The Wrong Wife

“You could have announced your presence.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“Spies do not thrill me.”

“I was not spying on you, Annabelle,” he lied. “I was thinking that I am not usually a social nitwit. I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted.” She turned to go back into the house.

Suddenly the day seemed dark. “Wait!” He reached for her forearm. “How about dinner?”

“What?”

“Dinner. Me, you, tonight.”

“Now I know you’re crazy.” She pointed toward the house. “I think you already have a date, Mr. District Attorney. And I suspect she’s wondering where the heck you’ve gotten to.”

He let her go, and leaned back against the trunk of the tree. This could not be happening. Not to Ben Jackson. His mother had slipped a love potion into his tea while they were waiting for Brittany.

He had a brain tumor, or an aneurysm that had burst suddenly. There had to be some rational explanation.

He closed his eyes. Whatever had occurred, he had to fix it, exorcise it, reverse the spell, before it devoured him, his career plans, his goals and the rest of his life in a hapless, fruitless pursuit of a woman who not only was unsuitable in every respect, but who obviously didn’t even like him.

“WHAT HAVE YOU been up to?” Elizabeth Langley said to her son. “You’re a mess.”

“I—uh—I tripped on the patio. The bricks were slick.”

“Really.” His mother accepted the explanation readily enough, or so it seemed to Ben. “Brittany and I have designed her dress for the ball. Period enough to work for the Steamboat’s 1880 theme, but modern enough to wear to the symphony or one of the secret-society parties during carnival.”

“Can I see the design?”

Brittany laughed. The sound, which had enchanted him only hours before, now sounded as raucous as a crow’s. “No, you cannot, you naughty thing. It’s bad luck!” She stretched back on the couch as his mother picked up her sketch pad and notebooks and went to put them back into the armoire in the corner.

“Actually, that only applies to wedding dresses,” his mother said.

Brittany giggled. Ben decided he must have been drugged to be able to change his opinion about a woman this beautiful so quickly and so totally.

He blinked, opened his eyes and hoped against hope that the Brittany he had liked would be back.

No such luck. He could still appreciate her beauty, but she no longer moved him any more than if she’d been carved out of marble.

“Now, children, off to dinner you go,” Elizabeth said. “I have my own plans.”

Ben tried desperately to think of some way to get out of his date, but he’d been raised better than that, and Brittany hadn’t done one thing wrong. The responsibility was his alone, his and his witch mother, who had set him up and cast a spell on him.

Maybe it was like the twenty-four-hour flu. He’d wake up tomorrow morning cured of Annabelle Langley.

He heard the two women making leaving sounds without registering the words. He followed them to the door, and held it while they air kissed.

“Coming, sweetie?” Brittany said.

“I’ll send him along in a minute,” Elizabeth said. “You did come in two cars, didn’t you?”

For a moment Brittany’s good nature slipped, but the flash of annoyance that crossed her face came and went so swiftly that Ben wasn’t certain he’d seen it.

“Of course. See you at the club,” she said, and ran her hand down his cheek. He stood on the step beside his mother and watched Brittany glide to her car and drive away with a wave.

“She is a lovely woman,” Elizabeth said.

“Uh-huh.”

“And very, very clever.”

That didn’t sound like a compliment.

“She will look extraordinary in the dress we designed. Daddy, I take it, has money?”

“Pots of it, according to the grapevine.”

“Do I need to start designing her wedding dress?”

“Uh—I’d hold off on that.”

“Ah.” His mother narrowed her eyes at him. “You can’t have cooled off so quickly.”

He ignored her remark. “If I don’t get out of here, I’m going to miss our reservations at the club.” He kissed his mother perfunctorily and started down the concrete stairs to the front yard.

“Are you going to bring her to my regular Thursday-night dinner party?” Elizabeth called after him.

Damn! His mother’s legendary Thursday nights. “I don’t know. I’ll call you.”

“Fine. It doesn’t have to be Brittany, you know. Any girl will do so long as she’s not an airhead.”

“Right.” He climbed into his car and drove away much too fast for the narrow street. He scared a small woman who was walking a large bull mastiff. He knew he should have stopped to apologize. She was probably one of his mother’s neighbors, although he didn’t recognize her. She would be one of his constituents, if he ever became district attorney. He needed to remember he was a lawyer first, a man second.

The hell he was.

CHAPTER TWO

ANNABELLE SHUT THE DOOR to the backyard and leaned against it with both hands behind her back. There was no point in throwing the bolt against Ben. He’d just walk around to the front. His mother would let him in, assuming he didn’t have his own key to her house.

Annabelle’s heart raced, the pulse in her temple throbbed, and she knew she had a film of sweat on her upper lip, despite the cool early-April air outside.

The kin of my enemy is my enemy. Her grandmother had drummed that into her head since she could remember. Grandmere was already having triple conniptions because Annabelle was working for Elizabeth, Hal Jackson’s ex-wife. The idea that Annabelle might be attracted to Hal Jackson’s son would probably give her a stroke.

And she was attracted. Heck, she’d always been attracted to Ben, although she hadn’t seen him since he went off to college.

She’d known about Judy Bromfield’s death, of course; it had happened the summer after Ben graduated from high school. The whole thing had been horrible, especially when it came out that Ben’s father had been responsible for getting the man who’d raped and murdered Judy off on another charge only two months earlier.