Bachelor On The Prowl (7 page)

“Yes, he did. He apologized, he sent flowers, he sent fruit-of-the-month selections, he sent me a box of New York strip steaks. The man apologized until I begged him to stop. And then he introduced me to his accountant’s son, Dennis. Max just doesn’t
learn,
Julia.”

“I agree, he doesn’t. He’s very persistent, which is why I’m so very happily married to him instead of still pretending I don’t love him. But I promise, Holly, this is the last time. I’ll tell him—no more fix-ups, okay?”

“Like I have a choice?” Holly grumbled, once more feeling one of her bad moods trying to slip over her. She fought it off. “So, you said this Colin guy just got into New York yesterday? Where’s he from?”

“Texas,” Julia answered as Holly, carrying little Max's empty bottle, followed her friend into the kitchen. “Well, originally from Texas. He’s lived just about everywhere, I believe, as his parents get around a lot. But, for the past few years, Colin has been handling—brilliantly, I might add—Max’s overseas companies. He was headquartered in Paris, if you can believe that. We met him there, on our second honeymoon.”

“Paris?” Holly said, unscrewing the baby bottle lid and tossing the lid and nipple into a jar of soapy water Julia always kept beside the sink. “Did you say Paris?”

“Mm-hmm,” Julia told her, rinsing cups and saucers and placing them in the dishwasher. Julia had a live-in housekeeper, but she’d been raised to “do” for herself, and enjoyed taking care of her own house. “Why? Do you remember now? Because I told you how Colin took
us to all these wonderful out-of-the-way restaurants tourists never see.”

“Paris,” Holly repeated, her stomach twisting in a knot even as her arms and legs started this sort of
tin
gle
…
a sort of early-warning system she’d developed that warned her when she was about to be
very
unhappy. “And he’s gorgeous?”

“Yes, Holly, he’s gorgeous. Remember that old advertising line? Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful?”

“Remember it? I think
I
just heard it yesterday,” Holly said, heading back to the living room, ready to grab her purse and run.

There were just too many coincidences here.

“Holly, where are you going? You promised to stay.”

“I know, Julia, but I just remembered that
…
I forgot that
…
oh, hell, Julia, please just let me leave.”

“Too late,” Julia said, lifting her head slightly as the sound of Max’s voice came to them from the foyer.

“Julia? I’ve got Colin with me. I had a devil of a time convincing him that he
wasn’t barging in and that Max-D
euce is fine now. I
s Holly here? Because I told Coli
n that I really want him to meet—hi, Holly, honey,” Max ended as he entered the living room.

“Hi, Max,” Holly said, picking up her purse and heading for the door. “Hi, Harry,” she said, stopping in front of Colin.

Then, before he could do more than open his mouth to say something to her, she stepped back, took aim and
whopped
him a good one across the chest with her purse before running out of the condo.

Four

C
olin sat on the edge of the couch, his hands covering his ears in a sort of mock self-defense—maybe as a sort of
real
self-defense, because the air around his head had been rather blue for a while.

Max had been going after him for about twenty minutes now—once Julia had gotten through with him—and showed no signs of running down. Colin was a jackass, an idiot, the worst of the worst, cruel and immature, the lowest of the low—and those were his
good
points.

But, finally, even the great Maximillian Rafferty ran out of insults, probably because he was momentarily distracted as Julia brought the young Rafferty heir into the living room and thrust him at his adoring father.

Colin took his hands away from his ears and was just about to heave a sigh of relief when Julia sat down beside him on the couch.

“Okay, so now that Max has finished—you
are
finished, darling—what are you going to do now, Colin?” she asked him. She looked so innocent, sounded so rational, that Colin still had trouble believing his cousin Max had once worn a plate of linguine in clam sauce over his head, a parting gift from the ladylike Julia Sutherland Rafferty before she walked out of his life for nearly five years.

Colin shrugged, hoped to find the right words to keep Julia looking as cool and unruffled as she sounded. “Find her? Apologize?”

“Grovel at her feet? Throw yourself in front of the Park Avenue bus?” Max growled unhelpfully. “No, better.
I’ll
throw you in front of the Park Avenue bus.”

“Now are you done, darling?” Julia asked, smili
ng up at her husband. “Because I
think it’s Colin’s turn to speak. Colin?” she asked, directing her cool brown stare at him, as if she expected him to perform like some trained dog. “Speak.”

Standing up, putting some prudent space between himself and both his cousin and Julia, Colin tried to dig out, just a
l
ittle, from beneath the mess he’d piled up since arriving in New York City.

“Look, it just
happened.
I came here, Julia, to see you guys, and the housekeeper told me you were out. Okay, so I left a message, told you I’d be checking in at the Waldorf, and me and the limo you sent to the airport went over there.” Colin’s grammar, always meticulous, was suffering badly. But, then, he was operating under some duress.

