Fiance Wanted

“Is Matt getting excited?” Katy wanted to know.

Laura rolled her eyes. “Deliriously. Even when I informed him that I expect him to go into the delivery room and hold my hand the entire time, he didn’t run screaming from the house.”

“Brave guy,” Katy agreed. That her old school friend Matt would turn out to be such a rock impressed her. He was certainly nothing like his friend and Katy’s long-time nemesis, Dylan Cole. Katy would have bet that you couldn’t melt Dylan and pour him into a delivery room.

Laura beamed. “The kids say I owe it all to you and that magic wand they gave to you,” she said with a mischievous gleam in her eyes. “They’re probably right. After all, who else would have forked out hard cash for those magnificent glass slippers? They made it impossible for me to turn down the pleas of my Prince Charming.”

The two women laughed together, reliving the trials and tribulations leading up to the happy melding last year of Matt and his daughter with Laura and her son into one big happy family.

Katy had been a willing participant with the children in bringing about the union of two people obviously meant to spend their lives together. Yielding to the children’s pleas, she’d bought the ugliest and biggest plastic shoes in the world for Prince Charming to slip upon the dainty feet of his Cinderella. To avoid any last-minute complications, Jessica and Zach had also made and decorated a “magic wand” out of a paper plate and a dowel, presenting it to Katy as their own special Fairy Godmother. Getting into the spirit of the occasion, Katy had waved that wand around with more enthusiasm than verve.

“And,” Laura added, “I see you’ve brought your wand with you today. Are we going to need a little magic?”

“Laura, I need a lot of magic. My family is driving me nuts about—”

“Laura, Laura, we need you at the head table.” Rawhide’s Mayor Marilyn Rogers appeared to whisk Laura away to the place of honor. Throughout the luncheon, throughout the opening of baby gifts, Katy remained uncharacteristically quiet, in the background, with a half-sad smile pasted on her face.

All this hoop-de-doo couldn’t help but remind her of her own failings. Thirty and single, her entire family was on her back to marry and reproduce—as if it were that simple. She couldn’t exactly wave her magic wand—as successful as it had been in the past—and conjure up a Romeo of her own.

If she could, she certainly would. A movement near the door caught her eye and she saw Dylan Cole enter. He hesitated, looking around for a table. She could only hope he didn’t notice the empty one directly behind where she sat.

She and Dylan couldn’t be in the same room for five minutes without launching into battle. It had been that way all their lives, even back in grammar school when he and his buddy Matt Reynolds had made her life miserable.

She turned her back on him just in time to see Laura pull a beautiful hand-made baby quilt from a brightly wrapped box. Good thing mother isn’t here to see this, Katy thought darkly. Lovely and feminine, Laura was the daughter her mother should have had, she thought gloomily even as she applauded enthusiastically. Instead, her mother had got a daughter who grew up a wild tomboy ready to take on the world.

On her thirtieth birthday last October 25, Katy had thought her mother and grandmother were going to hold a wake. And this year, she realized, would be even worse. Her grandmother’s health had deteriorated, her mother reported weekly, and Grandma’s only wish was “to see Katy settled before I die.”

“Settled,” to the Andrews family, meant married, preferably with children.

Throughout lunch and the opening of gifts, Katy mentally reviewed every man she knew in or near the town of Rawhide and came up short. There wasn’t a single suitable husband for her in all the land—and she knew them all. Born and raised here, now in her seventh year as a reporter at the local paper, it was no exaggeration to say she knew everyone.

The shower wound to a close. Katy remained in her seat while Laura said her good-byes and thank-yous, then approached to sink gratefully, if ungracefully, into the chair she’d occupied earlier.

“Isn’t everyone nice?” Laura gushed. “To go to so much trouble for me is just—”

“Natural,” Katy inserted, “because you’re so nice, Laura.”

Laura smiled. “I don’t know about that, but I do know that I’m so happy I sometimes think I’m just going to burst with it.” Leaning across the table, she patted Katy’s hand. “In fact, I’m so happy that I want all my friends to share in it. Lately, I’ve been getting this uncontrollable urge to play matchmaker. Isn’t that awful?”

