The Man Every Woman Wants (3 page)

W
HY
indeed? Ryan wondered as he quaffed back a good portion of his drink.

He suspected it was because the idea amused the hell out of him. He rather fancied the prospect of Laura having to act the part of his doting girlfriend.

But of course he could hardly say that. And there
was
another reason, one which might convince the surprisingly sentimental Laura into going along with his suggestion.

‘As I mentioned before,' he said, ‘I have a soft spot for grandmothers. Mine was marvellous to me. I don't know what I would have done without her.' He certainly wouldn't have gone on to be a success in life. She was the one who had first taken him to soccer—even though he was a little old at thirteen to take up the sport, which was why he ended up a goalkeeper. And she was the one who had made him believe that he could put the past behind him and become anything he wanted to be.

‘I've always regretted that she died before I could give her all the good things she deserved in life,' he added. More than regret—remorse was more like it. He hadn't realised until she was gone just how much she'd done for him, and how much she meant to him. He'd cried buckets when he found out she'd died, though not in front of any of his teammates. He'd been a very selfish twenty-two at the time and had just been signed to his first contract with a premier league English team. He
hadn't returned to Australia for his grandmother's funeral, another deep regret.

He'd been touched by Laura sitting with her grandmother all night, not wanting to leave her to die alone. Clearly, the old lady meant a lot to her.

‘It's obvious that you're very close to your grandmother,' he said.

‘I am,' Laura said, her voice sounding a little choked up. ‘She raised me after my parents were killed in a plane crash.'

‘I see…' And he did see. His grandmother had raised him after his own mother had died.

Damn it all, but he didn't want to think about
that
!

‘So what do you say to my suggestion?' he asked, not feeling quite so amused any more. But it was too late to retract his offer.

Laura's expressive eyes showed considerable reserve. ‘I have to confess that I'm tempted. But I'm not sure we could bring it off—pretending to be lovers, that is. I mean, we don't even like each other.'

‘True,' he said bluntly.

‘You don't have to agree with me so readily,' she snapped. ‘What is it, exactly, that you don't like about me?'

He smiled. ‘You don't really want me to tell you that, do you?'

‘I certainly do.'

‘Okay, you asked for it. First there's your appearance.'

‘There's nothing wrong with my appearance!'

Ryan raised an eyebrow sardonically and infuriatingly she felt herself blush. He continued, ‘Then there's your manner.'

‘What's wrong with my manner?'

‘Well, “ice queen” would be an understatement. Of course,' he went on, unbowed in the face of her outrage, ‘If I could persuade you to let your hair down in more ways than one, then it'd be a breeze. Do you think you could do that?'

‘I'm not going to tart myself up for the likes of you, Ryan Armstrong,' Laura pronounced huffily.

‘And there we have the main reason that I don't like you: because
you
don't like
me
.'

‘No,' she bit out. ‘I don't.'

‘Why not?'

‘You don't really want me to tell you that, do you?'

He chuckled. She might not have an imagination but she did have a sharp wit. ‘Actually, I'm not so sure that I don't like you,' he said. ‘You are very amusing company.'

She made no comment, just gave him another of her dry looks.

‘Do you have a boyfriend, Laura?' he asked abruptly.

‘Don't be ridiculous,' she retorted. ‘If I had a boyfriend do you think I would be in this damned awful predicament?'

‘Having a boyfriend does not equate with your finding Mr Right. But let me rephrase that—are you sleeping with anyone at the moment?'

Her eyes grew even colder, if that were possible.

‘I'm between boyfriends at the moment,' she said tartly.

‘Ah.'

‘And what does that mean?' she demanded to know.

‘Ah just means ah.'

‘I very much doubt that. You think I'm not capable of getting a boyfriend, don't you? You think I'm too cold.'

Wow, he thought, how right you are. But rather fascinatingly frosty. What he wouldn't give to have the chance to melt some of that ice. Unfortunately, a man could get frostbite trying.

He'd have to watch himself with her this weekend.

