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The Dating Game
Sandra Field
A Business Arrangement? Attractive divorcee and single parent Julie Ferris had problems with a succession of men who were interested in her body, not her mind. Successful lawyer Teal Carruthers shared her concerns.A widower with a small son to bring up, he was targeted by every woman he met as a potential husband. Should feelings get in the way - when the solution seemed an obvious one… ?
The Dating Game
Sandra Field
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u3d4a3154-c834-5b79-9e9f-e85b243a344f)
CHAPTER TWO (#u6693bc7f-dc24-5b6c-a1f6-853e4e8fd070)
CHAPTER THREE (#u1d8a539d-7d56-5d11-acd4-70f6dbc6856b)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
HE WAS in a foul mood.
Teal Carruthers rolled down his car window. Several vehicles ahead of him, at the traffic lights, a delivery truck and a taxi had collided at the intersection; a tow truck and a police car were adding to the confusion without, as far as he could see, in any way ameliorating it. Behind him the cars were lined up as far as he could see. He looked at his watch. Five to five. He was going to be late home.
Today was Monday. On Mondays Mrs Inkpen came to clean the house and stayed with his son Scott until he, Teal, got home at five. Scott liked Mrs Inkpen, whose language was colorful and whose cooking bore no relation to the rules of good nutrition. Teal had gotten in the habit of taking Scott out for supper on Mondays, in theory to save Mrs Inkpen the trouble of preparing a meal, in actuality to protect himself from hot dogs adorned with anything from cream cheese to crunchy peanut butter. Even Scott, as he recalled, had not been too crazy about the peanut butter.
Mrs Inkpen didn’t like him to be late.
The driver of the tow truck was sweeping up the broken glass on the road and the policeman was taking a statement from the truck driver. Teal ran his fingers through his hair and rested his elbow on the window-ledge. It was the first really hot day of the summer, the kind of day that made Scott, aged eight, complain loudly about having to go to school. Heat was shimmering off the tarred surface of the road and the smell of exhaust fumes was almost enough to make Teal close his window.
The policeman shoved his notebook in his back pocket and began directing the traffic. Teal eased the BMW in gear and inched forward. Bad enough that he was late. Worse that he had had an interminable day in court. Worst of all was the fact that he had enough work in his briefcase to keep him up past midnight.
The traffic light turned red. He should never have trusted Mike with the brief today; that had been a bad mistake. A really bad mistake. Particularly with old Mersey presiding. Mr Chief Justice Mersey had been trying to trip Teal up for the last three years, and today he had more than succeeded. And all because Teal had left Mike, his brilliant but erratic assistant, to cross-examine one of the prosecution’s main witnesses.
Mike, Teal now suspected, had been suffering from a hangover. In consequence he had been erratic rather than brilliant, and had committed not one but two errors of procedure. Mersey had had a field day chewing him out and Teal had been left holding the bag. Which meant he now had to rebuild their case from scratch. The only good thing about the day was that court had recessed until Wednesday. Tonight once Scott was in bed he’d have to get a sitter and chase down his two main witnesses, and tomorrow he’d catch up with the rest of them. Both nights he’d be burning the midnight oil to come up with Wednesday’s strategy.
Who was he kidding? The three a.m. oil was more like it.
But Willie McNeill was innocent. Teal would stake his life on it. And it was up to him to produce enough doubt in the minds of the jurors so that they couldn’t possibly bring in a guilty verdict.
It wouldn’t be easy. But he could do it.
The light turned green. The traffic began to move and the bus that was two cars ahead belched out a cloud of black smoke. The policeman was sweating under his helmet, while the cabbie and the truck driver were laughing uproariously at some private joke. Very funny, Teal thought morosely. It was now ten past five.
By the time he turned into his driveway it was twenty-five past and Mrs Inkpen was waiting for him on the back porch. She was clad in a full-length pink raincoat with a hat jammed on her brassy curls, her pose as militant as an Amazon. Before Teal had married Elizabeth, Mrs Inkpen had cleaned for Elizabeth’s parents, and he sometimes thought she should have been included on the marriage license. Although she was now well over retiring age, his tactful suggestions that she might prefer to be home with her ageing husband were met with loud disclaimers; she was fanatically loyal.
Bracing himself, he climbed out of the car. Mrs Inkpen tapped her watch ostentatiously. ‘This’ll cost you overtime, Mr C,’ she said. ‘If I’d known you was goin’ to be this late, I could’ve cooked you a nice supper.’
