Waltz This Way (v1.1) (20 page)

She smiled regardless. She couldn’t help but smile when she saw Nate. Mel purposely focused all of her attention on him, ignoring Drew like she had for three weeks. “Hey, Nate! You here for some cow?”

He laughed, the dimples on either side of his mouth deepening.

“Yeah. You already know my dad and Aunt Myriam, but this is my Grandma and Grandpa.” He hitched a thumb over his shoulder and his grandparents waved.

Mel stood and held out her hand, reaching around Drew. “Hi, Myriam! And lovely to meet Nate’s grandparents. Nate’s one of my best students.”

A round woman with hair the color of midnight and patches of silver gave her a warm smile. “I’m Selena McPhee. I’ve heard lots of nice things about you, Ms. Cherkasov.” She smiled wider, like she had a secret.

“William. William McPhee,” Drew’s father said with a light brogue to his words. He took his ball cap off and shook her hand, then planted his fingers on top of Nate’s head and squeezed with a smile. “He’s a good dancer you say, Ms. Cherkasov?”

Mel’s smile grew. “The best. I’ve never had a student who’s as easily taught as Nate is— or picks up the steps quite as well.”

Myriam thumped Nate, whose face was red, on the back. “That’s because he’s like his Auntie Myriam,” she crowed with pride.

Nate winced. “Hey, Dad? Can I go play the video games before dinner?”

Drew dug in his pocket for some singles and handed them to Nate who skipped off to the game room in the front of the restaurant.

“Ms. Cherkasov. You didn’t say hello to me,” Drew whispered close to her ear.

“How did such lovely people spawn you?” she muttered back, turning her attention to Flo and the still-missing Ron’s empty chair.

“Everyone, this is Florence Benedetto, she’s …”

“Her date’s mother,” Florence muttered, her face pinched, clearly due to the disruption.

“Right,” Mel said on a cheerful nod. “Florence, this is Nate’s family, the McPhees. Nate’s one of my students at Westmeyer.”

Myriam snorted her disapproval at Florence’s grunt of acknowledgment, giving Florence that look Mel knew. The one that said Myriam was the bull and Florence was the human with the red flag.

Latching on to Mel’s hand, she asked Florence, “Are we interrupting, Flo?” This was a dare. A dare for the crabby, disapproving Flo to challenge her.

“No!” Mel added with haste, squeezing Myriam’s hand to keep her from charging. “Don’t be silly. We’re just waiting for Ron. Uh, my date.” She emphasized “date” in Drew’s cocky direction.

“What kinda man keeps a girl as pretty as you waiting?” William teased. “If I was him, I’d never leave the table. Would you leave someone as pretty as Ms. Cherkasov alone where some guy could come along and steal her up, Drew?” He gave his son a pointed look.

“Ne-ver,” he answered with a purposeful enunciation of the word and an arrogant grin at Mel, an amused glint in his eyes.

Right. Drew couldn’t possibly leave a woman alone at a table because he didn’t sit at tables with women. He only sat in beds with them.

Selena swatted her husband playfully with her hand, then put her arm through her husband’s. “Let her be, William. Now let’s leave the pretty Ms. Cherkasov to her meal and her date, and hurry it along here. I’m in the mood for a full rack of ribs.”

“Mel?”

Whirling around, flustered from Drew’s presence and the new male voice, Mel caught the edge of the tablecloth with the cheap ring she’d found at Walgreen’s on her hand.

Surely all that sloshing hadn’t come from just one little ole pitcher of iced tea?

There was a long, stunned silence filled with only the occasional gasp.

And then there was a lot of screeching from Florence’s side of the table. Somewhere in there, Mel heard her name, and so what if it was in vain? She’d been called worse.

“Oh! Florence, I’m so sorry!” Mel sprung into action, diving for the napkins at the empty table next to theirs and rushing to sop up the mess.

“What have you done to my mother?” Ron whined with a hint of outrage in his tone, pushing Mel out of the way and snatching the napkins from her with a yank so rough it made her jerk on her high heels and stumble backward into none other than Drew’s hard chest.

Myriam was next in the fray, poking a harsh finger in Ron’s arm.

“Don’t you put your hands on her again, buddy, or I’ll kick your can from here to Louisville!”

“Myriam! No!” Mel hissed, pushing out of Drew’s steadying grip to reach for her and tripping over the purse she’d put by her feet on the floor.

