Dad's E-Mail Order Bride (2 page)

But did she really look so different in person than she did in her pictures? Or was Graham one of those guys who only got into the fantasy part of an online relationship? Now that she was actually standing on his dock in the flesh, all of the interest was gone.

But why send her the airplane ticket?

Why invite her to his birthday party tomorrow?

Why lie to her on so many different levels?

What a disaster!

Had her best friend Beth not given her a membership to an online dating service for her birthday as a joke, Courtney never would have known about a Web site called LoveFromAlaska.com. And she certainly wouldn’t have been suckered by the man walking toward her now, who had obviously changed his mind.

But turning thirty-five had hit her like the big wrecking ball she’d used in one of her most successful ad campaigns. And the catchy slogan she’d come up with for the career placement service had been: “Break out of your going-nowhere life.”

For once, Courtney had taken her own advice.

And what had it gotten her? A trip all the way across country only to be rejected by the very man who had invited her to come.

Still,
Courtney thought,
what a shame.

She’d been so sure Graham Morrison was the real thing.

He stopped in front of her. And as luck would have it, he was even
better
looking in person. Thick, black hair. Rock-hard body. Dark brown eyes she could easily get lost in.

He cleared his throat and said, “There’s obviously been some mistake here.”

“You think?” Courtney shot back.

He seemed surprised by her sarcasm.

“It’s also obvious you can hear every word I’m saying,” Courtney said. “Why would you lie about something so serious, Graham? Why would you say you lost your hearing in an explosion while you were clearing land for the lodge?”

“What?” he bellowed back at her.

Courtney’s eyes narrowed. “Well, isn’t this convenient? You miraculously have your hearing back, but now you’ve lost your memory!”

“Now, look here,” he began.

“No, you look here,” Courtney told him. “Are you really going to stand there and pretend we haven’t been corresponding on the Internet since February? That you didn’t invite me to your birthday party tomorrow? And that you didn’t pay for my airplane ticket to get here?”

Before he could answer, Courtney dug into her purse and pulled out the card that had finally made her decide to come to Alaska.

Love from Alaska, Graham.

He frowned. “This is my daughter’s handwriting.”

“Rachel wrote that?”

Now he looked concerned. “How do you know Rachel?”

Courtney snatched the card back. “You know perfectly well how I know Rachel. She calls me every night.”

Or did he know that?

The thought made Courtney gasp.

He kept staring at her.

And Courtney said, “You really don’t know who I am, do you?”

“No,” he said. “Who are you?”

Courtney needed to sit down.

But there was nowhere to sit!

“I’m Courtney Woods,” she finally told him. “The idiot who’s been corresponding with your daughter pretending to be you.”

His expression said he’d figured that out already.

He headed down the dock for her suitcases. When he returned, he said, “I’m sorry, but that was—”

“The last flight out of here until Monday,” Courtney finished for him.

He nodded.

“And there aren’t any hotels in Port Protection.”

“No,” he confirmed, “there aren’t.”

“So, basically I guess that means—”

“It means you can stay at the lodge until Monday.”

He’d saved her from saying “you’re stuck with me.”

But they both knew that’s what he was thinking.

He motioned toward the path leading to the lodge. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “I’ll make some coffee while we sort this out.”

Lace my cup with strychnine,
Courtney prayed. All she wanted to do was curl into a ball and
die!

Graham simply wasn’t willing to take that chance.

Rachel was his responsibility. She was staying in Port Protection and that was final. Having his parents and his former in-laws irritated with him was old news.

But he blamed himself for not paying more attention to what his soon-to-be-punished daughter was doing on the Internet. And he also realized he shouldn’t have dismissed Rachel’s accusation that he didn’t want her to have a life because he didn’t have a life of his own.

That was the real reason Courtney Woods sat in the great room of the lodge now. Rachel obviously assumed if he had a girlfriend from New York City he would give in and move back.

He had news for Rachel.

He would never move back to New York City. And until Rachel reached eighteen and could legally do as she pleased, neither would she.

Graham walked out of the kitchen to where he’d left Courtney. Her chair faced the cathedral-style windows that made up the front of the lodge. The view of the cove and the snowcapped mountains in the distance was spectacular. Yet, Graham suspected the view was the last thing on Courtney’s mind at the moment.

She had to be disappointed that love was
not
waiting for her in Alaska as Rachel had led her to believe. Instead, all he had to offer Courtney was a promise that Rachel was going to regret the day she decided to play around with other people’s lives.

