Bedroom Eyes

There was something about the unexpected quiet tone of Anne’s voice that made Bettina think that she knew firsthand about deceit and hurt. Bettina found herself drawn to this woman. She liked that Anne cared about her mother. She liked even more that Anne felt uncomfortable with the lie. “Would you care for a cup of tea, Anne?”

“No, thanks.” Anne took a quick look at her watch and visibly made the effort to recapture her professional demeanor. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”

“Just Bettina. I try to live the fantasy I sell.”

“Bettina, I really need to get this done. Please show me what you have so that I can get back to my office.”

Bettina leaned back in her chair. “It doesn’t work quite that way. Your application tells me about your tastes, the kind of flowers you like, music, candy, gifts. Next we build a history for your fiancé, I provide you with a photograph and we start the fantasy courtship. Your fiancé may not be a real man but we have to make the people around you believe he is. Do you have any questions?”

“Yes. Where do you get your photographs?”

“I use models. But you don’t have to worry. Nobody will recognize your fiancé.” Bettina picked up Anne’s application. “If you’re ready, I’d like you to tell me about yourself in your own words.”

Anne sighed impatiently. “I work for Bundles of Joy, a baby products manufacturing company. The man who owns the company—the man my mother seems to have elevated to the top of her eligible bachelors list—believes that people who have children have some mysterious, inborn instinct for selling to others like themselves. I thought I’d have time to prove to him that he’s wrong. Now, one of the vice presidents is retiring and I’m in line for the job.”

“Wonderful,” Bettina said.

“It would be except my chief rival has a perfect husband and two perfect children. I don’t.”

“Do you like children?” Bettina asked curiously.

“I love children,” she said, tugging at her skirt again. Then she added in a voice so low that Bettina could barely hear, “I just don’t plan to have any. And the only husband I will ever have is the one you’re providing.”

The quick flash of angst in Anne’s eyes said more than her words. Bettina had seen that look before, in her brother’s eyes. He didn’t talk about it, but when he was in Hawaii there was an island girl he cared about. Then she died and he became a wanderer determined never to put down roots again.

Using only the name Dane, her brother photographed every rain forest, every archeological dig, and every big news event in the world. He’d built a reputation that guaranteed his choice of assignments and the income to support his vow never to stay in one place. There were no more island girls but at least one or two children with faces of despair found their way into every shoot. Except for two portraits an art gallery had sold, Mitchell filed the rest away in portfolios in a trunk in her basement.

Children and families didn’t fit into the very different lifestyles of either Mitchell or Anne. That’s when the answer came to her. She opened her desk drawer, fishing out the original file of the models she’d used to open her agency. She’d give Anne Harris the perfect fiancé. She’d give her Mitchell. And maybe, if she and Faylene put their heads together, they could figure out how to make Anne’s imaginary fiancé real.

“I think I have just the man you need. Let me tell you about Mitchell Dane.”

1

“THIS IS ANNE HARRIS, again,” the low, breathy voice whispered into the answering machine. “I must get in touch with the model who posed for the photograph of Mitchell Dane. I need him desperately.”

Mitchell listened to the latest message in dismay. He didn’t have to answer his sister’s phone, just check the messages and report any emergencies. In the time it had taken him to put away pancakes and scrambled eggs this morning, Anne Harris had left three messages, each more urgent than the one before. But that wasn’t what had him strung tighter than a bow. It was that the woman’s voice asked for Mitchell.

“I know it’s against your policy, Bettina, but,” she went on, trying unsuccessfully to hide the tremor in her voice with sharpness, “I simply have to reach him.”

He’d strangle Bettina when she returned. This little interlude had been only intended for picking up his mail and dropping off his latest photographs on his way to a photo shoot in North Carolina. The minute Bettina learned he was en route, she suddenly decided to visit their brother in Wyoming.

Granted, a one-woman business tied her down and he did owe her for being his clearinghouse since he didn’t keep a permanent address. But a storage locker in her basement and the occasional use of her spare bedroom didn’t quite equal the problem that seemed to be building. When he’d agreed to handle any emergency that came up, he’d assumed she meant leaking faucets or loss of electric power. What kind of emergency could you have with an imaginary lover?

The whole idea of pretend boyfriends had been crazy from the start. Five years ago, when Bettina had explained she planned a service that provided photos of imaginary lovers who sent gifts and made telephone calls to women, he and his brothers had howled.

She’d come to him because she needed photographs of attractive, sexy men. They had to be the kind of man every woman would fantasize about. Since she was just starting out and had no money to pay for professional models, her plan was to use her own brothers. They’d laughed louder and turned her down. But she was serious and, eventually, because they all lived away from the area, they’d agreed, providing Mitchell did the photography.

Photographing Jess and Ran to look sexy had been a hoot. Forcing his brothers to pose for cheesy beefcake pictures had gotten back at them for all the trouble they’d caused him as teenagers. If there had been such a thing as a catalog for Victor’s Secret, he could have made a fortune contracting out the Dane brothers as cover models. Finally, at Bettina’s insistence, he’d thrown in a couple of shots of himself made in Hawaii. Their photos were to have been temporary until she could afford to pay real models. He’d been assured they’d been retired as Bettina’s bachelors long ago.

But Anne Harris was using his name.

“Where are you, Bettina? Call me the minute you come in, or everything I’ve worked for will be lost,” she said and hung up.

Vacation or not, he didn’t care. Mitchell dialed his brother’s ranch in Wyoming and got his answering machine. “Listen, Bettina,” he snapped, “I know I swore an oath that I wouldn’t bother you unless it was a matter of life and death, but you’d better know there’s a woman named Anne Harris who sounds pretty desperate. I think you’d better call her.”

