Night Music (2 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said as she stepped over to a chair and sat down, “but I can only give you about ten minutes, Mr. Kitteridge. I have a dinner engagement.”

He frowned. “I didn’t drive for two hours just to talk for a few minutes.”

“Then you should have called first.” She smiled pleasantly, deciding the man was a complete idiot. A good-looking one, though. Her breathing still wasn’t back to normal.

“Break the dinner date.”

She raised her eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”

He slouched down on her sofa, his hands in his pockets. “Look, it’s important.”

“Then I suggest you get started, Mr. Kitteridge.”

He gave her a look that could have frozen hell over. She held on to every ounce of her courage against it. She couldn’t change her plans, even if she wanted to. And she was damned if she wanted to for an arrogant, egotistical, nasty boy like Devlin Kitteridge. She’d be a fool to agree to work for him. No matter what he paid, it wouldn’t be worth it. She opened her mouth to tell him so.

“My grandmother is going to try to match you up with me,” he said, then added bluntly, “I want you to go along with it.”

Hilary gaped, her mind whirling. “Match us up?”

He made a face. “Yes, like in
Hello, Dolly
. She thinks she’s Carol Channing in disguise.”

“You … and me?” She stared at him, at his disreputable clothes. He must be nuts.

“Yes, you and me. Ludicrous as that sounds.”

“This is a joke, right?” she asked.

“I wish.” He straightened and rested his forearms on his thighs, his gaze intent on her. “It’s simple, really. My grandmother has been making a habit of finding mates for her grandchildren. I’m her last intended victim, and she’s driving me crazy with it. My family wants a little revenge by matchmaking her, and I want to be left alone to run my boat charters. My family’s discovered your grandfather was once engaged to my grandmother, and they think something could be rekindled. They also think the best way to get the two of them together is through us. I know this sounds
like the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard, because it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever said.”

Hilary sat back in the chair, stunned. Clearly he didn’t want a dinner party catered. If she had been asked to guess why the crude, rude Devlin Kitteridge had come to see her, it wouldn’t have been this.

A picture of her grandfather came into her mind. He had always been so vital, but ever since her grandmother had died a year ago, he’d changed. He was apathetic now, refusing to go anywhere except to her town house. Instead of gradually coming out of mourning, he was rapidly sinking into real depression. She didn’t know how to stop it. But now …

She remembered the scrapbook she’d once found in her grandfather’s office. It had been filled with clippings of Devlin’s grandmother, sixty years’ worth. The opportunity was so perfect, she’d be a fool to pass it up. And she’d be a fool to do it too.

Devlin suddenly stood up, waving his hands. “Forget it. This is absurd, and I was absurd to even come here. No way any sane woman would agree—”

“Please. Mr. Kitteridge,” she said. “Sit down.”

“I’m not a nut,” he said, slumping back down on the sofa. “Maybe you know my brother, Miles, and his wife, Catherine? They can vouch for this. But I know it’s stupid, so thanks for patiently listening to my family’s ravings.…”

She knew his brother slightly and knew the two were twins. And, talk about “good twin, bad twin …” she thought. Devlin was the exact opposite of Miles, the charming, successful banker.

“… All we’re asking,” Devlin was continuing,
“is that you go along with it for a few … dates. Just to get the ball rolling.”

She tucked the scarf closer around her chest, took a deep breath, looked Mr. Macho-man right in the eye, and said, “All right.”

Dev blinked. Of all the answers he’d expected, it wasn’t this one.

“You’ll do it?” he asked in shock.

She nodded. “Yes.”

He couldn’t refrain from asking the obvious. “Why?”

“Because I think your family’s right about my grandfather and your grandmother. I’m willing to do anything to see him happy.”

“Including suffering with me,” Dev added, rubbing his unshaven chin. He’d been up since four that morning. Probably he should have shaved before he’d come, but he’d been in a hurry to get the whole business over with.

He glanced at her, irritated by the sleekly tailored suit she was wearing … the perfect little scarf tied so perfectly in an intricate knot on her shoulder … the shoulder-length hair, whose simple cut probably cost more than his loan payments … the flawlessly creamy skin and porcelain features … the slender hands with scarlet-tipped nails … the full breasts pressing against the suit jacket … the thighs enticingly outlined by her slim skirt …

He resisted the urge to haul her body against his and find sweet oblivion. He must be nuts to think there’d be any oblivion with Miss Prim.
Ms.
Prim, he corrected himself. She probably took pride in that abbreviation.

