Random Acts Of Fashion

Dear Reader,

I’ve always loved the craziness of fashion, where the absurd often hangs right next to the sublime. Hmmm—kind of sounds like romantic comedy, doesn’t it? Well, how could I resist? I just had to create Gillian Caine, a fashion designer from New York City who has just been dumped and swindled by a definite Mr. Wrong. Gillian was a delight to write. She’s strong-willed, creative, independent. She’s a girl who intends to stand on her own two feet—even when they’re stuffed into a pair of pumps with five-inch heels. To add to the fun, I transplanted Gillian to Timber Bay, Michigan—the small town I first introduced in my June, 2004, Flipside, Finding Mr. Perfect. Timber Bay is the kind of place where buying a new flannel shirt every winter is considered keeping up with the latest trends—until Gillian hits town, that is!

Gillian Caine is one of my favorite creations. A real Flipside kind of girl! I hope you have fun getting to know her as she commits Random Acts of Fashion on the eccentric citizens of Timber Bay.

May the fashion be with you,

Nikki Rivers

“I want you to decorate the tree with these,” Gillian ordered

Lukas nudged the box beside him, then looked at the suspended branches in the shop window. Opening the carton, he sputtered, “These are…um—”

“Lingerie, McCoy. Now get to work!”

“Yes, warden,” he grumbled, picking up a violet camisole. He continued arranging the garments as Gillian came over to inspect his work. Not used to her closeness, Lukas tripped over the stool, lunging toward her, crashing through the tree. Bras and panties took flight like a colorful flock of frightened birds.

“Lukas?” Gillian tossed underwear aside until she found a nose sticking out of the leg of a French-cut panty.

“Are you all right?” she asked as she lifted the lingerie. “Not exactly the way it’s worn, McCoy,” she said, grinning down at him.

“Maybe you’d like to demonstrate the right way to wear it then, warden,” he replied, his mouth holding back a wicked grin.

MILLS & BOON

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nikki Rivers loves writing romantic comedy because she believes that laughter is just as necessary to life as love is. She also gets a kick out of creating quirky characters, having come from a long line of them, herself. Nikki lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with her very own Mr. Right. She loves to hear from readers. E-mail her at RiversWrites@aol.com.

Books by Nikki Rivers

HARLEQUIN FLIPSIDE

17—FINDING MR. PERFECT

HARLEQUIN DUETS

66—A SNOWBALL’S CHANCE

HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE

550—SEDUCING SPENCER

592—DADDY’S LITTLE MATCHMAKER

664—ROMANCING ANNIE

723—HER PRINCE CHARMING

764—FOR BETTER, FOR BACHELOR

To my sisters, Bobbi, Pat, and Judy. Thanks for the laughter, the strength, and the love—and for all those bizarre weekends at the bazaar. Yes! An ant can move a rubber tree plant!

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

1

THE BLACK PICKUP TRUCK with Timber Bay Building and Restoration painted on its side in old-fashioned gold script pulled up to the curb in front of the Sheridan Hotel. Lukas McCoy got out of the driver’s seat and slammed the door behind him.

“I should have known,” he grumbled, scowling at the workmen installing a sign on one of the storefronts across the street. “Tigers never change their stripes.”

His partner and best friend, Danny Walker, got out the passenger side. “Lukas, pal, I never noticed how fond you are of non sequiturs.”

Lukas gave Danny a look. “Hannah teach you a new word this morning over toast and coffee?”

Danny grinned. “We skipped breakfast, pal. We’re still on our honeymoon.”

Danny had married Hannah Ross at the end of the summer. Everyone said it was the most beautiful wedding that Timber Bay had ever seen. And they were thrilled that Hannah, a research sociologist who’d come to Timber Bay on a misguided mission to find the perfect American family for an ad campaign, had stayed to become one of them. But it was still a little weird for Lukas to think of Danny as being married. He’d always figured that Danny would be a lifetime Lothario. Lukas had been the one most likely of the two to settle down with a wife. Danny had been his best friend since grade school and Lukas begrudged him nothing. But damned if he wasn’t just a little jealous of Danny’s happiness. Facing that satisfied grin of his partner’s every morning was starting to get mighty old.

