creak to them.

  Kay and Marty got out and shouted greetings to Grant. Through the car window, Mitzi saw Kay point toward where she was still hovering in the back seat. Grant turned, making eye contact with her. Having all that prime masculinity aimed in her direction caused her heart to do a few more unusual gyrations.

  Kay and Marty trotted away in the direction of Kay’s mom, leaving Grant with nothing to do but step forward to where Mitzi sat paralyzed with nerves, her hand frozen on the door handle. His walk was sheer male grace, and just the act of opening the car door for her seemed powerful when he performed it. Maybe the next week would be as pleasurable as Kay had promised... Suddenly, the realist in her was being badly outraced by the romantic.

  Grant stood before her. There was something insouciant about the way his mouth turned up at one corner.

  Hmm... Actually, now that she was trapped in its glare, that smile seemed almost a sneer.

  He looked her up and down with blue eyes that were almost sharklike in their lack of expression. “Aren’t you ever going to get out of the car?”

  Mitzi jumped. She didn’t know what she had been waiting for—maybe for Grant to say hello, or help her out? Call her old-fashioned, but when Kay had described him as “nice,” Mitzi had expected manners to come along with the package.

  Realism started creeping back up on her. Grabbing her handbag that went beyond oversize—it usually carried her entire life, including a camera and a few rolls of film—she hauled herself out of the car, wishing now that she had on something simpler than her long black gauzy skirt and a white sheer shirt. The charm bracelet she always wore, which had belonged to her grandmother, clinked noisily as she unfolded her long limbs and pushed off the seat. Next to Grant, who was so self-possessed-looking in his khakis and conservative button-down shirt, she felt fluttery and fussy.

  As she stepped out of the car, her new slick-bottomed sandals slipped against the hard pavement, nearly sending her flying. Before she could fall, she grabbed hold of Grant’s arm. His rock-hard arm. The man obviously had a close personal relationship with a Nautilus machine.

  Grant pulled her away from the car, let go of her and shut the car door firmly. Then he turned back, arms crossed, and gave her another long up-and-down stare. “So you’re Mitzi.”

  So you’re the bubonic plague, Mitzi interpreted. She tensed, not quite understanding why he was addressing her that way. Then suddenly it dawned on her. “Let me guess. You were expecting Mitzi Gaynor?”

  He scratched his chiseled jaw. “Well...yeah.”

  It never failed—the curse her musicals-loving mother had bestowed on her! Inevitably, people expected a Mitzi to be short and blond and perky, a regular Nurse Nellie Forbush. Perhaps a tap-dancing cutie was what her mother had envisioned, but instead, Mitzi had grown, and grown, to five feet ten, and her body had nowhere near the grace of her nimble namesake.

  “Okay, so I’m not a perky movie star. Should that rule me out as maid of honor?”

  The gaze he leveled at her was about as mirthful as a peptic ulcer. “Let’s just get this over with.” He turned and strode toward the church, leaving Mitzi to trail in his wake, astonished.

  She had never seen someone react so rudely to her appearance, which, for all her defects, wasn’t that terrible! She had even been called a rare willowy beauty once, although, granted, that boyfriend was now ringing prayer bells in a monastery.

  Still, Grant’s reaction seemed extreme. This was the dreamboat Kay couldn’t stop talking about? He seemed more like a battle cruiser, with all guns aimed at her.

  Kay’s phrase buzzed through her mind. “Just remember—he’s our best friend in the world. ”

  Had she missed something? Maybe there were extenuating circumstances that momentarily caused Grant Whiting to lose his devastating charm. Maybe he disliked wedding rehearsals, or parking lots. Or her.

  Kay bounded out of the church and beckoned them forward, alerting Mitzi to the fact that she and Grant were the last stragglers. The bride-to-be tossed her short blond curls and grinned. “You two need to stop flirting and get with the program—remember, you’re the stars of the whole production.”

  Grant, with a perfectly affable smile on his face, held the church door open for Kay. “I thought that privilege belonged to you and Marty.”

  He didn’t correct her about the flirting business, Mitzi noticed.

