Raffling Ryan

The bids got to seven hundred quickly, with Ryan stiffly looking out over the crowd, his eyes concentrated on some vague point in the far distance. Marcia had the top bid, and it appeared that no one else wanted to go against the chairperson on this one—not if they wanted to be invited back next year.

And then, as Marcia was saying, “Going…going…” another voice piped up from the rear of the room. “Eight hundred!”

Marcia stopped the gavel in midslam and, with narrowed eyes, looked out into the darkness. “Eight-fifty,” Marcia muttered from between clenched teeth.

“Nine,” came right back at her. Closely followed by a giggle.

Ryan turned at the head of the runway, and started walking back toward Marcia. Interesting. The woman was so sleekly blond, so very controlled. And now, suddenly, her cheeks were flushed, her lips thin with anger.

He didn’t know who had dared to overbid her, but whoever it was, he was certainly enjoying himself, which he just as certainly had never expected to do.

“One…thousand…dollars,” Marcia said, throwing back her head, exposing the length of her throat, the height of her arrogance.

The answer came in less than a heartbeat. “One thousand five hundred. Oh, the heck with it—two thousand even!”

The crowd, which had gone silent, began murmuring, shuffling in their seats as they turned to see who was doing the bidding.

Ryan turned with them, putting a shielding hand to his forehead to try to see through the ridiculous strobe lights.

All he saw was a bright red head and a wide, happy grin as Marcia, bred never to cause a scene, brought the gavel down. “Sold! Please go to the registration desk to write your check and meet your bachelor.”

Applause broke out, as Ryan had brought in the largest donation of the night thus far, and he saw Allie standing right up front again, having appeared there like a genie out of a bottle and clapping for all she was worth, giving out a few good “cowgirl” yells while she was at it.

She’s enjoying this! I’m really going to have to hurt that woman, Ryan thought as he went back through the curtain and accepted the back-slappings and “you dog, you” congratulations of the other bachelors.

As another bachelor stepped through the curtain, this time to the strains of “Young at Heart”—a fitting song for the eighty-year-old George McDonald, chairman of the board of the hospital—Ryan made his way through the crowd in search of his grandmother.

He found her at the registration desk, having gone there right after the bidding on Ryan, she told him, in order to pay for Charlie and arrange their date.

“How…why…what the devil do you think you’re—”

“Oh, Ryan, close your mouth,” Allie scolded. “I’m not looking for romance, if that’s what you think. Charlie Armstrong is the best pediatrician in town, and Jessica’s babies need the best pediatrician. I’m only buttering him up, considering that I’ve heard he’s not taking new patients right now—which will change when we’re done speaking, I assure you. Besides, Charlie is taking Western line dancing lessons, and I want him to take me with him.”

Ryan shook his head. “Do you ever just do anything, Allie? Or does everything you do have a purpose? And, that being said, are you going to let me in on the purpose behind putting me up on that runway tonight?”

Allie reached up, patted his cheek. “I just want you to have some fun, darling. Live a little, loosen up. Ah, and here comes your date now. Isn’t she…different. Be nice, Ryan. She’s probably more fragile than she looks.”

“She’s hardly built like a linebacker, Allie,” Ryan said out of the corner of his mouth as Janna stopped, bent from the waist to untangle her skirt from her boot, showing off the limber grace of form inherent in her long-waisted, dancer-slim body.

“Yes, but that flamboyant coloring, those clothes. I think she’s hiding behind them a little, Ryan, to make up for some courage she lacks. In fact, I’m willing to wager she’s had her heart broken at some time.” She patted his cheek again. “But you’ll fix that, won’t you?”

“I’ll fix—damn,” Ryan ended. He was talking to the air, for Allie was already back in the crowd, hanging on Charlie’s arm and making the pseudocowboy look good for it.

“Hi, again,” Janna said as she walked over to stand in front of him. “Quite the mad bidding war, wasn’t it? I was going to give up, but the auctioneer was so sure she had you that I just knew I had to rescue you. You can thank me later, unless you really wanted to be caught in her clutches for a whole day and evening. Besides, I was also being selfish. You’re the tallest man here.”

“Tall. Yes, you mentioned that before. What does my being tall have to do with anything?”

