Mr. Right Next Door

“Nothing!” She tossed up her hands in a frivolous gesture so unlike her that she immediately regretted it. Morgan composed his squarely chiseled face and lifted a hand to indicate the first room immediately off the hall.

“Let’s sit down, and you can tell me what’s wrong.”

Denise closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again and nodded at the same time as she looked around her. The hall was all polished wood and brass and sweeping stairs with marble treads and banisters. A large mirror, framed in heavy, ornately carved wood, hung on one wall, an old-fashioned hall tree stood opposite it. Between them a small, graceful chandelier hung from the ceiling, its brass inlaid with delicate cameos.

She followed Morgan into the living room. He put her on the couch and sat down opposite her on a wing chair, pulling it close and leaning forward with forearms braced against his knees. She crossed her ankles demurely and folded her hands in her lap, her heart beating a heavy rhythm.

“Okay,” he said, “now what’s wrong?”

She put on a smile, her voice falsely bright. “Nothing’s wrong. I just thought you might like to join me and some, uh, other people for dinner...Friday night.”

“Friday night,” he echoed thoughtfully.

“At the Ozark Springs Inn,” she added hurriedly. “I know it’s late notice, but I promised I’d bring an, er, a friend. Honestly, Morgan, I’d be so appreciative if you could manage—”

“Okay,” he said. “Now what’s the rest of it?”

She was still hung on the okay. Breathless with relief, she sank back against the pillows and closed her eyes. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate—”

“Just tell me what’s going on.”

She sat upright again, suddenly believing that it was going to be all right, after all. “Actually,” she said, almost laughing in her relief, “I don’t need a date so much as I need a boyfriend. Oh, not that I want one, you understand! It’s just that, well, my boss is a throwback to a less enlightened age, to put it politely. In fact, if I was willing to give up my career, I could nail him on sexual harassment charges. But I figure the best justice would be to get promoted despite him, maybe over him, and then don’t think I wouldn’t can his—Well, you get my meaning, I’m sure.”

She chuckled, expecting him to join her. He didn’t. Instead he said, “I take it your boss will be joining us for dinner.”

“Yes, and thank God that’s all! He had the brass to try to pull off an overnight stay at the inn, which is why I told him that I already had plans.”

“Uh-huh, and whose idea was the boyfriend?”

“His, actually. He just sort of jumped to that conclusion, and I let him think I had one in hopes it would make him think twice about planning any more overnight jaunts. Then he insisted that I bring you along for dinner. I mean, the boyfriend, not you necessarily. It’s just that I don’t know anyone else around here that I could ask to pretend with me. You do understand?”

He smiled then, but rather perfunctorily. “Sure. No problem.”

She sighed, a hand pressed to her chest. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Hey, it’s no biggie. I like the Ozark Springs Inn.”

“Oh, good. I’ve never been myself, but now I can look forward to it. Oh, I should tell you that it’s primarily a business dinner. We’ve brought on a new retailer, and the company rep will be there with us.”

Morgan nodded thoughtfully. “That’s fine. Is it just the four of us then?”

She pulled a face. “Chuck apparently doesn’t bring his wife along to these things. Uh, Chuck, that’s my boss.”

Morgan nodded again. “Makes sense. No doubt having the little wife along would cramp his style.”

“No doubt,” Denise agreed drily. “One more thing. I think Chuck’s planning something. When he insisted I bring along this fictitious boyfriend, he had a certain gleam in his eye, like he’s got an ace up his sleeve. Don’t be surprised if he does or says something outrageous.”

“Something that would make a real boyfriend walk out maybe?” Morgan asked thoughtfully.

Denise nodded with satisfaction. “That would be my best guess.”

Morgan shrugged. “No problem.”

“You’re sure?”

“I understand sharks like Chuck. Trust me.”

Oddly, she did. “I can’t thank you enough for this. I’ll be eternally grateful.”

“Hey, what are friends for?” Straightening, he rubbed his hands together in that exuberant way of his. “Now, can I get you a drink?”

“Oh, no, thank you. I don’t drink much beyond a glass of wine with my dinner. It just seems to go straight to my head.”

