Stand-In Bride

Julia nodded reluctantly. Oh yes, she’d met Sheila, Nate Fortune’s scheming, narcissistic first wife, the mother of Michael and his brother Kyle and sister Jane.

Nate, the younger brother of CEO Jake, was the lawyer in charge of contracts, patents, suits and other legal matters for the Fortune Corporation. Kristina was the product of Nate’s second marriage to warm, down-to-earth Barbara, the polar opposite of Sheila.

Julia didn’t care for Sheila Fortune, who had been sharp and condescending whenever she swept into the office. But being Michael’s employee, Julia certainly wasn’t about to join in trashing his mother.

Kristina didn’t expect her to. She was perfectly content to trash her father’s first wife on her own. “Truly, I don’t know how my sister and brothers stood living with Sheila when they were growing up, even part of the time. My dad said Sheila deliberately got pregnant with Mike and Kyle and Jane to insure herself eternal child support, not to mention a cushy lifetime of alimony that—”

To Julia’s immense relief, the telephone rang, cutting Kristina off in midtirade. While Julia answered the call, Kristina grabbed the magazine and left the office with a quick wave.

The rest of the morning was exceptionally busy, and Julia was in the midst of compiling copies of several targeted marketing surveys conducted by the company when Lynn, Margaret and Diana, assistants to other Fortune executives, arrived in her office.

“Time for lunch,” Lynn announced. “We’re debating between the Loon Café, where we can watch the yuppies eat while they talk on their cellular phones, or the mall. What’s your pleasure?”

Julia visibly started. “I had no idea it was this late!”

“No wonder. You’re buried under a ton of paperwork,” Diana observed. “But even slaves have to eat, so climb out from under it and come with us.”

The women made a point of lunching together at least once or twice a week, and Julia was always included. She hated to forgo their lunch date today, but these surveys were so time-consuming….

Michael chose that moment to enter her office. His expression could be interpreted as either questioning or accusing.

Julia chose to interpret it as questioning. “I was just thinking about going to lunch,” she explained.

“Lunch?” Michael echoed, as if the concept were unfamiliar to him.

Julia saw her friends exchange glances. “I’ll finish these surveys when I get back,” she said, her decision made. She was not a slave and intended to prove it.

“Then I suppose I’ll have to wait until after you get back to ask you to download these files.” Michael placed a stack of diskettes on her desk. Without another word, he turned and went back into his office.

“Brr! The temperature always drops at least twenty-five degrees when he’s in a room.” Margaret pretended to shiver. “The man is an emotional refrigerator.”

“Think of the career he could have in the frozen-food industry!” Diana said with a chuckle.

“He’s sort of in a bad mood today.” Julia came to Michael’s defense. Having seen that eligible-bachelor list and guessing the uproar it was going to generate, she figured he was entitled to one. “He has a lot on his mind.”

The four women left the office and started down the corridor toward the elevators.

“How do you tell his bad moods from his good ones?” Lynn queried. “Have you ever actually seen the man smile?”

“He is very reserved,” Julia explained. “But when you get to know him well, he is really a nice guy.” She was certain that was true, though she had yet to get to know him well.

“If you say so,” Margaret said doubtfully. “Hey, I’m casting my vote for the mall. There’s a fifty-percent-off sale at Lindstroms’ starting today….”

It wasn’t until later, when Julia was on her way home at the end of the day, that she had time to think about Kristina’s uncensored comments on Sheila Fortune, the woman who’d married and bitterly divorced Michael’s father.

Julia rode the bus to and from work because her job status did not include a parking place in the Fortune Building and the cost of all-day parking in town was prohibitive. But she didn’t mind the bus rides. If she didn’t have a book to read, she sat and gazed out the window, absorbed in thought. Today she did have a book—a thriller about a crime-solving coroner—but she laid it on her lap and let her mind drift to Michael Fortune.

Hearing those few basic facts about Sheila and Nate Fortune’s rancorous marriage and divorce did explain Michael’s uncompromising view of marriage, Julia mused.

He was adamantly against it. Julia had never heard anybody express such strong antimarriage views. And he certainly hadn’t altered his perspective this past year, during which three members of his family had decided to marry.