She rose to her feet, and he nearly groaned when he saw her skirt was deliciously wrinkled just at
the junction of her legs. “If that’s all, Mr. Kitteridge, I have to go.”

“Yeah, the date.” He pushed himself up off the sofa, wondering what jerk she was seeing and whether or not he knew him from the old days. “I expect my grandmother will be calling you soon, once my cousins get it into her head that you and I would be a ‘perfect’ match.”

“Fine,” she said, smiling like a robot. “Good-bye, Mr. Kitteridge.”

“Dev,” he corrected her. “If we’re going to be matched, we’ll have to act the part.”

“Devlin,” she conceded.

He looked heavenward.
Perfect opposites
, he thought. Everything about her was everything he’d hated for so long. Too bad it was all attached to a great body.

She led the way to her front door. He followed, loving the way her skirt outlined her hips and thighs. She had one helluva backside. A man would kill to smooth his hands down its soft curve, then slip around to find the lushness beyond.…

He nearly bumped into her when she stopped to open the door, and the fantasy burst in a large dose of reality. Still, the scent of her perfume was doing subtle, sensual things to his senses. Okay, so she had great perfume, but that didn’t mean he had to be a fool.

He stopped on the threshold. “Look, you don’t have to worry that this matchmaking crap will actually work with you and me. I just want my grandmother off my back, and I’m willing to do anything to do it.”

“Only a baboon would think we’re compatible,” she agreed.

She didn’t have to put it quite so bluntly, he thought.

“Right,” he said, and walked out the door.

It banged shut after him.

As he drove home, two things occurred to him. The first was that she had agreed awfully quickly to the proposition, despite her claim that she wanted to see her grandfather happy. It was enough to make him wary. The second was that he was too damned interested in her date that night. It had been bothering him ever since she’d mentioned it.

A third thought struck him. She had gotten him in and out of the house in eight minutes.

The date must be a hot one.

And he didn’t like that at all.

“Hilary Rayburn?” Lettice repeated into the phone, carefully giving her voice the right touch of astonishment. Her granddaughter, Ellen, was completely transparent, she thought. All of her grandchildren were.

“If I were actually looking for someone for Devlin …” she continued slowly.

“You are and you know it,” Ellen said.

“Maybe. Mmmm. I don’t know Hilary very well. But let me think about it.”

After she had hung up, Lettice allowed herself to take a deep breath of relief. Sixty years was a long time to love someone. But she had. If only she had been braver.…

She hadn’t, though, and she could never make up for that. But she could make a new beginning, even as she got the last of her grandchildren settled. Devlin, who clung so tenaciously to his
pain, would not be nearly as easy as the others. That was why she’d saved him for last.

Transparent grandchildren. She wondered how far they would go.

She picked up the telephone to find out.

“Dinner at Lettice Kitteridge’s?”

Hilary paused in wiping off a counter in her grandfather’s kitchen and smiled innocently at him. It had been a week since Devlin Kitteridge’s bizarre visit to her home. As he had predicted, his grandmother had called her a few days later to invite her to dinner.

“Nothing formal,” Lettice had said, which Hilary knew meant she needn’t wear a long gown. “I’m only having a few close friends over. But it will be a wonderful business opportunity for you, Hilary, because I know every one of my friends is desperate to find a new and excellent caterer.”

“Sounds like a marvelous idea,” Hilary had said. “Thank you for thinking of me, Mrs. Kitteridge.”

“ ‘Mrs. Kitteridge’?” Lettice had repeated, sounding amused. “Oh, no, my dear. You must call me Lettice.”

And with that she’d said good-bye, and hung up, without once mentioning her grandson.

Now, having idly told her grandfather about her dinner engagement for the following evening, Hilary noted how his fingers tightened around his coffee cup. It was the first sign of emotion she’d seen in months. Certainly it was the first one this night, at one of their regular twice-weekly dinners at his house. Interesting, she thought.