Mel crashed into Ron facefirst, her purse tangling on her shoe and dumping its contents across the floor. Ron fell like a tree that had been leveled minus the shout of “timber,” tipping over three chairs when he went and bellowing his pain as his head thwacked the floor.

She clung to his sports jacket, falling with him to hit the ground with a bone-jarring thunk.

“Get off of my Ronnie! He’s got a bad back!” Florence yelped, pulling at Mel’s arms, and dripping iced tea in brown splotches on her.

Drew extracted Mel, pulling her up and out of Florence’s reach while holding Myriam at bay. Drew set her down with a hard drop and scooped Myriam up into his arms while she struggled, shooting daggers from her eyes at Florence whose nostrils flared in huffs.

Ron rose with a wince and a moan, and indeed, he probably was six foot tall. Though, to say he had blond hair was probably generous, considering he didn’t have nearly as much as he’d had in his picture.

“Look what you did to my mother! What’s the matter with you?” he roared in outrage, the flap of his comb-over shooting upward.

If the entire restaurant wasn’t already gawking at them as a group because of all the commotion, they were now, and all eyes were on Mel.

And a little something slipped in Mel’s wiring. Whoa, whoa, whoa, Nellie. What she’d done to his mother?

Her mouth fell open, just before it snapped shut, and she gave him the kind of hell she’d been saving for a rainy day.

Mel leapt over the fallen chairs, catching her nylons on one, ignoring the loud rip and more gasps, and pointed her finger up at him.

“What I did to her? What’s the matter with me? Me? You brought your mother— your mother on a date! I think the question here is what’s the matter with you? Who, at forty-two years old, brings their mother on a date, I ask you? Then spends almost all of it in the bathroom with a nervous stomach while I sit out here with Florence the Hun and her disapproving, pinched-mouth glares! Serial killers, that’s who! I bet you live in her basement, don’t you? Is that where you hide the bodies that you’re going to skin and wear like last year’s Versace, too? How dare you misrepresent yourself as a strong, confident single man when in reality you’re just a mama’s boy!” Mel spat.

“This date is officially over, Ronnie ‘Everyone Just Calls Me Ron’ Benedetto— and don’t you ever e-mail me again or did mommy write all your e-mails for you? Arghhhhhh!” she jumped up and yelled in his face, making him wince and pale.

“Come on, Ronnie,” Florence cooed, patting Ron’s arm and giving Mel a look that screamed crazy. “Sure enough, you picked another doozy. From now on, Mother reads all of your e-mails so we can weed out the nuts!”

Myriam went for Flo’s throat just as William McPhee stepped in front of her. “Now cool your jets there, Myriam. Selena? Why don’t you go to the table and get us something to drink. Get something for Ms. Cherkasov, too. She looks like she could use it.” William also ran interference with the manager who’d come to see what all the yelling was about.

Stooping to gather the contents of her purse, she clocked heads with Drew who was on his haunches helping. “One word from your mouth, McPhee, and I swear, this compact and you are going to mate for life. Got it?”

“Far be it from me to remind you how cold the waters of the dating pool can be.”

Mel clenched her teeth, rubbing her head. “Shut. Up.”

“Should have gone on a date with me. I would have at least left my mother at home. Though, I can’t say Myriam wouldn’t make it more interesting.”

Her pent-up rage, her frustration at being this close to him again and liking it, even after she’d found out he was a total worm, all were factors in her next words. “You can’t date someone who only wants to screw!” That’s right. There it was— all out in the open.

Drew sat back on his haunches, delicious, sexy, dangerous, and gave her a blank stare. “Say again?”

Composing herself, she took a deep breath and repeated her words. “I said you can’t date someone who only wants a bunk mate.”

“I never said that.”

“You did, too.”

“I did not. I said it was no one-night stand, and that we were going to do it again.”

Duh, caveman. “Exactly. What had we just done, Drew?”

He smiled at her and winked. “Made a little whoopee.”

“So what would ‘do it again’ lead you to believe? We were going to prom?”

His look was of disbelief, like he’d just discovered the answer to the meaning of life. “So that’s what’s been up your backside all this time?”

“Nothing’s been up my backside,” she denied, though admittedly, pretty badly.