  Kay laughed. “That’s tomorrow. Tonight, you and Mitzi have to stand in for us.”

  He turned and bestowed on Mitzi a look that could only be called sour. Couldn’t Kay see it? Mitzi glanced at Kay and saw that, no, the woman was still smiling up at Grant as if he were an overgrown Boy Scout.

  “More superstitious wedding nonsense,” he said with a sigh.

  Kay giggled and shooed him inside. “You’d be superstitious, too, if you were about to march down an aisle in front of two hundred people on heels high enough to bungee-jump off of.”

  Grant turned to Mitzi, shrugging helplessly. “I guess ours is not to reason why, Mitz.”

  Mitz? Was he kidding? She watched in awe as Grant, Mr. Charming himself, tweaked Kay’s bangs playfully and, handing over control of the door to the bride, ducked past her and disappeared inside.

  Kay gestured for Mitzi to hurry. “What did I tell you?” she asked. “Isn’t he a doll?”

  “He’s very...striking,” Mitzi mumbled.

  “And just imagine—he’s got a brother who’s exactly like him!”

  “Two of them,” Mitzi breathed, awed that nature could make such a tragic mistake twice.

  “Only, his brother’s not nearly so nice.”

  Mitzi wondered idly whether Attila the Hun had a mean little brother.

  “Wait’ll you get to know him better,” Kay assured her. “I couldn’t imagine life without a friend like Grant.”

  Mitzi vowed to be patient. For Kay’s sake, she told herself. A bride had a stressful enough time without a fractious wedding party to worry about.

  Luckily, all the attendants were inside and the priest was ready to shepherd them through the ceremony. Immediately, the cleric picked out the maid of honor and best man to represent the bride and groom. To Mitzi’s surprise, Grant took her arm and went through the rehearsal like an old pro. And when she marched to the front of the aisle where Grant was waiting, hilariously feigning a nail-biting groom, she had to join in the laughter in the church. When the priest got to the part when he would announce that the groom could kiss the bride, Grant vaulted over a pew and planted a kiss on Kay’s lips to claps and whoops all around.

  He was charming, apparently, to everyone but her. Still, she finished the rehearsal feeling a little more kindly toward him. For Kay’s sake.

  “Does everybody have a ride to the restaurant?” Marty asked outside the church.

  The group was already broken up and headed to their respective cars to drive to the rehearsal dinner. Kay tossed a glance at Mitzi and then tugged on Marty’s sleeve and whispered something conspiratorially as she nodded in Grant’s direction.

  “Oh, Mitzi,” Marty piped up, as if Mitzi hadn’t noticed them plotting against her. “We’ve, uh, got some wedding gifts that Kay’s mother brought to haul around in the back seat now... I guess you’ll have to ride with Grant.”

  Mitzi stood frozen on the church steps and stared at Grant’s gleaming, hulking white truck. “Wouldn’t it be better if I rode with your mom? I mean—”

  Kay cut her off by hollering for Grant’s approval of the plan. “You’ve got room for Mitzi, don’t you, Grant?”

  Grant broke into one of his icy smiles. “Maybe you should tell your friend I don’t bite.”

  Kay and Marty laughed as if he’d just tossed off an i
rresistible witticism. “He doesn’t bite,” Kay assured Mitzi, practically pushing her down the stairs. As they reached the last step, she added in a whisper, “He likes you—I can tell,” and gave Mitzi a final shove that sent her tripping forward.

  She clambered up to the passenger seat of Grant’s truck and smiled at him. Tentatively. “Well,” she said, trying to start out on a friendly note. “That wasn’t so painful.”

  Ted snorted. Oh, it hadn’t taken him long to scope out this conspiracy. His hunch had been absolutely right. This whole wedding thing was a marriage setup...and Grant was the target. All of Kay and Mitzi’s whispered huddles were strategy sessions. They’d even gotten Marty in on it, had turned the poor sucker against his own species. Or sex, or whatever you called it.

  Why couldn’t they give a guy a break? After what Grant had been through with Janice, the man deserved some peace and quiet...not some green-eyed woman chasing after him relentlessly. That was just the trouble with women. If you were a little nice to them and gave them an opening, they never gave up until they had you, hook, line and marriage license.

