Making Mr. Right

“Oh?” She stood, hands on hips, her brush dripping smelly warm water down the leg of her jeans. She barely noticed. She didn’t care. “And how would you clean it, Mr. Expert,” she asked sweetly.

“You need cat litter and soda.”

“Baking soda?”

“Pop. The fizzy carbonated stuff.”

“Any particular brand?”

He scowled, thinking. “I don’t think so. I heard it on some do-it-yourself show on TV. I don’t remember them mentioning any particular brand.”

“Well, I have an idea. Why don’t you clean it if you know so much about it.” Actually she didn’t doubt he knew what he was talking about. Parker collected little tidbits of meaningless data and spouted them on demand, like one of his computers.

“Sounds like a fair trade.” He grinned his charming, boyish grin. The one that always disarmed her. “I’ll get the oil stain out of your garage floor, you change me from a frog into a prince.”

“For Mallory.” Her voice was flat. Skeptical.

The silly grin widened as he nodded.

“When is she going to behold this miraculous transformation,” she wondered aloud.

“Oh. I forgot.” He reached and checked several pockets before coming up with a piece of paper that had been stuffed in his pants pocket without the benefit of refolding.

She dropped her brush back into her pail, savoring a morbid sense of satisfaction as the ensuing splash reached him and left tiny dark dots on his gray suit pants. He was too absentminded to notice. He pushed his dark rimmed glasses up on his nose with the wrong finger and handed over the paper.

Taking it to the long workbench she’d built across the length of the garage, Cindy smoothed it out.

“A class reunion?” she said, reading the large bold print at the top of the page.

“Yeah.” Parker came to stand beside her.

She moved away, suddenly hating his nearness. “What makes you think Mallory will come?”

“Don’t you?” He stepped closer again.

She had the last time, Cindy remembered. Their ten-year reunion. Parker had been out of town and extremely disappointed when he’d discovered Mallory had been home while he was gone. He hadn’t said another thing about her sister in the intervening five years.

Geminy Christmas! How could he ask her to do this? “She did come the last time,” Cindy confirmed. “But I haven’t heard a thing from her about this. Surely if she was planning to attend, I would have heard—”

“I just got the invitation today. They were mailed from here. She may not even have hers yet.”

Raising both eyebrows, Cindy glanced at her watch, then tilted her head and stared at him. “How long have you been planning this, PC?”

He had the decency to look sheepish.

“For five years? Since the ten-year reunion?”

“What makes you think that?”

“You couldn’t have gotten your mail before eight o’clock this morning. You’ve known about this less than two hours. You didn’t decide to turn into Mr. Wonderful and marry my sister in two hours. Your mind doesn’t work that way,” she added.

He lifted one broad shoulder and tilted her one of his sensual half smiles. “See. You know me well. If anyone can do this, it’s you.”

“You are a nerd,” she said with the casual affection of their long-term friendship. “No one but a nerd would quietly obsess about his next high school reunion for five years. You are exactly the nerd everyone thought you were back then.”

“A successful, rich nerd,” he pointed out. “You said so yourself. Surely with my money and your flair for remodeling things, we can polish me up into something Mallory will find attractive.”

“You don’t have to do a thing,” she said dryly. “Mallory did notice you made the cover of Time magazine.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“I haven’t seen you.”

“True.” His mouth puckered thoughtfully. “She noticed? She said something?”

“The last time I talked to her.” Cindy compressed her lips and felt the ache build inside. She’d noticed. She’d called to congratulate him. He’d said an absentminded thanks and had to get off the phone. He didn’t even remember.

She suppressed the urge to tell him how many times Mallory had quoted and questioned his net worth. Her sister had definitely wanted Cindy to confirm that the figures in the article were accurate. Cindy was a little surprised Mallory hadn’t called him, too.

“I don’t want her to want me for the money,” he said, reading her mind. “I want her to fall in love with me.”

The vise around Cindy’s heart tightened painfully. Life was so unfair.

“So will you help me, Cindy? You know more than anyone what makes Mallory tick. You know exactly the kind of men she’s attracted to. And you know me,” he added. “Will you teach me?”

She inwardly groaned. In the twenty-eight years of her life—every one of those years she’d known and idolized and loved him—she’d never been able to tell him no. It would probably take her another billion years to find the strength to say it. She couldn’t now. Not even for this. Not even if it broke her heart and shredded every ounce of her pride and all of her dreams. “It ain’t going to be easy,” she said, struggling against the rasp in her throat to sound normal.

“Nothing worth doing is ever easy.” He tagged an optimistic sigh at the end of what had almost become his motto. Then he smiled, took off his jacket and started rolling up his sleeves. “Guess I’d better go buy some cat litter. Do you have the soda?”

“Hey, you aren’t getting off that easy.”

He gave her that frowning, out-of-it, what-are-you-talking-about look.

“You think getting an oil stain off the floor of this garage is even close to a fair exchange for transforming you into a...hunk?”

He laughed in that sheepish little boy way of his.

“Not remotely,” she said before he could protest. “You also have to help me...”

“What?”

She compressed her lips, her mind a total blank. “I’ll think of plenty. We have four months before the reunion. Four months worth of various to-be-named favors might be a fair exchange. Believe me, it’s going to take every second of that four months for my part of the task.”

“I’m not that bad, am I?”

She crossed her arms and studied him head to toe. His square jaw clenched uneasily and he shifted self-consciously. His thick brown hair usually needed a trim and now was no exception. The sprig he’d left standing on end a moment ago still jutted from beneath a smooth strand of straight brown and another sprig fanned out from behind one ear. His impressive blue eyes looked myopic behind the heavy dark framed glasses. With his jacket gone, his white shirt sort of swallowed him, camouflaging his wonderful broad shoulders. His slacks were also a smidge too long and the hem fell in a fold over the tops of his battered running shoes. From time to time, she itched to do exactly what he wanted her to do now. But why now? Why for Mallory?

“You’re not so bad that a wad of money and a lot of hard work won’t fix you,” she finally declared with only a tiny spark of malicious intent.