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Hers for the Weekend
Tanya Michaels
She wanted a temporary arrangement…Piper Jamieson needs a man. And not just any man. She needs someone to play her significant other when she heads home for her family reunion. Thanks to a self-imposed period of celibacy, she has no prospects…except for her sexy best friend, Josh Weber. \ Since there's nothing between them, kissing him will be a breeze, right?But he wanted her permanently!Spending an entire weekend with Piper sounds perfect to Josh…ifs the whole family thing that doesn't. Lately his dates haven't been as exciting as they used to be, and he knows why. His best friend's been on his mind–day and night. But Piper has made it clear she's not looking for a relationship. Luckily he's hers for the weekend, and he has three full nights to change her mind!
“Is there still something between you and your ex?”
“Are you kidding?” Piper’s grimace, complete with eyes rounded in horror, did Josh’s heart good. “He’s one of the reasons I need boyfriend camouflage this weekend.”
“Oh.” Josh glanced at the doorway, noting that he and Piper were visible to anyone in the dining room. “And your grandmother’s fondest dream is to see you in the arms of a good man, right?” Don’t do it.
“Right.”
He took a step toward her. Maybe he shouldn’t do this, but how could just once hurt? “I have an idea that should make your grandmother ecstatic.”
Piper’s ocean-colored eyes grew so wide he could drown in them. She stood on tiptoe to meet him, and then his lips were on hers.
Fire raced in his blood. Too late he realized that the reality of kissing her was far more devastating to his senses than the fantasy, and his assumption that he could walk away from “just one” kiss unaffected had been foolish.
Still, as long as he was making the mistake, he should make the most of it.
Dear Reader,
One of the fun parts of my job is exploring the different ways two people can end up together. As much as I love stories about a man and a woman who make an instant connection, I’m a sucker for stories about people who start out as friends. People who don’t immediately realize (or want to admit) what’s right in front of them, so they try in vain to fight the attraction. But the sexual tension and emotional undercurrent can’t be ignored.
At least, that’s the case for my heroine, Piper Jamieson, and her best friend, Josh Weber. Career-driven Piper has no time for romance in her life, especially not with a heartbreaker like Josh. When she needs a date for the weekend, though, her sexy best friend fills in—with unexpected results.
Piper and Josh are very special to me, maybe because I married my own best friend, maybe because they were just so much fun to write. I hope you enjoy their story and will check out the information about my other books and my story-themed giveaways at www.mindspring.com/~tjmic.
Happy reading!
Tanya
Books by Tanya Michaels
HARLEQUIN DUETS
96—THE MAID OF DISHONOR
HARLEQUIN FLIPSIDE
6—WHO NEEDS DECAF?
Hers for the Weekend
Tanya Michaels
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Contents
Chapter 1 (#u975a9483-1543-5a52-8d95-4845a95e89d3)
Chapter 2 (#u981fc7ea-83c2-53bb-b9a6-51e7b9ed9404)
Chapter 3 (#u70bc5670-143b-526c-9358-bd8b69a2c252)
Chapter 4 (#ud8bf6501-ae27-52bd-afe5-303d6b418b7d)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
1
PIPER JAMIESON SAGGED against the sofa cushions and rolled her eyes at the phone receiver. It could have been a wrong number, a pushy telephone solicitor, an obscene caller even, but nooo, it was her mother. Piper loved her mom, but all their conversations boiled down to the same argument—Piper’s love life.
She started to put her feet up on the oval coffee table, but stopped suddenly, as though her mother could see through the phone line and into her apartment. “So, how’ve you been doing, Mom?”
“Never mind that. I’m more concerned with how you are,” her mother said. “You don’t feel acute appendicitis coming on, right? You aren’t going to call us tomorrow with a severe case of forty-eight-hour east Brazilian mumps or something?”
Piper groaned. Although she’d bailed out on all of the family reunions in recent years, she’d used legitimate work-related excuses, never fictional medical ones. But this year she’d made a promise to her grandmother.
This year, there would be no reprieve.
“I’ll be there,” she assured her mother. “And I’m looking forward to seeing you all.” Mostly.
