One Bride Too Many: One Bride Too Many / One Groom To Go

“That’s wonderful, Cole!” She gave him a hug and walked to a table where a big pitcher, damp with condensation, was on a tray with two tall glasses. “Would you like some iced tea?”

It wasn’t his favorite beverage, but he was thirsty enough to drink Detroit River water.

“What’s this thing?”

Cole examined a gizmo on her desk while she poured tea for both of them. He wasn’t sure whether it was supposed to entertain babies or make them want to crawl back into the womb. He played with the weird spiral-shaped labyrinth wondering if maybe he’d accidentally hit on the truth when he told Tess his mom wanted grandchildren. Maybe part of her enthusiasm for her job came from loving babies. She had a lot to offer as a grandmother, so long as she kept the more bizarre Bailey toys away from them.

“It’s a toy. It must be a winner because you’re playing with it,” she teased.

He dropped it like a hot rivet. She’d gotten him on that one, and he grinned sheepishly.

“Tell me about your date.” She handed him the iced tea and daintily sipped hers.

“She’s a friend of an old acquaintance. Remember Tess Morgan?”

“Isn’t she the sweet girl who tutored you in British lit?”

“That’s her. She owns Baby Mart in the Rockstone Mall. She’s doing me a favor by introducing me to friends of hers. I promised her a sneak peek at the new product line.”

He walked around the office, noting without enthusiasm that she still had tons of pictures of him, Zack and Nicky on the walls. The cutesy photos used in early catalog ads embarrassed him. Poses of curly-haired twins with Bailey toys made him remember how bored he’d been as a child model—bored but successful. To her credit, his mother had refused to let them work for any of the agencies that besieged them with lucrative offers. She even stood up to Marsh in limiting how much work they did for the annual Bailey catalogs. It was one of the rare disputes his mother had actually won when it came to showdowns with Marsh. She did much better these days, but as chairman of the board, he was still a tyrant.

“I guess there’s no problem at this late date,” Sue said thoughtfully. “The new catalog will be ready next month for wholesale Christmas orders. A leak now wouldn’t be serious.”

“Tess isn’t an industrial spy,” he said dryly.

“Of course not. Actually, this is a good time to give her a preview. We have a display set up in one of the design labs for some potential investors.”

“Investors? Is Marsh going to go back on his word and agree to a buyout before he retires? Does he want to go public?”

“He’s always playing around with the possibility. It’s his way of keeping everyone on edge.”

His mother didn’t sound concerned. Cole was. It wasn’t his employees Marsh wanted to unnerve. Cole’s grandfather was holding the threat of a sellout over his head and Zack’s. He’d better find Ms. Right soon and insure that his mother wouldn’t lose control of the business.

“Why don’t you and Tess join your grandfather and the investors tomorrow? Their tour is scheduled for 9 a.m.”

He’d rather eat nails!

“I had in mind a private sneak preview. You know, give her a chance to look it over without the pressure of having Marsh there.”

“A private showing with Tess. I see.”

His mother smiled—slyly, he thought.

“She’s only a friend. I owe her. Tess and me? No, no way. Not my type at all, and she remembers me less than fondly from high school.”

“If you say so. Why did you persuade her to help you get dates?”

When his mother put it that way, it did sound ludicrous. When had he ever needed help meeting women? The only blind date he’d ever had was Zack’s fault. Some girl wouldn’t go out with him unless he found a date for her friend.

“She’s not getting me dates, Mom.” Maybe he sounded juvenile, but he wanted his mother to be perfectly clear on this. “She’s only putting me in the loop with some nice women. I don’t meet any when I spend all my time on the job.”

“She’s doing this just so she can see our new line?” She sounded skeptical.

“No, I’m showing it just to be nice.”

“Then why?”

He hadn’t been grilled like this since he drove without a license when he was fifteen.

“She lost a bet.”

He was getting The Look. His mother was a head shorter than he was, and slender to the point of being too thin, but when she raked him with her smoky gray eyes, he still squirmed.

“Two out of three games of pool.”

“This was a fair contest?” she asked, accusing him.

