Arlene James - Mr. Right Next Door

“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.