Janna’s smile dazzled more brightly than the strobe lights that had begun to flash again. Ryan would have looked to the runway to see what was causing the women to begin howling in delight, but he didn’t think he had the courage to see much more of the auction. Not if he had to face whoever was up there across a table at a business lunch anytime soon.

“What does it have to do with anything? Didn’t you read the rules?” she asked. “You’re mine for the day, for whatever—as long as it’s legal, I’m assuming. Well, I need a handyman, and you’re it. And you’re tall because, even on a ladder, you have to be tall to replace the lightbulb in the fixture over my front door. Oh, I could do it myself, but I get sort of dizzy up high, so I’d rather you do it. See?”

“No, no I don’t see. You just paid two thousand dollars to use me as a handyman for a day? You could have hired three handymen for that price. Half a dozen.”

“True, true. But I wouldn’t have this nice charity write-off, now would I? And besides, have you ever tried to find a handyman who just wants to do small jobs?” She threw back her head, showing her own long neck, and it was longer, and whiter, than Marcia’s. “Lots of luck, that’s what I say, trying to find a man like that.” She grinned. “So I bought you.”

“Because I’m tall. Because I can reach the light fixture over your front door. That’s it? That’s your reason?”

She stuck out one leg, and her rather adorable chin, and braced one hand on her hip. “No,” she said, her smile gone. “I picked you because of those killer bedroom eyes of yours. I took one look and wanted to jump your bones, big boy. There, happy now?”

Ryan had the grace to look ashamed, even feel ashamed. “You really do want me to be your handyman for the day. I—I’m sorry I didn’t understand from the first.”

“That’s all right,” Janna said, patting his shoulder, the way he imagined she’d pat a puppy who’d just got nervous on her carpet. She handed him a piece of paper. “Here. This is my address. According to The Weather Channel—if you’re into wild prognostications—this Saturday is going to be a lovely Indian summer kind of day. Perfect for handyman jobs. Be there at 8:00 a.m., okay? Now, I’ve gotta go see someone about a check.”

He pointed toward the registration desk. “You’re going the wrong way. You pay over there,” he told her, still trying to figure out what had just happened to him. Was he happy to have been rescued from Marcia? Or had he just been tossed from the frying pan straight into the fire, as the old saying went?

Janna grimaced, looking as comical as a pretty woman could, which, in her case, was pretty comical. Rather like watching a young Lucille Ball coming down the stairs in a ball gown, then looking into the camera lens and deliberately crossing her eyes. He had to smile, in spite of himself. “I know. But first I have to see…I have to…well, don’t you worry about me. I’ll see you Saturday morning.”

And then she was gone, and Ryan was standing there, holding the note, written, it appeared, in dark-brown eyebrow pencil: “Janna Monroe. 540 Washington Avenue. Eight o’clock. Be there or be square.”

Chapter Two

Janna stood at the kitchen sink, looking out the window at the sun as it rose slowly in the sky. It was Saturday, the sun was shining, and The Weather Channel had been right on target, because the expected high today was seventy-two degrees.

She glanced at the clock on the wall above the cabinets, watching for a moment as the turquoise-blue plastic cat wagged its tail as each second passed, bringing the time closer to eight o’clock. The cat’s big yellow eyes also moved with the second hand, shifting side to side in true feline fashion, and she grinned at it, thinking it was grinning at her, anticipating an interesting day.

Tansy, her real-life blue-cream shorthaired cat and boon companion since she’d rescued the then small, fuzzy kitten from the animal shelter eight months earlier, politely rubbed up against her jean-covered leg, reminding Janna that she hadn’t been fed yet. “Always the lady, Tansy. Good for you. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

The cat looked up at her hopefully, then hopped onto the counter without seeming to move at all. She was just on the floor one moment, and standing next to the soapy water-filled sink the next. Tilting her head to one side, Tansy began to “talk” to Janna.

And she really did talk, Tansy did. Just because nobody understood her didn’t mean she didn’t talk, or so Janna had explained to Zachary when her son teased her for talking back to a cat.

“Yes, yes,” Janna said, “I’m washing your dishes now. Yes,” she continued after Tansy held up her end of the conversation, “the pink one with the flowers on it. I know it’s your favorite.”

Seemingly satisfied with that answer, Tansy began her premeal ablutions, licking her front paw and then rubbing it over her whiskered face.

