“It’s a protein supplement. The lady at the health food store recommends it for toning skin in women over thirty.”
“Are you sure you’re supposed to drink it?” Meg asked.
Lindsey and Brenda looked at each other blankly.
“I’d better check the instructions again,” Lindsey said and carried it away.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Remington, we’ll have you whipped into shape in no time.”
“Coffee,” she pleaded. She couldn’t be expected to do anything, let alone exercise, without caffeine.
“You can have your coffee,” Brenda promised her, “but first … “
Meg didn’t bother to listen to the rest. She slithered back under the covers and pulled a pillow over her head. Although it did block out some of the noise, she had no trouble hearing the girls. They weren’t accepting defeat lightly. They launched into a lively discussion about the pros and cons of allowing Meg to drink coffee. She had news for these two dictators. Let either one of them try to stand between her and her first cup of coffee.
The conversation moved to the topic of the divorce; Brenda apparently believed Meg had suffered psychological damage that had prevented her from pursuing another relationship.
It was all Meg could do not to shove the pillow aside and put in her two cents’ worth. What she should’ve done was order them out of the bedroom, but she was actually curious to hear what they had to say.
Her divorce hadn’t been as bad as all that. She and Dave had made the mistake of marrying far too young. Meg had been twenty-two when she’d had Lindsey, and Dave was fresh out of college. In the five years of their marriage there hadn’t been any ugly fights or bitter disagreements. Maybe it would’ve helped if there had been.
By the time Lindsey was four, Dave had decided he didn’t love Meg anymore and wanted a divorce. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did—and it hurt. Meg suspected he’d found someone else.
She was right.
For a long time after the divorce was final, Meg tried to convince herself that her failed marriage didn’t matter. She and her husband had parted on friendly terms. For Lindsey’s sake, Meg had made sure they maintained an amicable relationship.
Dave had hurt her, though, and Meg had denied that pain for too long. Eventually she’d recovered. It was over now, and she was perfectly content with her life.
She’d started working at Book Ends, an independent bookstore, and then, with a loan from her parents she’d managed to buy it.
Between the bookstore and a fifteen-year-old daughter, Meg had little time for seeking out new relationships. The first few years after the divorce she’d had a number of opportunities to get involved with other men. She hadn’t. At the time, Meg simply wasn’t interested, and as the years went on, she’d stopped thinking about it.
“Mother, would you please get out of this bed,” Lindsey said, standing over her. Then in enticing tones, she murmured, “I have coffee.”
“You tricked me before.”
“This one’s real coffee. The other stuff, well, I apologize about that. I guess I misunderstood the lady at the health food store. You were right. According to the directions, you’re supposed to use it in the bath, not drink it. Sorry about that.”
Meg could see it wasn’t going to do the least bit of good to hide her face under a pillow. “I can’t buy my way out of this?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“You’ll feel much better after you exercise,” Brenda promised her. “Really, you will.”
An hour later, Meg didn’t feel any such thing. She couldn’t move without some part of her anatomy protesting.
“You did great, Mrs. Remington,” Brenda praised.
Meg limped into her kitchen and slowly lowered herself into a chair. Who would’ve believed a workout DVD, followed by a short—this was the term the girls used—one-mile run, would reduce her to this. In the past hour she’d been poked, prodded, pushed and punished.
“I’ve got your meals all planned out for you,” Lindsey informed her. She opened the refrigerator door and took out a sandwich bag. She held it up for Meg’s inspection. “This is your lunch.”
Meg would’ve asked her about the meager contents if she’d had the breath to do so. All she could see was one radish, a square of cheese—low-fat, she presumed—and a small bunch of seedless grapes.
“Don’t have any more than the nonfat yogurt for breakfast, okay?”
Meg nodded, rather than dredge up the energy to argue.
“Are you going to tell her about dinner?” Brenda asked.