“Ah, you’re wise to avoid it then.”

“Yes, well, I’d better go,” she said, growing uncomfortable again. “Smithson will be wanting his dinner.”

“Speaking of dinner,” he said, coming to his feet at the same instant she did, “what time Friday should I be ready?”

“I don’t really know. The reservations are for seventhirty, but as I’ve never been to the inn, I can’t say how long it will take us to get there.”

“It’s quite a drive,” he said, “about forty minutes. How about if I pick you up around a quarter to seven?”

“Oh, you don’t have to pick me up.”

“Nonsense. I’m your date, remember. How would it look if your boyfriend just met you there?”

“Yes, I guess that wouldn’t make quite the right impression. We can take my car, if you like.”

“Nah, I’ll just back the old Mercedes out of the garage. It doesn’t get much use anymore. The drive will do it good.”

“All right, if you’re sure.”

“My pleasure.”

She turned and walked into the entry hall, saying, “You’ve been out to the Inn. What should I wear? Would a cocktail dress be too much?”

“No, I don’t think so. I assume half the purpose of this dinner is to impress the new client, so to speak.”

“Right. Well, then, I’ll see you Friday.”

“Friday,” he said, opening the door for her.

She strolled out onto the porch. Dusk was already deepening into night. The smell of wood smoke permeated the chill. “Your home is lovely,” she told him in parting.

“Thanks.” He leaned a shoulder against the door frame and slid his hands into his pockets watching her as she descended the stairs to the walkway.

She sent him a last smile and hurried toward her apartment, wondering why her heart was again beating with such quick intensity. But this was not dread. This was... Dare she call it anticipation? And why not? Something told her that she’d just checkmated old Chuck, and come Friday, he’d know it. She was humming when she let herself into the apartment. She hummed all the way to Friday.

She opened the door to a kind of casual elegance she’d seldom seen in a man, and for a moment it held her spellbound. Perhaps it was the simplicity of a pale gray crewneck sweater worn beneath a gray silk jacket above classic black, pleated trousers. Or perhaps what held her spellbound was the way the grays shamelessly brought out the silver at his temples and the electric blue of his eyes; or maybe it was the slightly tousled look of his hair, worn short and sleek and sharply tailored, except in the very front, where it parted uncertainly in the middle and fell in two curving locks to his eyebrows. He looked relaxed and, at the same time, groomed within an inch of his life and utterly, totally male.

She didn’t know how long she might have stood there and stared if he hadn’t done a slow once-over, taken a step back and exclaimed, “Wow!”

She felt her own perusal turned back at her and literally blushed. She really didn’t want him to know how much time she had spent getting ready for this make-believe event, and yet she was glad that she hadn’t played down her appearance. The little red crepe slip dress with its gently flared skirt that swirled softly several inches above her knees was simple but classic. With spaghetti straps, it was a little light for a cool autumn evening, but she had augmented it with a long, clingy wrap of red organza, which at the moment was draped loosely about her shoulders and arms, hanging down almost to the tops of her red velvet heels and calling attention, she hoped, to slender ankles encased in the sheerest of black stockings. She hadn’t known quite what to do with her hair, whether to wear it down or rolled into a classic French twist. In the end, she’d settled for something in between, a loose chignon pinned at the crown of her head with lots of long tendrils floating down around her face and shoulders. Her only jewelry consisted of pearl drops at her earlobes, a teensy gold chain about her throat and a pearl and rhinestone brooch that she wore pinned in her hair.

Apparently she had done well. Perhaps she had even overdone it. Morgan certainly seemed to find her appearance more than merely acceptable, and, for some reason, that sent a thrill down the back of her neck all the way to her toes. At least she hadn’t outdone him, and to let him know that she fully appreciated that fact, she said to him, “You look wonderful!” at the same exact moment that he said it to her. Then they both laughed and said, “Thank you.”

More laughter followed, and then he said, “Frankly, I was afraid you’d look all buttoned down the way you do when you leave for work in the mornings, not that you don’t look good then, too, but, well, it wouldn’t aid the illusion, so to speak.”