“Thanks,” she said when he handed her the cup.

Graham sat on the chair beside her, aware he should say something—anything—to lessen the gravity of such an awkward situation. He just couldn’t think of anything to say.

She saved him the trouble. “You have to give Rachel props for masterminding such a perfect plan. The hearing impaired excuse for why we couldn’t talk on the phone was brilliant.”

“Yeah, Rachel’s a real mastermind, all right,” Graham grumbled. “We’ll see if she can mastermind her way out of being banned from the Internet for the rest of her life.”

She laughed and said, “Well, she definitely used the Internet to her advantage. Your Web site for the lodge, for instance. Rachel backed up her hearing loss story by pointing out your phone number isn’t listed on your site.”

Graham shook his head in amazement. “The phone number isn’t listed any longer because I spent the first six months after I launched the Web site answering calls from people who were only shopping around for rates. I only contact people who are serious enough to e-mail me.”

He thought for a minute and said, “Rachel used the Internet to her advantage another way, too. I pay a flat fee for phone and Internet service, so she had no long-distance charges to worry about. And Rachel living with the phone glued to her ear is normal. I had no reason to suspect she wasn’t talking to her best friend instead of you.”

“Only one thing still bothers me,” she said. “Some of the e-mails Rachel sent were…” She paused. “Well, to put it bluntly, they were too mature for a girl her age.”

Mature?

Graham gulped.

Did she mean things of a sexual nature?

And how advanced
was
Rachel in that regard? They’d had the
sex talk
when she was twelve. To his relief, the subject had never come up again.

Graham was still trying to summon the courage to ask what she meant by
mature,
when Courtney placed her coffee cup on the end table between their two chairs, bent and picked up her purse from the floor. After pulling out a handful of papers, she unfastened the clip and handed them over.

“Rachel said you could read lips, but I was still worried we would have trouble communicating,” she said. “I printed out my favorite e-mails. I wanted to show them to you and tell you how much they touched me. Read them yourself. And then you tell me if those sound like the words of a teenage girl to you.”

Graham looked down at the first e-mail.

He shifted the papers to the next e-mail:

Maybe Courtney had been honest enough to admit how embarrassed and how gullible she felt. She’d even explained that if her demanding job had left any time for a personal life, she never would have been curious about the online membership her best friend had given her for her birthday. Still, Graham’s embarrassment reached a much deeper level.

A complete stranger had seen right into his soul.

Graham felt as gutted as a fresh fish fillet.

“Let me guess,” she said. “Everything I saved came from your journal. Didn’t it?”

She’d guessed right.

She reached out and touched his arm, an innocent gesture—unless you hadn’t felt a woman’s touch in years.

“I don’t blame you for being upset about your journal, Graham. Just don’t be too hard on Rachel, okay? Be angry with me. I should have paid more attention to other red flags that kept popping up.”

Graham finally looked over at her. “What other red flags?”

“Well, mainly the fact that Rachel only e-mailed me pretending to be you about twice a week. And she covered her bases by telling me how busy you were once fishing season started.”

“I am busy once fishing season starts,” Graham said. “But I’m still more at fault here than you are. I shouldn’t have been too busy to keep up with what my daughter was doing.”

“Thanks for trying to make me feel better,” she said. “But I insist on paying you for staying at the lodge this weekend. And I’ll certainly reimburse you for the plane ticket.”

“Absolutely not,” Graham said, shaking his head in protest. “If anything, I’m the one who should pay you for your inconvenience in flying all the way across the country. And for your mental anguish over all of this.”

“Mental anguish?” she repeated.

He’d obviously said the wrong thing. Her tone had changed from apologetic to terse. And the insulted expression on her face confirmed it.

“Look,” she said. “I don’t blame you for thinking I’m some desperate love-starved female because Rachel met me through an online dating site. But let’s not make this into some big catastrophe that it isn’t, okay?”

Graham started to say something, but she didn’t give him the chance.

“The way I see it, you and I are the adults here. And I’m pretty sure we’ll both survive the weekend without either of us having to go into therapy.”

Okay, she’d put him in his place.

Graham began backpedaling as fast as possible. “I don’t think you’re desperate, or love-starved, or anything else. All I meant by mental anguish was that no one enjoys being the brunt of a joke. I know I don’t. Rachel has embarrassed both of us. And I intend to teach her a lesson for being so thoughtless.”

She was making him extremely uncomfortable. First, saying how much the words he’d written had touched her. Then, her hand on his arm. Even her plea now to be easy on his daughter.

