Mine 'Til Monday

by Ruby Laska

  Mud hastily turned away from the speakers. Something smelled wonderful, and he was aware of a gnawing hunger. It had been another Snickers-and-Coke lunch down at the shop today.

  “As long as it’s not moving, I’ll eat it,” he drawled, and was rewarded by a scowl.

  Why did he do that? Why the heck was he so tempted to promote the image he was convinced she had of him—an overindulged, undisciplined hick? Lord knew she was in the minority in that opinion. Most women found him more than adequate, in intellect as well as nearly every other arena.

  Maybe it was the challenge...?

  As soon as the thought occurred to him Mud banished it. He wasn’t here tonight to pursue Dorothy. Not to woo her, nor to bed her, now or ever. Even if he had been caught off-guard by those thick-lashed dark eyes, the full lips that had to work hard to suppress the shy smile lurking at the corners, the gamine little haircut that contrasted in the most unsettling way with curves he might never get used to.

  And he wasn’t even here to be nice, to help out an old friend for old times’ sake. No. He was here to fulfill a promise made years ago. Mud Taylor didn’t make a habit of promising anything to anyone, but when he did, he damn sure followed through.

  “Sole muniere?” he corrected himself, willing the twang out of his voice. It was a lazy habit anyway, something he absorbed from the kids at the shop. He straightened, found a spot on the counter to park his elbows, and took an appreciative draw of the fragrant steam. “Broccoli, toasted almonds...”

  “You’ve become a gourmand as well, then?” Dorothy inquired without turning from the stove. “You’re full of surprises. But actually that will help.”

  “What will help?”

  “You knowing your way around a fine meal. I doubt Miranda will be serving franks and beans next weekend.”

  Irritation won over Mud’s resolve to let Dorothy keep her opinion of him, no matter how wrong-headed. “Come on, Dot. Y’know, they served a square meal or two up at Huntington Country Club. Come to think of it, there was that one housekeeper Dad hired...Scrawlins, Coggins, something like that...anyway, she put me through the paces around the dinner table for a good month or so. Napkins in the lap, the whole nine yards. Even made me quit chewing toothpicks, if I remember right.”

  Dorothy sniffed disdainfully. “What made her leave?”

  “Me,” Mud admitted cheerfully. “I was around nine or so, going through a few growing pains. She started in January and didn’t even make it six months. ‘Course, summers were hard, since I was home all day to pester whoever Dad had hired to subdue me.”

  “I don’t recall anyone ever subduing you,” Dorothy said, laying down a spatula for a moment and turning to examine him.

  A tiny spot of flour dusted one cheek, and a lock or two of her inky hair swooped down over one eye, which added a hint of mischief to her gaze. “On the other hand, I don’t recall your father ever being too worried about it, either.”

  Mud chuckled. “Naw, you’re right. Pop was just happy if our household got through the day without flames or explosions or trips to the emergency room.”

  Dorothy shook her head, her brows curved sternly but, Mud was almost certain, a ghost of an amused smile playing around the corners of her mouth. “I can’t believe my parents sent me up to your place for three weeks every summer. What were they thinking?”

  “Aw, come on, Dot. You survived it. And if I recall it wasn’t always such an ordeal. There were a few good moments... remember?”

  He caught her gaze, held on. Held on even when he saw her dark lashes tremble, then drift slowly down, drawing the curtains on a look he would’ve paid good money to know the meaning of.

  Well, he’d just have to wait. Thanks to her crazy scheme, they’d be spending time together. Close together.

  Mud clanked his glass down on the counter. “Enough reminiscing. Let’s get this here show on the road.”

  Dorothy turned quickly back to her pots, but not before Mud noticed the color blooming on her cheeks. “You’re hungry?”

  “Yeah. And if I understood that phone call correctly, we have exactly one night to figure out how to turn you into the future Mrs. Mud Taylor.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mrs. Mud Taylor.

  In the dozens of hours she’d fretted and worried over her scheme, Dorothy had never once stopped to consider her new title. “Mrs.” It was so foreign, belonging to another woman, a married woman, a woman settled firmly into the path of her life.

