Czytaj książkę: «That Marriageable Man!»

One

“Holly, are you sure you want to do it? You really want to go there?” Brenna Worth studied her longtime friend Holly Casale, not bothering to mask her concern. Or her disbelief.

“Not you, too!” Holly shook her head and managed a laugh. A slight one. “I’ve been defending my decision to the family for weeks, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to do it with you, Brenna. Can’t you be happy for me? It’s a great opportunity. I’ll be the only psychiatrist with the Widmark family practice, which is one of the biggest in the city, so I won’t have to go begging for referrals like a newcomer normally would. And I’ve already been asked to serve as a volunteer with the Teens At Risk Task Force and a peer counseling program at one of the high schools.”

“All that’s in addition to your job? Sounds like they plan to run you ragged with volunteering.”

“It’s an ideal way for me to get involved with the community and to work with kids. You know that’s my main field of interest, Brenna.”

“Troubled teens aren’t kids, they’re hazards—to be avoided,” stated Brenna. “I’m so disappointed you aren’t moving back here, Holly. Your mom said you had three good offers all within an hour’s drive. It would be great if we lived in the same area again! And to be perfectly honest with you, how happy can I be when your new job is in South Dakota?”

“Careful, Brenna, you’re starting to sound like my mother. When I told Mom I was moving to Sioux Falls her first words were, ‘If you want to move to a place far away with bad weather, why not Alaska? At least there is supposed to be a surplus of eligible men.’”

“And then, inevitably, one of your aunts chimed in with...?” prompted Brenna. She knew Holly’s family well.

“Aunt Hedy said, ‘With the shortage of marriageable women in Alaska, you’re bound to find a man up there, dear,’” Holly quoted with a wry smile.

Brenna sighed. “They just don’t give up, do they?”

“No. And they won’t until I’m either married or dead. I’ve already received five copies of The Rules. In hardcover.” Holly opened her closet door and brought out multiple copies of the book, which offered women advice on how to coyly lure Mr. Right to the altar.

“Mom bought me the book the day it appeared in the stores. Then Aunt Hedy and Aunt Honoria each gave me one. The copies from my cousins Hillary and Heather arrived in the mail on the same day. My sister keeps quizzing me on the contents to see if I’ve read the book yet. The whole family firmly believes I need all the help I can get when it comes to landing a husband.”

“Subtlety has never been your family’s strong suit, Holly.”

“Not where men and marriage are concerned. Feel free to keep a copy for yourself, Bren.” Holly chuckled. “After all, you’re still single, too. You might find some useful pointers if you decide you want to acquire a—”

“Don’t even joke about it!” Brenna cut in, backing away from the books as if they were radioactive. “I acquire companies, not men. My career keeps me way too busy to even think about the noxious pursuit of husband-hunting.”

“My family would consider that blasphemy. Or maybe insanity.” Holly’s smile faded a little. “You see why I can’t come back home to work, don’t you, Brenna? I love my family dearly, but my visits here over the years have already given me a taste of what it would be like if 1 lived among my relatives full-time.”

Brenna knew. “An endless succession of setups with any man deemed marriageable by your mother and your sister, and your aunts and cousins.”

“And their idea of an eligible bachelor runs a wide gamut, from the twenty-two-year-old video games fanatic to the sixty-one-year-old widower who owns his own real estate agency and has two daughters older than me.” Holly heaved a reminiscent groan.

The heart knows no age limit, Aunt Hedy had said blithely. She was the one who’d fixed Holly up with the real estate agent, already a grandfather five times over.

A young man needs the guiding hand of a loving older woman, said Aunt Honoria. The video games nut, a college student who’d looked and acted not a day over sixteen, had been her contribution to the collective Marry-Off-Holly effort.

Your aunts love you, they care about you, they know a woman isn’t happy without a husband. Helene Casale, Holly’s mother, made no apologies for her two sisters’ matchmaking attempts.

No wonder. Mom had been responsible for her own selection of dud blind dates for Holly. The pet shop owner whose sole topics of conversation were tropical fish and reptiles. The lawyer who specialized in personal injury suits and bribed ambulance drivers to beep him so he could arrive at accident scenes to pass out his cards. There had been others, though none quite as memorably horrific.

Holly’s older sister Hope and their cousins, Hillary, Heather, and Hayley—all married—had also done their share for “The Cause” over the years, producing a contingent of men whom Holly was lovingly bullied into meeting. Sometimes the men actually were nice, normal and perfectly adequate human beings. Sometimes there would be second dates and even a few more after that.