“Start with me,” Katy said fervently. “Laura, my mom and grandmother are driving me nuts. They’re after me constantly to get married, like I’m against men or something! It’s been so long since I even had a date that I’m not sure I remember how to act.”

Laura squeezed the hand beneath hers. “It’s like riding a bike. You never forget.”

“Don’t be too sure.” Katy fingered the unpainted dowel supporting her magic wand. “Makes me sorry this magic wand doesn’t really work. I’d sure like to conjure up a fiancé to keep my family off my back and Grandma alive for another year.”

Snatching up the wand, she gave it a sharp crack over her head. It whapped into somebody or something, and she froze, afraid to look. Her horrified gaze begged Laura to tell her she hadn’t smacked some little old lady.

Laura laughed. “Hi, Dylan. What are you doing skulking around behind us that way?”

“Dylan!” Katy twisted in her chair. “Thank heaven it’s only you. I was afraid I’d hurt somebody.” She waited for him to make some sarcastic remark.

He stood there rubbing his right elbow, one eyebrow cocked while he looked down at the two women with a calculating expression on his face. A local rancher, he wore the uniform of his trade: denim pants, plaid shirt, boots and hat. Many women had raved to Katy about his good looks but she couldn’t see it; all she could see was the kid who’d pestered her and tried to get the best of her nearly her entire life.

When he simply continued looking at them with that unfamiliar gleam in his eye, she added, “That’s what you get for sneaking around behind people. What are you doing back there?”

“Eavesdropping.” He said it as if it were a virtue. “Mind if I join you?” He plopped down in an empty chair and placed his hat on the table, brim up.

“Yes, I mind,” Katy said, not expecting him to pay that the slightest attention, which he didn’t. “And you’ve got some nerve, eavesdropping on a private conversation.”

“Yeah, I do.” He gave them both a winsome smile. “I couldn’t help but overhear.”

“Couldn’t help? We were hardly shouting.”

“Katy,” he drawled, “you’ve got a voice that could shatter glass. I just seem to hear it above any hubbub.”

That brought a reluctant smile. “Okay,” she said ungraciously, “you eavesdropped. Now I suppose you have some caustic comment to make.”

“No.” He looked offended. “Look, you need a fiancé in name only. You can’t help it if you’re a wallflower.”

This was the Dylan she knew. “So?” She felt her cheeks grow hot with embarrassment. It was one thing to confide her lack of sex appeal to her best friend but quite another to discover an old adversary had also heard.

“So…” He sucked in a deep breath. “Surprise! So do I.”

For a moment she simply stared at him. Then she said, “I beg your pardon? So do you, what?”

“Need a fiancée,” he said patiently.

“For what? If this is a joke, Dylan Cole, so help me I’ll—”

“It’s no joke,” he said quickly. “Calm down, Katy. See, since Matt got married I seem to have become the favorite target of every love-starved female in town. Plus, Brandee’s back in town.”

“Brandee Haycox? Head cheerleader, homecoming queen, all-around Miss Popularity—that Brandee Haycox?”

“Ha-ha,” he said, “very funny. There’s only one Brandee Haycox.”

“Which has what to do with you? Last I heard, she’d gone off to run a health club in Denver or some such.”

“And now she’s healthy and she’s moved back again.” He squirmed in his chair. “And she…uh…seems determined to add me to her list of conquests, if you know what I mean.” He gave a self-conscious shrug of wide shoulders. “My spirit is unwilling but my flesh is weak. I gotta do something to protect myself, fast.”

Laura looked puzzled. “I don’t get it, Dylan. Can’t you just tell her you’re not interested?”

“I am interested—heck, a man would have to be dead not to be—but not in any long-term way, if you get my drift. I need someone to save me from myself.”

“Or save Brandee,” Katy said, annoyed because it seemed to her that he was trivializing her own problem, which was much more serious—i.e., more important—than his own. “Good grief, Dylan, you’ve never been a wimpy sort of guy. Just avoid her—avoid all of them.”

He gritted his teeth. “It’s not a matter of wimpy, it’s a matter of survival. And there’s something else.” He looked disgusted. “Since Brandee’s daddy owns just about everything in this town, including the bank that holds my mortgage, I’d just as soon not offend his baby girl.”

Katy nodded emphatically. “Okay, I get it. So your plan is to…what?”