  Of course, it was all a farce. A ruse that would last a weekend, land her the job she wanted more than anything. And that would be that. Mud would be free to high-tail it back to his testosterone-driven, rough-edged world, and she—and she would do exactly what again?

  For a moment Dorothy couldn’t quite remember what plum waited at the end of this crazy adventure, what could be so important that she’d subject herself to this roller coaster.

  Because, truth be told, her mind was a little too full of “Mrs. Taylor”.

  Dorothy gritted her teeth and forced a smile, dimly aware of Mud gazing at her expectantly. The job. Director of Marketing, or Strategic Planning, or some such, but everyone would know that really meant Heir Apparent to Finesse Sportswear. There would be a brief announcement in the business pages, a farewell luncheon at Gilford Mills, where she’d spent the last ten years rising through the ranks of the sales force. And then everyone would know: Dorothy Albright had managed to springboard herself from a healthy if rather dull fiber manufacturer to one of the most profitable sportswear companies in the country.

  That was it. Focus on the job. “Toss?” she inquired, offering Mud a pair of beech-wood tongs.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The salad. Would you mind tossing the salad? I just have to baste one more time and check on the soufflé, and then we can sit down.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” Dorothy managed a peek at Mud. She’d half expected him to plunge into the greens with the wrong end of the implements, but he was managing rather expertly, she had to admit.

  Full of surprises, he was. Far from being the deliberately unpolished cad she’d believed him to be, Mud Taylor had actually managed to pick up some class.

  Dorothy bent to open the oven door, letting the outpouring of heat flush her skin.

  Maybe this crazy scheme had a chance after all.

  Mud thoughtfully fingered the St. Christopher’s medal that hung permanently around his neck. “I don’t know, Dad,” he muttered. “I just don’t know.”

  The medal had been a gift from his father. “Got me through, son,” he’d said. “This, and Max Albright. Best friend I ever had.”

  By the time Mud was 16, his father evidently figured he didn’t need the medal anymore. One night he pressed it into Mud’s palm accompanied by a beery hug. High living, it seemed, didn’t need the constant protection that ‘Nam did.

  Mud had never been sure what his father hoped the medal would protect Mud from. Despite his constant scrapes and mischief, Mud was a lucky kid, always finding a foothold in the nick of time. He rarely took the heat for his pranks; people always seemed to want to believe the best about him.

  He’d certainly never taken a bullet to the chest and been dragged near-dead through the jungle by his best friend. On the other hand, he had no relationship like his father and Max had, friendship strong enough to bind them for life in a crazy, lopsided, incomprehensible pair.

  “Lucky son of a bitch,” Mud murmured affectionately. True enough. Without good fortune smiling on him, how else could his father have built an empire when he returned from the war? With no money, no wife, no family, and nowhere to live, and a six—month-old baby to boot.

  He had to hand it to his Dad—Simon had never missed a beat when Mud announced he had no interest in continuing the family plumbing business. Never hounded him during those few lost years after college when Mud was figuring out what he wanted to do, or during that crazy season on the pro tour.

  Simon never batted an eye when he first t
ook sight of the ramshackle golf shop Mud eventually bought, even though it looked like it was about to collapse under years of neglect. Simon even pitched in fixing the place up, and renovating the apartment up above the shop. When the last nail was driven he presented his son with a custom-made neon sign that read, simply, Taylor Golf Supply.

  Mud’s living room was lit from the sign below, in fact.

  The green letters glowed all night long, even after the last kid had gone home, the last customer pushed reluctantly away from the glass display cases. Mud kind of liked the way it bathed his apartment with a flickering, gentle glow.

  “Don’t know much, Dad,” he repeated. “But that Dorothy’s something else.”

  He heaved a sigh and retracted his feet from the coffee table, one knee grinding a little painfully in the process. Old climbing injury, from those crazy days.

