Her Valentine Blind Date

He looked puzzled. “Let me get this straight. You want to be called by your last name?”

“Cari isn’t my last name,” she interjected quickly. “I don’t know where you got that idea. It’s my given name. Just plain Cari. And there’s no J involved at all.”

He shook his head, bewildered by that. “Your name is Celinia Jade Kerry, right?”

“No.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste at the silly name he was trying to pin on her. “My name is Cari Christensen. That’s been my name for quite some time now. In fact, it’s official, and I’ve got proof. Want to see my driver’s license?”

He stared into her clear blue eyes for a long moment. She certainly looked like a woman telling the absolute truth. The light began to dawn. Something had been a little off about this entire operation from the start. She hadn’t fit the profile he was expecting. He should have trusted his instincts. And now—what the hell had he done? This was the wrong woman.

“Uh-oh,” he said at last.

CHAPTER THREE

CARI sighed, impatience building ever higher as she hugged the baby to her chest. This date had been strange from the start, but it was getting stranger.

First this man had turned out to be so incredibly different from what she’d expected. Then there was the Italian element—not to mention the accent. The mother on the phone. Abandoned babies in dirty apartments. An assistant named Tito. If she hadn’t known better, she might think she’d landed in the middle of a scene from a bad B movie and was caught up in some really crazy dialogue. Mara had not forewarned her of all of this.

“Listen, Randy,” she began, eyes flashing as she prepared to read him the riot act.

His own eyes widened and his head went back. “Who the hell is Randy?” he demanded.

Shock jolted through her. This man wasn’t Randy? This man wasn’t the one she’d been waiting for, the one her friend had set her up with? This wasn’t her blind date?

But of course he wasn’t. Hadn’t she suspected that all along? The scales fell from her eyes—so to speak. This wasn’t Mara’s husband’s cousin after all. And that just about explained everything.

“Aren’t you Randy Jeffington?” she asked, though by now she knew darn well he wasn’t.

He shook his head, looking like a man who expected all things in his path to snap into place and had been sorely disappointed once again—a man who was planning to make sure someone paid for this.

“Never heard of him,” he growled at her.

“Uh-oh,” she echoed softly, swaying and feeling just a bit unsteady on her feet.

Suddenly she had a clear and shining picture of a tall, sandy-haired man in glasses carrying a red rose. She’d seen him just as they were leaving the club and she now had an epiphany. That, no doubt, was Randy. Poor guy.

But something in the back of her mind had known all along, hadn’t it? This handsome figure standing before her was just too good to be true. Or too bad, as the case might be.

And poor Randy Jeffington. Was he still wandering around the Longhorn Lounge looking for her? Her hand went to her mouth, her eyes huge.

“Omigosh. We’ve got to go back.”

He nodded grimly. “You’ve got that right. We’ve got the wrong dates.”

“There must be a woman named… whatever that weird name you said was… waiting for you back there.”

“Holding a red rose.”

“Oh, no.” She grimaced tragically. “Too bad we all picked the same color, isn’t it?”

He was still glowering at her. “Too bad we didn’t get identities straight from the beginning,” he said curtly.

She frowned, shifting the baby from one hip to the other and trying to remember how it had happened. “You called me Miss Cari. My name is Cari, with a C. I thought—”

“I called you Miss Kerry with a K.”

“Oh. Well, it was hard to know that at the time.”

“It was perfectly straightforward. You should have guessed.”

“I should have guessed? What about you? You acted like you were sure I was the one. I sort of just… followed along—like a dummy.” She frowned, remembering how she’d almost been in a trance. She could hardly believe that a man like this was the Randy she was waiting for. And it turned out she was right. She sighed plaintively.

“Oh, well. What’s done is done. Now we have to do our best to undo it.”

“Exactly.” He glanced down at the sleeping baby in her arms, then around the simple room. “Let’s get out of here.”

She looked down at the baby. “Are we taking him with us?”

“Well, we’re not going to leave him here.”

“No, I suppose not.” She bit her lip. This didn’t seem right, but she didn’t know what else they could do.

From the crib, she picked up a blanket and wrapped it around the baby while he picked up the diaper bag. Looking up, she sighed as her gaze traveled over the handsome man who’d brought her here. He was like a mythic figure, so tall and strong with matinee-idol looks. When something seemed too good to be true, you had to know it was likely to be so. Oh well, this had been interesting.

“So what is your name, anyway?” she asked as they looked around the apartment to make sure they weren’t forgetting anything.

“Max,” he said grimly. “Max Angeli.”

“And I’m Cari Christensen.”

He looked down at her and almost had to smile. She seemed to be able to maintain a sunny personality despite all odds against it. In contrast to what he was feeling himself, which was dour indeed. “You said that.”

“I thought you might not have caught it in the heat of the moment.”

He nodded, mouth twisting. “I wish you’d mentioned it while we were still at the club,” he said. “There you were waving at me with that damn red rose.”

“Oh!” She stopped and glared at him. “You’re not going to blame this whole catastrophe on me.”

He liked the fire in her eyes. She wasn’t his type and he would never have picked her out of a crowd, but there was something appealing about her just the same. He liked the liveliness of her reactions and he couldn’t resist teasing her a bit.

“Why not?” he said with a careless shrug. “If you’d been on your toes, this wouldn’t have happened. You made me stand up the woman I was supposed to be with. You may have killed that relationship.”