Janna shook her head. “I really should get out more,” she said, not to Tansy but to herself. “Next thing you know, I’ll be talking to the clock, too.”

Her musings were interrupted by Zachary’s footsteps thundering down the hallway. He slid into the kitchen, stopping precisely next to his chair at the table. “Hi, Mom,” the nine-year-old said as he picked up the granola bar Janna had laid there for him. “Bye, Mom,” he continued around his first mouthful, already heading for the door.

“I don’t think so,” Janna said, rinsing Tansy’s dish under the tap and placing it in the dish drainer. “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

Zachary, a brown-eyed, red-haired, freckle-faced miniature of his mother, screwed up his face in thought. “Oh, yeah, right. I’ll be over at Tommy’s. We’ve got soccer practice at ten, remember? We’ve got to practice.”

“You’ve got to practice for the practice,” Janna said, nodding. “Understandable. Now, what else have you forgotten?”

Zachary comically screwed up his face once more, concentrating. “Nope. Can’t think of anything,” he said, trying not to smile.

“Now you’ve done it,” Janna said, advancing on him as he retreated toward the back door. She grabbed his face with her wet, soapy hands and planted a big, fat kiss on his forehead, then rubbed soapsuds into his cheeks, just for the fun of it.

“Aw, Mom,” Zachary complained, but his heart wasn’t in it. He was in too much of a hurry to run past her and scoop up some soap bubbles of his own. Once armed with two near mountains of bubbles, he advanced on Janna, heh-heh-hehing like the evil landlord about to toss poor, defenseless Little Nell out into the blizzard.

Janna rapidly retreated, looking for weapons as she went. Nothing. Not close enough to the refrigerator to get the canned whipped cream; too far away from the sink to reload there.

There was nothing else to do but make a break for it. Still watching Zachary, she struggled to open the back door, her slippery hands not making much progress on the doorknob.

Emitting eeks and acks and various other exclamations meant to show her “terror,” she finally wrenched the door open, then sidestepped quickly as Zachary, hot on her tail, couldn’t stop himself from running straight outside…and smack into the man standing on the back stoop, holding up his hand as if ready to knock on the door.

The two small mountains of soap bubbles became a casualty of the collision, some of them slamming into Ryan Chandler’s chest, some of them flying up and finding new homes in Zachary’s hair, on Ryan’s nose.

Ryan’s hands came down on Zachary’s shoulders to steady him, and he looked past the boy to the mother, who was leaning against the back door, laughing, and not trying to be quiet about it, either. Her laugh rang out pure and full and with genuine enjoyment, even as she pushed herself away from the door and grabbed a dish towel, handing it to Ryan. “Hi, Mr. Chandler,” she said. “You and Zachary have already bumped into each other, I see. Do come in.”

“Gotta go, Mom,” Zachary said, wiping his hands on his sweatpants. “Tommy’s mother drives today, so I’ll be home around lunchtime, okay? See you, um, Mr. Chandler. Oh, and sorry about that.”

With that, Zachary was off, racing across the backyard to his friend, and Janna didn’t bother to stop him. After all, he had apologized, hadn’t he?

“I didn’t know you had a son,” Ryan said, handing back the dish towel as he entered the house behind Janna and looked around the kitchen, pretty much as if he’d never seen one before today.

Janna looked around with him. She really loved her kitchen. It was the one room in the house where she had definitely let herself go, indulging her love of color as well as cramming every available space with one of her first loves: gadgets.

The kitchen set was a genuine antique, a sort of Art Deco chrome-legged set with Formica top—a turquoise Formica top, with matching padded chairs. She’d seen a set much like it at a local furniture store, new, and had laughed to think that her grandmother’s cast-off set from the fifties had stuck around long enough to show up in decorating reruns.

The walls were also turquoise, bright against the high old, glass-fronted cabinets she’d covered with not one but six careful layers of white paint and decorated with chrome pulls and handles in the shape of pineapples.

Then there was the bright-white tile floor she’d laid herself, with turquoise, pink and yellow tiles scattered throughout, ruffled curtains of turquoise, pink and yellow stripes she’d patched together out of remnants, the colorful prints on the walls, the dozen or so birdhouses and green, trailing plants in the space between the cabinets and the ceiling, the turquoise Formica countertops covered with bread maker, toaster oven, can opener, blender, pasta maker and several other can’t-live-without-it gadgets and…well…it was a “full” kitchen. No doubt.