She was…dammit!

She was being too nice about the whole thing. Plus, she
was
a knockout. She was the type of woman who could knock him right out of his comfortable existence if he gave her half a chance—smart, sexy, bold enough to speak her mind.

But he’d been foolish to think she would spend one second lamenting the fact that Rachel had sent the e-mails instead of him. Career-focused or not, Courtney Woods was
not
the type of woman who had ever been lacking for male attention.

Graham tossed the e-mails onto the table, left his chair and walked to the window a safe distance away from her. It didn’t work. She walked up beside him.

They stood in silence, looking out over the cove.

“Rachel isn’t as brilliant as you think,” Graham said. “I inherited this lodge from my grandfather. He was the one who lost his hearing in one ear from an explosion clearing land for the lodge.”

He turned toward her and added, “But tell me the truth about something. Didn’t the hearing loss part bother you at all?”

“No,” she said. “In fact, I admired you. I found it heroic you hadn’t let the accident ruin your life.”

Graham let out a long sigh. “Well, at least you didn’t show up because you felt sorry for the poor deaf guy turning forty.”

“True,” she said. “I only felt sorry for the turning-forty part.”

They looked at each other.

And burst out laughing.

It was the icebreaker they’d needed to cut through the tension. And at that moment Graham realized Courtney could have been a real bitch about what Rachel had done. Courtney could have even threatened to sue him. And who would have blamed her? Instead, she was taking it all in stride, far better than he was at the moment.

“This whole thing really is funny when you think about it,” she said. “I can’t imagine what you were thinking down on the dock when I sounded out every word so carefully, making sure you could read my lips.”

Wisely, Graham didn’t mention the Russian hooker.

Instead, he said, “I know someone who’s going to be reading
my
lips when she gets home. I can promise you that.”

“And that’s what has me worried,” she said.

Graham looked over at her again.

Now she had her arms crossed, tapping the fingers of her right hand impatiently against her left arm. And that’s one thing Graham
didn’t
miss since he’d dropped out of society—the whole business of trying to figure any woman out.

It was exhausting.

However, if memory served him correctly, her ambiguous statement was his clue to say, “Meaning?”

She looked straight at him and said, “Meaning I’m not interested in being caught in the middle of a father-daughter fight all weekend, Graham.”

“So what are you suggesting? That I just pat Rachel on the head and laugh the whole thing off?”

“I’m suggesting you postpone any punishment until later,” she said. “Rachel has really worked hard on your birthday party tomorrow. And I shouldn’t tell you this, but she has a special surprise dinner planned for you tonight.”

“A dinner?” Graham repeated.

Courtney nodded. “Rachel planned out the menu herself, and I’m supposed to help her cook the meal. I hate to see all of her plans ruined.”

“You forget Rachel’s
planning
is the reason she’s in big trouble right now.”

An awkward silence passed between them.

She cocked her head in his direction. “You know, if you really want to teach Rachel a lesson, the best way to do that would be to beat her at her own game.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I think we’ve both figured out the reason I’m here is because Rachel thought if we hit it off, you’d be willing to move back to New York.”

“Tell me, Courtney,” Graham said. “Is there anything you don’t know about me and my daughter?”

She smiled. “I don’t know if you’re willing to play along with my idea yet.”

Okay, one thing he
did
miss since he’d dropped out of society was having a woman smile at him the way Courtney had done now—a flirty little smile, the type of smile only a dead man could resist.

“Keep talking,” Graham said.

“What if we let Rachel think her idea worked when she first gets home? But then we tell her instead of you moving back to New York, I’ve decided to move to Alaska to be with you?”

Graham laughed. “To quote Rachel’s favorite expression, she would totally freak out.”

“Exactly.” She smiled again.

It took Graham’s gaze right back to her moist, pink lips. Memories of that kiss on the dock didn’t help Graham’s common sense, either. And whether he liked to admit it or not, the knowledge that a beautiful woman like Courtney had flown across the country to meet him was a huge boost to his turning-forty ego.

Why not go along with Courtney’s idea?

She was right. It wasn’t fair to put her in the middle of their fight all weekend. The situation was already awkward enough.

He’d honor Courtney’s request and keep things civil for the weekend. He owed her that much after what Rachel had done. But after Courtney left, Rachel’s life was going to change drastically.

And that was a promise.

Graham stuck his hand out. “Okay, it’s a deal. Let’s show Rachel what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a bad joke.”