An hour passed. No Bettina. Mitchell paced the condo that served as his sister’s living quarters and her place of business, and a permanent address for Mitchell Dane as well. He considered his options. He could have called the woman himself if she’d left her number. She hadn’t. He searched for Bettina’s address book but didn’t find one.

Anne Harris was either a client of Bachelor-in-a-Box or a potential one. If she was already signed up, she knew the rules. The contracts lying on Bettina’s desk plainly said, No contact between bachelors and clients.

Mitchell propped his feet on his sister’s desk and tried not to feel responsible. Bettina was a big girl now, and this was her business. But the tight, low voice on the answering machine had imprinted itself on his mind and wouldn’t go away. Too agitated to sit still, Mitchell replayed the tape. Annoyed that he felt a responsibility toward Anne Harris, he finally decided that it wasn’t her problem that stirred him, it was her voice—intriguing, polished, with a hint of a honeyed Southern accent. The throaty whisper brought to mind visions of hot tropic nights, of moonlight and wild orchids. He tried to imagine the face that went with that voice.

Then he considered the kind of woman who went out and bought a man. She was probably shy, a woman who lived her life through the movies and resorted to an imaginary lover to convince her girlfriends that she had someone who cared. He found himself trying to fit that kind of woman to the sexy voice. They didn’t match.

Creative curiosity was part of every photographer’s psyche, though of late he’d felt less and less curious. After too many long nights, extended flights and lonely assignments, everything looked the same. He rarely remembered the country…except for the children. Their faces haunted him. He felt responsible for every one of them.

But this woman caught his interest. Mitchell leaned back in his chair, thinking about her. His analysis started with what kind of woman would pay for a pretend lover, but it ended with why his sister had given Anne Harris his name.

Moments later, the phone rang once more. “Bettina, this is Anne again. Believe me when I tell you that I have a life-threatening situation here.” The voice was even tighter, lower. “It’s complicated, but I desperately need my pretend fiancé to become real, just for two days. It’s not just my job, but my mother’s future depends on it. You have to help me get in touch with the model who posed for my picture. I’ll pay him a thousand dollars for two days of his time.” She sighed. “Please, Bettina, you and my mother got me into this; now you have to help me.”

Bettina got Ms. Harris into a life-threatening situation that now threatened her mother? Mitchell groaned. For all he knew, this kind of thing happened all the time. But now he was worried. If Bettina was liable, some of the responsibility fell on him. He’d helped make his sister’s idiotic idea a reality. Now she’d left him in charge.

And this woman was looking for Mitchell. Why?

Why was she willing to pay a thousand dollars for two days of bachelor work? It might as well be called gigolo work—an intriguing idea. He smiled. He didn’t know what Mitchell was worth, but two days of Dane the professional photographer was a lot more expensive.

“I’ll take full responsibility for the weekend,” she promised.

She’d have to take the responsibility. Taking responsibility for someone else was a thing he knew well. When his father died, he’d turned a part-time job in a photographer’s studio into a seven-day work week while completing high school. He’d been a swimmer, with hopes of a scholarship. But as the breadwinner, swimming, dances, girls—all had to be left behind. Later, when Ran, Jess and Bettina were old enough to go out on their own, he took a gofer job with a photographer on assignment in Hawaii. For the next three years he’d lived the life of a beach bum, working only to buy film and supplies. Little by little, he learned and finally started to sell.

For Mitchell, Hawaii was freedom. Hawaii was life and beauty rejuvenating itself. Hawaii was Melia, a beautiful dark-haired native girl who became his model and his mate. They were young and reckless, drunk on moonlight and making love. Then he landed an assignment to photograph a waterfall in a wilderness area generally bypassed because native superstition warned that it was a sacred place.

A dozen times they’d gone into the rain forest, climbed rocky paths that led almost straight up, put themselves into danger to capture the beauty of the islands. But this time he’d had second thoughts about taking her. She’d begged him. “Please,” she’d said over and over, kissing him wantonly until at last he agreed. But this assignment had been different from the start. It rained nonstop. When the rain didn’t keep them away, the island gods reached down and reminded the intruders that they were unwelcome.

Melia fell to her death from the top of the falls. He didn’t know until later that she was carrying his child. Suddenly the beauty of the island was gone. He threw himself into his work, swore he’d never be responsible for another person again and began the nomad life he’d lived ever since. But he saw the face of the child he’d lost everywhere he went.

And now, he was responsible for this Anne Harris with the come-hither voice, whether he wanted to be or not. But it wasn’t personal, he told himself. He was simply helping his sister.

Then he realized that she hadn’t hung up the phone. He could hear a faint, jerky rumble, as if she’d laid the phone against her chest and he was hearing her heart beat. He thought at first that she was crying, then he realized that she was muttering to herself under her breath, cursing in a way he hadn’t heard a woman do since the breakdown of a bus hauling a group of models to a desert shoot in Arizona. The words seemed to be directed at men in general. His slumbering curiosity went up another notch.

Then her muttering softened. “Please?” she whispered, speaking into the receiver again.

An unwelcome jolt of heat hit his loins and he clenched his teeth. Not only did the woman have the sexiest voice he’d ever heard, she’d said please. She needed him. Before he realized what he was doing, he’d picked up the phone. “I’ll take the job. But you’d better know, I travel first class and I don’t do things halfway.”

There was a long silence. “What number do I have?” she asked, suddenly suspicious.

He repeated the number, adding, “You called Bettina, didn’t you? Well, she’s out of town.”

“Of course. First my mother disappears, now Bettina,” the voice said, then asked, “Who are you?”