He had distanced himself as much as possible from the events. Each time—when his cousin Caroline married Nick Valkov, when his brother Kyle married Samantha Rawlings and when Caroline’s sister Allison married Rafe Stone—Michael had sent Julia to select a wedding gift.

“Buy whatever you think is appropriate. I certainly have no ideas and no interest in anything pertaining to marriage,” he’d said, giving her carte blanche with his credit cards. He did not want to see or hear about what she’d bought for the happy couples.

Julia had hoped her selections were acceptable. The nice thank-you notes written to Michael by the brides had given her a warm glow. She sincerely hoped that all three couples would live the proverbial “happily ever after.”

Michael did not share her optimism. Each time, before signing his name to the wedding cards she’d purchased with the gifts, he’d made a sound that was something between a sarcastic laugh and a growl.

“I guess if this is what they really want to do…” he’d said all three times, his tone disapproving. Julia had once heard someone make a similar statement in a similar tone when commenting on a family of acrobats who insisted on working without a safety net.

“Personally, I’d rather be dead than married,” Michael had added all three times, while handing the cards back to her.

“Do you really believe it’s better to be dead than wed?” Julia had paraphrased wryly the third time he’d expressed the sentiment.

“Better dead than wed,” Michael repeated glibly. “Hmm, not bad. I think it has potential as a slogan. Maybe I’ll run it by my cousin Caroline in marketing.”

“Caroline would rather be wed,” Julia murmured. “You bought her a pair of lovely, antique silver candlesticks and signed a wedding card for her a few months ago, remember?”

“I remember signing the card. I have no knowledge of the candlesticks, nor do I care to.”

“Well, Caroline said that she loves them.”

“Good. Since you’re in sync with her tastes, I’ll put you in charge of buying Baby Valkov its welcome-to-the-world gift when the time comes.”

“I’d heard that Caroline was expecting a baby,” Julia murmured.

Everyone in the company knew, because Caroline Fortune Valkov was visibly pregnant. From what Julia heard through the company grapevine, Fortune’s vice president of marketing and her research-chemist husband were as blissfully happy as the card Michael had signed wished them to be.

“That seems to be the way it goes.” Michael looked grim. “Get married and then have a kid, for all the wrong reasons. Of course, some people do it backward—get pregnant and then get married—but the part about the kid being conceived for all the wrong reasons still applies. Doubly so in the shotgun-wedding cases.”

Julia was nonplussed. They’d never had a discussion like this one. And while she had been uncomfortable discussing his family members, she was even more unsettled by his starkly pessimistic views regarding their future. “You don’t believe your cousin and her husband are having a child because they love each other and want to create a family together?”

He’d given her an almost pitying glance, as if she’d just confessed that, as a twenty-six-year-old, she still firmly believed in the existence of Santa Claus.

“Love has nothing to do with it, Julia. The kid could be an accident, the result of a night of too much wine and an overload of hormones. Or if the pregnancy was actually planned, maybe Caroline believes a child will give Nick more incentive to stay with her—and the Fortune Corporation, of course. He is a valuable asset to the company, and Caroline is too good a businesswoman not to realize it. As for Nick, perhaps he sees a child as a way for him to stake a permanent claim on the Fortune money.”

“I think you’re wrong,” Julia said rather boldly. She’d seen the couple together, and their love for each other was obvious, even to an outsider like herself.

Michael shrugged. “Couples have been using children to serve their own agendas from time immemorial, Julia.”

“It’s not always that way. Don’t you think anybody has a baby for the right reasons?” Julia had been unable to keep herself from asking.

Michael had given that cynical laugh-growl and turned his attention back to the papers on his desk, not bothering to dignify such a naive question with an answer.

Having heard about Sheila Fortune, who according to Kristina had produced three children for monetary gain, Julia better understood Michael’s scornful pessimism.

Understood, but did not accept. Julia believed in love and marriage and the children who resulted from such a union. She’d been one herself, and she intended someday to have a loving union like the one her parents had shared. To have children who were loved and wanted by two parents who cherished each other.