“We’re looking forward to seeing you, too, honey. Especially Nana. When I went to visit her at the hospital last week—”
“Hospital?” Piper’s chest tightened. She adored her grandmother, even if Nana did stubbornly insist women needed husbands. “Daphne told me she was under the weather, but no one said anything about the hospital.” As Nana advanced in years, Piper couldn’t help worrying over her grandmother’s health.
A worry her mother was not above exploiting. “You know what would help your Nana? If she knew you had a good man to take care of you.”
Ah, yes—here came the Good Man Speech. Piper knew it well.
“You’ve always been independent,” her mother was saying, “but there’s such a thing as being too stubborn. Before you know it, you’ll wake up fifty, without anyone to share your life….”
Knowing from experience that it did no good to point out she was decades away from turning fifty, Piper stretched across the maroon-and-black-plaid couch. Might as well be comfy while she waited for her mother to wind down.
Though she’d escaped her small hometown of Rebecca, Texas, and now lived in Houston, Piper couldn’t escape her family’s shared belief that a woman’s purpose in life was to get married. Piper’s sole brush with matrimony had been a broken engagement that still left her with a sense of dazed relief—how had she come so close to spending her life with a man who’d wanted her to be someone different? When her sister, Daphne, had married, Piper thought the pressure would ease, that their mother would be happy to finally have a married daughter. Instead, Mrs. Jamieson was scandalized that her youngest was married, now pregnant, while her oldest didn’t even date.
As her mom continued to wax ominous about the downfalls of growing old alone, Piper stared vacantly at the dead ficus tree in the corner of her living room. I should water that poor thing. Although, at this point, it was probably more in need of a dirge than H2O.
“Piper! Are you even listening to me?”
“Y—mostly.”
“I asked if that bagel man was still giving you trouble.”
Mercifully, her mother had moved on to the next topic. Too bad Piper had no idea what that topic was. “Bagel?”
Then realization dawned. Her mother must mean Stanley Kagle, vice president of Callahan, Kagle and Munroe, the architectural firm where Piper worked as the only female draftsman. Make that draftswoman. In Kagle’s unvoiced opinion, Piper’s job description should be brewing coffee and answering phones with Ginger and Maria, the two secretaries who had been with the firm since it opened. Luckily, Callahan and Munroe held more liberated views.
“You mean Mr. Kagle, Mom?”
“Whichever one is always hassling you at work.” She paused. “You know, you wouldn’t have to work at all if you’d find a nice man and raise some babies.”
Piper could actually hear her blood pressure rising. One of only a handful of female students in her degree program at Texas A&M, she’d busted her butt to excel in her drafting and detailing courses, and was now working even harder to prove herself amid her male colleagues. Why couldn’t her family be proud of that? Proud of her?
“Mom, I like my job. I like my life. I wish you’d just accept that I’m happy.”
“How happy could you be? Daphne says you’re underappreciated and that one of your bosses has it in for you.”
And thank you so much, Daphne, for passing on that information.
“Daph caught me after a rough week, and I was just venting,” Piper said. “I love the actual drafting part.” And loved the feeling she got when she was in the middle of a drawing and knew it was damn good, the pride of passing a building downtown and seeing one of her suspended walkways. If things continued to go well, Piper was hoping her next review with Callahan would lead to her first project as a team leader.
But better to argue her point in a language her mom could understand. “I’ll admit to occasional work-related stress, but are you trying to tell me that marriage and motherhood are stress-free?”
Silence stretched across the phone line.
Aha! I have you there.
Then Mrs. Jamieson sighed as though this conversation epitomized her motherhood stress. “Honey, you aren’t getting any younger, and women can’t—”
Recognizing the introductory phrase of her Don’t You Hear Your Biological Clock Ticking Speech, Piper interrupted. “I’d love to chat more Mom, but…” She thought fast, determined to rescue herself from this black hole of a conversation. “I have to run because I have dinner plans.”
“You have a dinner date! With a man?”
Did she really want to lie to her mother? Piper gnawed at her lower lip. She’d already told one white lie. Besides, if it would save her from another round of “you’d be such a pretty girl if you just fixed yourself up,” why not? Her imaginary person might as well be an imaginary man.