“Tess plays in a pool league. I nearly lost to her. Anyway, I can’t leave the site of the condos we’re building during the workday. I was thinking of bringing her around nine in the evening.”

“Okay. The after-hours codes have changed, so I’d better write them down for you.”

She took a legal pad and wrote a neat series of numbers and letters.

“Your grandfather has been tinkering with the new security system again. He’s obsessed with catching industrial spies.”

“He’s not happy unless he can meddle,” Cole said with undisguised bitterness. He wished Marsh would be content fiddling with mechanical things and leave people—especially his family—alone.

“The important part is punching in these numbers at exactly twenty-minute intervals. There’s a panel in the lab as well as in the hallway.” She pointed with one neatly polished, but not long, fingernail. “Best to set the timer on your watch. There’s only a thirty-second margin for error.”

“Got it. Thanks a lot, Mom.” He bent his head and kissed her soft, smooth cheek.

“Don’t let the security alarm go off. It would put your grandfather in a dither.”

He patted her shoulder, then bolted for the door.

“Trust me, Mom.”

He wasn’t sure he trusted himself when it came to picking a wife, but he did have a date Friday night. She was a friend of Tess’s, so she had to be a nice girl. Didn’t she?

4

“WHY ARE WE sneaking in?” Tess asked in a breathy whisper.

“We’re not sneaking.” Cole answered a little louder than necessary to make his point.

“This feels sneaky. It’s dark and creepy in here.”

“The corridor lights dim automatically at night, that’s all. My mother has no objection at all to having you see the new products. The catalog will be out pretty soon anyway.”

“I still feel like a yuppie cat burglar. Why are you wearing all black?”

“These are the only clean jeans I could find, and I have a lot of black T-shirts. Do you see me wearing a ski mask?”

“I still feel funny.”

“I cleared it with the head honcho, who also happens to be my mother.”

“Not your grandfather?”

“Kicked upstairs to chairman of the board.” He didn’t want to talk about the old man. “Here we are. I have to punch in the after-hours code.” He pulled out the slip of paper his mother had given him and entered the sequence of numbers on the panel beside the door.

“Just like in spy movies.” She giggled nervously. “Are you going to eat the code when you’re done?”

“Can’t. I have to enter another sequence of numbers at twenty-minute intervals.”

He opened the door and snapped on the bright overhead lights, gesturing for her to go ahead of him. He stepped into the big room behind her and took a couple of seconds to set his watch.

“What happens if you don’t?”

She seemed more interested in the security system than the products she’d come to see. Darn, he’d forgotten about her raging curiosity. How long would it take for her to ferret out his real reason for wanting to meet her friends?

“The lab self-destructs, and we fall through a trapdoor in the floor to a chamber of horrors. We’ll be strapped into giant high chairs, forced to eat mushy beets and spinach and subjected to talking toys until we’re both raving lunatics.”

“Imaginative. I’ve never seen a lab with a wall border of lambs, kitties and ducks.”

She glanced around at the large lab, white and sterile-looking except for the wall decorations. The products were displayed on long, waist-high worktables with specifications printed on neat cardboard signs. Cole followed her gaze until it rested on a huge photo of Zack and him as kids. They were floating on an inflated water ship, one of Bailey’s colossal failures thanks to a tendency to sink when the passengers weighed more than forty pounds.

“That must be you and Zack!” Tess walked over to the glossy framed blowup. “You were adorable! Oh, and look at this one!”

She walked over to a shot of a gap-toothed Zack crawling out of an inflated imitation of a sewer pipe while Cole sat astride the top.

Either his mother or his grandfather had hung the damn twins photos everywhere. Tess walked around the room pointing out advertising poses he’d erased from his consciousness long ago. His masculinity did a nosedive as she cooed over each and every cutesy curly-haired image.

“Did you get to keep every toy you posed with?” she asked.

“Not after we sliced up the inflated giant beach ball with a dagger from Marsh’s World War II collection. Seems as though all our toys were metal after that. I thought you wanted to see the new products.”

He liked babies but hated their equipment. Just being around all the baby stuff made him nervous, even though he could shingle a roof three stories up without a qualm. The world of bottle liners and diaper bags gave him the willies. His grandfather had tried for years to snare him into the family business, but both he and Zack were adamantly opposed to having any part of it. It was a measure of Cole’s indifference that he’d never been in this lab.