At least he had been spared that. ‘There was an accident on the corner of Robie and Coburg.’
Her eyes brightened. ‘Anyone hurt?’
He shook his head, almost hating to disappoint her. ‘A lot of broken glass and a traffic tie-up, that’s all.’
‘Drugs,’ she said, nodding her head sagely. ‘That’s what it is, all them drugs. I said to my Albert just the other day, what with crack and hash and pot you can’t trust no one these days. Never know when someone’s goin’ to creep up behind you and bash you on the head.’ She rolled her eyes theatrically. ‘Course you know all about that, Mr C, you bein’ a lawyer and all.’
Mrs Inkpen’s vision of what he did all day was drawn from television, and bore little resemblance to reality. He said hurriedly, before she could ask him about his day, ‘Can I give you a drive home to apologize for being late?’
‘No need for that, I got to keep the old bones movin’,’ she said, her good humor restored. ‘Smell the lilac, Mr C; ain’t it a treat?’
Elizabeth had planted the lilac the year Scott had been born. Its plumes of tiny blossoms were a deep purple, the scent as pungent as spice. She had planned to plant a white lilac for the daughter that was to have followed Scott...
Wincing away from all the old memories, for there had been no daughter and now Elizabeth was dead, Teal said evenly, ‘Lovely, yes...we’ll see you next week, then, Mrs Inkpen.’
She gave him a conspiratorial grin. ‘That nice Mrs Thurston phoned, and so did Patsy Smythe. It must be great to be so popular, Mr C—you don’t never have to worry about a date on a Saturday night, do you?’ The yellow daisies on her hat bobbed up and down. ‘It’s because you’re so handsome,’ she pronounced. ‘Like the men in the soaps, is what I tell Albert—the ones the girls are always falling for. If I was twenty years younger, my Albert might be in trouble.’ Cackling with laughter, she set off down the driveway between the tangle of forsythias and rose bushes.
The bushes all needed pruning. Scowling, because when was he supposed to find the time to get out in the garden and besides, Mrs Inkpen couldn’t be more wrong—it was a damned nuisance to be so popular—Teal grabbed his briefcase from the back seat and went into the house. ‘Scott?’ he called. ‘I’m home.’
The kitchen, starkly decorated in white and grey, was abnormally tidy. Mrs Inkpen achieved this effect, so Teal had realized soon after Elizabeth died, by opening the nearest drawer or cupboard and shoving everything inside. Any normal man would have fired her months ago. But he was fond of her, and loyalty worked both ways.
The telephone sat on a built-in pine desk by the window; the green light on his answering machine was flashing twice. His scowl deepened. One of those flashes, he would be willing to bet, was Janine, wanting him to confirm their date this weekend. Janine was nothing if not persistent. He didn’t want to know who the other one was. He sometimes felt as though every woman in Halifax under the age of fifty was after him, each one certain that all he needed was a wife, a mother for his son, or a lover. Or a combination of all three, he thought with a twist to his mouth.
They were all wrong. He was doing a fine job bringing up Scott on his own, so why would he need to remarry? As for the needs of his body, they were buried so deeply he sometimes thought he should apply to the nearest monastery.
The telephone rang, breaking into his thoughts. Warily he picked it up and said hello.
‘Teal? This is Sheila McNab, do you remember me? We met at the board meeting last week. How are you?’
He did remember her. A well-packaged brunette whose laugh had grated on his nerves. They chatted a few minutes, then she said, ‘I’m wondering if you’d be free on Saturday evening to go to a barbecue in Chester with me? A friend of mine is celebrating her birthday.’
‘I’m afraid that’s impossible, Sheila; I already have plans that night,’ he said truthfully.
‘Oh...well, perhaps another time.’
‘Actually I’m very busy these days. My job’s extremely demanding and I’m a single parent as well...but it was nice of you to think of me, and perhaps we’ll meet again some time.’
He put down the phone, feeling trapped in his own kitchen. Maybe he should shave his head and put on thirty pounds. Would that make the women leave him alone?
He heard Scott’s footsteps thump down the stairs, followed by a swish that meant his son had taken to the banisters. The boy landed with a thud on the hall floor and came rushing into the room, waving a sheet of paper in one hand. ‘Guess what, Dad?’ he cried. ‘There’s a home and school meeting on Thursday, and you’ll get to meet Danny’s mum because she’s going, too.’
