Life Is A Beach / A Real-thing Fling
Two brand-new stories in every volume…twice a month!
Duets Vol. #99
Veteran Harlequin author Pamela Browning makes her Duets debut this month with a delightful, splashy Double Duets volume. Sisters Karma and Azure O’Connor undergo their share of woe with men in this pair of fun, quirky stories set in trendy South Beach, Miami. Enjoy Life Is a Beach and A Real-Thing Fling!
Duets Vol. #100
Duets is having a celebration this month! This smile-inducing series, featuring gifted writers and stories, is one hundred volumes old. Look for two terrific tales by fan favorites Jennifer Drew and Holly Jacobs. You’ll Be Mine in 99 and The 100-Year Itch are both set in the crazy small town of Hiho, Ohio, where anything can—and will!—happen when people fall in love. Happy reading!
Be sure to pick up both Duets volumes today!
Life Is a Beach
A Real-Thing Fling
Pamela Browning
www.millsandboon.co.uk
Contents
Life is a Beach
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
A Real-Thing Fling
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Epilogue
Life Is a Beach
Pamela Browning
“I’ll challenge you to a game of Scrabble,” Slade ventured.
Karma nodded and they settled down on the couch with the board between them. The room was illuminated only by the dim wavering light from the hurricane lamp nearby. Outside the wind rattled away and the ocean waves repeatedly battered the pilings beneath them. Every so often, the house would draw itself up, suck in its breath and give a shudder.
Karma tried to ignore the hunky cowboy opposite her and studied the letters in her rack before slapping down the word east. Slade promptly added the letters B and R, making it breast.
She raised her eyebrows.
“It’s a word, right? It’s legal.” His expression was one of pure amusement.
Karma added an O and one S, then a second S, making toss. Ah-ha, she thought, he’s beat.
Slade reached over and, using an S, a K, followed by an I, he answered her with kiss.
“Which,” he said softly, with the sexy look that she was coming to know so well, “wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
Dear Reader,
There I was on a flight to Miami reading the airline in-flight magazine. There she was, a professional matchmaker, smiling up from the page in all her glossy perfection. Cool job, I thought.
I recalled an elderly friend telling me how her happy marriage had been arranged by a yenta, the yiddish term for the neighborhood busybody who excelled at finding marriage partners. The phrase Rent-a-Yenta sprang into my mind, and thus the Rent-a-Yenta dating service was born.
As you read the stories of Karma and Azure O’Connor, the heroines in my Double Duets volume, I hope you’ll agree with me that even if true love comes along only once in a blue moon, it’s always worth the wait!
Best wishes and happy reading,
Books by Pamela Browning
HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE
786—RSVP…BABY
818—THAT’S OUR BABY
854—BABY CHRISTMAS
874—COWBOY WITH A SECRET
For Judith Arnold, who knows from bubbeleh and blintzes, and for the guy who walks like John Wayne.
1
SLADE BRADDOCK WAS JUST a big old lonesome cowboy, and he was bound and determined not to be that way for much longer.
Big? Well, that was one thing he couldn’t change, he reckoned. He was six foot three, so tall that he kept bumping into things in his cousin Mack’s houseboat, where he had squatter’s rights for as long as it took to find himself a wife.
Old? He was thirty-five, which was part of the problem. All the young women in Okeechobee City, Florida, were married. The older ones tended to mother him. So even though in some circles cowboys were said to be babe magnets, Slade had not found this to be true. He had heeded his cousin Mack’s suggestion to seek out a Miami Beach dating service.
Lonesome? The dating service should take care of that.
Slade sauntered across Toy Boat’s salon, which was a high-class word, he figured, for a living room. He twirled his Stetson off the wall sconce where he’d tossed it after getting royally drunk with a couple of rowdies from South Beach last night, and he stopped for a moment to squint critically into the floor-to-ceiling wall mirror.
Yeah, he looked all right. He wasn’t suave. He wasn’t dapper. He was a little worn and tattered around the edges. But he’d do. The woman he was looking for wouldn’t mind that a scar bisected his left eyelid, and she’d let him love her the way a woman was meant to be loved. He wanted a shy, sweet, old-fashioned girl to take back to Okeechobee City with him, to help him run the ranch. A small woman who would make him feel manly. And he’d find one before he left Miami Beach. He was determined.
He was so determined, in fact, that as he was striding purposefully toward the deck, he forgot about the low doorway and whacked his head.
A COWBOY DRESSED OUT in full regalia was not exactly what anyone expected to see ambling down a street in Miami’s trendy South Beach on an ordinary morning.
But that was exactly what Karma O’Connor saw. This guy looked as if he’d galloped in fresh off the range after herding a bunch of cattle or chasing rustlers or something.
“Your aunt Sophie, she wanted you to inherit the business,” said Uncle Nate as he admired the new brass plate beside the door.
Rent-a-Yenta, it said. Karma O’Connor, Matchmaker.
Very reluctantly, Karma peeled her eyes away from the cowboy and bent down to bestow a quick kiss on the little man’s cheek.
“Thank you, Uncle Nate,” she said warmly. “You could have closed up Aunt Sophie’s office. You two could have let me go on being unemployed instead of scooping me up practically out of a welfare line and—”
“Never,” said her great-uncle. “A girl like you should have a chance. Sophie thought about leaving the business to your cousin Paulette, but, well, she respected you, a single girl trying to make it on her own.”
“Paulette is single. She’s trying to make it on her own, too.”
“Ah, Paulette. She’s a go-getter, that one.”
Privately Karma thought that her cousin Paulette was an overbearing little snip. She adopted an expression of mock dismay. “Hey, Uncle Nate—you’re hurting my feelings. Aren’t I a go-getter, too?”