One might even call it cluttered. To look at Ryan Chandler, he was one of those who definitely would.

“Would you like a cup of coffee before you get started?” she asked, drying off her hands and setting the flowered bowl on the floor, filling it with dry cat food. “Of course you do. You sit down over there while I get it. Oh, and the list is on the table.”

When she turned away from the coffeepot to approach the table holding two stoneware cups, one pink, one turquoise, Ryan was staring at her. In fact, she got the feeling that he had done nothing but stare at her since his first inspection of the room.

She looked down at herself, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. She was wearing jeans. Okay, old jeans. Okay, very old jeans. Very old, soft, and somewhat tight jeans, worn low on her hips and hugging her very long legs.

What else would she wear if she and Ryan were going to be working on odd jobs all day? Well, a knit sweater, for one thing. And she was wearing one. A dark-gray sweater-vest once belonging to her late husband—which had shrunk badly in the wash—that she sometimes wore with a blouse, and sometimes without.

She looked down at herself again. Okay, so she should probably have worn a blouse under it today.

And maybe a bra.

She winced as she looked at herself.

Definitely a bra. I mean, she thought, how was I to know the guy would turn catatonic on me, for crying out loud? They’re just nipples. Everybody’s got them. He’s got them, for crying out loud.

Okay, and so maybe her venerable, shrunken sweater also didn’t quite meet the waistband of her jeans. Hadn’t the man ever seen a belly button before, either?

Still…did she look that bad, that terrible? She had pulled her thick, long, unruly mop of redder than red hair up on top of her head, securing it there with a rubber band, so that curls tumbled all over the place—back, front, sides. She always thought she looked like a really, really big chrysanthemum when she wore her hair this way, but it was comfortable, and it kept the mop out of her eyes and…“What?” she exclaimed at last, exasperated, and nearly spilling the coffee. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Ryan answered her, taking one of the cups from her and sipping its contents, his gaze now carefully lowered. “What’s this?” he said before taking another sip. “It’s coffee, yes, but there’s something else….”

“They’re French vanilla coffee beans, with a dash of apple cinnamon strudel flavor tossed in,” she told him, sitting down across the table from him. “Like it?”

“First thing in the morning? No. But, since I’ve already had two cups at home, yes, it tastes pretty good. Some special blend?”

“I pick it up at the mall, actually. There’s a gourmet coffee kiosk on the upper level. Every time we’re at the mall, I pick up another flavor. I’ve got a Jamaican blend that would put hair on your fingernails, I swear, but I didn’t think you’d like it. So,” she said, putting down her cup and bracing her elbows on the table, “what do you want to do first?”

His smile did something very strange, setting off a small explosion somewhere in the pit of her stomach. “Do first? Frankly, I’d like to offer you your money back and the services of a first-class handyman. But somehow I don’t think you’d go for that. Or would you?”

She pretended to consider this for a moment, then shook her head, her mop of curls speaking quite eloquently as they bobbed back and forth. “Nope. No deal. We have a bargain, right?”

She’d stick to that answer: a bargain. She wouldn’t mention anything else, couldn’t mention anything else. Not when she didn’t really understand it herself. She only knew she was doing a nice old lady a favor, and she would never renege on her promise.

Especially when her To-Do list was nearly as long as one of Ryan Chandler’s long arms.

Janna picked up the paper, scanned it. “I think you should start with the garage. Zach thinks it’s his private dumping grounds, but I need more storage space for my own stuff. I bought some shelving—you can put shelving together, can’t you?—and after you take everything out of the garage and hose down the floor, we can get everything arranged. Oh, and I’ll help put the shelves together, I promise.”

He looked at her as if she had just told him to climb to the top of Mount Everest and bring her back a tutti-frutti flavored icicle. “You’re kidding, right?”

She looked back at him blankly. “Kidding? Nope. Why would I be kidding?”

He reached up, scratched at a spot behind his left ear. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I thought you’d want to go for a drive, have lunch at some country inn, maybe take in dinner later? Dancing? You know, the sort of thing every other bachelor is probably doing this weekend with the women who bid on them. But clean a garage? Put up shelves?”