“The illusion?”

“Of a woman in love,” he said, leaning forward slightly. “You have a boyfriend, remember, not just a racquetball buddy—speaking of which, I think I deserve a rematch. I gave you a dam good game, if you’ll recall.” She smiled, glad to have a “friendly” topic to discuss. “So you did. Give me another one tonight, and you’re on.”

“It’s a done deal,” he assured her as she gathered up her tiny, red velvet handbag. Stepping aside, he allowed her to move past him and out into the cool night. While she adjusted her wrap, covering her head and looping the ends just so about her shoulders, he locked the door and pushed it closed. Smithson jumped up into the window as they walked past, yowling as if he thought it was expected of him, then settling down to groom himself with leisurely strokes of his tongue. Likewise, Reiver woofed from his station on the porch.

“That’s his protective post,” Morgan informed her. “He always stations himself there when I’m gone.”

“I’ve noticed that,” Denise told him, and then wondered if she should have, but he seemed to find nothing remarkable about her taking note of his comings and goings. He talked on about the dog.

“It’s part of his nature,” Morgan said. “He’ll stay right there until I get home and let him into the house for the night.”

“He sleeps in your house?”

“Right in front of my son’s bedroom door. It’s as if he knows instinctively what means most to me and seeks to protect that.”

“I’ve never seen your son. Does he get to visit often.”

“Radley’s up here all the time. You just probably didn’t realize who he was.”

“He lives close then?”

“He’s a sophomore at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Still.”

“Still?”

Morgan chuckled. “Rad’s not real serious about his course work. He’s twenty already, and his mother thinks he’s studying to be a burn just because he doesn’t know yet what he wants to do. Hell, I didn’t know what I wanted to do until I was thirty-eight.”

They had reached the polished black automobile sitting in front of the old carriage house at the edge of the property. “And just what is it exactly that you are doing?” she asked as he opened the passenger door for her.

He laughed again, easily, lightly. “Whatever I damned well please. Currently that means remodeling an old house up on Hanson Creek for resale.”

“Ah.”

He handed her into the car, then bent over her, hands braced on the door frame and the door itself. “It doesn’t compute for you, does it? I’ll bet you made a five-year plan and stuck to it every step of the way.”

She didn’t quite know what to say to that, for he was right, of course. Finally she asked, “Is that bad?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Unless you think it’s the only way to live and expect everyone else to think so, too.”

She digested that while he came around and got in behind the steering wheel. Okay, maybe she had been pretty sure that it was the only way she could get what she wanted, and it had worked, so far as it went. So maybe she didn’t quite understand why everyone else didn’t do it, and maybe she had assumed that everyone just naturally wanted what she did. Was something wrong with that? Had she closed her mind to everything else? Her sister surely thought so. And perhaps her parents, now that she thought about it. But she was well into the second five-year plan, and everything was going along according to schedule, so why should she abandon her goals now? Of course she shouldn’t.

On the other hand, when was the last time she’d really enjoyed herself? When had she last been happy? The answer to that lay buried back home in Kansas City, which meant, she reminded herself, that real happiness was forever out of her reach. What, after all, did she have left but her career? The answer was obvious, and yet it did not seem to have quite the bleakness about it that it usually did.

She didn’t know whether to be alarmed or encouraged by that. She could never, would never, forget her son or the loss of him. So how could the knowledge that he was gone be any less shocking or sharp today than it had been yesterday? With that worrisome enigma on her mind, she almost missed the sight of Fayetteville spread like a swatch of stars in the Ozark foothills, down one eastern slope and into the flat valley below then north in a milky flow to Springdale and Rogers and the cuts and gullies beyond. Thankfully, Morgan didn’t let her miss it.

“This is one of my favorite sights,” he said, jolting her from her reverie. “When I was a kid, I used to lie on my belly and look out the window of my attic room at the valley below and imagine what everyone in town was up to. It seemed another world even though we bused down every day to school.”

“We?”

“My sister and I.”

“I have a sister.”

“Older or younger?”

“Younger.”

“Me, too.”