‘What I think,' he said after careful consideration, ‘Is that you've been hurt by some man in your past which has given you a jaundiced view of the male sex.'

The slight widening of her eyes showed him he was on the right track with his analysis of her character.

‘Lots of attractive women who've been badly treated by men subconsciously do things to make themselves less attractive so that they won't be hit on. Some change their appearance by
putting on weight. Some dress in a manner which hides their femininity. Which I think—'

The sound of his phone ringing interrupted his spiel.

‘Excuse me,' he said to Laura as he fished the phone out of his jacket pocket and glanced at the identity of the caller.

Damn. It was Erica.

L
AURA
welcomed the interruption. Ryan's interpretation of her character was too close to the bone for her liking. Because of course he was right. Subconsciously, she knew why she dressed the way she did and acted the way she did. But no man had said as much to her out loud before.

She didn't like it. It made her feel vulnerable and weak. A coward, even. Yet she wasn't a coward—
was
she?

The thought tormented her. Alison was always saying that she should give the male sex another chance. But then what would Alison know? She was married to a great guy who was loving and loyal and would never hurt her. She'd never known what it felt like to have one's heart ripped out, not just by one man, but two. Laura knew she couldn't afford to open herself to hurt of that kind ever again because if she did, and disaster struck a third time, she suspected she would not survive.

Admittedly, sometimes she was very lonely. Sometimes, she wished her life had been different; if only she'd found someone decent when she'd been younger and still full of hope. Life's experiences, however, had finally turned her into a hard-hearted cynic, but quite a good judge of character. Nowadays, when she met an attractive man, she quickly saw through his looks to the man beneath.

She knew exactly what sort of man Ryan Armstrong was: the sort who would break a girl's heart and never lose a moment's sleep over it.

But he was not totally bad, she accepted as she glanced over the rim of her glass at him. Clearly he was capable of kindness.

‘Hi,' he said into his phone. ‘How's things going?'

He'd turned his body away from the table to answer the phone but Laura could still hear him clearly enough. The bar was beginning to fill up but the noise wasn't too bad, and the music hadn't yet started.

‘That boring, huh?' he went on. ‘No, I'm down at the Opera Bar having a drink with a friend from work.'

Laura frowned, knowing instantly that Ryan was being evasive to whomever he was talking to on the phone. His girlfriend, perhaps? He was sure to have one. He always had some girl on tap from what she'd heard. She'd forgotten about that when he'd offered to pretend to be her Mr Right this weekend.

What on earth did he plan to tell the girlfriend if she agreed to his suggestion? Laura couldn't imagine any female enjoying their boyfriend pretending to be another woman's boyfriend, no matter how innocent it really was.

‘I'll ring you later tonight, sweetheart,' she heard him saying, confirming her suspicion that he was talking to his current girlfriend. ‘Bye for now.'

He hung up and swung back to face her. ‘Now, where was I?' he said as he put his phone away.

Laura decided to put a spanner in his works with some much-needed honesty.

‘Your girlfriend wouldn't like you pretending to be my Mr Right,' she said with chilly disdain in her voice. ‘Or were you thinking about not telling her?'

His eyes grew even colder than her own, if that were possible. ‘Erica does not own me, Laura. Besides, she's in Melbourne this weekend for a conference.'

‘You mean what she doesn't know doesn't hurt her?'

‘Actually, I have every intention of telling Erica when I ring her back later tonight.'

‘Really.' Laura could not keep the sarcasm out of her voice.
In her experience, lying to their girlfriends was second nature to men like Ryan.

‘Yes, really. But I can see you don't believe me.'

‘Does it matter what I believe? It's all irrelevant anyway, because I've decided not to accept your kind offer.'

‘And why's that?'

‘Because it can only lead to further complications. Gran's eightieth birthday is coming up soon. If her health improves, the family is sure to throw her a party and she'll expect me to attend, along with my newly found Mr Right. I can't honestly expect you to go along to that as well. By then, we'll be asked eternal questions about when we're getting engaged and when the wedding's going to be. Everything will snowball and you'll wish you hadn't started it in the first place. Much better I go home this weekend and say we've already broken up.'

