Bait & Switch (3 page)

“I’ll be just a minute.” Mitch listened to the phone ring at his Atlanta apartment, then figured he better embellish his answer. “Nature calls.”

“You’re not calling nature on that telephone,” she yelled back. “What do you think I am? An idiot?”

“Of course I don’t think you’re an idiot,” Mitch answered just as Cary picked up the phone.

“I don’t think I am, either,” Cary said. “But thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“I wasn’t talking to you.” Mitch wondered how much the blonde could hear through the door. “For you, I’d use stronger language. Like inconsiderate and irresponsible.”

“What’d I do now? And why are you whispering?”

“Come out of there this instant,” the blonde demanded loudly.

“Who’s with you?” Cary asked.

Mitch gritted his teeth to keep from yelling. “That’s what I was going to ask you.”

“How would I know? I’m in Atlanta, bro. I can’t see who’s yelling at you.”

“She’s yelling at
you
. Except she doesn’t know I’m not you, and I don’t know who she is.”

Three quick raps sounded on the door. Mitch held the receiver out so his brother could identify the voice. “This hiding in the bathroom won’t work,” the blonde yelled.

“Almost through,” Mitch called back. He brought the receiver back to his ear and asked in a soft voice, “Did you recognize her voice?”

“You’re hiding in the bathroom?” Cary asked.

“Never mind that. I need to know who this blonde is and why she’s yelling at me.”

“What’s she look like?”

“She’s gorgeous. About five feet six with short blonde hair and freckles.” Mitch thought. “Oh, yeah. She drives a horse and carriage.”

“That has to be Peyton, although I wouldn’t call her gorgeous.” Cary sounded thoughtful. “Attractive, for sure. But not gorgeous.”

“Who exactly is Peyton to you?”

“My girlfriend,” Cary answered.

Mitch’s stomach fell so hard he thought it would hit the floor. It couldn’t be. The delectable blonde couldn’t belong to his brother.

“You said you didn’t have a girlfriend,” Mitch protested. Cary especially hadn’t said he had a girlfriend who looked like the embodiment of everything Mitch wanted in a woman.

On the other end of the line, Cary grimaced. He should have told Mitch about Peyton. Then again, he couldn’t be expected to think of everything. The woman was so unpredictable, he never knew what she’d do next. He’d guessed Splitsville, but there she was in his home.

“I didn’t think I’d still have a girlfriend after I failed to show up for dinner with the Ayatollah and his Mrs. last night.”

“The Supreme Leader of Iran?”

Cary laughed. “The Ayatollah McDowell. Her father. He’s the city solicitor, which is what they call a district attorney in Charleston. Peyton wanted me to make a good impression.”

“No wonder she’s so angry.”

“That’s my best guess,” Cary said. In the background, he could hear more pounding. He had to say one thing for Peyton. She would never drop dead of a heart attack because she bottled up her emotions.

“She’s angry enough to break up with you,” Mitch said.

Truth be told, Peyton wasn’t Cary’s type. He’d approached her at a Charleston night spot about a month ago mostly because she had a wild way of dancing. They’d break up eventually, but Cary wasn’t ready for that to happen. For one thing, Peyton was oddly appealing. For another, he’d yet to discover if that wild part of her nature played out in bed.

He wasn’t at all sure his big brother could make things right in Charleston. But if Mitch managed the improbable, it’d be nice to have something worthwhile to return to.

“Can you talk her out of it?” Cary asked.

“How am I supposed to do that?”

He thought of Betty Lou Sorenson, a high school girlfriend who’d caught him making out with Anna somebody or other the summer before their senior year. Betty Lou had been ready to rake her nails down his face until Mitch soothed the savage beast with talk of teenage boys and hormones gone haywire.

“You’ve done it before,” Cary said. “You can do it again.”

Silence filled the other end of the phone before Mitch broke it. “She means that much to you?”

She didn’t, not really. But if he admitted the truth to Mitch, Peyton was as good as gone from his life. And he didn’t want to lose her. Not yet, anyway. He made his voice sound pitiful. “Please, Mitch. Do it for me.”