“Oh, yeah. Listen, Mom, you’ve been a real trooper about this and we thought we should reward you. Tonight for dinner you can have a baked potato.”
She managed a weak smile. Visions of butter and sour cream waltzed through her head.
“With fresh grilled fish.”
“You like fish don’t you, Mrs. Remington?”
Meg nodded. At this point she would’ve agreed to anything just to get the girls out of her kitchen, so she could recover enough to cook herself a decent breakfast.
“Brenda and I are going shopping,” Lindsey announced. “We’re going to pick out a whole new wardrobe for you, Mom.”
“It’s the craziest thing,” Meg told her best friend, Laura Harrison, that same afternoon. They were unpacking boxes of books in the back room. “All of a sudden, Lindsey said she wants me to remarry.”
“Really?”
Laura found this far too humorous to suit Meg. “But she wants me to lose ten pounds and run an eight-minute mile first.”
“Oh, I get it now,” Laura muttered, taking paperbacks from the shipping carton and placing them on a cart.
“What?”
“Lindsey was in the store a couple of weeks ago looking for a book that explained carbs and fat grams.”
“I’m allowed thirty fat grams a day,” Meg informed her. “And one hundred grams of carbohydrates.” Not that her fifteen-year-old daughter was going to dictate what she did and didn’t eat.
“I hope Lindsey doesn’t find out about that submarine sandwich you had for lunch.”
“I couldn’t help it,” Meg said. “I haven’t been that hungry in years. I don’t think anyone bothered to tell Lindsey and Brenda that one of the effects of a workout is a voracious appetite.”
“What was that phone call about earlier?” Laura asked.
Meg frowned as she moved books onto the cart. “Lindsey wanted my credit card number for a slinky black dress with a scoop neckline.” Lindsey had sounded rapturous over the dress, describing it in detail, especially the deep cuts up the sides that would reveal plenty of thigh. “She said she found it on sale—and it was a deal too good to pass up.” She paused. “Needless to say, I told her no.”
“What would Lindsey want with a slinky black dress?”
“She wanted it for me,” Meg said, under her breath.
“You?”
“Apparently once I fit the proper image, they plan to dress me up and escort me around town.”
Laura laughed.
“I’m beginning to think you might not be such a good friend after all,” Meg told her employee. “I expected sympathy and advice, not laughter.”
“I’m sorry, Meg. Really.”
She sounded far more amused than she did sorry.
Meg cast her a disgruntled look. “You know what your problem is, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Laura was quick to tell her. “I’m married, with college-age children. I don’t have to put up with any of this nonsense and you do. Wait, my dear, until Lindsey gets her driver’s license. Then you’ll know what real fear is.”
“One disaster at a time, thank you.” Meg sat on a stool and reached for her coffee cup. “I don’t mind telling you I’m worried about all this.”
“Why?” Laura straightened and picked up her own cup, refilling it from the freshly brewed pot. “It’s a stage Lindsey’s going through. Trust me, it’ll pass.”
??
?Lindsey keeps insisting I’ll be lonely when she leaves for college, which she reminded me is in three years.”
“Will you be?”
Meg had to think about that. “I don’t know. I suppose in some ways I will be. The house will feel empty without her.” The two weeks Lindsey spent with her father every year seemed interminable. Meg wandered around the house like a lost puppy.
“So, why not get involved in another relationship?” Laura asked.
“With whom?” was Meg’s first question. “I don’t know any single men.”
“Sure you do,” Laura countered. “There’s Ed, who has the insurance office two doors down.”
“Ed’s single?” She rather liked Ed. He seemed like a decent guy, but she’d never thought of him in terms of dating.
“The fact that you didn’t know Ed was single says a lot. You’ve got to keep your eyes and ears open.”
“Who else?”
“Buck’s divorced.”
Buck was a regular customer, and although she couldn’t quite understand why, Meg had never cared for him. “I wouldn’t go out with Buck.”
“I didn’t say you had to go out with him, I just said he was single.”