“There are handouts for every product,” he told Tess. “You can take one of each with you.”

He was actually enjoying her interest in the stuff, following her and taking in her reactions. She commented on everything she saw without a single cloying oh or ah.

“Here’s a winner,” he said skeptically.

She slowly wandered over to see what he was pointing at.

“An inflatable potty for traveling. It’s ingenious.” She took a sample disposable liner and one of the handouts. “Where’s the baby-wipes warmer that plays lullabies?”

“I wouldn’t know one if it came up and bit me on the butt,” he said, grousing.

“You’re really not interested in any of this, are you?”

“Nope.”

She lingered beside a Swedish-designed stroller that sold for more than his first car in high school, then exclaimed over a state-of-the-art high chair in screaming neon lime green. He was bored out of his socks by the displays but found himself enjoying the way she moved around the room. Her khaki walking shorts showed enough leg for him to see hers were sleek and smooth-skinned. Her waist was tiny, not much larger than the span of his hands. It had been criminal to bulk it up with yards of pink material at the wedding reception. Tonight she was wearing a blue knit T-shirt. With eyes like hers, she shouldn’t wear any other color—they shone like a pair of pricey sapphires.

Easy as she was to watch, he couldn’t share her enthusiasm for the products. He knew Bailey Baby Products was a highly lucrative business, but he didn’t want to be lured by the prospect of easy money. He wanted to build his own designs, well-constructed, pleasant, affordable homes for people who’d never see the inside of a pretentious mansion like Marsh Bailey’s. Cole and Zack had hopes of winning some commercial bids that would put their business on a firmer footing.

“Here’s the baby-wipes warmer!” she said enthusiastically, her voice amplified and made lyrical by the silent vastness of the lab.

He walked over and watched her pick it up. A little beeping sound went off and didn’t stop when she put it down.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“The timer on my watch. Time to enter the code. It will just take a sec.”

He had thirty seconds. No sweat. He went to the wall panel in the lab, trying to recall the code—three-seven-five-eight-nine, or was it six? Marsh had deliberately made it as random as possible. Why couldn’t he use some significant sequence like family birth dates? The system was supposed to keep out thieves, not grandsons. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and took out his billfold, where he’d stashed the code, counting seconds and pretty sure he was running out of time.

The dull thud he heard wasn’t reassuring.

“What was that?” Tess asked.

“The locks engaged.”

He punched in the code his mother had given him, but nothing happened. The door wouldn’t open. He tried again in case he’d made a mistake. Still no results.

“Can’t you open the door?”

“No.” He tried a third time, but it was futile. He should have set his watch to allow extra time, but thirty seconds had seemed plenty long enough to punch in the code even if he had to look at the paper. Why did Marsh have such an elaborate system? Any thief who knew enough technology to get into the building could probably figure out a way to get out, but here they were, trapped in the lab. Unfortunately he wasn’t a professional burglar and anything he might try could result in costly damage to the system.

“There has to be a way out,” she said.

“Not if Marsh’s damn anti-spy gadgetry works. I wish his James Bond DVD collection would self-destruct!”

“Do industrial spies really steal plans for baby stuff?” She sounded more curious than panicked.

“How would I know? I haven’t had anything to do with the business since Zack and I gave each other haircuts to get out of posing for the catalog.”

“What do we do now?”

“Wait for the baby police, I guess.”

She laughed. He glowered at her.

“I don’t suppose you have a cell phone in your purse?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No, but isn’t that a phone over there?”

He walked over, annoyed because he’d been too rattled to notice it. It was dead.

“The phone service must cut off when the doors lock,” he said.

“Why?”

If this were a spy thriller on the big screen, the heroine would be clinging to him like spandex. He could imagine Tess in a role like that, unlikely as it seemed.

“Probably so anyone trying to steal the butt warmer can’t call a cohort to pass on the secret design,” he said in a husky whisper. He had an odd notion he wanted to hear her laugh again.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

“Good question. Let me see if I can short out the system.” Nuts to Marsh. If he ruined something, it wasn’t his fault.