And now this, Lukas thought sourly as he watched the neon sign being put into place in the window of the long-empty shop that used to be known as Clemintine’s Frocks.

“The big-city princess should have known to hire a local company, at least. Haven’t they ever heard of such a thing as goodwill in New York City? Don’t they know that it’s important to do business with somebody local? And just look at that. Neon.” Lukas spat out the word in disgust. “There isn’t one other neon sign on Sheridan Road.”

It wasn’t as if Timber Bay, Michigan, didn’t have its share of neon. Ludington Avenue was dotted with it. But the Avenue had always been faster than the Road. Always. The merchants on Sheridan Road tended to keep things just as they always had been. Simple redbrick storefronts marched alongside an old-fashioned theater marquee, a Greek Revival town library and an old wooden band shell that was perched in the park along the bay.

And then there was the Sheridan Hotel. Reclusive town matriarch Agnes Sheridan had hired Danny and Lukas to renovate it. The old lady wanted it restored as closely as possible to its original glory, right down to the intricate wood carvings that Lukas was duplicating to replace sections that had rotted.

Danny slapped him on the back. “A little neon isn’t exactly going to ruin the town, pal. Why get all worked up about it?”

It was true that Lukas rarely got all worked up about anything. But this was riling him to no end. “The big-city princess finally claims her inheritance and the first thing she does is plaster neon all over Sheridan Road—and brings in outsiders to do it, besides!”

“They’re from Green Bay, Wisconsin, Lukas, not Pluto,” Danny said as he went around to the back of the truck and let down the gate. “It’s sixty miles away.”

“Still, what’s wrong with hiring somebody local? She’s gotta mar the landscape and insult the citizens all in one day? And how come you aren’t upset, Danny? You’re so all-fired excited about preserving stuff. Clemintine’s Frocks is nearly as much a fixture on Sheridan Road as the hotel is. We don’t need some spoiled city girl coming into town and changing everything around.”

“Women have a way of doing that, pal. And it’s usually for the better.”

Lukas watched the neon being fitted into place and shook his head. “Nothing good is going to come from Gillian Caine coming back to Timber Bay.”

GILLIAN SUCKED IN HER TUMMY and eased the side zipper up on her latest creation—a pair of ultraslim cosmic gray satin pants. She sighed with satisfaction. Living on liquid diet shakes for the past week had paid off. She’d lost five of the ten break-up and go broke pounds she’d gained back in New York. She lifted the filmy ruffled shirt laid out on the bed and slithered into it. Looking in the full-length mirror in the tiny bedroom of her tiny apartment above Clemintine’s Frocks, she was almost satisfied with what she saw.

Of course, it wasn’t Clemintine’s Frocks any longer, Gillian reminded herself. Along with the five pounds, she’d also shed the wooden sign that had hung over the door for the forty years her Aunt Clemintine had been sole proprietor of the dress shop on Sheridan Road. Glad Rags. That’s what Gillian’s shop was going to be called. In bright, bold pink neon. There were two workmen out front right at that very moment hanging the sign. Which was why Gillian just had to look her very best today. Her most chic. She intended to be as bright an advertisement for Glad Rags as the neon was.

She’d purposely kept a low profile since she’d arrived in Timber Bay less than two weeks ago. Behind the yellowing newspapers that covered the display window, she’d toiled day and night, wallpapering, painting and staining until even the rubber gloves she wore couldn’t protect her neglected fingernails. She looked at her hands in disgust.

“Hold on, babies,” she cooed to her chipped and ragged nails. “Once we’ve made our debut, we will find the best manicurist in town and make you all shiny and new again.” Nothing wrong that a good nail wrap couldn’t cure. But at least the rest of her was looking good.