Ryan shrugged. ‘If that's what you want to do. But it wouldn't worry Erica.'

‘If you think that, Ryan, then you don't know women very well. I think I should go now,' she added, becoming nervous that people from her work would start arriving any minute now. ‘Thank you for the drink, and for your offer. It really was very nice of you. But not a good idea.'

She finished her drink and stood up. ‘I'll see you next Friday at three,' she said.

‘I tell you what,' Ryan said before she could escape. ‘I'll give you my private mobile-number just in case you change your mind. Do you have a biro in that bag of yours? I'll bet you do,' he added with a quick smile.

‘Yes, but…'

‘Just write it down, Laura,' he said with a hint of exasperation. ‘You never know.'

‘Oh, very well,' she said, and did what he asked, writing the number he gave her down on the back of one of her business cards.

Then she bolted for the exit, thankfully not spotting anyone she knew on the way out. Laura was out of breath by the
time she made it to the quay and onto the Manly ferry for the ride home, glad to subside into a seat in a private corner, glad to be alone with her still-whirling thoughts.

But, once her head settled and her heart stopped beating like a rock-band drummer, Laura knew she'd made the right decision, knocking back Ryan's offer. It was ridiculous to keep such a deception going, no matter how tempted she'd been.

What was that other saying, now? ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive'?

As she'd spelled out to Ryan, it would have been extremely difficult to carry off such a pretence without their dislike for each other shining through somehow. No, she'd done the right thing. The only thing. But she still winced at the thought of telling the family that she'd lied about finding Mr Right. She did have her pride.

No, she'd do what she originally said she'd do: make some excuse why Ryan couldn't join them this weekend. Then later on, if Gran continued to recover, she could say that they'd broken up because Ryan refused to get married. That would save her pride too. If Gran didn't recover—Laura's heart contracted fiercely at this thought—then it wouldn't matter. Gran would at least have died happy.

B
Y THE
time the ferry docked at the Manly wharf and Laura started off up the hill for the walk home, she'd become reconciled to her decision, except for one small regret. It would have been seriously satisfying to go home with a man like Ryan on her arm, she thought with a rather wistful sigh, just to see the looks on the faces of her aunt and uncle, both of whom never let an opportunity go by to point out what a loser she was in the dating department.

Of course the truth was that they didn't like her. Uncle Bill had resented her from the moment she'd been brought home to her grandparents' place to live and it had became obvious that his mother preferred her estranged daughter's daughter to the son he and Cynthia had produced.

Laura didn't think this should have been a surprise, since all the men in the Stone family were odious. Her grandfather especially. Jim Stone had been a male chauvinistic pig of the first order. His son and his grandson had taken after him, believing they were superior beings and that women were only put on this earth to pander to their needs. After actually living in her grandfather's house, Laura understood fully why her mother had run away from home as soon as she was old enough and why she'd married a man like her father who, though a strong man, had been compassionate and gentle in his dealings with people, especially women. He'd been a lawyer also; Laura had adored him.

She'd disliked her grandfather intensely and hadn't been at all sad when he had died. But even in death Jim Stone had been able to make her angry, leaving the family property to his son rather than his long-suffering wife. She'd tried to get her gran to contest the will but she wouldn't, saying that it didn't matter, that Bill promised to look after her until she died.

But that wasn't good enough, in Laura's opinion. The home which Gran had lovingly tended for over fifty years should have been hers until she died. Instead, she'd been relegated to the role of a poor relative, reliant on her son for charity. All her gran had been left was a miserable twenty-thousand dollars a year, not much more than the old-age pension. That was until Laura had had a little chat with her uncle and insisted that he bump the amount up to forty thousand at least, warning him that if he didn't then she would use every bit of her power and influence to get his mother to contest the will.

