Making Mr. Right

Parker shook his head.

“It isn’t necessarily the people you see every day, or the person you think you’d call,” she explained. “It’s someone you wouldn’t hesitate to contact anytime—day or night—if you needed help. Even at three in the morning. For any kind of help. You’ve always been that kind of friend for me, PC. I want you to know how much I appreciate it.”

“You make it sound...past tense.” He looked downright uneasy with the thought. “That isn’t going to—”

“I was thinking about it the other day...after you asked me to help you,” she interrupted. “With Mallory?”

His eyes were the color of a cloudy day now.

“If... when,” she corrected, “you marry Mallory, it will change.” She stopped him with a raised hand as he opened his mouth to protest. “We’ll still be friends. I know I’ll be able to come to you with almost anything.”

“We’d be family then.” His voice emphasized the words determinedly.

“You’ll be my brother-in-law. Wouldn’t it seem strange to call you for help instead of my sister?”

“You’d be calling both of us.”

“I love Mallory but I could never call her with my problems at three o’clock in the morning,” she said quietly.

“But you guys are close.” He looked guilty.

That wasn’t Cindy’s intent. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I love Mallory dearly, but she’s not a callme-with-your-problems-at-three-in-the-morning type person. But it will be fun having someone I feel so close to as a brother-in-law. What a change of pace!” She managed a short laugh. “A brother-in-law I will actually know.”

“Nothing will change,” he assured her. Or maybe he was reassuring himself. Then he sat up straighter, thumping the list that was still in front of him. “Well, I guess some things better change or all this is a pipe dream.”

She grinned at him, her very best friend as long as she could remember. “I’m not losing a friend, I’m gaining family.” She’d missed having ‘family’ since her parents’ death in a freak weather accident when she was fifteen years old. “Who would have guessed,” she forced a lighthearted tone into her voice, “that I would ever know someone as important as you, let alone be related. I guess it’s kind of unrealistic of me to expect to hear from you more. I do keep track, though,” she added. “I saw the interview on CNN last month.”

“You did?”

She nodded. “You were great.”

“I sounded like a total egghead.” He was still studying her with that bemused and confused look.

“You sounded very impressive, PC,” she said. “You managed to make the interviewer laugh a couple of times. I was proud of you.”

“I was proud of me, too,” he admitted, quieter than he’d been. “I am getting better at that sort of thing.”

“Do you have any choice with all the practice you’re getting?”

“Nah, I guess not.”

Cindy got irritated with herself. She was sounding as if she were the charter member of his Admiration Society again. She stiffened her spine and returned to their original subject. “You’ll never be my brother-in-law if you don’t marry Mallory.” She somehow managed to keep the bittersweet pain out of her voice as she pointed to the list. “We’d better get busy with the stuff you aren’t so good at.”

His smile faded and he turned his attention to the second item. “Clothes?”

“We’ll go through your closet in a little while,” Cindy suggested.

Parker pointed to the next item and scowled. “What’s wrong with my hair?”

Cindy pulled the list over and added Habit of Scowling to the bottom of it. “You need a decent haircut, PC. You need something with a little style. We’ll get you an appointment with someone really good. I know a stylist downtown who’d be perfect... has great taste and a good eye,” she raved enthusiastically.

Parker looked skeptical. “The guy does your hair?”

Cindy knew him too well to think he was insulting her; he must be trying to figure out how she knew him. “He bought my last house,” she explained.

“A definite sign of great taste.” Parker grinned and moved on, showing exactly how unimportant he thought his hairstyle was, despite his initial response.

“We should check into getting you contacts,” she said as his finger tapped at the next word: Glasses. It had a question mark beside it. “Or if you don’t want contacts, surely your eye doctor has more fashionable frames than those.”

“What’s wrong with these?”

“Nothing if you don’t mind looking like you bought cheap magnifying eyeglasses at the discount store.”

Parker looked up at her, flushing, then down at the nail he’d been flicking against the list.

“You don’t, PC,” Cindy protested. “Tell me you didn’t buy those glasses off a display rack in some drugstore.”

“They work.” He met her gaze. “My eyes aren’t that bad. I broke my prescription glasses a couple of years ago when I was out of town and bought some like this to get me through the emergency. I discovered I didn’t really need much, just something when I sit staring at a computer screen all day.”

“You’ve worn glasses all your life, Parker Chaney.”

“Mom used to make me go to the eye doctor at least once a year,” he said. “But when mine broke and I didn’t have time...”

“In how many years?”

“Five, maybe six,” he muttered.

Cindy pointed to the pad in front of him. “Put that on the list, PC. Top of the list. First thing Monday morning. You have to get an appointment with an optometrist.” She rolled her eyes. “And I wondered why you were getting such geeky glasses the past few years. I couldn’t imagine that your doctor didn’t have more fashionable ones.”

“But you think I should get contacts,” he pointed out.

“If you can wear them,” she said. “You have beautiful blue eyes, PC. You should let—”

“You think so?” he interrupted. The beautiful blue eyes narrowed. His voice lowered. “You think I have beautiful eyes?”

If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was flirting. She willed herself not to flush but wasn’t certain she was successful. “I’m guessing,” she said sarcastically. “It’s hard to tell behind those things.”

“Should I get colored lenses?”

“Why mess up such an interesting shade?”

He laughed and she realized she’d fallen into his trap. Okay, she’d admitted she thought his eyes were beautiful. They were a very normal blue, except they were flecked with gray. It made them seem the color of the sky on a beautiful day. Studying his gorgeous eyes was exactly the kind of habit she had to break. She looked away.

He finished perusing the list as Flo stuck her head in the door to check on them. “How’s it coming?”

“What do you think?” Cindy invited her in to look over the items they’d come up with.

Flo read over his shoulder, looking as skeptical about some of it as Cindy felt. “You’d better do something about his manners, too.”