Anything for Her Marriage

Two glasses of wine later, she was still waiting for the booze buzz to override the sexual whatever-it-was buzz so she could join this party and act like something resembling a normal person. Or better yet, pass out. Her right little toe already had.

“Well?” Elizabeth said, shoving another tidbit into her mouth.

When the going gets tough, the tough change the subject. “You know, if you don’t stop eating like that, you’re gonna weigh five hundred pounds.”

“Hah! You’re just jealous because I have boobs now and you don’t.”

Nancy smirked. Not that she’d turn down an extra cup size, should anyone offer, but mammary inadequacy was the least of her problems.

“And you’re not wriggling your way out of this.” Squinting, Elizabeth nodded at the low-necked, high-hemmed, velvet scrap of a dress Nancy had picked up cheap because it was the only size three left. “If nothing else, that outfit alone’ll jump-start his heart. Shoot, my eyes bugged out when you walked in tonight. You rent those legs, what?”

Elizabeth’s husband, Guy, burst into the kitchen, a pair of empty platters in his hand, a diamond stud glinting in his ear. He glanced at the plate in front of his wife. Sighed. “Uh, honey—isn’t the idea to fill the plate?”

She looked down, gasped at the four lonely goodies left on it. Guy chuckled, then kissed Elizabeth on top of her upswept hair. “I knew there was a reason we bought twice as much food as we thought we needed,” he said, then replenished the plates, giving Elizabeth a wink and a grin as he backed through the swinging door to the living room, balancing all three plates in his hands.

Nancy tried, really tried, to ignore the needles of envy that pricked her heart, and her conscience. She’d had no idea, when she’d relocated to Spruce Lake a couple months ago to take Elizabeth’s place at Millennium Realty, the small agency Elizabeth ran with her mother and Guy, just how much her friend’s bliss would point out the pathetic emptiness of her own life. Not that she wasn’t thrilled for Elizabeth, but seeing her and Guy together twisted a knife in her lonely, underused heart. Oh, sure, intellectually, she knew a woman didn’t need a husband and children. But the fact was, there were times Nancy envied Elizabeth so much it hurt.

“Hey!” Elizabeth duck-walked from behind the counter, grabbed Nancy by the wrist. “If you’re gonna go gloomy on me, you can go do it somewhere else.” She pushed open the door, shoved Nancy out into the living room. “Now go ye forth and schmooze.”

Nancy turned to find herself face-to-face with a gently swinging kitchen door.

“And don’t even think about coming back in here!”

Nancy sighed. Life was much better when she’d been the pushy one.

She finished off the wine, setting her glass on somebody’s abandoned paper plate on top of the piano, then smoothed sweaty palms down the front of her dress. Where, she wondered through the muzzies, had the twenty-plus years gone since Stanley Cohen’s bar-mitzvah dance, when Debby Liebowitz double-dared her to ask Norman Sklar to dance? To this day, though, she had no idea if she had or not. Funny, the way the mind blots out traumatic memories. She tugged discreetly at her underwire bra, which she could have sworn was growing teeth.

“You still there?” she heard from behind the door.

“Bite me,” she whispered in reply, and was rewarded with an evil giggle. She told herself it was boredom keeping her there. Her social life since moving here was not what one would call rip-roaring. Of course, one reason she’d left Detroit was to get away from a singles scene that, from the perspective of a burned-out thirty-four-year-old, had grown very tired. Like a fool, she’d naively thought the camaraderie of small-town living, of being close to Elizabeth and her new family— Guy had three young children already—would help ease the constant ache of being alone.

Wrong. Think Pleasantville on steroids. Which meant Nancy felt more a fish out of water than ever. And her mother, bless the dear thing, clearly thought aliens had sucked out her daughter’s brain. Who moved someplace where who knew what kind of men lived? As it was, Belle Shapiro had yet to forgive Nancy for letting one husband slip through her fingers, never mind that the creep considered himself exempt from mundane concepts like…oh, fidelity?

“But,” Belle had conceded eventually, “maybe this is for the best. If you never have children, you won’t know the heartache of having a thirty-something unmarried daughter throw her life away. No, it’s true—I wouldn’t wish such pain on anybody, least of all my own daughter.”

And the woman wondered why Nancy only called once a week.

But back to the here and now, where she was bored and pleasantly snockered and, okay, ravenous for male attention. She watched as, seemingly oblivious to the chatter of two dozen other guests in the room, Rod leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. His long, graceful fingers absently hugged a wineglass as he communed with the fire, which acutely defined the sharp angle of his brow, the clefted chin, and a mouth worth bronzing. His lips were fuller than usual for a man, yet not the least bit effeminate. His eyes and hair were nearly the same color, neither brown nor gold, but something in-between, the cut-and-styled-one-strand-at-a-time hair liberally threaded with gray at the temples.

She took another swig of the wine.

He started when Cora Jenkins, the agency’s office manager, laid a hand on his shoulder, her teeth strikingly white against her dark skin as she smiled, then apparently introduced her date to Rod. He seemed to shake himself, but immediately offered a hand and a smile to the distinguished gray-haired man, as well as a few words spoken in a low voice that, even at this distance and tangled in the threads of other conversations, threatened to turn Nancy inside out. Still.

She twined one wayward curl around her finger, her brow furrowed. Two things thirty-plus women weren’t supposed to get: zits and crushes.

Uh-huh.

Like she really needed this pair-of-tortured-souls-adrift-in-the-night routine. A pair of tortured souls who had absolutely nothing in common, who probably couldn’t sustain a conversation for more than twenty minutes without tripping over some major issue. The man was the epitome of upper-crust conservatism, while Nancy was…not. He probably didn’t even like cats.