Naturally, her firm stance hadn't gone down too well, but he'd done what she had asked. Of course, he'd made it sound like it was all his idea. When Laura had seen how touched her grandmother had been—she probably wasn't used to the men in her life treating her nicely—she hadn't said a word. Several times, during the five years since her grandfather had died, Laura had tried to persuade her grandmother to come to Sydney to live with her, but to no avail. Her gran said she was a country girl and wouldn't be happy living in the city.

Yet I have a very nice home
, Laura thought as she pushed open the gate which led up the path to the three-bedroomed cottage which had belonged to her parents and which had come to her when they were so tragically killed. Her grandfather had tried to sell it after she'd gone to live with him, but her darling grandmother—who had been sole executor of her daughter's will—had refused to give permission for the sale. So the contents had been stored and the house had been rented out until Laura had left school and moved back to Sydney to attend university, at which point she'd taken possession of it again.

She'd lived there ever since, mostly happily. Only once had the house been instrumental in bringing her unhappiness. But that hadn't really been the house's fault.

Laura inserted the key in the front door, knowing that as soon as she turned the lock and opened the door Rambo would come bolting down the hallway, meowing for food.

And there he was, right on cue. Putting her bag down on the hall table, she scooped him up into her arms and stroked his sleek brown fur. It was better to pick him up, she'd found, than to leave him down on the floor to trip her up.

‘How was your day, sweetie?' she said as she made her way down to the kitchen.

His answer was some very contented purring.

Once in the kitchen she plopped Rambo down on the tiled floor and set about getting him his favourite ‘fussy cat' food, steak mixed with chicken. She'd just filled his dish with the meat and shoved the plastic container in the garbage bin when her phone rang—not her mobile, her land line. Which meant it wasn't Alison or any of her work colleagues. The only people who used her land line were telemarketers and family.

Laura steeled herself as she swept up the receiver from where it was attached to the kitchen wall.

‘Hello,' she said somewhat abruptly.

‘I finally got you,' Aunt Cynthia replied with an air of frustration. ‘I tried ringing earlier but you weren't home.'

Laura glanced up at the kitchen clock. It was only five-thirty. She was rarely home on a Friday night before six.

‘You can always get me on my mobile,' Laura told her. ‘I did give you the number.'

‘Bill said I wasn't to ring people on their mobiles. He said it cost a fortune.'

Laura sighed. ‘Not these days it doesn't, Aunt Cynthia. Anyway, what did you want me for? There's nothing wrong with Gran, is there?' she added with a sudden jab of worry.

‘No, no, your grandmother's doing quite well, considering. I'm ringing because Shane asked me to.'

Shane was her vile only-son and heir who was a chip off the old Stone block. He'd tormented Laura from the day she'd gone to live with her grandparents. His family had lived nearby in a smaller house on the same property. Thankfully, when she had finished primary school, Gran had sent Laura to boarding school in Sydney, a move which she'd appreciated. Her grandfather had objected at first on the grounds of the cost but her gran had stood firm again, saying the fees could easily be covered by Laura's inheritance. Both Laura's parents had had excellent insurance policies which had paid out double because they'd died in an accident.

Laura had quite enjoyed her school days—not her holidays so much, which her wretched cousin had made a right misery. Admittedly, he'd improved slightly with age, mainly because he'd married a modern girl who refused to put up with his boorish behaviour. In truth, the last time they'd met, Shane had surprised Laura by being reasonably civil to her. But Laura couldn't imagine why he would ask their mother to ring her.

‘What does he want?' she asked warily.

‘To find out if your new boyfriend is the same Ryan Armstrong who was a famous goalkeeper a few years back. His father told him that it was highly unlikely, given he was dating you, but I promised to ask you just the same. Because Shane said, if he was, he wants to meet him.'

‘And if he wasn't?' Laura asked archly.

‘What?'

Laura gritted her teeth. They really were a most annoying family!

‘Yes,' she bit out. ‘Ryan is, or was, a famous goalkeeper.' She only knew that because she'd been told of Ryan's international success by a sport-loving colleague of hers who'd been quite jealous about her securing Ryan as a client.

‘Heavens to Betsy!' her aunt exclaimed. ‘I can't believe it. Shane's going to be
so
excited. You know how much he loves watching the soccer.'

