Ruth Dale - Fiance Wanted

The shower wound to a close. Katy remained in her seat while Laura said her good-byes and thank-yous, then approached to sink gratefully, if ungracefully, into the chair she’d occupied earlier.

“Isn’t everyone nice?” Laura gushed. “To go to so much trouble for me is just—”

“Natural,” Katy inserted, “because you’re so nice, Laura.”

Laura smiled. “I don’t know about that, but I do know that I’m so happy I sometimes think I’m just going to burst with it.” Leaning across the table, she patted Katy’s hand. “In fact, I’m so happy that I want all my friends to share in it. Lately, I’ve been getting this uncontrollable urge to play matchmaker. Isn’t that awful?”

“Start with me,” Katy said fervently. “Laura, my mom and grandmother are driving me nuts. They’re after me constantly to get married, like I’m against men or something! It’s been so long since I even had a date that I’m not sure I remember how to act.”

Laura squeezed the hand beneath hers. “It’s like riding a bike. You never forget.”

“Don’t be too sure.” Katy fingered the unpainted dowel supporting her magic wand. “Makes me sorry this magic wand doesn’t really work. I’d sure like to conjure up a fiancé to keep my family off my back and Grandma alive for another year.”

Snatching up the wand, she gave it a sharp crack over her head. It whapped into somebody or something, and she froze, afraid to look. Her horrified gaze begged Laura to tell her she hadn’t smacked some little old lady.

Laura laughed. “Hi, Dylan. What are you doing skulking around behind us that way?”

“Dylan!” Katy twisted in her chair. “Thank heaven it’s only you. I was afraid I’d hurt somebody.” She waited for him to make some sarcastic remark.

He stood there rubbing his right elbow, one eyebrow cocked while he looked down at the two women with a calculating expression on his face. A local rancher, he wore the uniform of his trade: denim pants, plaid shirt, boots and hat. Many women had raved to Katy about his good looks but she couldn’t see it; all she could see was the kid who’d pestered her and tried to get the best of her nearly her entire life.

When he simply continued looking at them with that unfamiliar gleam in his eye, she added, “That’s what you get for sneaking around behind people. What are you doing back there?”

“Eavesdropping.” He said it as if it were a virtue. “Mind if I join you?” He plopped down in an empty chair and placed his hat on the table, brim up.

“Yes, I mind,” Katy said, not expecting him to pay that the slightest attention, which he didn’t. “And you’ve got some nerve, eavesdropping on a private conversation.”

“Yeah, I do.” He gave them both a winsome smile. “I couldn’t help but overhear.”

“Couldn’t help? We were hardly shouting.”

“Katy,” he drawled, “you’ve got a voice that could shatter glass. I just seem to hear it above any hubbub.”

That brought a reluctant smile. “Okay,” she said ungraciously, “you eavesdropped. Now I suppose you have some caustic comment to make.”

“No.” He looked offended. “Look, you need a fiancé in name only. You can’t help it if you’re a wallflower.”

This was the Dylan she knew. “So?” She felt her cheeks grow hot with embarrassment. It was one thing to confide her lack of sex appeal to her best friend but quite another to discover an old adversary had also heard.

“So…” He sucked in a deep breath. “Surprise! So do I.”

For a moment she simply stared at him. Then she said, “I beg your pardon? So do you, what?”

“Need a fiancée,” he said patiently.

“For what? If this is a joke, Dylan Cole, so help me I’ll—”

“It’s no joke,” he said quickly. “Calm down, Katy. See, since Matt got married I seem to have become the favorite target of every love-starved female in town. Plus, Brandee’s back in town.”

“Brandee Haycox? Head cheerleader, homecoming queen, all-around Miss Popularity—that Brandee Haycox?”

“Ha-ha,” he said, “very funny. There’s only one Brandee Haycox.”

“Which has what to do with you? Last I heard, she’d gone off to run a health club in Denver or some such.”

“And now she’s healthy and she’s moved back again.” He squirmed in his chair. “And she…uh…seems determined to add me to her list of conquests, if you know what I mean.” He gave a self-conscious shrug of wide shoulders. “My spirit is unwilling but my flesh is weak. I gotta do something to protect myself, fast.”

Laura looked puzzled. “I don’t get it, Dylan. Can’t you just tell her you’re not interested?”

“I am interested—heck, a man would have to be dead not to be—but not in any long-term way, if you get my drift. I need someone to save me from myself.”

“Or save Brandee,” Katy said, annoyed because it seemed to her that he was trivializing her own problem, which was much more serious—i.e., more important—than his own. “Good grief, Dylan, you’ve never been a wimpy sort of guy. Just avoid her—avoid all of them.”

He gritted his teeth. “It’s not a matter of wimpy, it’s a matter of survival. And there’s something else.” He looked disgusted. “Since Brandee’s daddy owns just about everything in this town, including the bank that holds my mortgage, I’d just as soon not offend his baby girl.”

Katy nodded emphatically. “Okay, I get it. So your plan is to…what?”

“Well,” he said, “before I overheard you moaning and groaning about needing a fiancé, I didn’t have a plan. But now it occurs to me that if I wasn’t available, Brandee and the rest of ’em might take the hint.”

“What happens when she realizes your new love isn’t exactly on the up and up?”

He smiled. “You know Brandee. By then, she’ll have moved on to someone better.”

Katy did, indeed, know Brandee. Which meant she also knew he was right on in his assessment of the beauteous blonde. Brandee didn’t have a mean bone in her body but she could be very tunnel-visioned—and she liked men. A lot. “How long do you need this fictional sweetheart?” Katy wanted to know.

“I dunno, not too long. A few months? You?”

“A few months,” she agreed. “Until my birthday, for sure.”

He nodded. “October twenty-fifth.”

She gaped. “You remember my birthday?”

“Why not? I went to enough of your stupid birthday parties growing up.” He made a face. “The only thing that made it bearable was that your mother always baked a good cake.”

“Yeah, and she’s the one who made me invite you. She always liked ‘that nice Cole boy.’ Which proves she didn’t really know you.”

Dylan grinned. “Your mom likes me? That’s great. I need all the fans I can get.” His expression grew cautious. “So what do you think?”

“Give me a minute to think about this.” Eyeing him warily, she wondered if there was any way they might get along for more than five minutes, even with so much at stake. Certainly he was not bad looking—handsome, according to many. Owner of the Bear Claw Ranch west of town, he was popular with men and sought after by women, one of whom had caught him; he’d been married and divorced.

But could they make such a charade work? Unfortunately, Katy was desperate enough to find out….

“Okay,” she said, “we might as well give it a try. What do we have to lose?”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Nothing except our lives.”

“We’ll have to get a lot of things straight first,” she warned. “For example, how will we ever convince anyone we’re a couple?”

He grinned. “I’ve got a tougher question than that. How will we ever convince anyone that a dyed-in-the-wool career woman like you even wants to get married?”