  Dorothy had not—had definitely not—been anything like what he had expected. He’d been pulling her leg a little about the wedding. He remembered exactly when he’d seen her last, because that was the day he’d had to admit to himself that Dot had grown up. That his long-ago best friend and nemesis had shed her bony elbows for expanses of deep-gold skin. Had traded her fussy braids for a short, chic crop that somehow managed to curl perfectly around her ears and stop just short of the most graceful long neck he’d ever seen.

  That somewhere along the way she’d grown curves and swells and hollows of the most entrancing sort. She’d acquired a body that commanded attention even in yards of gaudy pink taffeta.

  His first inclination that night at the wedding reception was to ask her to dance. He made it halfway across the room before he halted so abruptly that a tuxedoed waiter nearly tipped the tray of champagne flutes he was carrying.

  He stopped himself because it was Dot. And that made her forever off-limits. Oh, she might not look like Dot any more, but he was sure that inside she was the same. So damn assured she was right—and most of the time, she was. So cantankerous.

  And worst of all—so impervious to his charms. Chalk it up to chemistry—but for most of his life they’d set each other off like oil and water.

  Her feelings for him hadn’t changed much, obviously. At dinner tonight, she’d seemed equally unimpressed with the charming and suave approach as with the hayseed/rogue thing.

  And what the heck did it matter, anyway? Mud rose and stomped off toward his bedroom, tugging his shirt off as he went. He must have a few screws loose to be trying any moves at all. This was a business venture—for Dorothy, anyway. And for him, a chance to fulfill an old promise. Nothing more.

  Besides, there were plenty of other women he could call.

  By next Monday, he’d be done with this whole project. Might call for a celebration, even, with that gal he’d met at that party a few weeks back. The one whose number had been burning a hole in his pocket.

  But now, for some reason, that phone number didn’t beckon him at all.

  “Have you ever picked up a golf bag in your life?” Mud demanded.

  Dorothy regarded the thing uncertainly. Examined the canvas with great interest. Avoided those blue eyes, steely now with frustration.

  “I play tennis,” she said, a little defensively. “Pretty well, in fact.”

  “How the heck have you gotten this far with Miranda?” he shot back. “The gal’s a golf nut. Got some of the old gents shaking in their shoes out at the club, from what I hear.”

  Dorothy shrugged, shifted a step back on the close-cropped green. “We always have lunch at the tennis club,” she said.

  “We talk a lot. You know. Besides, I, uh...”

  Dorothy let her voice trail off. She looked down the fairway, where a foursome was making good progress toward the green. They were next. Even worse, an impatient-looking knot of men stood not far behind.

  “You what?”

  “I told her you’d been teaching me. For...a while.”

  “Oh, man.” Dorothy snuck a glance at him. Mud wiped a hand across his brow, squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced. When he opened them she read resignation there.

  “Okay. Follow me.”

  He turned abruptly and strode off, back toward the clubhouse. Dorothy struggled with her bag, trying to turn it on the little wheeled contraption, as he lunged further and further down the path.

  “Wait!” she finally cried in desperation. “I can’t—I don’t know how—”

  She could feel four sets of eyes on her as Mud stopped, then slowly, slowly turned around to face her, a hand shading his eyes from the sun.

  “You need a hand, miss?” a voice drawled behind her.

  “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” Dorothy muttered under her breath, then arranged her features in the most pleasant expression she could manage as she turned.

  “It’s just—I’m not familiar with this particular type of— of—” She gestured at the contraption. “Wheeled thingie” was probably not the proper name, but then again it hardly seemed substantial enough to be called a cart.

  Dorothy hated to be wrong. Hated it worse than just about anything. She had been brought up to be an expert, to be tops in her field. To be the one other people came to for help, not the other way around. If Albrights didn’t know something about a subject, it was because it wasn’t worth knowing.

  “Yes,” she mumbled, feeling her face flush with color. “I guess I need a little help.”

  “Your, uh, friend know you’re just starting out?” one man asked, amusement sparking his query, while another adjusted the wheels for her and placed the handle in her hand.

  “I suppose that he does now.”

