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Okay, so she happened to be so beautiful he felt like he couldn’t breathe around her.
And she happened to pack a kiss with more punch than a trainload full of TNT.
He felt a tap on his shoulder, and turned to see Farley Houser, another lawyer from his firm, cutting in. Cutting in. Mitch didn’t even know that happened in real life. He thought it only happened in movies, which probably said all that needed saying about his social life.
Why did he feel so annoyed? He should be glad to be out of her clutches.
He stood there for a moment, watching her laugh up into Farley’s handsome, if somewhat sun-damaged face. What if she thought wrinkles were distinguished?
What did he care what she thought? Farley, who seemed to work for amusement and not because he needed money, would probably be a perfect match for her. Meeting him here could save her some money on her newspaper ad. Farley loved getting married. That’s why he had done it three times.
Still, Mitch had to ask himself if he sincerely wished Brit and Farley well, why was he gauging how Farley held her, ready to intervene in an instant if the space between their bodies closed, as if he were a chaperone at the high school dance?
Mitch joined his father and Angela Pondergrove at their table. But if he had hoped his father would talk business with him, and therefore take his mind off the intoxicating kiss he had just shared with Brittany Patterson, he was wrong.
Jordan Hamilton was embarrassingly enamored with the aging Angela. He spared Mitch only a few words before he turned his full attention back to his companion. When he leaned close and called her “Angel,” Mitch had no choice but to find something else to do with his eyes. He watched with relief as the music changed tempo from a waltz to some rock tune he recognized only vaguely.
He glanced around. Every male eye was on Brittany. His relief died. The girl could dance. She moved with grace and a subtle promise of sensuality. Her laughter floated on the air, like the tinkling of fairy bells. Farley, Mitch noted glumly, was an exceptional dancer, as well. The music died, and Farley, regret all over his face, gave her up to the Higgins boy who roasted hotdogs at the Piggy-in-A-Blanket stand during the day, and looked surprisingly like John Travolta by night.
After several dances it occurred to Mitch she was not going to return to their table. The local guys were around her three thick, like bees around honey.
What now? Could he go home? He didn’t think Jordan would approve of him abandoning his duties as her escort. The truth was Jordan didn’t ask many favors of him. And yet Mitch owed this man everything. Maybe he could look at sitting here at this dance, steam threatening to come out his ears, as part of his repayment to a man who had taken a wild, angry boy off the streets and given him a home, a life, a career.
So, he sat there, his mood getting darker and darker, as he watched the endless whirl of activity around her. It didn’t even seem to put a dent in her energy.
It was two in the morning before she made her way back to him. Angela and Jordan had long since departed. Brit’s face was glowing with laughter, looking as good as she had looked the moment he had first seen her. Better. Flushed. Exhilarated. Her bosom heaving delicately under the clinging fabric of that dress. She was absolutely at home with being the center of male attention and the belle of the ball.
“Mitch, there you are!”
He had barely changed position all evening, except to shed his jacket and tie, and roll up his sleeves against the insufferable heat in the room.
“I hope you weren’t waiting for me,” she said breathlessly. “Farley has offered to take me home.” She leaned confidentially closer to him. “He thinks the pink stripe in my hair is so cute. He said I could start a trend.”
“I don’t think so,” Mitch said, standing up. Brittany was a little bit tipsy. Several more strands of her piled-up hair had escaped and now curled wildly around her face. A bead of sweat rolled down between her collarbone, making its way straight for the vee in her dress between her luscious breasts.
He forced himself not to follow its progress.
“He probably doesn’t really think so, either,” she said, annoyed. “He was flattering me. That’s what men do when they find a woman attractive.”
She said this as if Mitch needed a few lessons in how to treat a woman, which he would be the first to admit he needed.
“I wasn’t referring to the pink stripe in your hair,” he informed her levelly. “You’re not going home with him.”
She looked at least as astonished as he felt that those words had come out of his mouth.
“When you’re ready to go, I’ll take you home,” he said, his voice deliberately quiet.
“But I told Farley—”
“You came with me,” he snapped. “It’s my responsibility to see you safely home.”
“Oh. Your responsibility.”
“That’s right.”
She glared at him. “I’m not six and I already told Farley—”
“I don’t give a damn what you told him.”
“What are you going to do? You can’t make me go with you instead of him.”
“Yes, I can.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. It occurred to him eyes like that, such a multitude of confusing colors, should be declared illegal.
“And how can you do that?” she asked defiantly. “Frankly, you don’t seem like the type to make a scene.”
