The World's Last Bachelor Read online

  The World’s Last Bachelor

  Pamela Browning

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  Larissa was late again.

  Not that this was any surprise to Deke Washburn. If there was one outstanding characteristic about his sister-in-law, it was that she was utterly predictable. She was not the kind of woman who appealed to Deke, that’s for sure.

  Deke rested his tall frame against a pillar by the escalator, trying to shrink into his surroundings. He didn’t feel at home in department stores, especially Fontana’s, the fanciest one in Atlanta. He never would have agreed to meet Larissa there if he’d known the ritzy kind of place it was, and if she weren’t his hostess for the next couple of weeks, he’d split. He glanced at the gilt clock above his head and figured he’d give her five more minutes at most.

  Larissa wanted to outfit Deke for his entrée into Atlanta society. He didn’t think he needed a tie. He didn’t think he needed a dark suit. He owned no ties, and suits were boring. Just because his company had sold seventy million cups of herbal tea last year and had moved its corporate offices off a mountaintop in north Georgia and into an exclusive high-rise office building in Atlanta didn’t mean he had to change his image, no matter what his brother’s wife said.

  Svelte matrons, their hair artfully streaked and styled, brushed past him on their way to the escalator. During the past week, Larissa had introduced him to several divorcées who were from the same mold as the women who patronized this store, but her efforts had fallen flat. His sister-in-law hadn’t taken the time to find out what kind of woman he liked. He eyed a petite blonde beyond the escalator. Now that was his type.

  Deke studied her, figuring he might as well feast his eyes on something special while he waited. The blonde was sheltered beneath a thatched-roof display booth that was overhung by—so help him—a real palm tree. A keen-eyed mynah bird sidled back and forth along a perch near her right shoulder. Every once in a while the bird whinnied like a horse.

  Since Deke didn’t make a habit of frequenting upscale department stores, he wasn’t sure what was going on in that booth. Was the blonde taking pictures? Filling out survey forms? Selling pets?

  As unobtrusively as possible, Deke edged around the pillar for a better view. The part of the blonde that had previously been hidden by a display case turned out to be a gorgeous pair of legs and dainty feet encased in sandals made of beads. She was wearing—and this hadn’t been apparent from the other side of the pillar—a short and skimpy sarong fashioned of brightly colored fabric. Wow.

  He moved a bit closer, and her eyes latched onto him. Or more to the point, they locked with his. Wow, he thought again as the sarong-wrapped body undulated toward him with an exquisite and fluid grace. Under these circumstances, he was too smitten to think in an articulate manner. All his tortured mind could manage was Wow, wow, wow.

  By this time the woman inside the sarong was talking to him, but for the first few seconds his ears simply didn’t register what she was saying. How could he pay attention when he had just met his all-time fantasy woman?

  She was gazing up at him as if he were the only man in the world. Her eyes were a serene pale blue, the irises bordered in heliotrope. “Tell me, sir, do you take a bath or a shower?” she asked. It wasn’t quite what he expected to hear.

  “What?”

  “I said, do you take a bath or a shower?”

  He collected himself. “Um...isn’t that kind of a personal question?”

  “You’re not supposed to say that,” she retorted, an expression of annoyance flitting ever so fleetingly across her perfect features.

  He estimated that she was a good ten inches shorter than his six feet two inches. And she certainly was a knockout in that sarong. But he suddenly had the urge to see her all dressed up in a slinky black dress with a low neckline. With little diamond studs in her ears. And with her hair piled on top of her head so that all he’d have to do was pull out a pin to make it cascade around her shoulders.

  But first things first. “Who decides what I’m supposed to say?” he asked.

  “The scriptwriters,” she said bluntly.

  “You mean they have scriptwriters who tell salespeople how to talk to customers?” he asked.

  “I know it sounds ridiculous, but let’s face it, it’s a way for me to make a living,” she told him. “And besides, I’m not exactly a salesperson. This comes under the heading of a modeling job. Now, why don’t we start over? I’m supposed to move eight products every hour.”

  Deke noticed boxes printed with a wild tropical pattern stacked up on a counter inside the display hut. The pattern on the boxes matched the fabric of this model’s sarong. He noticed that the mynah bird had stopped inching back and forth on its perch and was eyeing them both with interest. Reggae music blasted from the booth; it was really quite annoying.

  “What product are you selling?” he asked.

  “Caribbee. It’s a new fragrance by the Naiad cosmetic company.” She cast a worried look over her bare shoulder and lowered her voice. “And if you make problems, I’m going to lose my job, which means I won’t be able to pay my rent this month.”

  “Okay, so give me the full spiel. If you insist,” Deke said, realizing that listening was the price he would have to pay to become the object of her full attention. With any luck, Larissa wouldn’t show up for a long time. He began to hope that she’d been held up in a rush-hour traffic jam.

  The blonde smiled beguilingly and launched into a speech. “Caribbee...the new exotic fragrance that takes you to faraway places, faraway lands. Out of the ordinary, into the sublime.” She lowered her eyelids seductively. “Caribbee, the new fragrance by Naiad. Tell me, sir, do you take a bath or a shower?” she asked, raising her eyelids again.