When she’d arrived in Timber Bay she had still been a mess from the crisis in New York. A girl’s world tumbling to pieces around her tended to make for dull hair and muddy-looking skin. So while she’d subsisted on diet shakes, she’d moisturized, exfoliated, mud-packed and conditioned. She leaned in closer to the mirror, scanning her complexion with a critical eye. “Progress,” she pronounced with a smile. There were still five pounds to lose but she was looking a whole lot better than when she’d slunk out of NYC on a one-way ticket on Amtrak.

Gillian slipped an ankle-length duster that matched the pants off its hanger and put it on, drawing the deeply ruffled cuffs of the pink georgette shirt out to flounce over her hands. She struggled into the pink crocodile boots filched from what was until only recently her very own—okay, her co-owned—boutique in lower Manhattan. They were expensive enough to give Ryan, ex-partner, ex-boyfriend, and ex-decent human being, acid reflux when he realized they were missing. But Gillian had no qualms. In fact, she hoped he’d just downed a double espresso when he discovered the boots were gone and that there wasn’t an ant-acid to be had in all of Manhattan. After what that pseudo-designer and society wannabe had done to her, he was lucky she hadn’t taken him to court.

“Enough about him,” she said, turning to check out her completed look in the mirror. She smiled hugely at what she saw. There wasn’t a woman in Timber Bay under thirty-five who wouldn’t be drooling to get inside Glad Rags by the time the grand opening rolled around.

Suddenly her smile faltered, then fell into an outright frown. She had been wrong about Timber Bay in the past. What if—?

Gillian determinedly shook off the thought and the frown. Frowns turned into wrinkles. Besides, she wasn’t going to be wrong this time. This time the town was going to want what she had to offer.

They had to. Didn’t they? she silently asked her reflection. She’d win them over this time. Wouldn’t she?

“Oh, why are you starting with this old insecurity stuff now?” she impatiently asked her reflection. “It is time to exude confidence, Gillian! You are no longer a little girl needing acceptance but a businesswoman who will be fulfilling a need in the community.” And boy, if they were anything like they used to be, the women of Timber Bay had a really big need for what she had to offer. How could she miss?

Her reflection seemed to be listening to her self-inflicted pep talk. Her shoulders straightened, her chin lifted, and her mouth curved into a smile. “That’s more like it.” She tucked the large silver clutch bag she’d designed to go with the outfit under her arm and headed down the stairs and out the door.

LUKAS AND DANNY WERE getting ready to unload stacks of lumber for the hotel from the back of the pickup when Danny paused. “Well, look at that,” he said under his breath. “A princess from outer space. And I thought Halloween was almost a month away, yet.”

Lukas’s gaze followed Danny’s across the street.

The woman who had just come out the door of the dress shop was wearing something silver. As sleek and shiny as a brand-new saw blade. And she was walking on pink boots with heels as thin and long as a railroad spike. It was some walk she had, too. Lukas knew for sure that there wasn’t a woman in town who walked quite that way. She wasn’t tall, maybe five foot four, but she had a confident stride for such a shrimp of a girl. And she moved from her hips, causing the fabric of the coat she was wearing to swish back and forth when she walked. Watching her stride over to the workmen was like a compulsion. She said something to them and one of them laughed. For some reason, the sound made Lukas’s scowl deepen.

“She still looks like a spoiled big city-princess to me,” he muttered.

Danny shrugged. “I guess that must be how they dress in New York City.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t New York City,” Lukas muttered. “No one around here is going to buy that kind of stuff. Now let’s get this truck unloaded.”

ACROSS THE STREET, Gillian tipped the workmen generously, trying not to calculate how much closer she was going to be to broke because of it. One of the lessons she’d learned from Ryan—besides the need to watch her back—was that you had to look successful to be successful. Money attracted money like lint to black cashmere. Nobody liked to associate with failure. Ryan had always said that looking needy was worse than looking nerdy.

She waved as the workmen drove off, feeling suddenly and absurdly alone. As the truck turned the corner at the Town Square and disappeared down Ludington Avenue, it felt like her last contact with the outside world had been broken. In a way, she supposed, she was like the pioneer women who helped settle the west. Instead of trails forged over mountains or through deserts, she was going to be forging a trail through the closets of Timber Bay, bringing style instead of civilization.