“Frankly, you don’t know the first thing about me,” he told her quietly.
“I know you are not the type to toss a girl over your shoulder and storm out of the room like some Neanderthal fresh from the cave.”
The picture that flashed through his mind was not at all unappealing. “Don’t tempt me,” he warned her.
“Mitch Hamilton, I am twenty-seven years old, and you are not going to tell me what to do.”
“Why is it I have this feeling no one has ever succeeded in telling you what to do?”
“That’s correct,” she said with satisfaction.
Here’s what she didn’t know. He dealt with some of this community’s toughest kids on a regular basis. He had a knack—a furrow of brow, a deepening of voice, a flex of muscle—that encouraged them to see things his way. Still, facing a drug-crazed kid with a knife had nothing on facing her, not that he was going to let that show.
“Maybe it’s about time someone did,” he said, his voice deliberately calm, level. “Your friend who wants to drive you home is forty-seven years old. He’s been married three times. He brags about his conquests over morning coffee.”
And if she became one of them, Mitch had the awful feeling he’d fly across the coffee table and have old Farley up against the wall, his shirt wrapped in his fists, in the blink of an eye.
A bit of the street fighter was still in him, the rebel, the bad boy was not completely banished as he had thought.
Farley was coming toward them now, and Mitch saw with some satisfaction her eyes were fastened on his own taut biceps, before they flickered, full of doubt, to Farley.
Mitch stepped in front of Brittany, folded his arms over his chest, and placed his feet astride. “She came with me. I’m going to take her home.”
He waited for Brittany to leap from behind him and protest, and was amazed by her meek silence.
“She came with you? I had no idea,” Farley said, all smooth charm, completely unruffled.
“He’s got some old-fashioned notion that he needs to take me home,” Brittany said from behind Mitch. “But you can call me, Farley.”
She said Farley’s name with enough sugar in it that she could have been trying out for the part of Scarlett at the ball.
Mitch saw Farley glance at his face, and knew he saw there what Mitch managed to keep hidden most of the time, a wild place that would never be quite tamed. Mitch knew, with a sensation of satisfaction he did not want to investigate, that Farley would not be calling Brittany anytime soon.
Mitch turned to her. “Let’s go.”
“Humph,” she said, tilting her nose in the air.
She stumbled on the stair out, and he took her elbow. Her skin was warm beneath his fingertips, and soft. He actually regretted that he had not overcome his pride and danced with her one more time.
He was not a man accustomed to regrets.
“Is it necessary for you to make me feel like a prisoner under escort?” she asked.
He ignored her, and did not release her elbow. When they got to his car, he opened the passenger side door and shoved her inside. When he went around to the driver’s side, she had her face turned out her window and she kept it that way.
They drove to her place in silence. He got out and went around to her door, which she allowed him to open for her, but she jerked away from his steadying hand this time, and went up the lane and the stairs to her door in front of him. He walked her to the door not because he was foolish enough to expect—or want—a repeat of that kiss, but because the alleyway did not look like a safe place for a woman at this time of night.
“Good night, Mitch,” she said coolly at the top of her steps.
“Brittany,” he returned, just as coolly. He waited to hear the bolt slide shut on her door before he walked away. He walked down the stairs, thinking, with relief and regret mingled in equal parts. It’s over.
His obligation to Jordan was fulfilled.
“Mitch, it’s coffee time.”
Mitch glanced up at his office door. His adoptive father, Jordan, stood there. He debated telling him he couldn’t go today.
But they went for coffee every morning together. Had been doing so since Mitch joined the firm six years ago.
Unfortunately, they usually went just down the street to the Main Street Bakery, and he had not forgotten Brittany telling him her grand reopening was today.
Mitch took his jacket off the back of his chair, stood up and shrugged into it. Using the mirror on the back of a closet door, he straightened his tie. His eyes had dark crescents under them.
“You look tired, Mitch. Is everything all right?” Jordan asked.
“Sure,” he said.
But the truth was, it wasn’t. He felt like he hadn’t slept a wink since Saturday night. Haunted by the taste of her lips, the fire in her eyes, the toss of her head. Haunted by his own behavior.
The last thing he needed to do was go to her bakery and see how she was blundering along, her idealistic dreams on an inevitable collision course with cold, hard reality.
And he doubted if he could make himself stay away. He’d been tempted to drop in all morning. It was an unsettling feeling for a man as accustomed to control as he was, to be so tempted, to feel so pulled to the very thing that most threatened his control.