Drew rose on enticing thighs she knew intimately, pulling her along with him. “Oh, the hell, lady. You thought I just wanted to do you, and that pissed you off, so you’ve avoided me whenever and wherever you can.”

“It did not piss me off. But yes, that’s what I thought.”

“It did, too, and why didn’t you ask for clarification instead of giving me the cold shoulder for three solid weeks?”

Mel raised a freshly plucked eyebrow. “I didn’t know you’d counted the passage of time.”

“You mean since we bumped uglies? You bet I did.”

His honesty made her want to smile. But not yet. “Why didn’t you ask for clarification?”

“How can I ask about something I didn’t even know was a misun-derstanding? I thought you just used me and my awesome bedroom skills to quench your insatiable post-divorce lust. I felt cheap.”

Mel’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, even if her lips were fighting a curve upward. “Did you read that in Cosmo?”

He grimaced, the lines on his forehead forming a frown. “I think it was Vogue. I can’t remember. It was all they had to read at the urologist I took Myriam to.”

God. He drove Myriam everywhere. It was clear his family was close. He was good to his son and his aunt. It made her heart tighten and retract.

Maybe he wasn’t a pair of feet waiting to wipe themselves on her doormat of a forehead. Maybe. “Well, the fact is, you didn’t ask for clarification either, nor did you beat down my door to ask me out again, did you?”

“You sure didn’t behave as though you wanted to be asked out again, now did you?” he countered. “Was I supposed to know you were angry about something I didn’t even know you’d misinter-preted? I’m a straight shooter, Mel. Instead of hiding all over Westmeyer to avoid me, you could have just called me on all those cruel thoughts you had about me.” He pouted comically for good measure.

Mel rolled her eyes up at him. “Men really are from Mars.”

Drew grinned. “And women really are from Venus. So what do you say we align the planets, and you join my crazy family and the homicidal Myriam for dinner? We’ll start all over again.”

Mel let out a sigh. “It’s been a long twenty minutes in Internet-dating hell. I don’t know if I can keep my eyes open for any more.”

“Oh, I bet if I offer to pay for your pig, you can manage it.”

Her reserve was cracking. “Does that include the salad bar?”

He paused, as though contemplating his finances. “Fine. But no dessert.”

Mel made a mock expression of outrage. “What kind of date are you? How can you ask me to give up Chester’s cheesecake? I’m not sure I’m up to another cheapskate like Flo and Ron.”

Drew put his arm under her elbow to lead her to his family’s table.

His broad chest sheltered her, leaving her fighting a sigh. When they caught sight of them, they all waved. “I’ll tell you what. Maybe I can con my father into paying for the lot of us, and then you can have cheesecake. How’s that?”

Mel finally couldn’t hold back her chuckle. It slipped out just as they reached the table and William McPhee jumped up to pull out a chair for her. “Devious, Mr. McPhee. Very devious. I like how you think.”

Mel took the seat William offered with a smile, her heart a bag of mixed emotions that left her confused and anticipating … something.

As she sat with Drew’s family, passing baskets of cheesy garlic bread, watching when they lovingly teased one another about anything and everything, smiling when they ate off each other’s plates, she realized she wasn’t only happy, but comfortable.

And when she recognized and identified that emotion— she let it be just that.

Comfortable.

Backing up against her father’s truck, Mel waved to the McPhee’s once more when they drove out of Chester’s parking lot, taking Nate with them. She turned to look up at Drew who smiled down at her.

“Never let it be said the McPhee’s can’t show a lady a good time.”

“It was a good time. Thank you.” Dinner had been a rousing success after such a disappointing beginning. Her stomach was full and her spirit renewed. She was officially in love with the McPhee’s in all their chaotic madness.

Drew shot her a confused look. “Who are you?”

“Someone who just had a really great meal with your even greater family. Don’t spoil it, caveman,” she teased.

Drew rested the heel of his hand on the truck, once again sheltering her with his body, creating delicious havoc with her senses. “Yeah, they are pretty great, huh?”

“I enjoyed every minute of it. But I especially enjoyed the chocolate cheesecake.”

He drew a thumb over the corner of her mouth, the rough tip of it making her have to work to control a visible shiver. “I can tell. You still have a little chocolate right here,” he murmured, his eyes roving her face, glittering in the parking lot’s lights. Her breathing stopped when he leaned in so close she could smell the beer he’d had with dinner on his breath. “So you wanna do it again?”