This was a lab. There had to be tools. He opened one of the cupboards under every workstation and found a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.

“Isn’t there a night watchman or something?” she asked, hovering behind him as he removed the casing from the control panel on the wall.

“There’s a whole crew of security people, but I’d rather get out of here before anyone comes.”

“You said we weren’t sneaking in.”

“We weren’t.” He didn’t want to look like a dope for getting the code sequence wrong, but the jumble of bunched wires was a puzzle with no solution.

“Look at all the colored wires. Just like a movie where the right one will deactivate a bomb and the wrong one will—”

“It’s not a bomb,” he grumbled.

“Can I pick the color?”

“Why not?”

“Yellow, pull out a yellow.”

“Yellow as in no parking, no passing and crime-scene tape.”

“Good point. So do you want to try the green as in go?”

He caught a green wire snaking through a bunch of other colors and yanked with the tip of the pliers. A shrill alarm sounded on the other side of the door.

“Wrong wire.”

She shrugged with a nonchalance he didn’t feel. He didn’t relish being known as the idiot grandson.

“Try the blue,” she suggested. “We’re locked in with all that racket in the hall. What else can happen?”

“The walls could move in and crush us.”

“Like Poe’s ‘Pit and the Pendulum.’ You remember that story,” she said enthusiastically.

He’d never read it, but then, he hadn’t had Tess as a tutor that year. She’d read Macbeth aloud, scene by endless scene, then made him admit some of it was exciting.

He ripped out the blue wire. Nothing happened as far as he could tell. The door was still bolted shut.

“Cole, does it seem a little chilly in here?”

She hugged her arms across her chest.

“Yeah, it does.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. He looked around but couldn’t find a thermostat to regulate the air-conditioning.

“Maybe when you pulled the blue wire…” she said, her lips turning blue.

The whole lab was one bizarre booby trap, he realized. Marsh had gone from designing clever toys in his early days to this diabolical trap. Cole tossed the pliers on the counter. No way was he pulling another wire. The red one would probably turn the floor into a giant griddle.

“Wonder if the wiper thing works as a hand warmer,” he mused.

Tess was shivering too much to answer. The vents were sending out Arctic blasts, making a mockery of energy conservation.

“The SWAT team should be on their way. Until then, we’d better share body heat,” he said.

He stepped behind her and wrapped his arms around her. The heat generated between her back and his chest was nothing compared to the inferno where her bottom snuggled against his lap.

“I’m warm now.” She tried to squirm away.

“I’m not.”

“Well, too bad! You got us into this.”

“You wanted to preview the new line.”

“Not if it meant being freeze-dried!”

“My grandfather likes to tinker.”

“Your grandfather should be committed!”

Her teeth chattered like a pair of windup joke teeth, and he could feel a shiver ripple down her spine.

The door flew open with a bang, and they both whirled around, arms half raised in anticipation of some really tough cops.

“That’s a pretty harsh judgment, young lady.”

“Grandfather.” Cole forgot about calling him Marsh.

“I’m glad you’re taking an interest in the business, Cole.”

Marsh Bailey radiated intimidation from his razor-sharp features and cold blue eyes to the immaculate press of his silvery gray Italian suit. He was the only person Cole knew who’d never owned a pair of jeans. The man didn’t even loosen his tie on the rare occasions when he watched a public affairs program on TV. Cole instinctively put his arm around Tess’s shoulders, surprised at how square and rigid they felt.

“This isn’t a very nice way to treat one of your best customers, Mr. Bailey. The Baby Mart, which I own and operate, sold thirty-two of your inflatable play tents for Christmas last year.”

“Thirty-two. I’m impressed. That’s more than the Toy Warehouse in any of their north side stores. But that doesn’t explain why you and my grandson set off the security system. If I hadn’t been checking the surveillance screen for reception problems, you’d be looking down the barrels of some high-power firearms.”

“The timing to enter the code the second time is off.” His grandfather always made Cole feel belligerent.

“I can vouch for that,” Tess said. “I saw Cole set his watch.”

“Then it seems I owe you an apology, Miss…”

“Tess Morgan.”

