Her Passionate Plan B

No sensible raincoat for him, much less an umbrella. Rain beat down on his bare head, plastering gleaming black hair to a deeply tanned brow. For reasons she was at a total loss to explain, she felt a shiver of purely sexual interest. If she’d learned one thing from the past—and she’d learned several—it was that the minute sexuality kicked in, common sense flew out the door.

The man was a full head taller than Egbert, which would have made sharing Egbert’s umbrella difficult even if he had offered. And knowing Egbert, he would have offered, because he was not only polite, he was genuinely caring—another big mark in his favor.

Between sneezes, the preacher managed to get in a few words about the man they were there to honor while Daisy wondered some more about the mysterious stranger. If she’d ever laid eyes on him she would definitely have remembered, not just because he was the only one present who was not appropriately dressed.

Although she had to admit that his blue jeans and leather bomber jacket were far better suited to the weather than her six-year-old black dress and leaky black raincoat, not to mention the muddy pumps that were slowly sinking into the wet earth.

It wasn’t very cold, but the rain was beginning to come down in earnest now. Hardly a time to be wearing sunglasses, but then, people often did at funerals, she rationalized, if only to hide eyes that were red and swollen from tears.

Or, as in Daisy’s case, to shield open curiosity.

No, he definitely wasn’t from around here. She knew everybody in Muddy Landing by sight, if not by name. Besides, if Sasha and Marty had ever laid eyes on him, he’d be heading their list of eligible bachelors. That is, if he was eligible.

She tried to see if he was wearing a ring. He wasn’t, but that was no guarantee. He had tucked his thumbs under his belt with his fingers splayed out over a flat abdomen. The phrase washboard abs came to mind.

Washboard abs? She’d been watching too much television. Since Harvey, her longtime patient, had died so unexpectedly, she’d had trouble getting to sleep, but from now on she’d stick to the weather channel.

He hadn’t moved a muscle. Maybe he was from Fish and Game, checking to make sure no one slipped down to the river for a spot of illegal duck hunting. No uniform, though. Besides, his hair was too long for a fed.

On a day like this, she mused, he could at least have worn a hat. She pictured him in a Stetson—a black one, not a white one, with the brim turned up on one side and a showy cluster of feathers tucked under the band.

Almost as if he could feel her staring at him, the stranger suddenly looked directly at her across the blanket of drowned flowers and artificial turf. Daisy stopped breathing. There was nothing unusual about blue eyes, but when they were set under crow-black brows in a face the color of well-tanned leather, the effect was…well, riveting, to put it mildly.

The service came to a hurried conclusion just as a fresh wave of rain blew in off North Landing River. With no family to console, the preacher sneezed again, glanced around and mumbled a few apologetic words to no one in particular before hurrying to the waiting black minivan. The pitifully small group of mourners began to straggle away—all but two.

Oh, Lord, they were headed her way. Not now—please!

Pretending not to hear Egbert calling to her, Daisy hurriedly splashed her way through puddles to where she’d left her car in the potholed parking lot. She was in no mood to have anyone—not a stranger and certainly not Egbert—see her with wet hair straggling down her neck, wearing a six-year-old rayon dress and a soggy raincoat that was even older. Not that she was egotistical in the least, but that would probably set her plans back at least six months.

The timetable she’d set for herself didn’t allow for six months. She wasn’t getting any younger. Three months from now Egbert would have been widowed exactly a year. Timing was everything. She didn’t want to rush him, but neither did she want to wait until some other woman moved in and staked a claim.

She pulled out onto the highway, the windshield wipers slapping time with her disjointed thoughts.

She would finish all the sorting and packing that had to be done, and then she would sit quietly and listen while Egbert explained for the third time all the legal whereases, whereinafters and heretofores that prevented him from simply reading poor Harvey’s last will and testament and turning everything over to the beneficiaries. Which in this case were the housekeeper Harvey had shared with Daisy’s two best friends, and a loosely organized, poorly funded historical society.

A glance in the rearview mirror told her Egbert was two cars behind, driving precisely two miles under the speed limit. Some devil made her press her foot on the accelerator until she was doing five miles above the speed limit.

Daisy never exceeded the speed limit. Caution was her middle name.

“We’ve got to do something about Daisy.” Rain droned down outside as Sasha propped her elbows on the table, carefully stroking glittery purple polish on her long fingernails. “She’s showing signs of being seriously depressed.”

At Daisy’s request, neither of her friends had attended the graveside service. They hadn’t insisted.

“She’s not depressed, she’s grieving. She’s always like this after she loses a patient, especially a long-term patient. That color clashes horribly with your hair, by the way.”

Sasha studied her nails, then looked at her friend, Marty Owens. “Purple and orange? What’s wrong with it? You know, the trouble with Daisy is that she takes every case so personally. It’s bad enough working all those long hours, but when she actually moves in with a patient the way she did with poor Harvey Snow…” Sighing, she wiped off a smudge of polish.