She thought back to those wonderful days when her family had been together—Mom and Dad, she and her younger sister, Joanna. A lump lodged in Julia’s throat, and she blinked away the tears that suddenly filled her eyes.

The Chandler family’s time together had been brief, making the happy memories particularly poignant and bittersweet. Her father’s unexpected death from the complications of appendicitis had occurred when she was seventeen. Tragedy had struck again three years ago when a car accident claimed her mother’s life and grievously injured poor Joanna.

Thinking of her younger sister rallied Julia, and she forcefully shook off the aura of gloom threatening to envelop her. Joanna was twenty years old now and in a superior rehabilitation center, working hard to overcome the effects of her devastating injuries from the crash.

Julia was filled with a quiet pride as she visualized her little sister fighting to overcome the odds stacked against her. With the help of a program tailored specifically for her recovery, consisting of grueling regimes of physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, music therapy and recreational therapy, Joanna never wasted time feeling sorry for herself.

And until Joanna was well again and able to live an independent life, Julia had put her own hopes and dreams on hold. Her job at the Fortune Corporation was all-important because her generous salary enabled her to pay Joanna’s considerable expenses at the rehab center. Julia didn’t protest about the long hours that workaholic Michael Fortune demanded because there was nothing and no one in her life as important as Joanna and their daily phone calls and weekend visits.

A happy marriage to a man who loved her as much as she loved him, and their much-wanted, much-loved children, had to wait. But when the time was finally right, Julia was certain she would find him. Or maybe he would find her.

Two

“Another bag of mail for the eligible bachelor!” Denny, the clerk from the mail room, sang out, heaving an industrial-size plastic sack into Julia’s office. Three other sacks just like it took up most of the floor space. “There’s more coming in. We had to clear this out to make room.”

“Mr. Fortune will be thrilled to hear it,” Julia murmured wryly.

“Not!” Denny chuckled, pleased with his own joke. “We heard he’s furious about all this. But me and my buddies sure don’t know why. If I had hundreds and hundreds of letters from hot babes craving my bod, you can believe I’d be in paradise!”

Julia glanced at the short, perspiring overweight young man, who was somewhere in his twenties and looked ten years older. There would never be hundreds of letters from hot babes craving his body. Maybe not even one.

“Mr. Fortune doesn’t like the attention the magazine article has brought him,” Julia explained tactfully.

For the past five days, ever since the magazine had hit the stands listing Michael Fortune as one of the top-ten most eligible bachelors in the U.S.A., she’d had versions of this same conversation with Denny whenever he arrived with another sack of mail.

Usually the mail clerk shuffled out immediately afterward, but this morning he seemed to be in a chatty mood. He lingered by her desk.

“We had to bring two more people into the mail room to handle all this extra stuff.” Denny stared at the bulging sacks with a proprietary air. “I was put in charge of them, since I’ve been in the department for five years. We call ourselves the ‘Fortune bachelor team.’”

“Ah,” said Julia. Were congratulations in order? She wasn’t quite sure.

“Yep, we open every letter addressed to Mr. Fortune that don’t have the special company code on it.”

She nodded. To distinguish Michael’s usual business correspondence from the mountain of letters inspired by the eligible-bachelor list, Julia had notified all his colleagues and associates nationally and worldwide to use a special code.

“We even open the letters marked Personal. Mr. Fortune said to especially open those ones.” Denny leaned forward and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Those are usually the ones with the really good stuff in ’em.”

Julia winced.

“You wouldn’t believe what we’ve been finding, Miss Chandler!” Denny exclaimed exuberantly. “Women send Mr. Fortune panties with their phone numbers written on them! And we’re not talking plain old underpants, either. These panties—”

“I hope you’re donating any suitable items of clothing to charity,” Julia interjected, before he could go into detail.

“Miss Chandler, no respectable charity would want them panties, I can tell you that,” Denny said with alacrity. “And then there’s the pictures being sent in! Wow!” His face reddened and he began to breathe heavily. “Mr. Fortune said we could have whatever is in the envelopes, so we divide up the pictures. Sometimes we trade ’em. Chuck actually bought one off of Jonesy for ten bucks! He offered me twenty for a really great one I got, but no way I’m selling!”