“So I get to the Waldorf, and I see this placard in the lobby about your showing. I found my way to the staging area, dressing rooms, whatever you want to call
it, and the next thing I know this
woman
is grabbing me by the arm, telling me I’m late, and ordering me to drop my pants. She damn near pulled them off me.”

Max’s attention was at last redirected from tickling his son under the chin. “She said
what?
She did
what?”

“Oh, dear. It doesn’t sound quite so funny hearing Colin tell it,” Julia remarked, wincing.

“Exactly! That’s the same thing I thought, Max. I thought
—what
?
”
Colin said, pointing a finger at Max and ignoring Julia’s comment, because he hated to think about how the story had been told from Holly’s perspective. “Now I ask you, Max—what would you have done? I tell her she’s made a mistake, and she’s going to go ballistic because she’s just made a fool of herself with Max Rafferty’s cousin. Besides, they were short one model, and she needed help. She really
did
need help. I was there, I was available—the tux fit. So what would you have done, Max? Tell me.”

Max looked at his wife. Colin could almost see his cousin’s brain working, smell the smoke as the gears turned. “Nothing,” Max said. “I would have done and said nothing. I would have gone along with it, at least for the moment. You really didn’t have much choice, not with your pants hanging around your ankles.”

“Except you would, at the first opportunity after the showing, explain who you are, so that there’d be no misunderstanding,” Julia supplied helpfully.

Max immediately looked guilty. “Right. Er, right! That’s exactly what I would have done. The moment the showing was over, I would have explained everything. Definitely.”

“Oh, give me a break,” Julia said, shaking her head.
“You would have done the same thing Colin did. I’ve already heard this story, from Holly’s perspective, and believe me, Colin was actually rather restrained in his response. Poor frazzled, deluded, desperate Holly on her knees, tugging at his suit pants. Colin basking in the thought he’d been mistaken for a top male model.
Maroon
briefs.” She rolled her eyes. “I can just picture it.”

“Um, Julia?” Colin asked quietly, “I know you’re trying to help here, and I thank you. But please don’t tell me you can picture me in my underwear. Max is listening, and I kind of like having all my own teeth.”

Julia looked at her husband. “Oh. Sorry,” she said, then grinned. “Besides, I’m not letting you off the hook just yet, Co
li
n. I can understand that you were having fun, going with the moment and all of that. But you had plenty of time to correct Holly’s mistake, and you didn’t. That’s what I find so inexcusable.”

“So do I,” Co
li
n agreed, rubbing at his abdomen. Not that it really had hurt when Holly slugged him with her purse, but for a woman who probably couldn’t weigh much more than one hundred pounds, she sure did pack a wallop. “I guess you would have had to have been there. I don’t remember the last time a woman was so open, so honest with me. Not trying to impress me, not flirting and sending out lures, not—”

“We get the idea,” Max bit out shortly.

“And at least one of those
we
is getting nauseous,” Julia added, smoothing down her skirt as she stood up. “You poor, poor Rafferty men, so horribly cursed with their beauty. Give me that child, Max,” she ordered, holding out her hands toward her baby. “I’m going to
take him into the kitchen to feed him. But you two stay here. I don’t want him to hear any more of this. He’s young, and impressionable.”

Max waited until his wife had disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, then grinned at his cousin. “So you like her, right?’.’

“Oh God,” Colin all but groaned. “Here we go. Yes, Max, I like her. And I was going to find her later today, tell her the truth, explain everything over dinner in some very public place, so she couldn’t scream at me or throw things. I had it all worked out in my mind.”

“Really? Obviously you don’t know Holly that well. She probably would have pelted you with the dinner rolls, then stomped out of the restaurant. Which is a lot less lethal than anything my wife would have done to me in the same circumstances, but Holly’s a nice person.”

“And Julia isn’t?”

“My wife is a wonderful person, Co
li
n,” Max said, grabbing them each a bottle of water from the small refrigerator built into the bottom of a cherry buffet table. “But she has a very well-defined notion of quid pro quo. You
quid
, and she
pro
quos
you—double. Sometimes triple. Did I ever tell you about the linguine with clam sauce?”

“Yes, you did. So Holly wouldn’t go that far?”

Max unscrewed the lid of his water bottle, frowning. “No. No, she wouldn’t. She’d blow, definitely. But then she’d get very sad. Not that my wife can’t be hurt, because she can. But Holly can turn being hurt into a real production number, complete with tears, sulks and more slammed doors than you’d want to know about, trust
me. She makes a great show of being angry, but mostly she’s hurt. Holly’s a lot of bluster, but she’s very vulnerable. Not fragile, but vulnerable. You hurt Julia and you get hurt back, in spades. You hurt Holly, Colin, and I expect you’re going to have to do some major groveling before you can make things right again. You do want to make things right again, don’t you?”