But so far, friendship rather than romance had resulted in every case because both Holly and the selected matrimonial candidate would recognize that their budding relationship was fated to be platonic, not romantic.

The female members of the clan were in despair that Holly, who had countless male friends, had never come close to nabbing that ultimate prize—an engagement ring. To be followed by the traditional big white wedding. Then the nagging to produce children could rightfully begin. Both Hillary and Heather already had a daughter apiece. Hope and Hayley were each trying zealously to conceive.

“I guess the fact that little Heidi is engaged and planning her wedding hasn’t made things any easier for you.” Brenna was sympathetic.

Little Heidi was Holly’s youngest cousin, who’d turned twenty last month and was currently flashing a minute solitaire on her finger. Though barely a diamond chip bought with the twenty-one-year-old husband-to-be’s student loan money, it was still an engagement ring provided by an authentic fiancé.

“Poor Mom. I felt so sorry for her when Heidi announced her engagement at the family’s monthly brunch.” Holly grimaced at the memory. “Mom claimed she was thrilled about little Heidi’s engagement but she left shortly afterward. She claimed she’d been food poisoned, but we all knew why she really felt sick.”

“Never mind that she has a daughter who graduated with honors from the University of Michigan’s med school and completed a psychiatric residency there.” Brenna’s blue eyes flashed. “That doesn’t count because Honoria is the one meeting with bridal consultants and shopping with Heidi for her wedding gown.”

“True. The fact that I’m twenty-nine without a single prospective son-in-law in sight is what really counts as far as Mom is concerned,” Holly said dryly.

“God, Holly, it makes me furious on your behalf! Furious and...and crazy.”

“Don’t be. And as a newly board-certified shrink. I advise you to redirect your anger into something positive. Like making plans to visit me in Sioux Falls as soon as I get settled in. Promise you’ll come soon, Bren.”

“I promise.” Brenna nodded her head. “And it’ll have to be soon because doesn’t winter come early there? Like around the first of September?”

“South Dakota is not in the Arctic Circle, Brenna. And considering some of the winters we’ve had here in Michigan, we really have no room to mock the weather anywhere else.”

“You’re getting defensive about your new hometown already. I guess you’ll fit in out there in Frontier Land. Well, Sioux Falls is lucky to have you, Holly. I just hope that you’ll...” Brenna paused, an unholy gleam in her eyes. “That you’ll meet the man of your dreams there. Imagine the thrill of being deluged with Planning the Perfect Wedding Guides from all your approving relatives!”

There was a knock on the door and Helene Casale entered Holly’s bedroom.

“How is the packing coming, Holly?” she asked, glancing at the suitcases that lay opened and half full on the bed.

“It’s coming along fairly well, Mom.”

“Don’t forget to pack this, Holly. You never know when you might need it for reference.” Helene Casale put a copy of The Rules into the suitcase, then handed one of the books to Brenna. “And you take one, too, dear. The authors practically guarantee a proposal if you follow their advice. Rumor has it that J.F.K. Jr.’s bride was a Rules girl.”

Holly’s eyes met Brenna’s and she read her friend’s silent message. Accepting the offer to join the Widmark family practice in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, far from her ever-loving, ever-obsessed-with-her-marital-status relatives, was definitely the right move.

The plane touched down at the Sioux Falls airport nearly two hours after its scheduled arrival time, the delay resulting from a mechanical problem discovered in Minneapolis shortly before takeoff.

Rafe Paradise glanced at his watch again.

“Watching the clock isn’t going to make the time pass any faster.” His seatmate, a petite blonde in a chic gray suit spoke up, her tone amused. “It’s ten minutes past the last time you checked. You really are in a hurry to get home, aren’t you?”

“Actually, no.” Rafe managed to return her smile. There was a difference between wanting to get home and having to get back as soon as possible, though he didn’t feel like discussing the whys and wherefores with the pretty woman sitting next to him.

She’d been flirting with him all during the flight and had already ascertained that he wasn’t married, that he was a lawyer who lived in Sioux Falls and had no significant other in his life. Rafe had answered her very direct questions without posing any of his own, but the blonde kept the conversation going, undeterred by his perfunctory responses.

He now knew that her name was Lorna Larson, that she lived and worked in the Twin Cities and was making one of her frequent business trips to Sioux Falls. (“Thanks to the deregulation of telecommunications, Sioux Falls has become a major center of credit card processing and telemarketing,” Lorna, a self-proclaimed rising star in a telecommunications company, explained to him.)