Meg couldn’t see herself kissing either man. “Anyone else?”
“There are lots of men out there.”
“Oh, really, and I’m blind?”
“Yes,” Laura said. “If you want the truth, I don’t think Lindsey’s idea is so bad. True, she may be going about it the wrong way, but it wouldn’t hurt you to test the waters. You might be surprised at what you find.”
Meg sighed. She’d expected support from her best friend, and instead Laura had turned traitor.
By the time Meg had closed the bookstore and headed home, she was exhausted. So much for all those claims about exercise generating energy. In her experience, it did the reverse.
“Lindsey,” she called out, “are you home?”
“I’m in my room,” came the muffled reply from the bedroom at the top of the stairs.
Something she couldn’t put her finger on prompted Meg to hurry upstairs to her daughter’s bedroom despite her aching muscles. She knocked once and opened the door to see Lindsey and Brenda sitting on the bed, leafing through a stack of letters.
Lindsey hid the one she was reading behind her back. “Mom?” she said, her eyes wide. “Hi.”
“Hello.”
“Hello, Mrs. Remington,” Brenda said, looking decidedly guilty.
It was then that Meg saw the black dress hanging from the closet door. It was the most provocative thing she’d seen in years.
“How’d you get the dress?” Meg demanded, angry that Lindsey had gone against her wishes and wondering how she’d managed to do it.
The two girls stared at each other, neither one eager to give her an answer. “Brenda phoned her mother and she put it on her credit card,” Lindsey said at last.
“What?” Meg felt ready to explode.
“It was only a small lie,” Brenda said quickly. “I told my mom it was perfect and on sale and too cheap to resist. What I didn’t tell her was that the dress wasn’t for me.”
“It’s going back right this minute, and then the three of us are paying Brenda’s parents a visit.”
“Mom!” Lindsey flew off the bed. “Wait, please.” She had a panicked look in her eyes. “What we did was wrong, but when you wouldn’t agree to buy the dress yourself, we didn’t know what to do. You just don’t have anything appropriate for Chez Michelle.”
Chez Michelle was one of the most exclusive restaurants in Seattle, with a reputation for excellent French cuisine. Meg had never eaten there herself, but Laura and her husband had celebrated their silver wedding anniversary at Chez Michelle and raved about it for weeks afterward.
“You’re not making any sense,” Meg told her daughter.
Lindsey bit her lip and nodded.
“You have to tell her,” Brenda insisted.
“Tell me what?”
“You’re the one who wrote the last letter,” Lindsey said. “The least you could’ve done was get the dates right.”
“It’s tonight.”
“I know,” Lindsey snapped.
“Would someone tell me what’s going on here?” Meg asked, her patience at its end.
“You need that dress, Mom,” Lindsey said in a voice so low Meg had to strain to hear her.
“And why would that be?”
“You have a dinner date.”
“I do? And just who am I going out with?” She assumed this had something to do with Chez Michelle.
“Steve Conlan.”
“Steve Conlan?” Meg repeated. She said it again, looking for something remotely familiar about the name and finding nothing,
“You don’t know him,” Lindsey told her. “But he’s really nice. Brenda and I both like him.” She glanced at her friend for confirmation and Brenda nodded eagerly.
“You’ve met him?” Meg didn’t like the sound of this.
“Not really. We exchanged a couple of letters and then we e-mailed back and forth and he seems like a really great guy.” The last part was said with forced enthusiasm.
“You’ve been writing a strange man.”
“He’s not so strange, Mom, not really. He sounds just like one of us.”
“He wants to meet you,” Brenda put in.
“Me?” Meg brought her hand to her throat. “Why would he want to do that?”
The girls shared a look, reminiscent of the one she’d caught the night before.
“Lindsey?” Meg asked. “Why would this man want to meet me?”
Her daughter lowered her eyes, refusing to meet Meg’s. “Because when we wrote Steve … “
“Yes?”