“I do,” Coli
n said, nodding his head. “After all, it’s my fault.”

“Yes, it is your fault,” Max agreed. Damn Max for always being so agreeable when Colin was the one looking bad. “But don’t do it just for me, or for Julia. Things are bad enough now. Don’t lead Holly on, okay? Just be honest.”

Coli
n tried to explain himself, just one more time. “She was going on and on about models—male models mostly—and how they’re so vain and how she feels, well, insecure around them. And the whole time she didn’t even notice that heads turned as we walked by, especially while she was eating that damn ice-cream sandwich. One guy nearly walked into a pole, watching her lick vanilla ice cream off her fingers. She’s cute, she’s funny and she’s sexy as all hell. All of it wrapped up in this tiny, yet rather volatile package.”

He shook his head. “Now tell me, Max. How was I going to throw a monkey wrench into a wonderful evening by telling her the truth? It was just a whole lot simpler at the time to be Harry Hampshire.”

“She’s staying at the Waldorf, like you,” Max said after a moment.

“I know. I’ll head there now,” Colin said, feeling
about as ready to move as a rabbit with a fox in the vicinity. “Maybe flowers? Candy?”

“Your head on a platter might work,” Julia said, reentering the living room, young Max on her shoulder as she patted the baby’s back. “You might want to give her a little more time to blow off steam, Colin, and to have a good cry. Besides, I doubt that she went back to the hotel, because you know she’s staying there. If I know Holly, she’s at the Frick, sitting in the enclosed courtyard, trying to calm herself. She really loves the Frick.”

“The Frick?” Co
li
n asked, frowning.

“The Frick Collection, an art museum,” Max told him. “On East Seventieth Street, at the park. You can walk there from here on a nice day like this, which is probably why Julia’s so sure Holly went there.”

Colin headed for the foyer, then stopped, turned around. “Thanks, guys, and I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry, and I’ll fix it.”

“Of course you will, Co
li
n,” Julia said encouragingly. “But just one favor before you go, if you don’t mind. What sign are you?”

“What sign am I?” Colin, his head full of too much information as it was—and staffed even fuller with questions—answered blankly, “Sign of the Zodiac? Isn’t that question sort of old hat now? I thought it died out with the last millennium.”

“Tell her your sign, Co
li
n,” Max said calmly, although a smile hovered at the co
rn
ers of his mouth.

“It’s Taurus. Why?”

Juli
a smiled sweetly. “No reason. Taurus. How nice.
Call us later and let us know how you make out, Colin, all right? Don’t forget.”

“Sure,” Colin promised, then headed toward the door once more. If Holly was at the Frick, he’d go to the Frick. If Holly was on the moon, he’d go to the moon. Hell, he’d go to the moon on his own if he didn’t go after Holly, because Max would boot him straight into outer space.

It was a nice day for a walk in Manhattan. The sun was warm, the breeze mild and the lunchtime crowd remarkably polite as they made their way along the sidewalks. Colin stopped at a small grocery store that had an outside display of bouquets, picking one made up of butter-yellow chrysanthemums that caught his eye.

Holly would either accept them, or bash him over the head with them
…
which is why he decided not to buy her anything as dangerous as a five-pound box of chocolate truffles. A solid brass paperweight of the Statue of Liberty, also on sale at the counter of the grocery store was, of course, entirely out of the question.

As he walked along, in his hand-tailored navy suit, his dark sunglasses shielding his eyes from the sun, the breeze doing a small dance in that one lock of hair that always seemed to fall forward onto his forehead, Colin was blissfully unaware that he had made the days of at least three secretaries, and gladdened the heart of one octogenarian who still had a very good memory of her younger, more flirtatious days.

It was like that for Colin. Sometimes he
knew
when he was causing a stir. It was rather hard not to know. But, mercifully, for the most part he was unaware of
stares, covert looks, hands lifted to feminine mouths to cover girlish giggles.

Because he was Colin Rafferty. He knew he had this certain
appeal
to the feminine mind or heart or whatever, but he had learned to never let it go to his head. He couldn’t. He was much too busy living his life, enjoying his career.

Okay, so he wasn’t beneath using a well-aimed look, a perfectly timed smile, when it got him what he wanted, where he wanted to go. Only a jerk would look a gift horse—or a handsome face—in the mouth.

And he hadn’t always been so unaware of the power of his physical looks.

From the time he’d been handed over to his third or fourth nanny—at about the age of five—he’d figured out that women liked him. They catered to him, liked to feed him milk and cookies, liked to help him with his homework.

For a while, during his teenage years, he’d become more than a bit of a jerk. Females flocked to him, and he wasn’t yet mature enough to resist the urge to take advantage of them, injure their tender hearts.