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

“Did I get all the mustard?” she asked.

“All but a tiny dab here.” He tweaked the end of her nose with his finger.

“I didn’t get any on my nose!”

“Are you absolutely sure of that?”

“Not without a mirror,” she grudgingly admitted, “and, of course, I don’t have one because I don’t have my purse. Okay, let’s see it.”

She reached toward the sheet of paper he still held in his left hand.

“Don’t laugh,” he cautioned, not that she could be intimidated.

“I lost my sense of humor when you dazzled me with your pool hall prowess,” she complained.

He handed over the list, not sure whether to be embarrassed by the characteristics written in a dark scrawl with a thick-leaded carpenter’s pencil.

“Am I reading right?” she asked. “Number four is inexperienced?”

“Maybe a bad word.” He felt six inches high.

“No, I get your meaning. You want to be able to teach her a thing or two.”

“Not exactly!” He choked.

“Chew your food.”

She didn’t want to do this, so she was making him suffer, another thing Tess did very, very well.

“Are you sure you didn’t copy this from a medieval handbook for husbands?”

“Let’s just say, if her little black book has fewer pages than mine, I’ll be happy.”

“Like that wouldn’t apply to every unmarried woman I know.”

Was it possible sweet little Tess was nurturing a grudge for all the times he’d provoked her in high school? She was certainly stomping on his list with hobnail boots. He wasn’t going to give her any more ammo by revealing his grandfather’s horror of tainted women.

“You’re not making this easy for me,” he mumbled.

“Sorry. We both want this to be over. I like requirement number nine—family oriented. I adore mine, especially Erika and Erin.”

“Your nieces, right?”

“Yeah.” When she smiled without the snide expression, her face lit up. “Here’s a practical one. You like to be outdoors, so naturally you would enjoy a woman who shares your interest.”

“I’m glad you approve,” he said dryly, wrapping the uneaten portion of his bun so she wouldn’t notice. Anyone could lose his appetite once in a while.

“Several of the names on my list qualify so far,” she said.

“Who?”

“Let me compare your list with mine and decide who’s perfect for you. Then I’ll see if any of my friends are interested in meeting you.”

“I don’t want a perfect woman. Someone like you would be fine.”

“Thanks a lot…I think.”

Whether from the heat of the day or internal combustion, her cheeks were glowing sunburn-red.

“I didn’t mean it as an insult.” Dang, had he made her squirm this much in high school? He chugged the rest of his root beer, which he didn’t like and didn’t remember ordering. “By someone like you, I meant a nice, attractive woman with interests of her own and not a whole lot of dating experience.”

“How do you know I haven’t dated multitudes of men since you knew me in school?”

“I don’t know. Sorry.” A guy does know, he thought, trying not to let her see his smugness. “Why are you making this so complicated?”

“I have too many possibilities on my list—friends, sisters of friends, cousins of friends, friends of friends, customers, friends of customers, relatives of…”

He laughed defensively. “That narrows it down to all the eligible women in the greater Detroit area.”

“Not quite, but I have at least a dozen good prospects. I’ll mull it over, then negotiate.”

She stood and brushed crumbs from the lap of her short, swingy, flowered skirt, forcing him to notice those spectacular legs again.

“Negotiate, as in union contract?”

“You have to realize, some of my friends may not be interested in meeting you.”

He did the wrong thing—he laughed.

“I have to get back to work,” she said forcefully. “By the way, I do want to thank you again for letting me preview the new product line. It was quite an experience.”

“One I’m trying to forget,” Cole muttered.

TESS WENT BACK to work seriously considering signing up for a yoga class. Nothing she’d learned in the self-assertive discipline of kickboxing had helped when Cole showed up at the store without warning for the second time. She was embarrassed to remember her pounding heart and racing pulse.

He’d startled her. That could be the only possible explanation for her purely involuntary adrenaline rush.

Instead of working on the next week’s work schedule, she laid Cole’s list and hers side by side on her desk in the back room. The numbered lineup of unattached friends spilled over onto the back of her page, even though she’d printed their names in ant-size letters. She flipped the paper and put her own name at the bottom of the list in tiny, barely legible script. She belonged in this anthill, too.

Cole would get his fill of the eager and the eligible. Meeting Mr. Right was the Mount Olympus of dating, and the older a woman got, the harder it was to scale up to where the Greek gods were hiding.

She stabbed at the paper with the pen point, obliterating her name. What had she gotten herself into?

Anyway, she said she would set him up, and she would, and why had Cole wrapped his sausage and bun instead of eating it? Did being with her zap his appetite, or was it the prospect of an endless string of blind dates? More puzzling, why was he gung ho to have her help him meet women when he didn’t have the slightest bit of trouble getting acquainted with them wherever he went? She didn’t buy his excuse about not finding nice women on his own.

She could keep him supplied with a new date every night of the week and double book him for lunch and dinner on the weekend. She’d begin with friends from high school. They’d at least know him by reputation—the Bailey twins’ legacy had endured at least until Tess’s class graduated, if not longer.

Lucinda deserved to sit on a jellyfish on her tropical paradise honeymoon. If it weren’t for that ludicrous dress, Tess’s bow wouldn’t have been caught in the trunk and Cole wouldn’t have paid the least bit of attention to her. Now she was really stuck—matchmaker to a man of many conquests.