As if he, a lifelong native of the city, didn’t already know. Still, Rafe made no comment. Why bother to go through the motions—me flirtatious smiles, the eye contact, the exchange of personal info and other requisite preliminaries? As soon as he mentioned his situation, the come-hither glow in Lorna Larson’s eyes would turn to frost.

Worse, he didn’t care. His interest in sex had sunk to ground zero, Rafe acknowledged grimly, because the lack of female companionship in his life no longer even bothered him. Since he’d inherited his two younger half sisters last year—there were other words he could use to describe how they’d happened to land in his life but “inherited” was the most charitable—his social life had become as extinct as the Neanderthals who once inhabited the earth.

Maybe he was on to unlocking the mystery of their disappearance from the planet, Rafe mused darkly. Their caves had been besieged with kids—other people’s, not their own—who’d worked them over so thoroughly that their sexual drive had been effectively obliterated. The species had faded from sheer lack of time, interest and energy in sex.

Rafe could definitely relate. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d had sex. Certainly before Camryn and Kaylin had moved in with him. Before his Little Brother Trent and Trent’s kid brother Tony had gradually become residents instead of visitors to his house. His last few dates, months and months ago, had ended in disaster because crises with the kids had disrupted them in grand style.

Lorna Larson pressed her business card into Rafe’s hand as they reached for their carry-on luggage stored in the overhead compartments. “I wrote the name of the hotel where I’m staying while I’m here in town. Give me a call and we can get together for drinks.” Her smile promised much more. She was clearly in the mood for some action during her stay in Sioux Falls.

Rafe murmured a polite response and tucked the card into the pocket of his suit jacket, knowing he wouldn’t call. He wouldn’t be up to drinks or anything else after dealing with those kids. Especially after his overnight absence. God only knew what they’d gotten into while on their own. At least he’d had the foresight to have his pal on the police force, Joe Stone, regularly check the house during his absence, thereby guaranteeing that the entire adolescent population of Sioux Falls would not have been partying there.

He remembered that first fateful time he’d gone away on an overnight business trip, not long after the kids’ arrival. He had naively expected them to carry on as if he were home. Oh, they’d carried on, all right. His house had been the sight of a teen saturnalia that would have done the ancient Romans proud. The two little guys, Trent and Tony, had their own fun, as well, inventing in-the-house versions of baseball, football, hockey and golf. Never mind pesky obstacles such as lamps and windows that happened to get in the way of a flying ball or puck and break into pieces.

Once again, thinking about the kids had supplanted thoughts of anything or anyone else, he realized. Already, the willing and ready Lorna Larson had been relegated to the realm of forgotten in his mind.

Rafe picked up his car in the parking lot. While driving on Interstate 90 toward home, the urge to keep going—all the way to the west coast without turning around—struck him hard. It was a tempting notion indeed.

But his sense of duty and responsibility was stronger than his longing for freedom. Rafe Paradise headed home.

“We’re gettin’ new neighbors and it’s gonna be cool. Maybe there’s a kid and he’ll go to our school. We can play golf an—” Ten-year-old Trent paused in the middle of the rap song he was composing. “What rhymes with golf?” He kept up his beat, hitting the edge of the coffee table with two wooden rulers.

“Nothing rhymes with golf,” said Kaylin, sixteen. “Why don’t you try another word? Like ball. Lots of things rhyme with ball. Call, fall, mall, tall.”

“Stop! I feel like I’m trapped in a Dr. Seuss book.” Seventeen-year-old Camryn, lying prone on the sofa, adjusted the ice bag on her forehead. “Trent, will you puh-leese quit that pounding! Every beat feels like a nail being driven into my head.”

“Call me Lion,” demanded Trent. “Did you get drunk again last night, Camryn?”

“Like I’d ever tell you! You’d run straight to Rafe and squeal on me, you weaselly little tattletale.” Camryn heaved a groan. “Kaylin, get me a couple Excedrin. And a cola. And some ice cream.”

“Sure.” Kaylin scurried into the kitchen to do her sister’s bidding.

“She’s not your slave, y’know,” Trent declared. “Slavery is against the law.”

“So is murder, but if you don’t stop making so much noise, I’m going to kill you,” Camryn warned.

Trent resumed his ruler beat, this time with a new rap. “I’m not scared of Camryn, even though she’s mean. She’s ugly, too, so bad she’ll make you scream.”