“Yes.” Guilt over the uncharacteristic fib immediately niggled at her, but she pressed forward. “It’s a man.”
“Good heavens. I can’t believe you let me go on all this time and didn’t say anything about having a boyfriend!”
Boyfriend? She’d only meant to allude to a dinner date to buy herself some peace and quiet, not invent a full-blown relationship. “Wait, I—”
“What does your young man look like, dear?”
Piper blurted the first thing that came to mind. “Tall, dark and handsome.” Oh, very original! “Dark-haired with green eyes,” she elaborated.
“And you’ll bring him home with you for the reunion, right?”
“Well, no, I—”
“We can’t wait to meet him. I was hoping this weekend would give you the chance to get reacquainted with Charlie, but I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.”
“Charlie?” Piper would invent a dozen fake boyfriends before she let herself go down that road again. “Mom, I don’t want to see Charlie.”
Her mother’s uneasy silence made it clear that it was too late for Piper to avoid her ex-fiancé.
“You’ve invited him for dinner or something, haven’t you?” What did it take to convince people that she and Charlie were over? Not over in the-timing-just-wasn’t-right, maybe-later kind of way. Over in the stone-cold, do-not-resuscitate, rest-in-peace kind of way.
“Piper, he’s like one of the family.”
More so than she was, it would seem.
“And I don’t know why you sound so appalled whenever you mention him,” her mother continued. “Charlie Conway is a good man, and he’s the most eligible bachelor in the entire county.”
That was probably true. Handsome, funny and smart, Charlie Conway had been a fellow Rebecca native and A&M student. He’d been so sought after in high school that Piper had been surprised when he pursued her in college. He’d claimed to love her because she was so refreshingly different from the girls they’d grown up with, and he’d eventually proposed. Their engagement had been strained, however, by his decision to return to Rebecca and carry on the Conway mayoral tradition, and Piper had returned the heirloom diamond ring when she realized that the allure of “refreshingly different” had faded. The longer she’d been with Charlie, the more he’d tried to change her.
“Mom, I don’t care how eligible he is. He’s not right for me.” She’d tried to explain this before, but since she was rejecting the very lifestyle most of her family and childhood friends had chosen, they didn’t quite understand. Piper knew they were fond of Charlie—she had been, too, at one point—but she hadn’t liked the person she’d become when she was with him. “Promise me you’re not going to spend the weekend trying to throw us together.”
“Well, of course not, dear—not with this new young man in your life. We can’t wait to meet him!” her mother repeated.
“I’ll, um, see if he’s available.” Piper hated the blatant dishonesty, but not as much as she hated the thought of an entire weekend explaining why the county’s most eligible bachelor wasn’t good enough for her.
“This is so exciting,” her mom said. “I can’t wait to call everyone and let them know. Oh, and honey, if you’re going out tonight, I hope you’ll think about wearing a dress for a ch—”
Ding dong!
Piper jumped at the unexpected pealing of her doorbell. “Who—” Remembering that she was supposedly expecting a date, she swallowed the last of her question. “Gotta go now, see you this weekend. Love to Dad.”
The doorbell shrilled again as she hung up, and a familiar male voice called through the door, “Piper? You home?”
Josh. Thank goodness, because a day like she’d had called for one of two things: venting to her best friend or a Chocomel, a chocolate-covered bar of caramel-and-nougat-filled nirvana. Talking to Josh was calorie-free.
“Hey,” she greeted him as she opened the door. Joshua Weber was a co-worker who’d become her best friend after moving into her downtown Houston apartment building two years ago. “Did we have plans tonight and I forgot? I’m sorry, it’s been a horrible day, and—”
“Relax, darlin’.” His lips curved into the sexy smile that had no doubt been instrumental in seducing many women. Luckily for Piper, seduction wasn’t high on her priority list. “We didn’t have plans. I just wanted to see if you were interested in going with me for a bite to eat.”
“What, no date tonight?”
Women flocked to Josh in droves. With his long lean build, square jaw, lionlike green-gold eyes and thick hair the color of rich chocolate, he was easily the best-looking man in the apartment complex. Maybe the zip code. Or the state.