Mitch didn’t answer, which meant Cary would once again get his way. His brother was being such a good sport about everything that, for an instant, Cary considered telling him he had no intention of remaining in Atlanta. He might have if he weren’t sure Mitch would dream up some reason Cary should stay put. Some reason sure to fill Cary with guilt.

Cary could hear more pounding on the bathroom door in the Charleston he’d left behind.

“Sounds like you’ve gotta go, bro,” Cary said. “You’re the best, you know that?”

He hung up without waiting for an answer, walked purposefully to the door and picked up his suitcase. He had a fleeting thought of Mitch and the mess he’d left him to deal with before he dismissed it and walked out the door.

His brother could handle whatever was thrown at him. It wasn’t as though Cary were abandoning Mitch. He’d call him in a couple of days. Whenever he got to where he was going.

Peyton McDowell stared at the locked door, willing her temper to cool and trying to get her breathing back under control.

Her parents would be mortified if they knew she’d been huffing, puffing and trying to blow the bathroom door down. They’d drilled into her every day of her life that she had an image to uphold.

Her doting parents, who loved her all the more because they couldn’t have other children, only asked that she take her rightful place in Charleston society. They’d sent her to the city’s most exclusive school for girls, groomed her into a debutante and given her everything she wanted.

Their fondest dream was that she one day marry a man with a Charleston lineage as illustrious as their own two-hundred-year legacy.
 

Yet here she was, acting out of control in the home of somebody her parents would deem most inappropriate. Especially in light of what he’d done last night.

Heck, she’d known he was unsuitable herself from the moment she’d met him. But he’d been fun and good-looking and outrageously flirtatious, all of the things the suitable men of Charleston were not.
 

She’d never imagined, not for a second, that the relationship would last. She didn’t even want it to. She simply yearned to have a little fun with someone less stuffy than the taxidermy specials her parents were always thrusting at her.

Except dating Cary had ceased to be fun.

Expelling a long breath, she turned and walked away just as she heard the bathroom door open. She lifted her chin in the regal manner her mother had taught her and kept moving.

“Peyton, wait.”

“Why should I?” she tossed over her shoulder. “I don’t know why I got involved with you in the first place. You’re egotistical, arrogant and inconsiderate.”

“Give me a chance to explain.” Footsteps sounded behind her.

She paused, curious as to what he would say. It wasn’t as though she’d been dying for him to meet her parents. It was way too early in their relationship for that. But when they’d gotten past date four, her mother had insisted on inviting him to dinner. He shouldn’t have accepted if he were going to stand up the whole family.

She stood, waiting.

“I’d rather not explain to your back,” he said.

She slowly turned around, which was a mistake. One of the things that had attracted her to Cary was his appearance. He looked far better today than he ever had.

His dark hair was mussed instead of perfectly groomed and his blue eyes seemed softer, like the sky on a hazy day. She’d never seen him anything other than perfectly shaved, and she liked the slightly rumpled air the stubble on his lower face lent him. Even his mouth seemed different: gentler, more sensuous.

But it was his bare chest that commanded most of her attention. Cary Mitchell’s upper torso looked as though it were fit for a god. Light brown hair sparsely covered a broad, muscular roadmap of perfection. She had the insane desire to swoon.

She pursed her lips so she wouldn’t ask him for a bucket of water to toss over her head. How odd. She’d never reacted this way to him before. Was it because this was the first time she’d seen him shirtless?

She heard a honking sound in the background, but she couldn’t quite place where it was coming from.

“That’s better.” He smiled at her. Funny how that smile had never quite seemed to reach his eyes before now. She steeled herself against him, recalling the embarrassment he’d caused her the night before.

“Don’t bother explaining. Absolutely nothing you say will matter.” Peyton managed to glare at him. “We’re through.”

Even though he’d predicted this moments ago on the phone to his brother, Mitch wasn’t ready for it. How could they be through when he’d just found her? Not that he would let himself, even for a single second, think of his brother’s girl as his own.

“Breaking up with me is a bad idea.” He tried to come up with a reason why. For Cary’s sake. “You wouldn’t have gone out with me in the first place if you wanted to break up with me.”

She put her hands on her sweetly rounded hips. “That’s nuts.”