“Put together shelves, then put them up. There’s a difference. These are just inexpensive metal thingies, freestanding shelves we sort of smash back against the walls to load my junk onto.” She rolled her eyes at him. “I mean, I wouldn’t ask you to put together real shelves. We have too much else to do to fool with something like that.”

Now he rubbed a hand across his jaw. He really was quite expressive with his hand movements, although he probably didn’t know that. “Got any aspirin, Ms. Monroe?” he asked after a moment.

She got up quickly to get the aspirin bottle down from the cabinet, keeping her eyes on him. Look how he frowned. He was so cute when he frowned. Tall, dark, green-eyed…and really, really cute. Almost cuddly, although she doubted anyone had ever told him that! She nearly dropped the aspirin bottle, realizing that her mind had taken a quantum leap from dirty garages to…well, she’d think about all of that later, wouldn’t she? “You have a headache?” she asked.

“No, but I’m pretty sure I will any minute now,” Ryan said, accepting the two tablets she handed him, swallowing them down with a sip of coffee, and then heading for the back door.

Janna felt the sudden, irresistible need to make a stupid fool of herself, something she could usually do with quite a flourish, especially considering she hadn’t felt foolish about a man—especially a man like Ryan Chandler—in a very, very long time.

“The garage door has one of those electronic openers,” she told him, hands on hips as she felt her tongue begin to run on wheels. “The code is 0000, as it’s easy to remember—and because zero is the lowest number on the keypad and Zachary could reach it by the time he was five and we put it up—and then you press the Enter button and the door goes right up. Sorry if I’m rattling on. I was just giving you a bit of Monroe folklore, or whatever. You don’t mind, do you? No, of course you don’t.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, shaking his head as he pulled the door shut behind him.

Janna put her hands on her hips and stared at the closed door for some moments. The colorful room suddenly seemed drab, now that he’d left it. “The man’s obviously in a daze,” she told herself with false concern and a pot full of ulterior motive. “He’ll forget the code on his own,” she said out loud finally, and went after him.

Three hours, four bandages, and several muttered curse words later, the garage was clean. Hell, it sparkled, if a garage could be said to sparkle.

And, much to Ryan’s surprise, he was beginning to enjoy himself.

Janna had been as good as her word, and had helped screw together the inexpensive, freestanding metal shelves, using an electric screwdriver that had enough attachments to be standard issue on a manned Mars landing-and-recovery module.

As she had put the last bandage on his scraped elbow, a maneuver he couldn’t quite manage himself, she’d kissed the cartoon-covered strip to “make it all better.”

He hadn’t even felt insulted, being lumped into Zachary’s age group, where kissing to make things better must be standard operating procedure.

Besides, it worked.

“Where to now, boss?” he asked, still feeling pretty good about himself. He was, after all, in very good shape. He worked out three times a week in his own home exercise room—without resorting to Allie’s motivational exercise tapes. He golfed. He played the occasional game of tennis—although never against Allie, who cheated blatantly. “Out” to his grandmother only counted if she called it.

“Where to now? Upstairs, to the main bathroom,” Janna answered, already leading the way.

The trip to the second floor meant that Ryan was going to get a look at her house, which intrigued him mightily. Outside, it was a typical redbrick Cape Cod, although the bright-yellow shutters and woodwork were, to say the least, out of the ordinary. However, once inside her kitchen, he’d known that here lived a woman who was either color blind or in love with color. Bright colors. Sunshiny colors. Happy colors. She’d even painted the interior of her garage a sunny yellow—with blue stripes, no less.

They passed through the kitchen and directly into the dining room. Ryan stopped in his tracks, instantly mesmerized by the hand-painted mural on the wall shared with the kitchen. It was a scene from a park, a Paris park, in fact. He recognized snippets from his art history classes. The tree in the foreground. The lady in the hat, exposing her profile and the bustle of her long skirt.

“Isn’t that Monet?” he asked, pointing to the mural.

Her grin flashed at him, once again nearly blinding him—he’d really have to get used to the fact that she seemed so damned happy all the time. “Nope. It’s a Monroe,” she corrected, idly tracing a finger over the lady’s profile. “See? That’s me under the hat. And the little boy? That’s Zachary, although he was only five then, of course. Oh, it might have started out as a Monet, but I added a few touches of my own. Like the parrot in that tree over there. Like it?”