“Yes,” she said, “Lettice Kitteridge. How was the orange-poppyseed dressing on the apple salad?”
she added, deliberately changing the subject to see how intrigued he was by her mention of Lettice. “I’m experimenting.”

“Almost too sweet. What are you catering for Mrs. Kitteridge?”

Bingo, she thought, smothering a grin. “I’m not catering. She asked me to dinner as a guest.”

Her grandfather set his coffee cup down in a too-careful manner. It spoke volumes.

“Moving up in the world, aren’t we?”

His tone was nearly as sarcastic as Devlin’s, she thought, and that surprised her.

“I thought we were already there,” she said.

“Once, maybe. It’s amazing to discover what people are really like when you lose all your money.”

“That was sixty years ago in the Depression, Grandfather,” she reminded him. He was certainly in his cynical mood tonight. “Besides, you made it all back in the pharmaceutical business.”

In his first years as a surgeon in the mid-1930s, he had invented a technique using sulfa and antibiotic drugs to make them more effective. He’d sold the technique to the Walters-Stevens Pharmaceutical Company just before World War II began, thereby helping save thousands of lives.

“Yes, I might have made it all back,” Marsh said, “but more importantly, I was a better person for it. But now I’m nouveau riche. I get to look at their bladders instead of their Monets.”

“That’s only because you like their bladders better,” she said.

He laughed, and saluted her with his coffee cup.

Her grandfather might still be bitter, Hilary mused as she turned back to her cleaning up, but her mother, if she were there, would be ecstatic
about the dinner invitation from Lettice. For as long as Hilary could remember, her parents had moved on the fringes of the old Philadelphia families’ intimate social circle, desperately clinging to it, trying to reestablish the Rayburns’ position in it, and getting almost nowhere. They tenaciously followed all of the archaic societal rules, even planning vacations around the movements of the best families, rather than their daughter’s school schedule. Their annual jaunts to Palm Beach in the winter and Cape Cod in the summer were funded by the generous salary her father received for his mostly figurehead position as a vice president with Walters-Stevens. When Hilary was younger, they had casually left her, their only child, with her paternal grandparents. She’d considered that a much more preferable fate. Life with her parents was rigid with social customs of dos and don’ts, while Marsh and Elise’s home was filled with laughter, fun, and love. At least, Hilary thought as she wiped the last counter, she put all the rigmarole—as well as the contacts she made through her parents’ avid social climbing—to excellent use with her business.

“This is good coffee,” Marsh said, interrupting her musing. “I don’t suppose it’s out of ajar, like in the commercials.”

She raised her eyebrows. “African-grown, and freshly ground right before brewing.”

“Don’t you ever eat at McDonald’s, instead of having this fancy cuisine all the time?”

She laughed. “Once a week, and I’ve been known to hit a Taco Bell upon occasion. Happy now?”

“Indubitably.” He got up, taking his cup with him. “Have fun at the dinner.”

Not exactly the response she’d hoped for, Hilary
thought. But there
had
been a definite spark of something.

She still couldn’t believe her conversation with Devlin Kitteridge. It felt so unreal. Even more unreal was her willingness to do it. She must be nuts. But her grandfather needed something to snap him out of his fog.

She wondered if she should have told him about Devlin. She had a feeling more than a spark of interest would be the result. It was certainly the result with her. Her reaction to Devlin was dangerous. Maybe she ought to skip the dinner. If she were smart, she would. If she were the perfectly correct daughter her parents had always wanted her to be, she would. But “perfectly correct” had never interested her, and she was intrigued to see just how far Devlin Kitteridge was willing to go to save himself from his grandmother.

After his granddaughter had left, Marshall Rayburn sat down in front of the TV for another mindless round of the boob tube. Lately it appealed to him more than he cared to admit.

He thought of Hilary’s surprise announcement that night. He had set Lettice Kitteridge aside decades ago, nurturing his anger and bitterness until Elise had come into his life … and until she died. Now that the future was gone, he seemed to prefer being lost in memories of the past. He couldn’t stop it. It was the curse of an old man.

Damn that woman, he thought. She was treacherous, fickle. She’d broken their engagement because his family had lost all its money in the 1929 stock market crash. He hadn’t forgotten that in
sixty years, and he didn’t like it at all that Hilary was going to dinner there.