Yes! That was it! A pioneer woman of fashion. She suddenly felt a whole lot better. She also felt hungry—for some real food for a change.

“Time for this pioneer woman to go on a little scouting trip,” she murmured to herself as she scanned the street for a sign of someplace to eat. Maybe a nice juicy—

“Mmm, yum,” she said under her breath when she looked across the street. Two very juicy guys with a truck. Not exactly what she had in mind, but—

“Oh, swell,” she groaned when she got a better look at them.

She hadn’t seen either one since they were boys, but she recognized them all the same. Maybe because they were together, just like they’d always been all those summers so long ago. That was Lukas McCoy squatting in the back of the pickup truck. And the other one, the one grinning at her, was Danny Walker. Walker used to tease her mercilessly about wearing the same outfit as the doll she’d always carried around with her. McCoy, who’d been a big, quiet kid, would just sort of scowl at her. Just like he was scowling at her right now.

There had been plenty of kids in Timber Bay who hadn’t liked her. But of all of them, McCoy had been the worst. Not that he’d ever said anything. In all the years she’d come to Timber Bay as a child to visit Aunt Clemintine, she’d probably only heard his voice once or twice. But it seemed to her back then that he smiled at everybody else almost all the time. He had these big dimples and they flashed all over the place like the lights in Times Square. Unless, that is, he was looking at her. She seemed to be in some weird no-smile zone as far as he was concerned.

Apparently, from the look on his face, she still dwelled in it.

As a shy little girl her defense had been to stick up her nose and pretend he wasn’t there, but she wasn’t that girl anymore. Recent events had toughened her up even more. This time, she decided to meet his disapproval head-on. She decided to cross the street.

When she was halfway across, McCoy started to stand up. And up. Gillian’s step faltered and slowed as he unfolded and jumped down off the back of the truck.

He was nearly as tall as the dress shop and almost as wide. The scowl hovered on his still boyish face but there was no mistaking the shadow of the dimples on either side of his mouth. With that huge, grown-up body, those blond cherub curls falling over his forehead and that smooth boyish face, a smile would have been enough to make her trip and fall flat on her face. Gillian decided for once that maybe she was glad to be in the no-smile zone.

It occurred to her that she still had time to sort of swerve in her crossing and avoid his orbit altogether, but what the heck. If she could take on Manhattan, she could take on this block of disapproval, as well.

Briefly the thought intruded that she’d lost miserably at taking on Manhattan, but she squashed it down again with the ring of her spiked heel on the cracked pavement of Sheridan Road. She hadn’t lost anything—she’d been robbed. Manhattan had been stolen from her, along with her share of the boutique, by her conniving ex and a boney-bottomed lingerie model turned scanty-panty designer. But this small-town giant didn’t know that—and neither did anyone else in Timber Bay. And as long as she dripped confidence, style and flare, they never would.

As she neared the other side of the street, Gillian decided it wouldn’t hurt to take advantage of the three extra inches the curb offered by stepping onto it. She might as well have dug herself a hole to stand in for all the good those three inches did her. Not to worry, she was used to making up for her shortcomings with bravado.

“I see you’ve still got your sidekick with you, huh, McCoy?” she asked, with a cocky New-York-City-girl tilt of the head as she looked up at him.

The giant just scowled down at her.

“I don’t get kicked that often anymore, though,” the other one, Danny Walker, said as he held out his hand. “Welcome back to Timber Bay.”

“Well, it’s nice to know that one of you has learned some manners, at least,” she said, taking his hand.

“Some of us grew up okay,” Danny said.

“And some of you just grew, I see.”

Lukas knew he was coming across as an oaf. He knew he should be smiling at the lady and making nice. After all, hadn’t he just been going on to Danny about “goodwill”? But the big-city princess had always managed to tie his tongue just by looking at him when he was a kid and it looked like nothing much had changed in that department.