Something else they had in common. “I have a brother, too,” she said, and felt a spurt of relief when he shook his head.

“I always wanted one, though.”

Denise sighed as they turned back into the foothills and left Fayetteville behind. “So you lived up here, hmm?”

He nodded. “My dad’s still up there. Delia—that’s my sister—thinks he ought to move down to Little Rock with her, but he says he’ll never leave my mom. She’s buried up there near the house.”

“Is it safe for him, so far from everything?”

He shrugged. “He says it is. Personally, I lived without indoor plumbing and electricity until I walked out of high school and into the University of Arkansas, and I didn’t find anything particularly ennobling about it. But Dad says that life is best at its simplest, and frankly I see no reason for him to change his life now just because he’s into his mid-seventies. He wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.”

“You must worry about him, though.”

He inclined his head at that, saying, “I don’t worry about much, frankly. If I see a problem and I can fix it, I do, but worrying never solved anything so far as I can tell. Actually, as far as Dad goes, I admire him, and I always did, even when I was lost and so miserably unhappy I didn’t know which way to turn.”

“And when was that?” she heard herself asking.

He considered a moment. “Oh, about ten years ago. That was the worst of it, anyway, though it had been building for a long, long time.”

“And now?”

“Now I love my life,” he said, grinning broadly. “I have everything I’ve ever wanted except...”

“Except,” she prodded, and he turned his head to settle a look on her that was clearly meant to remind her that she had asked.

“Except someone to share it with,” he said softly, and the yearning in his eyes made her turn away. She felt a bit sorry that she had asked, a little panicked, even, because something seemed to flutter in her chest when he looked at her like that, something she was too mature and too battered to feel, something that didn’t belong in her second five-year plan, something that made her wonder if she had left out an important element. She pushed away the thought, fixing her mind on business, and she remembered what she had meant to tell him about Chuck, the warnings she ought to issue, the instructions she felt he needed to make this little charade work.

She spent the remainder of the drive doing just that, briefing him much as she would have a team going out on a major sales push. If he looked at her occasionally as if she secretly amused him, she let it pass without comment. After all, he was a friend doing her a favor, and a huge favor at that, not a subordinate questioning her judgment or instructions. He seemed to understand all that she had to tell him, commenting once that he knew Chuck’s type all too well and another time that she shouldn’t worry about the primary reason for the meeting-that being business-falling victim to the secondary reason, which he referred to as “nipping Chuck’s extracurricular proclivities in the bud.”

“I’ll leave the former to you,” he said. “Just you leave the latter to me.”

She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that, but he reminded her of what she wanted to forget, specifically, that they were supposed to be in love or very close to it. He was right, of course. A casual date would do nothing to short-circuit Chuck’s disgustingly sexual approach to her. A lover would—hopefully. The possibility existed that this would all be for nought. Chuck could be vicious enough to demand sexual concessions no matter what her personal situation, but her read on the situation was that he considered her fair game because she was unattached, so the obvious solution was to attach herself quickly to someone. And who else was there besides Morgan Holt? She was new to town, after all, and he had expressed an interest, but that was before he’d understood that she had no interest in anything more than friendship. Now that they understood each other, he’d proven a true friend, and that alone made him the appropriate candidate for this kind of date, not that this was a real date or anything. Certainly not. But it did feel oddly datelike even... She sat up a little straighter. Romantic? No, of course not! What could be romantic about pretending, about campaigning toward a goal? This was just another end run around the next fellow in her way. This was business. So what if the man with whom she’d chosen to align herself looked good enough to eat? So what if in an unguarded moment he made her heart beat a little faster? So what if the night was dark and soft and she felt cocooned in luxury and utterly feminine for the first time in so long that she couldn’t remember ever feeling so, and the smile on his face and the appreciation in his eyes somehow caused a secret little thrill deep within her? So what?

So she was in trouble. That was what.

And, by golly, someone was going to pay. She narrowed her eyes, smiling when she imagined good old Chuck comparing himself to Morgan Holt and falling far, far short. Oh, yes, he was going to pay.