Actually no, Laura didn't know any such thing. She'd had as little to do with Shane as possible over the years.

‘I must say I'm somewhat surprised,' her aunt rattled on, ‘That you've got yourself a boyfriend at all, let alone a famous one.

‘I was saying to Bill just the other week that it looked like you were going to end up an old maid. You're not a bad-looking girl, but you do have an unfortunate way about you. You state your opinions much too strongly. Men don't like that, you know. And the way you dress is…well, not very feminine. Still, I guess there's someone for everyone in this world. So how old is your Mr Armstrong? I dare say he's not all that young.'

Laura couldn't say a word for a moment, having been rendered speechless by her aunt's tactless commentary.

But, as she struggled to find her tongue, Laura knew that there was no way now that she was going up to that house tomorrow alone. No darned way!

‘To tell you the truth, Aunt,' she said at last, ‘I'm not sure exactly how old Ryan is. Middle to late thirties is my best guess.'

‘You'd think you'd know your boyfriend's age,' her aunt said snippily. ‘How long did you say you'd been going out with him?'

‘We've been business acquaintances for two years. But we've only started dating recently.'

‘Oh, I see. So he's not that serious about you yet.'

‘He's
very
serious about me,' she heard herself saying. ‘You don't think he'd agree to come home with me and meet Gran if he wasn't serious, do you?'

‘What? Oh no, no, I suppose not. So what time do you think you might arrive?'

Laura closed her eyes and prayed that Ryan would not change his mind and retract his offer when she rang him.

‘Around noon?' she suggested.

‘Could you make it later than that?' her aunt said. ‘Say, around three? That way I won't have to do lunch tomorrow as
well as dinner that night and lunch again the next day. That's a lot of work, you know.'

‘But we weren't going to stay the night,' Laura protested.

‘Don't be silly, of course you are. I've already bought the food and the wine. On top of that your grandmother is expecting you to stay for the weekend, not just for a few short hours. You wouldn't want to disappoint her, would you?'

‘No, of course not,' Laura said, but her head was spinning. How on earth was she going to keep up such a ridiculous charade for that long? And what if Ryan refused to go with her? Giving her his phone number was no guarantee he would say yes a second time.

‘We'll see you tomorrow around three, then?'

‘All right,' Laura agreed somewhat weakly.

‘And Laura…?'

‘Yes?'

‘Bring a dress to wear for dinner tomorrow night, will you? I don't want to see you at the table wearing those ghastly jeans you seem to live in.'

Laura sucked in a deep breath through wildly flaring nostrils. She was about to launch into a counter-attack when she realised the line had already gone dead. She glared down at the receiver for several furious seconds before slamming it back on the hook.

If there was anyone who could get under her skin even more than her uncle, it was her aunt—stupid, self-important, insensitive woman! Laura felt sorry for her grandmother, having to live with two such impossible people. She deserved better after putting up with that wretched husband of hers for fifty-five years.

Thinking about her grandmother's feelings put some perspective back into Laura's growing frustrations over the weekend ahead. Okay, so she'd backed herself into a right royal corner now. Too bad. Gran was worth putting up with pretending to be Ryan Armstrong's girlfriend for longer than a few hours. And worth having to put her pride aside to ring him
back and tell him that she'd changed her mind and wanted to accept his offer. If he prevaricated, she would beg him to come with her, if she had to. Hell, she'd even bribe him if she had to. Though what with, she had no idea.

The thought of offering him sex popped into her head out of the blue. It was such a crazy idea that she threw back her head and laughed out loud. As if the prospect of sex with her would persuade a man like Ryan to do anything! It would more likely make him run in the other direction.

Shaking her head, she marched back down the hallway to where she'd left her handbag, rifling through it to retrieve the business card she'd written his number down on.

Her stomach tightened into a knot as she picked up her mobile phone and punched in the numbers. For what
would
she do if he refused? What
could
she do? Laura felt sick just thinking about it. She hit the call button and started praying.