To Catch a Husband. Laura Altom Marie

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      He released her, and once again she could breathe.

      “I left my cell in the truck, so let me run out and get that and I’ll call in an order. What do you want? The usual?”

      “I guess.” Look at them. They were like an old married couple—without the sex. Only, if Adam were hers, she’d want to—well, you know—every night of the week!

      “You’re grinning again,” he said, pulling on a leather jacket before heading out the door. “When I get back, you’d better tell me what happened today, or else.”

      If by “or else,” he meant he’d tickle her again? Charity would gladly take her chances.

      SATURDAY NIGHT, Frederika, a Puerto Rican swimsuit model Adam met Friday afternoon while she was doing a promo thing at his favorite sporting goods store, glowered across the table at him. “Are you on purposefully trying to ruin our evening?”

      “Um, no,” he said, putting down his menu. It’d been two days since his shrink-mandated order to find himself a date. He’d done just that, and look, on his very first try, not thirty minutes into the evening, already it was a disaster. “Why?”

      “First,” she said, slapping down her menu, as well. “You show up dressed like…” With exaggerated Latin flair, she waved her hands. “A hobo—”

      “A hobo?” He glanced down at his jeans and T-shirt. “This is one of my best tees. I even ironed it.” Sort of. Seeing how he’d yanked it out of the dryer while it’d still been warm.

      “And this place…” she said with a roll of her tongue, eyeing Ziggy’s red walls lined with sports memorabilia and the light fixtures that’d been rigged from basketball halves. She probably wasn’t much into the all-sports radio blaring, either. “Could you no have afforded better? And now, you tell me we must have beer with dinner, not wine? And your car was…how you say? Fill-thee.” Her speech’s grand finale was a theatrical shudder.

      “Sorry,” he said, nose back in his menu. Cheese-burger or ribs? Tough call.

      “You should be sorry. Do you know how lucky you are to be with me? I could get another man just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I deserve better. You show me good time or I’ll call my brother Rico. He tell you how to treat a woman.”

      Adam inwardly groaned.

      “Well?” his date said, lifting razor-thin eyebrows. “You ready to take me to a nice place?”

      Where Adam wanted to take her was straight back to her apartment, but a vision of his glowering shrink made him try to please.

      “ADAM?” Charity opened her door as wide as the security chain would allow. “What’re you doing here? It’s the middle of the night.”

      “Only for homebodies like you,” he said. “For normal people it’s 8:00 p.m. So? You going to let me in?”

      She closed the door to unfasten the chain, then opened it again, wishing she’d had the foresight to put on real clothes.

      Once he’d helped himself to her sofa, then flicked on the end table lamp, he asked, “What’re you wearing?”

      “It’s a nightgown.”

      “No,” he said with a wink. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was negligee. Your sis give you that to go with the Victoria’s Secret lotion?”

      “Yeah, what of it? I wouldn’t even be wearing it if all my sweats weren’t in the laundry.”

      “I’m not complaining,” he said. “Looks good on you. You should wear it again sometime.”

      “F-for you?”

      “Like friends with privileges?” He winked. “Hell, yeah!” A jab to her ribs showed her he was just joshing. So why wouldn’t her pulse slow down? “Hey, you wanna order pizza? I’m starving.”

      She dropped onto the far end of the sofa, pulling her knees up to her chest, then wrapping her arms around bare legs, wishing the ivory satin-and-lace baby-doll-styled number had a couple more yards of fabric. “Thought you had a swanky dinner date tonight with that swimsuit model?”

      “I did. But she didn’t like Ziggy’s Burger Barn, so I ended up having to take her to Swenson’s—and you know how pricey that place is. I shelled out fifty bucks a head for an ounce of beef and a few mystery green squiggly things. Oh, and there was some freaky mushroom pile, drowning in gravy and carrot sprinkles. But she didn’t like that, either. I was going to stop back by Ziggy’s after taking Freddy home, but after all that mind-numbing talk about her hair, clothes and nails, I found myself craving pizza—and you.”

      “Flattery like that will get you everywhere,” she teased, plucking ten or so insect catalogs from the sofa so he could park himself beside her. “Well? You going to order?”

      “Sure. The usual?”

      “You know it.”

      He snatched the cordless phone from the coffee table, placed an order for a large pan pizza with the works, gave his credit card number, then hung up. Wandering into the kitchen, he grabbed a bag of potato chips from her snack cabinet. For an average person, this might’ve seemed odd, but Adam ate more than anyone on earth, so chips after a swanky dinner and before pizza was pretty much his norm. After popping two Hostess cupcakes, as well, he said, “And, hey, while we’re waiting for the grub, I’ve got something I’d like to run by you.”

      “Shoot,” she said, returning to the stag beetle she’d been pinning before Adam’s interruption.

      “Here’s the deal…” He sat beside her, then reached for her hands. As focused as she’d just been on pinning her new acquisition, the shock of him again taking her hand so intimately jolted her to a whole ’nother place—the fantasyland she’d spun of the two of them. Her first instinct was to yank herself free, but instead she froze, like the last time he’d pulled this stunt, selfishly indulging in the decadence of being held. “In the middle of this date with a strange, high-maintenance woman I knew after being alone with her for five minutes I never wanted to see again, I had a great idea.”

      “What’s that?”

      “Glad you asked,” he said with a grin so potent, it took Charity a second to find her next breath. “The company shrink told me I had to date, right?”

      “Yeah.” He was still massaging her hands, flooding her with tingling pleasure.

      “Well, the doc didn’t say a thing about who I had to date—just that I had to go out with someone.”

      “And?” Charity said, blaming trace formaldehyde fumes for the dizzying heat.

      “And—you’re going to love this—so I figure, why don’t I just go out with you?”

      Chapter Two

      Charity hadn’t yet recovered from Adam’s first ludicrous statement, when he kept going. “The beauty of this plan,” he said, “is that not only do I get the doc off my СКАЧАТЬ