Teal’s smile faded. The last thing he needed was one more woman to add to the list. Especially such a paragon as Danny’s mother. ‘I thought home and school was finished for the year,’ he said temperately, rumpling his son’s dark hair.
Scott ducked, sending out a quick punch at his father’s midriff. Teal flicked one back, and a moment later the pair of them were rolling around the kitchen floor in a time-honored ritual. ‘Is that your soccer shirt?’ Teal grunted. ‘It needs washing in the worst way.’
‘It’ll only get dirty again,’ Scott said with unanswerable logic, bouncing up and down on his father’s chest. ‘The meeting’s so you can see our art stuff and our scribblers before school gets out; you’ll come, won’t you, Dad? Maybe we could take Danny and his mum with us,’ he added hopefully. ‘She’s real nice; you’d like her. She made chocolate-fudge cookies today, I brought a couple home for you; she said I could.’
Janine, who had marriage in mind, had sent Teal flowers last weekend, and Cindy Thurston, who wanted something more immediate and less permanent than marriage, had tried to present him with a bottle of the finest brandy. He didn’t want Danny’s mother’s chocolate-fudge cookies. ‘I’d rather we went on our own,’ he said. ‘And you must change your shirt before we go out for supper.’
Scott stuck out his jaw. ‘She’s beautiful—like a movie star.’
Teal blinked. What eight-year-old noticed that his best friend’s mother was beautiful? Feeling his antipathy toward the unknown woman increase in leaps and bounds, he said, ‘There are clean shirts in your drawer. Move it.’
‘She’s prettier than Janine,’ Scott said stubbornly.
Janine was a ravishing redhead. Teal sighed. ‘I’m sure we’ll meet her at the school,’ he said.
And I’ll be polite if it kills me. But just because her son and mine are fast turning into best friends it doesn’t mean she has to become part of my life. I’ve got problems enough as it is, he added silently.
‘Her name’s Julie.’ Scott tugged on his father’s silk tie. ‘Can we go to Burger King to eat, Dad?’
‘Sure,’ said Teal. ‘Providing you have milk and not pop.’
With a loud whoop Scott took off across the room. Teal followed at a more moderate pace, loosening the knot on his tie. A sweatshirt and jeans were going to feel good after the day he’d had. He’d better phone for a sitter and drink lots of coffee with his hamburger so he’d stay awake tonight.
He was going to ignore both his phone messages until tomorrow.
* * *
Julie Ferris turned her new CD player up another notch and raised the pitch of her own voice correspondingly. She was no match for John Denver or Placido Domingo, but that didn’t bother her. At the top of her lungs she sang about the memories of love, deciding that if even one of the men currently pursuing her could sing like that she might be inclined to keep on dating him.
Not a chance. On the occasions when her dates came to pick her up at the house, she sometimes contrived to have this song playing, fortissimo. Most of them ignored it; a few said they liked it; the odd one complained of the noise. But none burst into ravishing song.
It was just as well, she thought. She really didn’t want to get involved with anyone yet; it was too soon after the divorce. Anyway, if the men she’d met so far were anything to go by, the options weren’t that great. She was better off single.
‘...dreams come true...’ she carolled, putting the finishing touches to the chicken casserole she was making for supper. The sun was streaming in the kitchen window and the birds were chirping in the back garden. The garden was so painfully and geometrically orderly that she was almost surprised any self-respecting bird would visit it. On Friday she was going to find a nursery and do her best to create some colour and confusion among the right-angled beds with their trimmed shrubs and military rows of late red tulips.
Technically, her landlady had not forbidden her to do so. She had merely made it clear that she expected the house and the garden to be maintained in apple-pie order. An odd phrase, apple-pie order, Julie mused. A phrase she intended to interpret liberally.
The phone rang. Wiping her hands on the dishcloth, she crossed the kitchen to answer it, chuckling as Einstein the cat swiped at the cord with one large paw. She and Danny had only lived here for six weeks and already she had acquired a stray cat, an unkempt gray male who for the first week had eaten voraciously and virtually ignored them. Now, however, he was intent on running the household. She had called him Einstein because, despite his mass, he could move with the speed of light. ‘Hello?’ she said.
‘Julie? Wayne here.’