Camryn threw the ice bag at him and he deftly dodged it, laughing. Unfortunately, the ice bag hit the overweight mixed-breed dog dozing in the patch of sunlight in the middle of the room. The dog awoke and began to bark.

“Aw, poor Hot Dog.” Trent tried to comfort the animal by patting its head. Hot Dog snapped at him.

Trent quickly pulled his hand back. “How come Hot Dog hates me?”

“He doesn’t hate you, he’s just grouchy when he wakes up,” said Camryn. “C’mon, Hot Dog. Come here, sweetie. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hit you.”

“Yeah, she wanted to smack me, not you, boy.” Trent attempted to pat Hot Dog again. The dog bared his teeth and growled at him. “Y’know, he’s grouchy all the time, not just when he wakes up.”

“That’s ’cause he hates it here,” explained Camryn. “He liked living in Las Vegas. Me, too. Of course, who wouldn’t like Las Vegas better than Sioux Falls?”

“Me!” crowed Trent. “I love Sioux Falls.”

“That’s because you and your little brother have been stuck here all your lives. You can’t compare it to anything else.” Camryn heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Hey, where is that kid, anyway? Why isn’t he here making my headache even worse?”

“Tony slept over at the Steens’ last night. They’re going to the zoo today, they said we could both come along, too. Hey, know what, Camryn? When I’m as good a golfer as Tiger Woods I’ll go lots of places besides Sioux Falls,” Trent vowed. “I’ll go to Las Vegas.”

“And you’ll probably blow all your golf tournament winnings in the slot machines. All five dollars of it.” Camryn snickered at her own joke.

“I think that Trent is going to be a great golfer.” Kaylin rejoined them with Camryn’s order. “He’ll be the next Tiger Woods. Maybe even better.”

Trent beamed. “I’ll buy a big house in Las Vegas and you can live there, Kaylin. It’ll be a mansion and we can all live there, me and you and Tony and Camryn and Rate and Hot Dog. And my mom, too, if she wants to.”

“What about Flint? And Eva?” Camryn sat up to swallow the pills with a gulp of cola from the can. “Are they going to be living in the mansion with us, too?”

“No.” Trent shook his head decisively. “Flint will want to stay here and work and Eva—”

“Wouldn’t live with us if you paid her to,” Camryn finished for him. “She hates us too much.”

“Wonder why?” Trent looked glum. “Wish she didn’t.”

“If pigs were wishes, we could fly.” Kaylin shrugged philosophically. “Or something like that.”

A few minutes later Rafe Paradise walked into his living room to find Camryn breakfasting on cola and strawberry ice cream and Kaylin in his chair, a massive blue recliner. She was cuddling Hot Dog, the fattest, homeliest, worst-tempered beast Rafe had ever had the misfortune of meeting. Now he lived with the creature. And Hot Dog, with his imperious sense of canine entitlement, was drooling on the chair’s textured upholstery as well as shedding all over it.

Young Trent was stretched out on the floor on his stomach watching TV. Not quality children’s programming, Rafe noted dourly, but a poorly drawn cartoon that featured stick figures blasting other stick figures with some version of nuclear weaponry.

Rafe hardly knew where to begin. Since Trent jumped to his feet and ran to greet him joyously, Rafe decided to let the issue of violent cartoons slide—for now. Trent stopped just a few inches in front of Rafe, his arms at his sides, and beamed. A hug would’ve seemed natural to some, but Trent was wary of physical contact, and Rafe hadn’t been raised to be physically demonstrative. So the two smiled their mutual affection.

“Hi, Rafe. Did you have a good trip?” asked Kaylin.

Since she was the one sitting in his chair, Rafe didn’t scold her about the dog’s presence there, though it was strictly forbidden. Undoubtedly, it had been bratty Camryn who’d placed the offensive Hot Dog in his chair, anyway.

“The trip went well,” Rafe replied. His specialty was contracts law, and he knew the details of his work would bore the kids, should he attempt to explain it. So far, he never had.

He zeroed in on Camryn, who hadn’t acknowledged his presence at all. She was pouring cola over the ice cream and mashing it into a fizzing mess with her spoon before gobbling it down. At ten o’clock in the morning!

Rafe grimaced. “What kind of a breakfast is that?”

“It’s the only breakfast I want,” retorted Camryn

“And it’s not good for you. I went food shopping before I left for Minneapolis and I know we have juice and eggs and—”

“Quit it, Rafe!” Camryn made a gagging gesture. “You’re trying to make me sick on purpose.”

