Snoops in the City (A Romantic Comedy) (12 page)

“Because I do. And because you’re way too good a person to leave me in the lurch.”

“You don’t understand, Eddie.” Tears welled in her eyes and she wiped one away. “I’m afraid I’ll make a mess of this.”

“Hey, I just watched you get rid of a client so you could have it out with me yourself. I know what you can do.”

She sniffed. “What’s that?”

“Anything you put your mind to.” He kissed her on the forehead. “All you've got to decide is what to put it to."

The ladies’ room on the first floor of Seahaven City Hall smelled of antiseptic cleaner and hand soap.

Lorelei wrinkled her nose and sprayed a cloud of perfume into the air, then walked with her arms outstretched through the fragrant mist.

There. Now all she needed was for the perfume to live up to its name.

Eau de Vixen.

Just in case perfume alone wouldn’t do the trick, she crossed to the mirror above the sink, puckered her lips and applied another layer of hot-pink gloss.

She ran a brush through her professionally tinted blond hair, pinched her cheeks and powdered her nose. Next she inched down her already low-cut blouse.

The mirror didn’t provide a view of the lower half of her body but she already knew she had exceptional legs. Long and lean with good calf definition. She’d showcased them by wearing a bright pink miniskirt.

She smacked her shimmering pink lips together and grinned at her reflection.

“You better be ready, Wade Morrison, because here I come,” she said aloud.

A few minutes later, finding the Tax Assessor Clerk’s desk vacant, she sashayed through the open door of his office.

Wade Morrison sat slumped over his desk, so engrossed in his paperwork that he didn’t look up. He held up a finger to indicate he’d be with her in a minute, and a corner of Lorelei’s mouth twitched with amusement.

His pale-yellow dress shirt wasn’t so much ugly this time as boring. She couldn’t say the same for his tie, a yellow-and-blue abomination that he wore loose around his neck.

With his glasses perched on his nose and his dark-brown hair a disheveled mess, he looked like a first-class nerd. Especially because the calculator at his fingertips and those creases in his forehead probably meant he was puzzling over some math problem.

She shuddered at the very thought. Thank goodness high school graduation had delivered her from the evil of math.

Wade didn’t seem to feel the same. His complete and unwavering concentration made her wonder what it would be like to be the recipient of his full attention.

She vowed to find out.

Before she could do that, she needed him to notice her. Especially since he seemed to have forgotten he’d heard somebody arrive.

“Hey, there, handsome,” she said into the silence.

His head jerked up, causing his glasses to slip even farther down his nose. She read slack-jawed shock on his face and had to clamp her lips to keep from laughing. He was too cute.

“Remember me? Lorelei Palmer from the mayor’s party?”

“I thought. . .” He pushed his glasses up his nose, cleared his throat and tried again. “I thought you were my clerk."

“Do I look like your clerk?”

He cleared his throat again. “Not hardly.”

He folded his hands on his desk and clenched them, seeming to strive to get himself under control. “What can I do for you?”

She thought about using a throaty voice to answer that she surely could think of something except feared he might go into apoplexy.

"I was in the vicinity and thought you could take me to lunch," she said, which was true only because she'd made it her point to be in the vicinity. She put some oomph into her steps as she moved toward him, enjoying the way his jaw loosened even more. “I’ll let you pick the place.”

He started shaking his head before she finished speaking. “I can’t.”

“Don’t tell me you’re one of those guys who eats lunch at his desk.”

He hesitated, causing her to peer at him more closely. Behind his glasses, his right eye looked red and watery. Moisture glistened on his cheek.

“What happened to your eye?”

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head.

“Something happened.”

“I got poked, that’s all. It’s not a big deal.”

“It is, too, a big deal.” She came around the desk, not stopping until she could reach out and touch him. “Take off your glasses,” she ordered.

“That’s not necessary.”

“I say it is. Now take them off so I can see what you did.”

“It was only a finger—”

“Take them off,” she repeated with even more authority. This time, he complied.

He squinted, obviously sensitive to the overhead florescent light. She leaned close. She loved a man who wore cologne but couldn’t smell any on his skin, which had a clean, appealing scent nevertheless. Breathing it in, she gently pried his eye open with her thumb and forefinger.

The color of his iris reminded her of the cherrywood dining-room furniture at her parents’ house. The white of his eye, however, was red and inflamed.

Excessive tearing made it difficult for her to get a good look at the injury.

“I think your cornea is scratched,” she said. “You need to see an eye doctor. He’ll give you some medicated drops and it’ll heal in a couple of days.”

“Are you a nurse?”

“Me? A nurse?” She took her hand from his face and straightened. “Why would you ask such a silly question?’

He wiped the moisture from under his eye with a fingertip and put his glasses back on. “You seem to know what you’re talking about.”

“I volunteered at a hospital for a summer when I was in high school,” she confessed, “but it was so not me.”

“I don’t know about that. You have a nice bedside manner.” He didn’t quite meet her eyes.

The guy was so shy he’d probably hide under his desk if she informed him she was better in bed than beside it. Okay. That was too forward. But she was making inroads here.

“Does that mean you’ll go to lunch with me?” she asked.

He stared down at his desk, not a good sign. Before he could refuse, she continued, “No, of course you can’t go. What was I thinking? You need to have that eye looked at.”

He nodded, obviously relieved.

“How about dinner?” she asked.

“Dinner’s not a good idea,” he said quickly.