  It was such a corny sales pitch that Deke couldn’t help it. He snickered.

  To her credit, she managed to keep smiling while she shot him a murderous look.

  “A shower,” he said hastily, relieved to see that she immediately reverted to sweetness and light.

  “Why, so do I!” she said. “And I just love Caribbee’s luxury shower gel, only 24.95 for our eight-ounce copra-pack. Loop it over the towel rod and you’re transported to the tropics every time you take a shower. How many would you like?”

  “Eight,” Deke said. “Give me eight of those.”

  Her eyes widened. “Eight!” she exclaimed.

  “Sure,” he said easily. “Compared to the cost of a plane ticket, it’s a cheap price for instant transport to the tropics. Besides, I take lots of showers.”

  “Oh. Well, great. Please step into our Caribbee Hut over there, and Celeste will ring up your order.” She started to turn away as a large, puffy-haired grandmother-type sailed by, accompanied by a cou-ple of kids.

  “What would you have said if I’d told you I take a bath?” Deke asked desperately. He didn’t want to lose her attention at this point.

  The grandmother and kids disappeared in the direction of the toddlers section.

  “I’m back from my break, Dorian,” called someone from the hut.

  “Okay,” said the blonde.

  “Is that your name? Dorian?” he asked.

  “I don’t tell customers my name,” she said.

  “I haven’t pai
d yet, so I don’t think I’m a customer,” Deke said patiently. “And as I recall, I asked you what you’re supposed to say if I’d told you I take a bath instead of a shower.”

  Dorian sighed. “Well,” she said, “if you say you take a bath when I ask the question, I’m supposed to tell you that we have a wonderful product called Caribbee Tropical Bath Silk, and caramba beads that make bubbles, and so on. But most people take either a bath or a shower, not both. It must be like being left-handed or right-handed. You’re either one or the other, and that’s all there is to it,” she said.

  “I’ll take six Tropical Bath Silks and six of those caramba beads things, whatever they are, and that means you’ve sold twenty items in seven minutes, which puts you way ahead of your quota. So what do you say we go around the corner and drink a cup of tea to celebrate?” Deke flashed her his biggest grin, but she frowned.

  “I don’t think it works that way,” she said.

  “What way?”

  “I mean, if I sell a lot of products to one customer, I don’t think it counts.”

  “Why not?”

  “It just doesn’t, and anyway, my supervisor may be watching while you waste my time. You’d better go get those things rung up.” She pursed her lips and walked toward an approaching potential customer. “Excuse me, miss, would you like a sample of our new fragrance, Caribbee, the scent of the tropics?” she asked, handing a small vial of perfume to a teenage girl with a purple streak in her hair.

  Deke cleared his throat and prepared to invade their group of two. “It goes well with purple,” he told the girl, who looked up at him from beneath her colorful topknot and grinned. “Here,” Deke said heart-ily, pulling out his wallet. “Buy yourself some Caribbee. It’s my treat. Drop by that hut with the mynah bird over there and tell Celeste what you want,” he said as he pressed a fifty-dollar bill into the girl’s hand. The girl was open-mouthed with amazement, and Dorian stared up at him in astonishment.

  “Go on. It’s a great fragrance, and I hear that the caramba beads are terrific,” Deke said helpfully. Only the greatest restraint kept him from giving the teenager a little push to speed her along.

  “What on earth do you think you are doing?” Dorian asked furiously when the girl was finally on her way.

  “Buying time with you,” Deke said, flashing her a smile that was calculated to weaken her defenses. It didn’t work.

  “Get out of here. What are you, some kind of nut?” Her eyes had darkened ominously, and two spots of color appeared high on her cheekbones. She clutched the tray of Caribbee samples to her chest in a stance that could only be interpreted as defensive.

  In that moment, Deke knew for sure that he had gone too far. Here he was standing beside his all-time fantasy woman, and he’d blown it. He racked his brain trying to think of a way to salvage the situation before Dorian hit him over the head with her sample tray, but before he had figured things out, who should walk up but Larissa.

  “Hello, would you like a sample of Caribbee?” Dorian said sweetly to Larissa, turning her back on Deke with visible relief. “Caribbee...the exotic new fragrance that takes you to faraway places, far-away lands. Out of the ordinary, into the sublime, that is the promise of Caribbee by Naiad. Tell me, ma’am, do you take a bath or a shower?”

  “Neither,” said Larissa briskly. “I wallow with the pigs. Deke, are you ready to look at those ties?”

  “Augh,” Dorian said in disgust. “Women who claim to wallow with pigs. Men who are one sandwich short of a picnic. A mynah bird that thinks it’s Mr. Ed. I’ve had enough. I’m quitting.” She stalked over to the thatched hut and shoved the basket with its samples of perfume across the countertop. “I’ve had it with this Caribbee stuff. What they left out of the script is that it smells like three-day-old road kill. Tell Mr. Sturdivant that I’ve quit,” she said to the girl behind the cash register.

  The mynah bird neighed like a horse. “You’d better quit, too,” she said to the bird. “Otherwise they’ll have you neighing things you’d never neigh if you were in your right mind.” She marched away without a backward glance.