“I’ll have some juice and eggs, Rafe,” said Trent. “I want the kind with the egg fried in the middle of the bread, like my mom makes sometimes.”

Rafe looked at him blankly. He had no idea what kind of eggs Trent’s mother sometimes made.

“I know what he means. I’ll make it for him.” Kaylin rose to her feet and headed out of the room. “Anybody else want anything?” she called over her shoulder.

“No thanks.” Rafe was grateful for her willingness to help. Kaylin was usually cheerful and cooperative around the house, quite different from Camryn, whose disposition could and often did border on the demonic. But although Kaylin was easier to live with, she was as determined as her sister to run wild with the wrong crowd.

Rafe’s temples began to throb. “Did the girls go out last night, Lion?” He never forgot Trent’s nickname-of-the-moment.

“I don’t know,” Trent replied. “I was playing with my Gameboy. It’s the best present I ever got, Rafe. Thanks again.”

Rafe got the picture right away. The kid wasn’t going to squeal on Kaylin and Camryn, maybe his own choice, maybe because they’d threatened him to keep quiet. Perhaps if he rephrased the question, a standard lawyer’s trick... “What time did the girls get in last night, Lion?”

“I don’t know anything, I was playing with my Gameboy.” Trent stuck to his story.

“By the way, Tony is at the Steens’,” Camryn said in the acidly sweet tone she used to induce guilt. “Did you forget about him? ’Cause you didn’t mention him.”

Rafe felt guilty, all right. “I was just about to ask where Tony was.” He hadn’t forgotten about eight-year-old Tony, he assured himself. He’d been just a second or two away from noticing the child’s absence.

As he glanced from the boy to the girls and then to the dog, a peculiar feeling of unreality swept over him. It had been a whole year, and sometimes he still had difficulty believing that they were all here, living with him. That the life he’d known as a carefree bachelor had been so drastically, irrevocably, changed.

“The new neighbors are moving in today,” Trent said, flopping back down on the floor. “Did you see the moving truck when you came in, Rafe?”

“No, it wasn’t there.” Rafe already pitied the new neighbors who’d been unlucky enough to rent or buy the other half of the duplex in this development of town house condominiums. He knew that the kids’ noise and other antics had driven the Lamberts, the yuppie couple who’d previously lived there, to move across town.

“Maybe it just pulled in this second. I’m gonna go check.” Trent leaped to his feet and ran out the front door, closing it with a jarring slam.

Camryn clutched her head with her hands. “That felt like a cannon blast to the brain,” she complained.

“Where did you go last night and what time did you get in?” Rafe forced himself to ask, hating his role as warden. It was a role thrust upon him and he knew he wasn’t very good at it.

“I went miniature golfing with my friends and then we stopped at the Dairy Queen for sundaes. Real wholesome Midwest teen fun, huh, Rafe? Oh, and I was home before my curfew.” Camryn had a smile that was positively angelic.

Rafe had been fooled by her the first few days after she’d moved in. Then he’d caught on—the girl was actually the devil in disguise.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, scoffing his disbelief. “And Kaylin is going to be the valedictorian in her class and you’re going to be the prom queen in yours.”

The odds of either event occurring went far beyond the realm of possibility, with Kaylin’s and her “what’s bad about a D?” philosophy toward education and Camryn’s Princess of Darkness persona so at odds with the wholesome students at Riverview High. The same odds applied to Camryn’s version of how she’d spent her evening.

Kaylin came into the room carrying a plate with eggs and toast and a glass of orange juice. “Where’s Trent?”

“Pestering the new people next door, or trying to.” Camryn glanced at the food and sat up. “I’m starving! Can I have that?”

“It’s Trent’s,” Rafe said.

“I’ll make him some more. It’ll be cold by the time he gets back, anyway.” Kaylin handed the food and juice to her sister and sat down on Rafe’s designer recliner, wriggling in next to Hot Dog. The dog opened one eye, then closed it again, accepting her presence without protest.

“I feel kind of sick.” Kaylin swallowed visibly. “Like I might throw up. Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten all those Oreos. ’Specially not on top of the Twizzlers.”

“For breakfast?” Rafe heaved a groan.

“I had milk with them.” Kaylin was defensive. “Milk’s good for you.”

“Just don’t puke in here or else I will, too!” Camryn shuddered as she proceeded to shovel the food into her mouth.

Rafe decided to skip this particular conversation. “I’m going upstairs to unpack and change.” He fled from the room.