One Bride Too Many: One Bride Too Many / One Groom To Go

“She lost a bet.”

He was getting The Look. His mother was a head shorter than he was, and slender to the point of being too thin, but when she raked him with her smoky gray eyes, he still squirmed.

“Two out of three games of pool.”

“This was a fair contest?” she asked, accusing him.

“Tess plays in a pool league. I nearly lost to her. Anyway, I can’t leave the site of the condos we’re building during the workday. I was thinking of bringing her around nine in the evening.”

“Okay. The after-hours codes have changed, so I’d better write them down for you.”

She took a legal pad and wrote a neat series of numbers and letters.

“Your grandfather has been tinkering with the new security system again. He’s obsessed with catching industrial spies.”

“He’s not happy unless he can meddle,” Cole said with undisguised bitterness. He wished Marsh would be content fiddling with mechanical things and leave people—especially his family—alone.

“The important part is punching in these numbers at exactly twenty-minute intervals. There’s a panel in the lab as well as in the hallway.” She pointed with one neatly polished, but not long, fingernail. “Best to set the timer on your watch. There’s only a thirty-second margin for error.”

“Got it. Thanks a lot, Mom.” He bent his head and kissed her soft, smooth cheek.

“Don’t let the security alarm go off. It would put your grandfather in a dither.”

He patted her shoulder, then bolted for the door.

“Trust me, Mom.”

He wasn’t sure he trusted himself when it came to picking a wife, but he did have a date Friday night. She was a friend of Tess’s, so she had to be a nice girl. Didn’t she?

4

“WHY ARE WE sneaking in?” Tess asked in a breathy whisper.

“We’re not sneaking.” Cole answered a little louder than necessary to make his point.

“This feels sneaky. It’s dark and creepy in here.”

“The corridor lights dim automatically at night, that’s all. My mother has no objection at all to having you see the new products. The catalog will be out pretty soon anyway.”

“I still feel like a yuppie cat burglar. Why are you wearing all black?”

“These are the only clean jeans I could find, and I have a lot of black T-shirts. Do you see me wearing a ski mask?”

“I still feel funny.”

“I cleared it with the head honcho, who also happens to be my mother.”

“Not your grandfather?”

“Kicked upstairs to chairman of the board.” He didn’t want to talk about the old man. “Here we are. I have to punch in the after-hours code.” He pulled out the slip of paper his mother had given him and entered the sequence of numbers on the panel beside the door.

“Just like in spy movies.” She giggled nervously. “Are you going to eat the code when you’re done?”

“Can’t. I have to enter another sequence of numbers at twenty-minute intervals.”

He opened the door and snapped on the bright overhead lights, gesturing for her to go ahead of him. He stepped into the big room behind her and took a couple of seconds to set his watch.

“What happens if you don’t?”

She seemed more interested in the security system than the products she’d come to see. Darn, he’d forgotten about her raging curiosity. How long would it take for her to ferret out his real reason for wanting to meet her friends?

“The lab self-destructs, and we fall through a trapdoor in the floor to a chamber of horrors. We’ll be strapped into giant high chairs, forced to eat mushy beets and spinach and subjected to talking toys until we’re both raving lunatics.”

“Imaginative. I’ve never seen a lab with a wall border of lambs, kitties and ducks.”

She glanced around at the large lab, white and sterile-looking except for the wall decorations. The products were displayed on long, waist-high worktables with specifications printed on neat cardboard signs. Cole followed her gaze until it rested on a huge photo of Zack and him as kids. They were floating on an inflated water ship, one of Bailey’s colossal failures thanks to a tendency to sink when the passengers weighed more than forty pounds.

“That must be you and Zack!” Tess walked over to the glossy framed blowup. “You were adorable! Oh, and look at this one!”

She walked over to a shot of a gap-toothed Zack crawling out of an inflated imitation of a sewer pipe while Cole sat astride the top.

Either his mother or his grandfather had hung the damn twins photos everywhere. Tess walked around the room pointing out advertising poses he’d erased from his consciousness long ago. His masculinity did a nosedive as she cooed over each and every cutesy curly-haired image.

“Did you get to keep every toy you posed with?” she asked.

“Not after we sliced up the inflated giant beach ball with a dagger from Marsh’s World War II collection. Seems as though all our toys were metal after that. I thought you wanted to see the new products.”

He liked babies but hated their equipment. Just being around all the baby stuff made him nervous, even though he could shingle a roof three stories up without a qualm. The world of bottle liners and diaper bags gave him the willies. His grandfather had tried for years to snare him into the family business, but both he and Zack were adamantly opposed to having any part of it. It was a measure of Cole’s indifference that he’d never been in this lab.

“There are handouts for every product,” he told Tess. “You can take one of each with you.”

He was actually enjoying her interest in the stuff, following her and taking in her reactions. She commented on everything she saw without a single cloying oh or ah.

“Here’s a winner,” he said skeptically.

She slowly wandered over to see what he was pointing at.

“An inflatable potty for traveling. It’s ingenious.” She took a sample disposable liner and one of the handouts. “Where’s the baby-wipes warmer that plays lullabies?”

“I wouldn’t know one if it came up and bit me on the butt,” he said, grousing.

“You’re really not interested in any of this, are you?”

“Nope.”

She lingered beside a Swedish-designed stroller that sold for more than his first car in high school, then exclaimed over a state-of-the-art high chair in screaming neon lime green. He was bored out of his socks by the displays but found himself enjoying the way she moved around the room. Her khaki walking shorts showed enough leg for him to see hers were sleek and smooth-skinned. Her waist was tiny, not much larger than the span of his hands. It had been criminal to bulk it up with yards of pink material at the wedding reception. Tonight she was wearing a blue knit T-shirt. With eyes like hers, she shouldn’t wear any other color—they shone like a pair of pricey sapphires.

Easy as she was to watch, he couldn’t share her enthusiasm for the products. He knew Bailey Baby Products was a highly lucrative business, but he didn’t want to be lured by the prospect of easy money. He wanted to build his own designs, well-constructed, pleasant, affordable homes for people who’d never see the inside of a pretentious mansion like Marsh Bailey’s. Cole and Zack had hopes of winning some commercial bids that would put their business on a firmer footing.