“Did you enjoy yourself Saturday night?” Jordan asked him, as they strolled down the street.
Mitch slid him a look. “It was okay,” he said noncommittally.
“Those triplets are beautiful, every one of them, but Brittany seems to have an extra—” He paused looking for words.
“Spark?” Mitch suggested drily.
“That’s it! She seems on fire with life.”
“Whatever.”
“You didn’t like her?” Jordan asked. “She seems like such a nice girl.”
“Dad, you aren’t matchmaking are you?”
“Of course not.” This said too quickly.
“Because it would be beneath you. I think Mrs. Pondergrove is a bad influence on you. That’s the type of thing I can see her doing.”
“Angela only wants people to be happy.”
“I’m happy just the way I am. You can pass that on to Angela, if you happen to see her.”
“Mitch, to be frank, you don’t seem to have much of a life. Work. Those kids at the community center where you volunteer. A man needs more than that.”
“Well, not this man.”
“Monica made you bitter,” Jordan decided.
Being jilted at the altar had a tendency to do that. Mitch said nothing.
“Why don’t you just get to know the Patterson girl a bit? What would it hurt?”
“She’s looking—with a frightening single-minded purpose—for something quite different than me.”
“Happiness?” Jordan suggested.
“Marriage!” he replied, as if this answer should have been obvious to his father.
“She’s a lonely kid in a strange town taking on a whole new set of circumstances. She’ll need a friend.”
“Fine, send old Angela over to visit her.”
“I don’t like it when you refer to Angela in that tone of voice. She’s a good woman with a kind heart.”
“Sorry, Dad.” A good woman with a kind heart, and a meddlesome way.
“Would you look at that?” Jordan said with amazement as they approached the bakery. “Is that a lineup?”
It was a lineup, going right outside the door, and curving in front of the newly lettered front window. Heavenly Treats.
“It’s good to see her doing so well,” Jordan said.
But Mitch, not blessed with the same spirit of undaunted optimism as his father, quickly realized the line wasn’t moving forward. Several people left in disgust. He suspected, not that she was doing well, but that she wasn’t coping with even the normal crowd.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” Mitch said.
“Slip in there and see what’s going on,” Jordan said. “Maybe you can help her out.”
Mitch shot his father a look that Jordan ignored.
“How could I help her out? I don’t know anything about bakeries.”
“Neither does she.”
Mitch saw the set of his father’s chin, and drew in a deep breath. There were some occasions when you didn’t argue with Jordan Hamilton.
“Excuse me,” he said. Drawing in a deep breath, he shoved his way through the little bottleneck in the doorway, ignoring the irritated looks he got.
Inside, the smell of fresh paint overpowered the smell of baking.
The paint job was probably the worst he’d ever seen. The wallpaper was on crooked, the patterns unmatched. Black and white posters of Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean had been hung at random, he suspected over the worst of the paint job. He thought she’d achieved a kind of wartime café ambience, as if everything was a little shaken because of the last bombing, but they were bravely open for business anyway. He somehow doubted that was the atmosphere she’d been aiming for.
The few little tables were already covered with dishes that had not been cleared away.
The brand-new tablecloths, pink with an overlay of lace, had coffee stains and crumbs on them. The fresh flowers, stems of daisies, drooped.
The customers were cranky.
And there she was, behind her counter, a white apron, with spilt coffee on it over a dress that looked like it was meant to be worn at a summer church picnic—on second glance, he realized it might be just a touch too sexy for the church picnic—her hair falling out of its neat ponytail, her mascara smudged, a look of determined cheer on her face that was faltering.
“What do you mean you’re out of doughnuts?” the man was blustering at her. “I’ve had a doughnut in here every day for fifteen years.”
Mitch glanced at her display cases. On the shelf that usually overflowed with honey-glazed and chocolate and sugar doughnuts, were lacy little pastries and several large, round chocolate cakes. Not a single slice was missing from the cakes. Hand lettered signs, an awful imitation of calligraphy, announced the cakes were Chocolate Mocha Torte and Carmel Fudge Delight.
“We’re branching off from doughnuts,” she told the man with determined pluck. “Wouldn’t you like to try some chocolate mocha torte?”
“No,” the man snapped at her. “I wouldn’t. Just give me a coffee.”
“Irish Cream Cappuccino or French Vanilla?” she asked.
Leave, Mitch ordered himself. He’d seen enough and there was nothing he could do. Not that he was sure his father would see things quite the same way. Damn. From the very beginning Jordan had forced him to be a better person than Mitch believed he really was.
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