“Brenda and I told him we were you.”
Two
Steve Conlan glanced at his watch. The time hadn’t changed since he’d looked before. He could tell it was going to be one of those nights. He had the distinct feeling it would drag by, one interminable minute after another.
He still hadn’t figured how he’d gotten himself into this mess. He was minding his own business and the next thing he knew … He didn’t want to think about it, because whenever he did his blood pressure rose.
Nancy was going to pay for this.
He was early, not because he was so eager for tonight. No, he was only eager to get it over with.
He tried not to check the time and failed. A minute had passed. Or was it a lifetime?
His necktie felt as if it would strangle him. A tie. He couldn’t believe he’d let Nancy talk him into wearing a stupid tie.
Because he needed something to occupy his time, he took the snapshot out of his shirt pocket.
Meg Remington.
She had a nice face, he decided. Nothing spectacular. She certainly wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous, but she wasn’t plain, either. Her eyes were her best feature. Clear. Bright. Expressive. She had a cute mouth, too. Very kissable. Sensuous.
What was he supposed to say to the woman? The hell if he knew. He’d read her letters and e-mails a dozen times. She sounded—he hated to say it—immature, as if she felt the need to impress him. She seemed to think that because she ran an eight-minute mile it qualified her for the Olympics. Frankly, he wondered what their dinner would be like, with her being so food conscious and all. She’d actually bragged about how few fat grams and carbs she consumed. Clearly she wasn’t familiar with the menu at Chez Michelle. He couldn’t see a single low-fat or low-carb entrée.
That was another thing. The woman had expensive tastes. Dinner at Chez Michelle would set him back three hundred bucks—if he was lucky. So far he’d been anything but …
Involuntarily his gaze fell to his watch again, and he groaned inwardly. His sister owed him for this.
Big time.
“I refuse to meet a strange man for dinner,” Meg insisted coldly. There were some things even a mother wouldn’t do.
“But you have to,” Brenda pleaded.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Remington, I feel really bad springing this on you, but Steve didn’t do anything wrong. You’ve just got to show up. You have to … otherwise he might lose faith in all women.”
“So?”
“But he’s your date,” Lindsey said. “It would’ve worked out great if …” she paused and scowled at her best friend “… if one of us hadn’t gotten the days mixed up.”
“Exactly when did you plan on telling me you’ve been communicating with a strange man, using my name?”
“Soon,” Lindsey said with conviction. “We had to … He started asking about meeting you almost right away. We did everything we could to hold him off. Oh, by the way, if he asks about your appendix, you’ve made a full recovery.”
Meg groaned. The time frame of their deception wasn’t what interested her. She was stalling, looking for a way out of this. She could leave a message for Steve at the restaurant, explaining that she couldn’t make it, but that seemed like such a cowardly thing to do.
Unfortunately no escape plan presented itself. Brenda was right; it wasn’t Steve’s fault that he’d been duped by a pair of teenagers. It wasn’t her fault, either, but then Lindsey was her daughter.
“He’s very nice-looking,” Brenda said. She reached behind her and pulled out a picture from one of the envelopes scattered across Lindsey’s bed. “Here, see what I mean?” Meg swore she heard the girl sigh. “He’s got blue eyes and check out his smile.”
Meg took the photo from Brenda and studied it. Her daughter’s friend was right. Steve Conlan was pleasant-looking. His hair was a little long, but that didn’t bother her. He wore a cowboy hat and boots and had his thumbs tucked into his hip pockets as he stared into the camera.
“He’s tall, dark and lonesome,” Lindsey said wistfully.
“Has he ever been married?” Meg asked, curiosity getting the better of her.
“Nope.” This time it was Brenda who supplied the information. “He’s got his own business, same as you, Mrs. Remington. He owns a body shop and he’s been sinking every penny into it.”
“What made him place the ad?” she asked the girls. A sudden thought came to her. “He is the one who advertised, isn’t he?”