Oh, come on. This had nothing to do with cats or backgrounds or anything else. The fact was, polite or not, he’d blown her off. More than once. So—excuse me?—whence came this urge to wrap her arms around the man and tell him everything was going to be okay?

The wine, the heat, the sensuous mingling of perfumes, food aromas, laughter, all fed a gentle whirring in her head that quickly burned a tingling path along her skin…and somehow propelled her across the room to stand in front of someone far too perfect for the likes of her. Women like Nancy just didn’t hook up with fair-haired, racquet-club-raised Golden Boys. Women like her—

He looked up, and the hurt and loneliness and disappointment in those golden eyes yanked her soul up by its bootstraps.

Women like her had no business fantasizing about a relationship with a man like Rod Braden. Then again, she never saw a man who looked more like he could use a little kindness right now. A little feminine…understanding.

Come to Mama, she thought, and got all warm and fluttery inside.

Rod smelled her perfume before he saw her, briefly wondered how—or why—he’d picked out her scent among the dozen or more in the room. He’d apparently startled her: her mouth was open, as if she’d been about to say something. Instead, she lifted a hand to her lips and dissolved into laughter.

He thought she might be just this side of drunk, but when she cleared her throat and looked directly at him again, her deep brown eyes were clear and sparkling, even if her face was flushed.

“That’s not fair,” she said, obviously tamping down a new round of giggles. “I was trying to come up with some wickedly clever line, and you screwed me up.” She sucked in a deep breath. To quell nerves? “So. How’re you doing?”

Loaded question. He took another sip of wine, considering how to answer, even more seriously considering why things that had been comatose not ten seconds before were stirring now. That voice of hers probably had something to do with it—low, sensuous, and far too rich to come out of a body so slender that she probably didn’t dare venture outside on blustery days. He smiled. He couldn’t help it, any more than he ever could help the braided feelings of terror and attraction Nancy Shapiro’s presence sparked, had always done from the first time they met, right before he’d starting dating Elizabeth. Her natural ebullience, the way her emotions crackled around her like summer lightning, at once exhilarated and appalled him. Wasn’t that he didn’t like her. He did. More than she knew, more than he’d ever before admitted to himself. But she was too lively, too witty, too bright, too…much. This was a woman, he suspected, who threw things during a fight, who slammed doors and burst into copious tears and got in a person’s face, demanding immediate and honest answers.

Living with someone like Nancy would be an invitation to a coronary. He’d always preferred cool, together blondes—soft-spoken, genteel women who never raised their voices. That both his ex-wives and any number of also-rans, including the woman in whose house he now sat, were cool, soft-spoken blondes…well, perhaps he really wasn’t in the mood to ponder such things too hard this evening.

Any more than he was in the mood to ponder why Nancy Shapiro had such an unsettling effect on him. Why he wanted to see if he could span that deceptively fragile waist with his hands, if she kissed as irrepressibly as she laughed. Which made no sense, since Rod didn’t want to touch or kiss Nancy or get close enough to do either anytime before the next millennium. He wanted peace, not passion. To be left alone to nurse the wounds left from this last marital debacle in a nice, cozy cocoon of self-pity, maybe to have a chance to salvage what was left of his tattered relationship with his children, who had spent the holidays skiing in Aspen with their mother and her latest boyfriend.

So why was he here?

And why was Nancy frowning down at him like that?

He realized her hands, tipped with long, glossy nails nearly the same burgundy as that bit of a dress she wore, were planted on her hips. Or where her hips would be, if she had any. Humor sizzled in those molasses eyes as she said, “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s rude to stare at people?”

Despite his rotten mood, he grinned again, surprised to realize his cheeks actually ached a bit from the effort. The firelight sent streaks of molten amber through her curls; his fingers itched even as need warmed his belly.

“The way you have your hair fixed tonight,” he heard himself say, “it’s very flattering. Really shows off your eyes. Did you know—” he hurtled into the compliment with the recklessness of a kid on a sled after a foot-high snowfall “—in this light, they’re nearly black?” He shook his head. “Extraordinary.”

Extraordinary was right. What the hell was that all about? Something trembled, deep inside him, as he took a sip of the same glass of wine he’d been nursing for nearly an hour, watched those eyes grow huge with astonishment. Her hand went to her mouth again, and she turned away for a moment. He couldn’t tell in the firelight, but he thought she might be blushing. Then she laughed again, softly this time, before twisting around to plop down beside him.

No! She wasn’t supposed to…

He wasn’t supposed to let her….

So why’d you give her the compliment, lamebrain?

Good question.

Now her perfume tendrilled through his bloodstream, the sweet-spicy scent threatening to dissolve what little common sense he had left. And somehow, they fell into a natural, easy conversation, about nothing, really. Elizabeth and Guy, the weather, the party, if he knew the couple standing next to Maureen Louden, Elizabeth’s mother. Nancy was one of those touchy types, her hand often landing on his sleeve as they talked. Not that he minded. She got him to laugh, several times. And he enjoyed the sound of her laughter, too.

He was enjoying her.

She bent over to adjust the ankle strap on one of her black silk high heels; her back was flawlessly clear underneath a pair of crisscrossed spaghetti straps, her fragile-looking spine smooth as a string of pearls. Her boisterous hair teased her shoulders, teased his libido even more.

How many times in the past had he pretended not to notice her interest? How many times had he told himself he wasn’t interested? Yet, here he was, lonely and horny and in no position even to think what he was thinking about this lovely, lively woman who was all wrong for him, even as her very presence threatened to cause a major testosterone explosion. Hell, even if she had been his type, it was probably a pretty safe bet she was looking for a husband. Whereas he was definitely not in the market for a wife. At this point, he doubted he could even deal with a mistress. Not that he’d ever had one before, but…