  It was Grant’s good fortune to have a big brother to run interference for him. And it hadn’t taken Ted more than one long look at Mitzi to know what method would send her scurrying back to where she came from. With women as with football, the best defense was a good offense.

  And, as Grant had pointed out so often, Ted excelled at offensiveness.

  “No, the rehearsal was entertaining,” he said. “I especially enjoyed that little performance at the end.”

  She stared at him blankly. “Performance?”

  “The little scene you played out there on the church steps, where you pretended that you wanted to go to the restaurant with Kay’s mom. As if you weren’t trying to finagle a ride with me to the rehearsal dinner all along.”

  Mitzi sputtered in astonishment as Grant’s monstrous vehicle peeled out of the parking lot. “I would rather have ridden with Kay’s mother.”

  He laughed. “Whatever.”

  “How far is it to the restaurant?” Mitzi asked, glaring at the road in front of her. She’d never met a man who could send her from annoyed to burning mad in nothing flat!

  “Oh, relax. I’ve never seen anyone so uptight.”

  “Uptight!” She had to take a deep breath to calm herself. She did feel uptight, but only because he was such a jerk! “Ever since we met, you’ve been provoking me. I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t think it might have something to do with whatever designs you might have cooked up for this wedding?”

  “Designs?” It was as if he were speaking a foreign tongue.

  “Kay hasn’t mentioned me to you before?”

  Just constantly, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. What an arrogant...! “Well, yes, in passing, but—”

  “In passing?”

  Mitzi huffed in frustration. “Kay’s just in a match-making mood. That doesn’t mean I was taking her seriously.”

  A dark blond eyebrow arched skeptically. “Weren’t you?”

  “Of course not!”

  He laughed that husky laugh of his. “Lady, I saw the way you were looking at me when you were sitting in the back seat of that car. Like you were a kid and I was Christmas.”

  She writhed in humiliation at the memory of how attractive she’d considered him at first glance. Adonis! Adonis with the personality of Hannibal Lecter. “Believe me, my only plan in coming here was to witness my high school buddy’s wedding and to have a peaceful week of rest in her house while she’s away. Is that so hard to swallow?”

  “Frankly, yes.”

  She tossed her hands in the air. “I give up.”

  He cast her a sideways glance as if sizing her up. “I’ve had you pegged from the beginning. You’re a single New York woman with a couple of failed relationships under your belt, and now you think you’ll come down here and wear your chic black getup and trick some poor soul into thinking you’re sophisticated.”

  Mitzi, huddling in the far corner of the seat, fumed. “If you must know, I received several compliments on my outfit at the rehearsal.”

  “It’s a Southern custom to be polite to strangers.”

  “Really? You might try it sometime yourself.”

  Grant pulled into a parking lot in front of an old warehouse building that announced Lou Rae’s Bar-B-Q in blue neon. Several people Mitzi recognized from the church were getting out of their cars. She clawed at the door handle and just managed to stop herself from leaping out of the truck before it had stopped moving. The upbeat strains of a western swing band drifted on the warm night air.

  “Don’t worry,” Mitzi assured Grant with a huff. “I’ll use all my New York feminine wiles to avoid you like the plague.”

  He shook his head and looked at her as if she’d said something totally uncalled for. “You know, I think you’re just about the most abrasive woman I ever met.”

  Mitzi gaped at him, speechless. She was abrasive? He made it sound as if she were the one who had started the trouble between them. She, who didn’t give two hoots about catching a man or even dating one! And as for Grant Whiting, she’d sooner go out with Godzilla!

  She trailed a good ten yards behind Grant into the restaurant. Once inside, she was escorted out to a patio that overlooked Lake Austin, which was sparkling with the day’s last rays of sun. Several long picnic tables were set up to accommodate Kay’s party, which had ballooned in number since the church. The traditional red-and-white-checked tablecloths practically sagged under the weight of heaping platters of barbecued chicken, beef and ribs, and bowls of coleslaw and potato salad. Almost as she walked through the door, a waiter inserted a white plastic cup of beer into her hand.