  Trying to ignore the warmth flooding her face, Dorothy murmured her thanks and then jerked much too hard, so that the cart propelled her along down the path toward Mud, who was waiting with a look of bemused resignation.

  “Where are we going?” Dorothy asked, trying to match his long stride.

  “Driving range.”

  “Oh.”

  The day was beautiful, at least, and the course gorgeous. That might be some small excuse for the game, Dorothy considered as she struggled to keep up with Mud, who seemed to be accelerating. And without a backward glance, either.

  Over a ridge she found herself looking down on a row of golfers, each whacking balls far into oblivion. Mud ambled down the hill to an open spot and stopped.

  “Wait here.”

  Dorothy stood on the pad, feeling more foolish than she had in quite some time. Mud disappeared around a low wooden enclosure, and came out a moment later with a bucket of golf balls in each hand.

  He reached her side and set down the buckets.

  “Okay. Let’s get started.”

  “Right,” Dorothy said, and reached for the closest club, drawing it out of the bag. It was lighter than she’d expected, and she balanced it tentatively on the ground.

  “You’re going to use a putter?” Mud demanded, frowning.

  “Of course not!” Quickly, Dorothy stuffed the club back into the bag. “I’m not a total idiot.”

  Mud sighed heavily, a long, dramatic intake of breath as his eyes rolled heavenwards. “For a gal who’s been in the sporting goods business all these years—”

  “Sportswear, not sporting goods. There’s a big difference. Besides, my company makes fibers, not the clothes themselves.”

  “But if you land this job at Finesse Sportswear—”

  “Obviously, I’ll have to round out my knowledge. It’s no big deal. I have mastered a few more challenging concepts than sending a teeny little ball flying through the air, you know.”

  “Yeah. You’re the genius. How could I forget? Dorothy Friggin’ Child Prodigy Who-the-heck were you named after again?”

  While he spoke, Mud selected another club and placed it in her hands. Dorothy took it tentatively, but before she could heft it Mud placed his hands over hers and began moving them down the shaft of the club. His fingers were strong, well-callused with hard pads on his fingers. The combination of
rough and warm seized her attention and suddenly Dorothy was aware of every sensation.

  “Crowfoot-Hodgkin,” she replied, swallowing as heat seemed to travel right from his hands through her own, and right on into her body. Her fingers went limp as Mud arranged them on the smooth metal. “Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin—”

  “Nobel prize winner, what was it, 1910? Chemistry?”

  “You remembered all along,” Dorothy accused, but with little venom. Once he had shifted her thumb so it met her other fingers, Mud circled around behind her, his body inches from hers. He was so close that she could feel his warm breath on the back of her neck, and she had worked to tamp down a delicious shudder.

  “Heck, you never let me forget! You were always reminding me that your parents were professors, which automatically made you smarter than me.”

  “Mmm.” Dorothy feigned distraction, bending over the club in an approximation of a ready stance.

  Unfortunately, the movement pressed her backside squarely against Mud’s body. Rather than back away, he extended his arms along hers, adjusting the angle of her elbows, nudging one foot slightly closer to the other with the toe of his sneaker. With his chin practically resting on her shoulder, Dorothy let her eyes flutter shut for a moment and tried to fight off the powerful notion that Mud’s teaching style felt an awful lot like a lover’s embrace.

  “Hey, relax. Tension will screw up your swing like nothing else.” Mud’s rough, low words in her ear felt like hot syrup, and she fought the crazy notion to angle her head just a little until his lips were aligned with her own. “Still, I think your sister Marie got the better end of the deal.”

  “Oh...?” Dorothy waggled the club slightly in an attempt to prove she was concentrating on the sport.

  “Well, at least everyone’s heard of Marie Curie. Most folks probably even know she discovered—what did she discover, anyway?”

  “Mmm...radium, for one thing, “ Dorothy managed weakly, her voice barely more than a whisper.

  If Mud noticed, he didn’t let on. Evidently satisfied with her stance at last, he guided her through a backswing. Her body twisted in concert with his, and somehow the contact remained unbroken even as she arced the club behind her right shoulder.