Chapter Three

Morgan pulled the Mercedes beneath the covered drive of the sprawling, rustic inn and rolled down the window. A white-jacketed valet wearing a small headphone bent forward and looked into the car. Morgan smiled. The Mercedes was eight years old, but the odometer had less than forty thousand miles on it, and the condition of the car was absolutely pristine. Morgan felt not the least desire to “trade up” to a newer model and wasn’t sure that he ever would. The young valet returned his smile and swiveled down the tiny microphone suspended in front of his mouth.

“Do you have a reservation, sir?”

“We’re meeting another party,” Morgan said, deferring to Denise.

She leaned forward and looked at the valet. “A Mr. Charles Dayton.”

The valet maneuvered the microphone back into position and spoke softly into it. “Mr. Charles Dayton.” He pressed a fingertip to the speaker nestled inside his ear and his smiled broadened and warmed. He nodded to Morgan and Denise. “Mr. Dayton has arrived. Your names please.” They told him, and he relayed the message to whoever was on the other end of that microphone, then signaled to another valet, who quickly stepped up and opened the door for Denise, while the fellow with the mike did the same for Morgan.

Morgan strode around the car and caught up to Denise, who had already started up the steps. He slid his hand against the small of her back, pleased with the light, taut feel of her body, and leaned close to whisper into her ear. “Slow down. This is one battle that must be fought leisurely.”

She slowed her stride, bowed her head slightly and nodded, slanting him a sly, grateful look that made his breath catch. If only she knew how loverlike he felt and how delighted he was that she’d given him this opening. Oh, his offer of friendship had been genuine enough, but only because he hadn’t seen what else he could do. Even at that, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d closed the door on him and his casserole. Instead, she’d let him inside and all but handed him the key to unlocking her so tightly buttoned-up self. He knew now that she had suffered great loss and hurt and because of it had closed off her emotional self, focusing all her energies on her career. Morgan knew from experience that a career could make a very poor partner with which to share a life, and he, for one, was more than ready to share his life with someone special. It was time for him. The question was, was it time for Denise? He knew that he was not going to look elsewhere until he found out. She drew him, this sleek, contained woman, and had done so since he’d first laid eyes on her.

The thickly timbered door of the lobby opened of its own volition as they approached, and another white-jacketed servant bowed them through, pointing as he did so toward a broad hallway on the right. Denise looked around her as they walked side by side through the expansive lobby with its warm aura of rusticity, taking in the massive beams, unglazed brick floors, and gargantuan, freestanding fireplace built of native rock and currently roaring with a small bonfire. The inn was famous for its homey luxury, mud baths and excellent food. It was perhaps infamous for its almost fanatically insured privacy, making it a favorite trysting place for well-heeled cheaters and the very, very discreet. Chuck had chosen his spot well. Fortunately Denise was too smart—and too upright—to be so easily caught in his web. Morgan knew that he was going to enjoy putting old Chuckles in his place, just as he enjoyed the knowledge that Denise was not nearly cynical enough or lost enough to sleep her way to the top. This was a woman of real substance.

Not for the first time, Morgan wondered what kind of idiot would toss such a woman aside, as her ex obviously had done-her and their child. The thought boggled the mind. How had a woman like Denise, who was obviously extremely sensitive, even gotten involved with a man like that? But then who was he to ask such a question? He, too, had loved the wrong person. He, too, had paid a heavy price. Ah, but life was good now. Still, it could be better. He thought of the nights he went to bed alone and of the mornings when only the company of his dog kept every day from beginning in a gray funk. His hand warmed against her back as he pictured Denise in his bed, tousled and soft, a smile spreading across her luscious mouth as she opened her eyes to find him there. Oh, yes, he was going to enjoy playing his part tonight—and hope that it inspired her to allow him to turn pretense into reality.

They strolled past various small, trendy shops and arrived at the entrance to the restaurant. They were greeted at once and led out into the maze of snowy white tablecloths and deep, comfortable chairs. Halfway across the room, Morgan slid his hand up to Denise’s shoulder, feeling the satiny warmth of her bare skin beneath the filmy fabric of her wrap. “Denise.”