Crystal Green - Mystery Date

For a short time, in Adam’s case.

He glanced over his shoulder at Beth, whose long dark hair was swept back into a tortoiseshell barrette. In her chic printed silk wrap dress and with her rosy-brown skin, she seemed colorful and exotic, but the melancholy expression she wore gave him pause.

“You still think this is a bad idea,” he said, a trace of amusement in his voice.

“I think it’s an odd one.” She turned her liquid-brown gaze on him. “I think all you had to do was bid on Leigh’s basket and reveal who you were.”

“She wouldn’t remember me.” He hadn’t stuck around the university long enough for there to even be a picture of him on the walls of the fraternity house, where he’d pledged for only a short time before he’d had to drop out and return home.

But several months ago, when he’d seen Leigh on TV for the first time, he’d certainly remembered her. And when Beth had mentioned the basket auction that was being held at the reunion for their connected organizations, he’d thought of Leigh as she had been fourteen years ago, laughing all the time, taking a moment to smile at the shy freshman pledge who didn’t say much to girls—the kid who’d disappeared without ever becoming an official Phi Rho Mu brother.

Beth sighed and walked away from the window. Adam turned around, folding his arms over his chest while she spoke.

“Do you blame her for being cautious about this?” she asked. “For all she knows, you could be the Phantom of the Opera in this old house.”

He dodged her comment. “I didn’t want to use any of my own homes.” Not for a one-night basket date that had sparked his imagination.

“You know damned well that it’s not your homes I’m talking about,” Beth said. “Really, Adam, this is the strangest thing you’ve ever done. In fact...”

She didn’t have to say anything else. Ever since his wife, Carla, had withered away from breast cancer two years ago, he had become a recluse, uninterested in most things that happened outside the walls of his homes, except for the many property and business investments that he’d inherited from Carla, money that kept his bank accounts flush, thanks to the way he’d multiplied the investments.

“Hey,” he said, walking over to Beth and reaching out, chucking her under the chin with his finger. “This is going to turn out all right. No worries.”

Beth rolled her eyes. “Yes, it’ll turn out all right for you. This date will provide some temporary entertainment, and then you’ll move on to whatever comes next. I’ve seen it before with your women, but none of them have ever been one of my sisters.”

She was talking about the women he’d met online. Women he would talk to behind yet another wall—this one created by the computer. They provided mental fantasies for him, and that was all he’d needed for a couple of years now....

Until he’d seen Leigh on TV, wearing a red-and-white-checkered shirt that was unbuttoned down to here, her stomach bared because of the knot she’d tied above her waist, her long blond hair pinned away from her heart-shaped face and tumbling down her back as she worked in her Come-on Down Kitchen by candlelight, creating sensual country meals on her show.

She’d taken off a lot of weight since college, but he thought she’d looked just as beautiful with her curves and soft skin back then. He’d first seen her at a casual party populated mostly by his fraternity brothers and the Tau Epsilon Gamma sorority, and his heart had skipped a beat while she’d joked with her friends across the room. Her laugh had captured him in some physical way that he’d never been able to explain, but it had consumed him that night, and he’d never forgotten. And that smile she’d given him in passing—that dazzling, pure smile that had reached inside and grabbed him.... If he’d been less shy, he would’ve taken that as encouragement, but the fact that he’d never had the chance made Leigh Vaughn into a figment of his college imagination, made her into the ultimate “what could’ve been” girl.

Of course, that had been just before he was called home after his dad succumbed to a heart attack and Adam had taken up the mantle of “man of the house.”

He turned back around, moving to the window again. He could see that the car was still parked, and even now his heart flipped. But it wasn’t because of some old never-consummated crush. It was because of tonight’s scenario.

The basket.

He’d initiated all of this out of sheer curiosity. How had Leigh turned out so many years later? Did she still have the same warmth a man could feel even from across a room?

Adam gripped the window frame. He wasn’t someone who needed warmth—it was the curiosity that was driving him. That was all. And these days he could afford to appease it.

He could afford almost anything that broke up the boredom.

As he kept looking through the barred window, he could faintly see his reflection: dark hair and nearly gold eyes from his mom’s Spanish heritage, a mouth drawn tight. A man wearing a black shirt and jeans. Someone he barely recognized.

“This is only a harmless date, Beth,” he said. “For everyone involved.”

“I’ll bet Leigh’s ready to jump out of her skin. Does that turn you on or something?”

He paused. Did it turn him on to know that she was wondering who he was?

Yeah. Yeah, it did. And he liked that she would never know enough about him to contact him for another date if she got it in her head that she wanted more. He didn’t do attachments. Not anymore, not after Carla had taken his heart with her.

Beth walked away, her footsteps thudding on the polished wood floor.

“I’m going out there,” she said.

“To drag her inside?”

“I don’t know what I’ll do, but this is ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as being the executive assistant to a man who wants to stay in the shadows during his entire date.”

He laughed. His plan for dinner did sound demented. But he was in the mood for it. Besides, how was keeping a distance from his date any different from getting to know all those women online? There he could be anyone, just like tonight.

No attachments, no strings. This was the ultimate safe date...and a game, if he had to admit it. And the more he thought about tonight’s game, the more turned on he got.

Beth left the room, and Adam found himself holding his breath. He let it out, shaking his head. Carla would’ve thought he was going off-balance, too. She would’ve put her hands on her hips, asking him what the hell had happened to make him this way.

But Carla had always gotten straight to the point, even fourteen years ago after he’d returned to his family ranch, mourning his father, keeping his mother from shriveling into a depressed heap while helping her to run their cattle operation and raise his three younger siblings the best he could. Carla, seven years older and wiser, with a family so rich that they had already bequeathed her the gentleman’s ranch next door, had come calling the second day after he’d settled in.

Yes, even back then Carla had offered a neighborly hand to the eighteen-year-old who was so out of his depth that he could barely catch four hours of sleep per night. And as the years went by, friendship had turned into love, then into a happy marriage.

Then she was gone.

Through the window, Beth appeared on the driveway, her skirt swishing around her legs as she strode down to the open gate and the car beyond it.

Adam held his breath yet again, watching to see if Leigh was going to get out of that car and embark on this strange date.

Or if she was going to leave, just as everyone in his life seemed to do.

* * *

“OH MY GOD, here she comes,” Leigh said, sliding down in her car seat as she spied Beth walking down the driveway with purpose.