Julia’s forced smile became even harder to maintain. She glanced at her watch, a time-honored cue of dismissal. “Uh-oh, I’m running late and have to—”

“But my favorites are the videos the women send in!” Denny did not pick up on her cue. He was not interested in being dismissed. “Picture this, Miss Chandler. Women wearing these real sexy getups or else lying naked on rugs or on beds with candles lighted and music playing while they tell Mr. Fortune how and what they’re going to—”

“I really have to—to get this document to Mr. Fortune for his signature.” Julia jumped to her feet, almost knocking over her desk chair. “It’s extremely urgent.”

“Well, tell Mr. Fortune we followed his orders. There are only letters in the bags. We took care of the other stuff for him.” Smirking, Denny lumbered from the office.

The other stuff. Julia imagined Denny and his cronies slavering over their newfound panty, photo and video collections, and shuddered.

The door to Michael’s office opened, and he stood on the threshold, grim faced. His dark blue eyes focused immediately on the latest sack of mail. “Oh, Lord, not more!”

“Denny wanted me to assure you that he and his crew have removed, uh, any accompanying paraphernalia, and that these sacks contain only letters.”

“Only letters!” Michael echoed tightly. Exasperated, he ran his hand through his dark, thick hair, tousling it. “Do you have any idea of the content of those letters?”

“A fairly good idea,” Julia admitted. She felt a totally unexpected, strange and disconcerting impulse to smooth his hair back into place, and she clasped her hands in her lap, as if to physically prevent herself from acting upon it. “From Denny. He’s extremely enthusiastic about your bachelor-list mail.”

Michael groaned. “This is a nightmare!”

He entered her office and began to pace. It wasn’t easy, since the big mail sacks took up most of the room. Nevertheless, Michael wound restlessly among them.

“Ever since that damnable magazine hit the stands, I haven’t had a moment’s peace. I’m hounded unmercifully day and night by women. I’ve had to get an unlisted phone number. I have to sneak out of my apartment at odd hours and go skulking in and out of the building like a criminal on the run. I don’t dare go to a restaurant or a store or—or anywhere. Women come up to me and tell me the most incredibly intimate things, like their bra size or what they’ll do if I—”

He broke off abruptly, a dark red flush staining his neck. Julia was both amazed and amused. Was Michael Fortune blushing?

“I guess it’s a good thing Denny and his pals have taken custody of the pictures and videos your, er, fans have sent,” she murmured. “According to Denny, who’s become something of an expert in the field, they’re way beyond an R rating.”

“Don’t be flippant, Julia!” Michael reprimanded sternly. “You have only to think about what has happened in the last five days to recognize what an upheaval that list has caused, not only to me personally but to the company!”

“There was definitely an upheaval when the company’s entire computer system had a seizure because all the voice-mail boxes were overloaded with messages for you,” Julia agreed.

“The whole system was down for hours on three separate days!” Michael was beside himself. “How can we possibly conduct business under those conditions? It’s a catastrophe!”

“It certainly isn’t business as usual,” Julia affirmed mildly.

Michael’s eyes glowed like blue flames. “When I told Kristina that having my name on that list constituted an atrocious invasion of privacy, I had no idea how bad it would actually be. The phones and fax machines are jammed with messages from women demanding to meet me. Every radio and TV station in Minneapolis and St. Paul calls at least once a day to schedule an interview with me. The newspapers—both in and out of state—want pictures and interviews, and those syndicated TV tabloid shows have actually sent people to try to get me to consent to appear on their programs. And then there are the talk shows who want to get the ten of us from that wretched list into their studios with an entire audience comprised of single women!”

“That could get ugly,” Julia said dryly. “I have visions of the ten of you being torn limb from limb by your overly enthusiastic prospective brides.”

“It’s not a far-fetched scene. After living through this, I can well believe that there are hundreds of women out there crazy enough to do anything to snare a man!”

“If it’s any consolation, I’m sure the other nine eligible bachelors are being harassed, too.”