“Why not?” she asked before a terrible possibility occurred to her. “Oh, no. Grady was wrong, wasn’t he? You
are
married.”

His brows knitted, and she braced herself to hear that he was off limits. Despite the free-and-easy act she sometimes put on to get Grady’s goat, she wouldn’t date a married man.

“Are you related to Grady Palmer of Palmer Construction?” He phrased it as a question but it sounded like an accusation.

"He’s my brother,” she said, “and you didn’t answer my question.”

His reluctance either meant he didn’t want her to know he was available or he was already taken. She suspected it was the former.

“For the record,” she continued, “I asked if you were married.”

“I’m not married,” he finally said.

“Engaged?”

“No.”

"Gay?"

"No!"

“Seeing somebody exclusively?”

“Well, no.”

“Then what's the problem? Don’t you find me attractive?”

If he denied it, she'd know he was lying. He didn’t even try.“That’s not it.”

Lorelei threw up her hands. “What then?"

His shoulders rose, then fell. “You’re twenty-one years old, and—”

“We’ve already been over how my age is so not a big deal,” Lorelei interrupted.

“You didn’t let me finish."

She swept her hand through the air with a flourish. “By all means, finish.”

“And I have responsibilities that leave me no time for a woman like you.”

“You can’t possibly know what kind of woman I am,” she said indignantly. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know you like to have fun.”

“And I know you have too little of it,” she shot back.

He ran a hand over his forehead. “You don’t understand.”

“Have dinner with me and explain."

She held her breath, sure he'd refuse. After a moment, she sensed that he arrived at a decision.

“You said I could pick the place, right?”

She nodded eagerly. “Right.”

“Mario’s Pizzeria. Six o’clock.”

She started to object to both the location and the early hour then thought better of it. She’d envisioned a romantic dinner at a French restaurant, but she could compromise.

“Deal,” she said. “I have one caveat.”

“What?” He looked suspicious.

“You have to get that eye checked out first.” She’d spent the last ten minutes silently empathizing with him for the pain she knew it caused. “Promise?”

“Promise,” he said on a sigh.

She smiled at him, glad her impromptu visit to his office had paid off in more ways than one.

“Good.” She walked away before calling over her shoulder. “Because when I come into that pizza parlor tonight, I want you to see you’re about to become one lucky man.”

***

MARIO’S PIZZERIA WAS unremittingly red.

Red booths, red carpet, red doors.

Plastic red-and-white tableclothes covered the tables, and the young employees behind the crimson counter spread red tomato sauce on pizzas they fed into an industrial-sized oven.

Five minutes after the waitress had seated Wade Morrison at a booth for four, his eyes still had trouble adjusting to the sea of red, especially his right one.

The pain had significantly lessened, thanks to the antibiotic drops the ophthalmologist had prescribed.

Lorelei had been right. He had a scratched cornea.

She’d been wrong, too. No doubt she’d be wearing some crazy, skin-baring outfit when she entered the pizza parlor. But she was the one who would get an eye full.

“Daddy, watch this.”

The tiny blond girl across from him rose to her full height of three feet one inches and jumped up and down on the booth’s cushioned seat.

“Stop that, Mary Kate,” he said sternly.

The giggles of a second equally blond girl drowned him out. “Ashley wants to be kangaroo, too,” she said gleefully, scrambling to her feet and joining her sister up, then down.

Both of the girls had messy, lopsided pony tails. Mary Kate’s listed to the right while Ashley’s veered left. Other than that and their T-shirts of different colors, they could have been carbon copies.

“Girls,” Wade said sternly. “Stop that right now.”

“’s fun,” Mary Kate said.

“Kangaroo roo,” Ashley cried.

“Roo roo,” Mary Kate added.

The place was nearly full, mostly with families. Even the diners with young children turned disapproving looks toward Wade.

“Girls,” he repeated. Their giggles didn’t ease.

Aware of the murmurs getting increasingly louder, he quickly came around the booth. He caught and lifted a giggling Mary Kate, scooted into the booth with her on his lap and managed to gather Ashley to him on her way down from one of the jumps. He held the twins close while they giggled helplessly.

He didn’t smile. He needed to make them understand they couldn’t act like marsupials in restaurants.

“Listen to me, girls,” he said.

After a few more laughing gulps, they did, each one gazing up at him with big green eyes.

Wade wished their mother hadn’t named them after the Olsen twins who starred in all those silly look-alike movies. He had to admit, though, that the girls resembled the actresses when they’d been children. Up to a point. He thought his Mary Kate and Ashley much cuter.

“No more jumping in restaurants,” he said.

Ashley screwed up her tiny forehead. “Why not, Daddy?”

“Restaurants are places for eating, not jumping.”

Mary Kate reached out a pudgy hand and tapped him on the mouth. “Daddy, smile.”

“I’ll smile if you promise not to jump anymore.”

“Promise,” Mary Kate said happily.

“Promise,” Ashley said.

After that, he did smile. Although the little girls were a constant trial, they were also his biggest joy. Because he never regretted having them, he’d even be able to withstand Lorelei Palmer’s look of horror when she came into the restaurant.

He didn’t have any illusions. The beautiful, vivacious young woman would be horrified at the thought of dating a man with three-year-old twins.

Just as he was horrified at getting involved with a woman whose main objective was to have fun. He couldn't blame Lorelei for her joie d’ vivre. Chronologically she was a woman, but emotionally she seemed little more than a vibrant, spirited child.