The Heiress Takes A Husband

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.”