  She took a sip and tapped her toe to the upbeat music, eager to shake off the surly mood the short truck ride had left her in. Mitzi scoped out the lay of the land and chose an empty chair far away from God’s Gift to Women.

  Sue, one of the other bridesmaids, smiled as Mitzi walked up. “Take a load off,” she said.

  Mitzi tried to put Grant out of her head and began enjoying herself, eating way too much and drinking... well, more than she’d drunk in a long time. Every time her plastic cup was drained, a waiter bearing a pitcher magically appeared to refill it. Sue’s friends were loud but great fun, and Sue herself was as boisterous as Kay had said she was. She was especially vocal on the subject of the bridesmaid dresses, a topic about which Mitzi was in complete sympathy.

  “I mean, I can understand Kay’s not wanting the usual pastels,” Sue said, “but honestly, the three of us are going to look mighty peculiar standing up there. Lime-green? Fuchsia?” Sue, who was actually wearing a neon-orange dress—“tangerine,” Kay called it—laughed lustily at the prospect. “We’ll look just like, like—”

  “An assortment of Tropical Lifesavers?” Mitzi said.

  Sue, cackling, clapped Mitzi on the back hard enough to send her flying forward, spilling the beer in her hand. The magic waiter with the pitcher reappeared, refilling Mitzi’s glass before she could even register that it was empty. “I think that man has a psychic connection with the bottom of my cup,” she said, sending the table into peals of laughter.

  They’d all had far too much to drink.

  “Dance time for Mitzi!” Kay yelled suddenly, standing up and pointing at her maid of honor. People began to holler and clap, less in response to what Kay had said than to the volume she had achieved saying it. “C’mon, Mitzi, you haven’t danced all night!”

  Mitzi shrank back in her metal folding chair. Dance? “I’m not even certain I can stand up.”

  Amid laughter, her table moved as one to prop her up on her feet and propel her toward the dance floor. “But I don’t have anyone to dance with,” she protested.

  “Yes, you do!” Kay hollered.

  Mitzi turned, weaving slightly, and discovered to her horror that Kay was shoving Grant out onto the floor to dance with her. She stood frozen, instantly sober, her gaz
e darting to the lake, which she considered diving into. Anything to avoid more contact with Grant. And she might have taken that leap, if not for the nagging voice in the back of her head that stopped her.

  “Just remember—he’s our best friend in the whole world.”

  Tomorrow was the wedding, she assured herself as Grant weaved in her direction and the band began playing a spirited “Waltz Across Texas.” After tomorrow she would never have to see Grant Whiting again for her entire life—a sunny fact that would no doubt comfort her during hard times for years to come.

  “Shall we?” He sent her a sarcastic little bow.

  She clenched her teeth, determined not to be the one to cause a scene. For Kay’s sake.

  The easy waltz rhythm might have disguised the stiffness between them to any onlookers, but Mitzi had felt more romance dancing around her apartment with her vacuum cleaner.

  “You’re stiff as a board,” Grant said.

  She glared into her partner’s blue eyes. “You’re not exactly Fred Astaire yourself.”

  He shook his head. “I thought since you’d managed to get me out on the dance floor—”

  Her squeak of dismay only stopped him momentarily.

  “—that you might at least make some effort to be pleasant.”

  She had never met anyone so infuriating. “I did not want to dance with you.”

  His guffaw made her rage soar. “Right. I could see you were real hard to persuade.”

  “First you think I’m angling for a ride, now a dance. You are the most outrageous egotist I’ve ever met in my life!”

  To her frustration, her words seemed to have no impact whatsoever. “What I don’t understand,” he explained, as if he were the most rational person in the world, “is why you just don’t go for it.”

  She squinted in confusion. “Go for what?”

  “For me.”

  “You?”

  The man had to be certifiable!

  He pulled her a little closer to his hard-muscled torso. Mitzi feared she would throw her neck out leaning away from him. “Just relax, sugar,” he purred in his low Texas drawl. “If you just went for what you really wanted every once in a while, you wouldn’t be nearly so uptight.”