Okay. Bad reason. He tried to think of another one, but it was difficult considering all the honking coming from the street. Ah, what the heck. If Peyton were his girl and he was in danger of losing her, he’d go straight to begging.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’re sorry?” Peyton blinked her big, soda-pop eyes. “I thought apologizing went against your grain. Aren’t you always saying what’s done is done?”

She was right. Cary did say that.

“I am,” Mitch agreed. “But, in this case, it was done poorly.”

“You’re not making sense.” She didn’t know the half of it.

“That’s because you haven’t let me explain,” he said.

“How can you possibly explain blowing off dinner with my parents? You must have guessed how humiliating it would be for me.”

Mitch took a breath, relieved he could at least utter one sentence that was true. “I’d never deliberately hurt you.”

She gazed at him, and he knew she was wondering how much she could believe. He didn’t blame her. Cary meant well, but he had a habit of spinning a situation to suit his own purposes. It wasn’t lying, exactly, but neither was it the truth.

“Then why didn’t you show up for dinner last night?” she asked.

He hesitated, not wanting to lie to her, and saw resignation fall over her face. “There was this guy in a harness dangling over the bridge,” he blurted out.

“The Cooper River Bridge?” She named the enormous span that connected peninsular Charleston to Mount Pleasant. He’d been referring to a bridge in Atlanta but nodded anyway. The time and place might not be true, but the story was.

“He was up there smoking cigarettes, drinking whiskey, singing old Janis Joplin songs.” Mitch snapped his fingers. “Oh. And eating Ho Hos.”

“Ho Hos?”

“Those little chocolate cakes with the creamy white centers. He said they were delicious.” Mitch scratched his chin. “Although I never did figure out what Ho Hos had to do with Janis Joplin.”

“You talked to him?” she asked. Wariness had replaced the resignation.

“Sure. He was tying up traffic. I was trying to get him to come down.”

“You were trying to talk the drunk down?” Her eyebrows lifted, and he realized his mistake. As a cop, Mitch talked to nuts holding up rush-hour traffic. Cary didn’t. “Why would
you
of all people be doing that?”

Good question. He made up an answer. “Because I was in front of the line of cars?” Judging by her expression, the answer wasn’t good enough. “And he liked me. I told him I believed he was Bobby McGee.”

“Who’s Bobby McGee?”

“You know. From the Janis Joplin song.” He was no singer but attempted to put melody to a couple of lines. “Bobby McGee used to make her feel good when he sang the blues.”

“And making Bobby feel better took all night?” Her voice was steeped in suspicion. “You couldn’t break away long enough to call me?”

“Bobby had a knife. I was afraid he’d cut himself loose.”

She scrunched up her nose. She even looked a tad sympathetic, which filled Mitch with fresh guilt. “What happened next?”

“The police sneaked a cable onto his rope and lowered him to the ground. Turned out he was depressed over Janis dying.”

“Janis Joplin died like forty years ago.”

“Yeah, well, he didn’t know that. He hadn’t been a fan for long.”

She grew silent, which made the incessant honking seem louder. She rose her voice to be heard above the cacophony. “Why didn’t you call and explain?”

A few of her blonde hairs were close to falling in her eye. He reached out and brushed back the strands, enjoying their silky texture. “It was late by the time I got to a phone,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

 
She bit her full lower lip, an action he couldn’t fully appreciate because of the continued honking.

“Why wasn’t this in the newspaper?” she asked.

Another excellent question. Too bad he’d run out of his supply of plausible answers. “Reporters can’t be everywhere?”

Her expression hardened and she took a step backward, breaking the contact. “Yeah, right. At least it was more entertaining than your other excuses.”

“See, I’m improving.” Mitch latched on to the positive and ran with it. “Don’t do this to us, Peyton. Give us another chance.” Her expression wavered, so he went for the trump card. “Please.”

She shook her head as she gazed at him, but the flintiness had gone out of her eyes. “I shouldn’t.”

He reached across the chasm and captured her hand, lazily drawing circles on her palm. “But you’re going to anyway,” he said, hoping he was right.

She considered their linked hands. For one awful moment, he thought she’d yank her hand from his. Then she raised her head, and he saw the resignation in her face even before she nodded. He smiled. She shook the index finger of her free hand at him.