As a boy, he used to think she looked like she belonged on top of a fancy birthday cake. She was always dressed in something as light, fluffy and sweet as frosting. She’d been so small with a mass of ash-colored hair hanging down her back and a pair of eyes that looked like they were seeing the world a whole lot differently than anybody else saw it. She still had those eyes. Big. Pale gray irises with dark rings around them. Like the eyes on greeting-card kittens. He’d gone tongue-tied the first time she’d fastened them on him. All he could do was stare. She turned out to be no kitten, though, that little girl from the city. The cat had turned out to be a brat. A snooty, spoiled little girl who didn’t like to get dirty and never went anywhere without her doll.

A sudden breeze off the bay lifted her hair and blew it across her face. It was the same ash color he remembered but cut just above her shoulders now, straight and slick as the skeins of silk yarn his mom embroidered with. She whipped it out of her face with a toss of her head and asked, “Can either of you boys point me in the direction of a decent sandwich?”

This was it, thought Lukas. An opening. Sweet Buns, his sister’s coffee shop, was right next to the Sheridan Hotel. Who better to give her the scoop on the place? He opened his mouth, but it felt like he’d walked through a dust storm without a bandanna and nothing came out. As the seconds ticked by, Danny kind of cleared his throat as if to nudge Lukas on. When Lukas tried to lick the dryness from his lips he discovered that his tongue had gone missing.

Finally, Danny started to tell Gillian about Sweet Buns himself. And he was doing it entertainingly enough to get a little giggle out of the girl from New York City. Danny never had any trouble being clever with the ladies. Lukas wished he could think of something clever to say but the longer he stood there, stoically silent, the harder it was to say anything at all—never mind clever.

“I’ll move these boards,” was all he could finally come up with. He cringed at the lameness of it. And maybe that was why, when he grabbed the small stack of one-by-fours, his grip didn’t quite close around them and they went clattering to the sidewalk, grazing the toe of one of Gillian Caine’s pink, spike-heeled boots in the process.

She squealed and jumped back, then fixed him with those gray eyes while she stuck her nose into the air. “Is that how you welcome all the new girls to town, McCoy, by nearly crippling them and skinning their shoe leather?”

When he said nothing—and how could he with his mouth full of a brand-new load of sand—Danny swooped in to soothe her and make sure she was okay. Lukas knew he should apologize, but if he couldn’t get a word out before he had almost buried her feet in lumber, he sure couldn’t spit out any words now.

“You sure you’re okay?” he heard Danny ask once again. “I’m fine, thanks. You’ve been sweet. But your friend here could obviously use some help in that area. Do the town a favor and don’t let him volunteer for the welcoming committee,” she said before turning in a swirl of glittering silver and heading down Sheridan Road toward Sweet Buns.

The compulsion still with him, Lukas watched her walk away.

GILLIAN MARCHED INTO Sweet Buns and stopped dead.

“I think I’ve just found civilization.” She closed her eyes and took a deep, long breath in through her nostrils. The aroma nearly made her swoon.

The young woman behind the counter laughed. “Sounds like we have a new coffee addict in town.”

“If it tastes as good as it smells, you’ve got yourself a customer for life.”

“Regular or decaf?”

“I’m from New York City.” Gillian slid onto a stool at the counter. “What do you think?”

The woman laughed again and poured her a cup of regular. Gillian lifted it to her mouth and took a sip. “Mmm. This is heaven. I never dreamed I’d find a cup of coffee this fantastic so far from Manhattan.” She took another swallow, then held out her hand. “I’m Gillian Caine, by the way.”

“Yes, I know,” the woman behind the counter said as she shook Gillian’s hand. “You used to visit your aunt. I’m Molly. Molly Jones.”

Gillian shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I remember you.”

“Oh, we weren’t friends,” Molly quickly added.

Gillian rolled her eyes. “Big surprise. I wasn’t exactly the most popular girl to come to town. Hopefully,” she added with a nervous little laugh, “that will change, considering I’m reopening my aunt’s dress shop.”

“Is what you’re wearing an example of what you’ll be selling?”

“Yes, it is. I designed it myself.” Gillian stood up and gave a little twirl. “What do you think?”