Marsh never apologized. He believed the rich didn’t have to be sorry for anything. Cole had braced himself for a verbal flogging, and the old man was making nice with Tess.

“Now that you’ve seen the new line, Miss Morgan, what do you think of it?”

“The lime-green high chair won’t sell. The design is wonderful, but the color will clash with almost everyone’s kitchen. The portable potty is a stroke of genius, though.”

Marsh ran his finger over the pencil-thin mustache he’d worn for as long as Cole could remember. His iron-gray hair was clipped to within a quarter inch of his skull. It was more than coincidence that both Cole and Zack wore their thick hair semilong and their faces clean-shaven when beards would have been more convenient.

“The potty is one of my designs.” The old man actually puffed up. “The high chair also comes in sandy white for the American market.”

Cole took Tess’s hand. He’d had more than enough baby business for one night.

“About the yellow wire,” she said as he pulled her to the corridor.

“Activates the sprinkler system.” Marsh followed them through the doorway. “This has been a very satisfactory test of my new system.”

TESS SPENT the rest of the week thinking about the new Bailey line—the one Cole had handed her, not the baby stuff.

Why ask her to become involved in his love life? Either he’d had too much champagne at the reception or a Bailey built brick wall had bounced on his head. She wished he’d remained nothing but a glossy memory in the yearbook.

Or did she?

Certainly he made life more interesting. She’d been trapped by a mad inventor—well, a quirky one, anyway—and suspected of industrial espionage. Even better, she’d told Marsh Bailey what was right and wrong with his new products. Would that she could do the same for Kozy Kountry cows!

As she lolled in her oversize yellow sleep shirt, munched microwave popcorn and watched Bride of Frankenstein, Cole was wining and dining Jillian Davis, of all people. If Tess had ever had any aspiration to be a matchmaker, this would have killed it. Jillian wasn’t even on her Z list of possible dates for Cole, although, with brilliant hindsight, she had to admit her fellow kickboxer was probably his type. He thought so, anyway.

Darn, why had Marsh tried to turn the lab into the house from Dr. Zhivago? She’d been blissfully ignorant of how it felt to have Cole’s strong arms wrapped around her for real, not as a tactic to beat her at pool. She was going to remember the moment long after portable potties were forgotten in the mental haze of advanced old age.

The door buzzer aroused her from speculation about whether Cole had curly black hair on his tummy. Not that it mattered to her. Someday she’d find a man who was right for her, one who’d make analytical comments about Bride of Frankenstein while he nuzzled her throat and did other nice things.

She checked her spy hole, as she liked to call it. Cole’s face was distorted like the image in a fun-house mirror, but there was still no mistaking how cute he was. Darn again! She didn’t want him to see her in a nightshirt, and she especially didn’t want to hear about his wonderful date.

Opening the door as far as she could without taking off the chain, she peeked out at him.

“Hi. Can I come in?”

“I’m not exactly dressed.”

“You look decent to me. I really need to talk to you.”

“Your grandfather’s not going to have us arrested for trespassing, is he?”

She took off the chain and let him step into her snug little living room.

“Nice place.”

He looked at the gray and pink striped satin couch—impractical, maybe, but she loved it—and the two deep rose velvet armchairs. The rest of her furniture was salvage from relatives or thrift-shop bargains, but she liked the touch of class her good furniture gave the light beige carpeting and white walls of the bland apartment.

“Are we in trouble for sneaking into the lab?”

“We didn’t sneak.”

“Of course not, but I’ll pass up any more tours of Bailey Baby Products, not to sound ungrateful.”

She didn’t want to hear about his date, but eventually she’d run out of inane chatter.

“Next time you set me up,” he said, plopping down on the couch, “I’d prefer it’s with someone you know better.”

He dipped into the metal mixing bowl of popcorn without invitation.

“Help yourself.”

“Oh, do you mind?”

She didn’t mind sharing her popcorn. She strenuously objected to arranging dates for him.

“You may remember, I didn’t set you up with Jillian. You engineered that.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

“So, didn’t you have fun?”

She couldn’t pretend to be sorry. There was something about Jillian that was too perfect.