She had had a date with Wayne last Saturday night; he was an intern at the hospital where she worked. They had seen an entertaining film she had enjoyed, had had an entirely civilized conversation about it over drinks at a bar, and then Wayne had driven her home, parking his sports car in her driveway. Before she had realized his intention he had suddenly been all over her, as if she were a wrestler he was trying to subdue. His hands had touched her in places she considered strictly off-limits, and his mouth had attacked hers with a technical expertise she had found truly insulting. She had pulled free from a kiss whose intimacy he in no way had earned and had scrambled out of the car, her lipstick smeared and her clothes disheveled. She had not expected to hear from him again.
‘Julie—you there? Want to take in a film Friday night?’
Julie had, unfortunately, she sometimes thought, been well brought up. ‘No, thank you,’ she said.
‘That film we talked about last Saturday is playing in Dartmouth; you said you hadn’t seen it.’
She could lie and say she had plans for Friday night. She said, ‘Wayne, I don’t like having to fight my dates off. I’d rather not go out with you again.’
There was an appreciable pause. Then he said, sounding aggrieved, ‘Fight me off? What are you talking about?’
‘I have some say in who kisses me, that’s what I’m talking about.’
‘Hey, don’t be so uptight—it was no big deal.’
‘You felt like a tidal wave,’ she said shortly. Large and wet and overwhelming.
‘Don’t tell me you’re one of those feminists who charges a guy with assault if he as much as looks at them.’
Refusing to pursue this undoubted red herring, she said, ‘I can hear my son getting home from school; I’ve got to go, Wayne.’
‘What about the movie?’
‘No, thanks,’ she said crisply, and replaced the receiver.
Wayne was not the first of her dates to exercise what she considered liberties with her person and what they plainly considered normal—even expected—behavior. Robert had always told her she was unsophisticated, she thought grimly. Maybe he was right.
There was a loud squeal of brakes and then twin rattles as two bikes were leaned against the fence. Julie smiled to herself. Danny was home, and by the sound of it Scott was with him. A nice boy, Scott Carruthers, she decided thoughtfully. How glad she was that Danny and he had become such fast friends; it had eased the move from the country to the city immeasurably.
‘Hi, Mum,’ Danny cried, almost tumbling in the door in his haste. ‘Scott fell off his bike and he’s bleeding; can you fix him up?’
As Scott limped into the kitchen, any lingering thoughts about the peculiarities of male dating behavior dropped from Julie’s mind. She quickly washed her hands at the sink, assessing the ugly grazes on Scott’s bare knees. ‘Danny, would you get the first-aid kit from the bathroom cupboard?’ she said. ‘That must be hurting, Scott.’
‘Kind of,’ said Scott, sitting down heavily on the nearest chair and scowling at his knees.
No two boys could be more different than Danny and Scott. Even discounting a mother’s natural love for her son, Julie knew Danny was an exceptionally handsome little boy, with his thick blond hair, so like her own, and his big blue eyes, the image of Robert’s. He was shy, tending to be a loner, and she had worried a great deal about uprooting him from the country village that had been his home since he was born. Scott, on the other hand, was a wiry, dark-haired extrovert, passionately fond of soccer and baseball, who had drawn Danny very naturally into a whole circle of new friends and activities.
She knelt down beside Scott, using a sterile gauze pad to pick the dirt from his scraped knees. Although he was being very stoical, she could see the glint of tears in his eyes. She said matter-of-factly, ‘How did you fall off?’
‘He was teaching me how to do wheelies,’ Danny announced. ‘But the bike hit a bump.’
Wheelies involved driving the bicycle on the back wheel only. Julie said, ‘Not on the street, I hope.’
‘Nope,’ Scott said. ‘Ouch, that hurts...my Dad said he’d confiscate my bike if he ever caught me doing wheelies on the street. Confiscate means take away,’ he added, bunching his fists against the pain. ‘My dad’s a lawyer, so he knows lots of big words.’
The lawyer she had consulted to safeguard her interests in the divorce had charged her a great deal of money to do very little; Julie made a non-committal sound and wished Scott had practised his wheelies on grass rather than gravel. ‘We’re nearly done,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I’m hurting you.’
‘Do nurses always hurt people?’ Scott asked pugnaciously.
Julie looked up, startled. There was more behind that question than simple curiosity. But she had no idea what. She said cautiously, ‘They try very hard not to hurt anyone. But sometimes they have to, I guess.’
His scowl was back in full force. ‘You work in a hospital; Danny told me you do.’