“It isn’t any consolation at all!” Michael growled. “The situation is intolerable. I can’t live this way. Bad enough that I can hardly focus on my work with all the distractions and interruptions, but the entire company has been disrupted by this—this army of zealous women who—” Abruptly, he stopped talking, stopped walking and turned to face her. “I just don’t get it, Julia. Why are they doing this?”

“The magazine said the ten eligible-bachelor picks were the ‘Prince Charmings of the ’90s’,” Julia said thoughtfully. “I guess they tapped into all the fairy-tale magic that surrounds—”

“Fairy-tale magic!” Michael gave a derisive snort. “Prince Charming! Give me a break! What woman in her right mind wants to be a sniveling simp like Cinderella?”

“I agree the Prince Charming concept is outdated, and I’ve always thought Cinderella was passive to the point of being dysfunctional.” Julia grinned. “But these letter writers aren’t passive, they’re assertive, and they probably find the prospect of being Mrs. Michael Fortune—”

“There is never going to be a Mrs. Michael Fortune,” Michael promised fiercely. “But even if I did have the slightest inclination to marry, I would never choose a wife by drawing a letter out of a sack. What sane man would? So why do these women bombard us with mail?”

“Hope springs eternal, I guess.”

“There is hope and there is delusion, Julia. These letters fall firmly into the latter category.”

“Well, all those women who wrote in can’t be delusional, so maybe it’s, uh, ambition that is motivating them,” Julia suggested gamely.

“I’m quite familiar with that particular ambition.” Michael’s lips twisted in a cynical grimace. “This entire debacle simply proves what I’ve always known—that women are obsessed with money and will do just about anything to get it.”

“That’s a very depressing point of view, not to mention a vast over-generalization,” Julia said, in defense of every member of the female sex who was not a money-grubbing fortune hunter. Or Fortune hunter.

“Sure.” He laughed coldly. “Whatever, Julia.”

He leaned against the wall and folded his arms in front of his chest. “Did you hear that my mother was the one who sent in that picture of me? She admitted it and didn’t even apologize for doing it. The magazine contacted her, told her about the article, and she express-mailed the photo the next day. Charged the mailing expenses to my dad, of course.”

Julia nodded. She’d heard. She also knew that Nate Fortune had refused to pay and had sent the bill back to Sheila, prompting a visit by her to company headquarters.

Julia knew all about it because Sheila and Nate Fortune had had a screaming match in the corridor of the legal department. Everybody who worked there had heard every word, and news of the scene quickly spread throughout the company.

“Kristina was also right about my mother’s reason for sending my picture into the magazine.” Michael stared broodingly at the floor. “Mother actually said she hoped that the daughter of a ‘sinfully rich billionaire’ would become aware of my existence and contact me.”

His piercing blue eyes met Julia’s, and she shifted uneasily under his gaze. He seemed to be waiting for her to comment.

“I don’t know very much about the daughters of sinfully rich billionaires.” She chose her words carefully, determined to be tactful. “But I don’t think choosing a husband from a magazine list is, uh, quite their style.”

“As if that would deter Mother! She also delivered her standard lecture on the importance of acquiring one’s own immense personal fortune, by whatever means possible. I’ve been hearing that one since I was in kindergarten.” He gave Julia a hard stare. “Did your mother talk to you like that?”

“When I was in kindergarten, my mother and I talked about my dolls and the Easter Bunny and things like that. I can’t remember any advice about financial planning for the future.”

“What? No counsel on how to land a rich husband? No advice on ways to hold out against a prenuptial agreement or on the number of carats requisite in the diamond engagement ring to be purchased by the sucker on the hook? I thought all mothers indoctrinated their daughters about the necessity of marrying into wealth, from the time they were in the cradle.”

“Did your mother have discussions like that with your sister?” Julia asked curiously.

“Of course. For all the good it did. Poor idealistic Janie! She was determined to find true love without money and only succeeded in getting abandoned by the father of her child when he learned she was pregnant. I don’t know what upset our mother more—the fact that Jane slept with a man who wasn’t wealthy enough to be sued for a seven-figure child-support settlement or the fact that Sheila was going to be a grandmother. She still finds it difficult to admit her grandmother status.”