  Larissa watched the whole scene in amazement. “What was that all about? Was it because I made that remark about the pigs? Honestly, Deke, some people have no sense of humor.”

  Some moments stand out with a clarity that defies explanation. Deke knew in that instant that if he let Dorian walk out of his life now, he’d regret it forever.

  He started off at a trot. “Buy me anything you please,” he shouted over his shoulder at Larissa as he broke into a run in pursuit of Dorian, whose brightly colored sarong was even now diminishing into the distant reaches of the store amid the tasteful blues and beiges worn by the customers.

  “But, Deke, I can’t pick out your suit without you!” Larissa wailed.

  Deke didn’t answer, lost as he was to all reason. He only hoped his quarry didn’t manage to evade him in the busy parking lot.

  * * *

  AS DEKE WAS NEGOTIATING the revolving doors leading outside, he tangled inadvertently with a young mother who seemed convinced that he was a mugger. He managed, by smiling a lot, to convince her that he was harmless. She was staring after him in perplexity as he darted into parking lot B, where he saw Dorian wending her way through a phalanx of parked cars.

  He was slightly out of breath when he reached her.

  “You again,” she said, sparing him a withering look as she swung open the trunk of her aging Mazda and pulled out a small duffel bag.

  “Me again,” he said, full of remorse. “I hope you didn’t quit your job because of me.” His heart was beating fast, but not because of running. It had something to do with her voluptuous curves, which were enhanced so cleverly by the drape of the sarong.

  “You’d better get back to your wife. That is, if it doesn’t bother you that she wallows with pigs,” she retorted.

  “That was my sister-in-law, and she likes to startle people. She says things to be funny, but they don’t come out that way. It’s something like the way I say things to attract attention, and then they backfire. I was trying to snag a date with you under the most preposterous of circumstances, and I went about it in the wrong way. I’m truly sorry. Can’t we start over?”

  “No,” she said with great finality, slamming the trunk lid.

  “But you quit your job. What about your rent? You said you needed the job to pay it.”

  “That’s true. I did. But I shouldn’t have taken the job in the first place. It was demeaning. It was irritating. I would have been better off waitressing. Anyway, I’ll make out all right. I was working two jobs, so I still have one left.”

  “I don’t suppose it would be a good idea for me to offer to pay your rent,” Deke ventured.

  She eyed him balefully. “You do that and I’m liable to clop you in the chops. So don’t try it,” she said. Her tone left no doubt in Deke’s mind that she meant what she said.

  She unlocked the car door and got in, slamming it after her. He motioned to her to roll the window down, but she pointedly ignored him as she rammed the key into the ignition.

  “Couldn’t we get together and talk about it?” he shouted through the glass. She continued to ignore him and turned the key, whereupon something stuttered and died under the hood.

  She had a very expressive face, Deke thought as she looked at him through the closed window. Right now her face was expressing extreme dislike. He couldn’t think of anything to do but stand there feeling awkward. He wanted to offer to take her where she needed to go, but he had the idea that she’d walk a hundred miles without one of her smiles before she’d get into a car with him. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, waiting to see what she would do.

  Finally she opened the car door. “Why should a car problem surprise me?” she muttered as she got out. “On a day like this, why should anything surprise me?”

  “What are you going to do?” Deke couldn’t help asking.

  “Make a phone call. But the way things are
going today, I probably won’t have any change.” She fumbled through her purse, dumping the money from her wallet into her hand. “Exactly what I figured. Only pennies.” She tossed the pennies back into the purse. Even with the corners of her mouth turned down, she looked beautiful, Deke thought.

  He dug down in the pocket of his jeans. “I have a quarter,” he said, offering it to her with great trepidation.

  She treated him to a probing look. “Thanks,” she said finally. She snatched the quarter out of his hand and headed toward a pay phone near the mall entrance while Deke stood scuffing sheepishly at a bit of aluminum foil on the ground and wondering if there was anything he could do to make her like him.

  * * *

  YE GODS, DORIAN THOUGHT as she surreptitiously eyed Deke from her vantage point near the store entrance. He looked determined, and disgusted with himself, and his face was all scrunched into a frown.

  Not that it wasn’t an attractive face, with those high craggy cheekbones and cleft chin, not to mention the deep-set dark eyes that made her feel as if he was looking right through her skin to her soul. And he was tall—very tall, over six feet. He’d towered above her.

  She dropped the quarter in the phone slot and waited for the phone on the other end to ring. Charles didn’t answer, which was too bad, since he lived nearby and could have nipped over in a matter of minutes.

  The telephone didn’t return the quarter when she hung up even though she jiggled the little lever and thumped the phone a few times for good measure. Sighing in exasperation, she fished her wallet out of her purse again and made a quick inventory of the contents, which included a driver’s license, a Visa card, a discount coupon for cereal, and two one-dollar bills. She didn’t even have enough money for cab fare.

  Well, she could charge the cab to her credit card, though it was already dangerously close to the limit. If she could find a taxi company that accepted plastic, that is.

  She glanced at her watch. It was getting late. And Deke was staring at her across the tops of the parked cars, his admiration written clearly on his face.