“I guess it made sense when she got evicted and he had that big old empty house going to waste.”

“She wasn’t evicted. Everybody had to move out after the fire. Where else would she have gone? The nearest motel still open is in Elizabeth City—that would have added at least forty minutes to her daily commute. Anyway, it probably wouldn’t have hit her so hard if either one of them had any other family.”

Nodding in agreement, Marty poured herself another glass of wine. She was already over her limit, but weekends didn’t count. Trouble was, since being forced to close her bookstore, every day was a weekend. “I never heard her call him anything but Mr. Snow, but you know what? I think she considered him sort of a surrogate grandfather. Who’ve you got in mind for our next match, Sadie Glover or the girl with the thick glasses who works at the ice-cream place?”

The two women—three, when Daisy was with them—were accustomed to topic-hopping. Sasha said, “How about Faylene?”

Marty’s eyes widened. “Our Faylene? Well, for one thing, she’d kill us.”

“Daisy needs a distraction. Can you think of a bigger challenge than to find a mate for Faylene?”

“She’d be a challenge, all right. The trouble is, we’re running out of male candidates unless we expand our hunting range.”

“Oh, I don’t know—I’ve got a couple of possibilities in mind,” Sasha said thoughtfully.

Several years ago it had been Sasha and Daisy who had lured Marty into helping set up a shy, elderly neighbor with the cashier at the town’s only pharmacy. At the time, Marty had just lost her second husband to another woman and needed a distraction. The match had been deemed a success when the neighbor had rented out his house and moved in with the widowed cashier and her seventeen cats.

The three women had toasted their success and begun looking around for any others who might need a deftly applied crowbar to pry them out of a lonely rut. Soon matchmaking had become their favorite pastime. Not simply shoving a pretty single woman into the path of any eligible man. There was no challenge in matchmaking for winners.

But for those who had given up hope—for the terminally shy, the jilted, the plain and the socially inept—now, there was a worthwhile cause. Without actually planning it, the three friends began identifying needy singles in the area and tactfully offering makeovers and even a few hints on dating protocol where needed. Often all that was required was a simple boosting of self-confidence. Or as Sasha put it, echoing a song from her humongous antique record collection, accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative. After that, they engineered situations that threw the prospective couple together, the local bimonthly box suppers being a favorite venue, and let nature take its course.

“Forget Faylene,” Marty said now. “Why don’t we just find a man for Daisy?” Of the three women, Daisy Hunter was the only one who had never married. Marty, having buried one husband and divorced another, had officially sworn off men for herself.

Sasha had divorced four husbands and readily admitted to having abominable taste in men, but that didn’t keep her from choosing mates for other singles. “Lost cause,” she said now. “Daisy knows plenty of men—what about all those doctors she works with?”

“What, after Jerry whatsisname? He of the sockless Gucci loafers? He of the Armani suits and the blow-dried hair, not to mention that god-awful cologne? The jerk who dumped her the night of the rehearsal dinner?”

“Yeah, there is that. You know what? The trouble with the nursing profession is that most of the people Daisy meets are either doctors or patients. When a patient happens to die, it’s bound to be depressing, especially when it’s one she’s had as long as she had old man Snow.”

“Well, duh. She’s a geriatric nurse, for Pete’s sake. She knew what she was getting into when she chose that specialty.”

“She chose that specialty,” Marty reminded her friend, “because she had the hots for the guy who used to manage that adult day-care center, remember? The one who turned out to be skimming profits?”

Sasha shrugged. “Okay, so she’s got lousy taste in men. Join the club.”

“That’s right, your second husband got sent up for money laundering, didn’t he?”

“Hell, no,” the redhead said indignantly. “It was my first. I was only eighteen—what did I know?”

Both women chuckled. Marty said, “Right. So while she’s grieving, house-sitting and packing stuff up for the thrift shop or whatever, we can start trolling for eligible bachelors between the ages of what, twenty-five and fifty? By the way, who’ve you got in mind for Faylene?”

Sasha frowned at her nails. “Hmm, it is sort of flashy, isn’t it? Okay, two possibilities come to mind, but I thought we might start with Gus down at the place where I just got my brakes relined. I happen to know he’s single.”

“Gay?”

“You ever heard of a gay mechanic?” Sasha slipped off her sandals and contemplated her unpolished toe-nails while Marty continued to sip her wine.

“You know what, Sash? If we want to get Daisy involved in another project we really need to wait until she can sit in on the planning session. Maybe if we encourage her to come up with a few candidates on her own, she’ll perk up and get involved. But I still say Faylene will have a hissy fit if she finds out what we’re up to.”

Applying purple glitter polish to a toenail, Sasha slanted her a grin. “She can have all the hissy fits she wants, just so she doesn’t quit. You know me and housecleaning.”