He blinked up at her, a wizened little gnome with eyes that crinkled charmingly around the edges. “You are, bubbeleh, you are. Sophie said you reminded her of herself when she was young,” and with that pronouncement, he launched into an emotional reminiscence about his late wife, who had died six months before.
Karma listened, and she agreed with Nate that her great-aunt had been a kind, charming, and, in fact, brilliant woman. While Nate rattled on as was his wont, she distracted herself from his monologue by searching for the cowboy’s Stetson above the sleek blond heads of a bunch of roller-skating beach bunnies.
The hat was there, all right. It shaded the cowboy’s face so that she gleaned only a quick impression of craggy cheekbones, a strong straight blade of a nose, and a tan that put those beach bunnies to shame. Wide shoulders, too. And, farther down, slim hips sl
ung with a pair of well-worn jeans. Almost as if he knew she was watching him, the cowboy headed in her direction.
“How cool is he?” she murmured to herself in awe.
“It’s hot today like always in Miami,” Nate said as he eased himself down on the bench beside the door to the corridor that led to her office.
Karma kept forgetting that she had to speak loudly so that her uncle could hear. He wore a hearing aid but often forgot to turn it on.
“No, I wasn’t talking about the weather. I was admiring that cowboy heading our way.”
Nate scoffed at this. “You should be thinking about business, not some meshugeneh cowboy. Like I told you before, Sophie managed to make fifty good matches a year and you haven’t made any yet.”
“I wish I could have trained with her for a while,” Karma said wistfully. Unfortunately Aunt Sophie had been too sick during her final illness to work, and the business had gone downhill fast.
“An apprenticeship with my Sophie might have helped. Then again, maybe not. No offense, Karma dear, but a two-time college graduate like you doesn’t necessarily know the human factor.”
“My degrees are in psychology,” Karma reminded him gently as the cowboy continued toward them.
“Psychology, shmycology. You got to know people. Not that you don’t,” he added hastily. “Sophie thought you had potential. ‘That girl has real potential,’ she’d always say after we saw you at one of those family dinners at your parents’ house.”
This was nice to hear, but Karma couldn’t remember a single one of those dinners in which she’d been able to get a word in edgewise, what with all the big talkers in the family. She’d always been the quiet one, the too-tall sister who passed the hors d’oeuvres while her three siblings noisily showed off their piano-playing and dancing talents.
And since when had any of her relatives thought she was anything but a loser compared to her talented and brilliant sisters, not to mention that colossal suck-up, Paulette? “I hope I can live up to your expectations,” Karma murmured.
Truth to tell, her full attention was drawn to the cowboy. In a tropical climate where people customarily wore sandals or even went barefoot, this man was clomping along Ocean Drive in cowboy boots. A couple of children hung back on their mothers’ hands and stared.
“Come along, Chuckie,” urged one of the mothers, tugging.
“Aw, Mom, I want to see the cowboy.”
So did Karma. She wanted to see him up close. And it looked, at this very moment, as if she might have that opportunity.
His boots were finely tooled leather, elaborated worked. She’d heard you could tell a lot about a cowboy by his boots. These were clearly expensive, maybe even hand-made, and definitely too dusty. The boots didn’t jingle, however. This cowboy wasn’t wearing spurs. Which she supposed made sense, since she didn’t see a horse around anywhere.
“I guess I better stop talking about Sophie, I’m getting hoarse.”
“Horse?” Karma said, caught off guard.
“Yeah, my throat itches. Sit down for a minute, Karma, while I catch my breath.”
Karma felt her own breath grow shallow as the cowboy’s gaze fell upon her. Up it went, then down. Never mind that this took a few embarrassing seconds because of her height. Was she blushing? No, she wasn’t that susceptible to nuanced glances. She was twenty-seven years old and the veteran of more than one ill-fated heavy relationship. She was dedicated to carving a career for herself out of the matchmaking business. So why did this man make her heart beat like—well, like thundering cattle hooves?
Because he was possibly the handsomest man she had ever seen. Because his cowboy boots had stopped right in front of the bench. Right in front of her.
The cowboy stuck a hand in one of his back jeans pockets and rummaged around. Going to roll a cigarette, Karma thought. That’s what cowboys always did in the movies, and the movies were the only place she’d ever seen a cowboy. She watched spellbound, expecting him to extract a fistful of rolling papers and some tobacco. Instead he pulled out a red bikini bra. A very ample red bikini bra.
He stared at it and then, with a puzzled and pained look, he crumpled it up and stuffed it back in his pocket.
As Karma watched, her mind was racing faster than a spooked mustang. She wasn’t exactly thinking about this cowboy. What she was thinking was that things never came easily to her. Not graduating from college nor getting a master’s degree, and certainly not holding a job. People always thought that if you were a natural blonde, you were home free in life. Well, nothing was free, and at the moment, Karma didn’t have a real home. What she did have was a couple of possibly useless degrees in psychology, a generous great-uncle and a third or fourth chance to make something of herself.
She jumped up from her seat, feeling absurdly like a jack-in-the-box. She said to the cowboy, “Sir, I don’t suppose you could use the services of a matchmaker, could you?”
He looked her over. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. “That’s exactly what I need,” he said.
“You’ve come to the right place,” Karma said, praising whatever gods were in charge of lucky coincidences.
The cowboy angled his head toward the shiny new sign on the building behind them. “That your place?”
“Yes. As of two months ago.” She held her breath, half expecting him to walk away.
“The thing is, you’ll have to tell me something. Just what exactly is a yenta?”
Nate stood up. “It’s a Yiddish word. In Jewish communities, where marriages used to be arranged, you would go to a yenta that you trusted to find the right person for you. It’s a family tradition, like with my Sophie. She was a good businesswoman, Sophie was. Knew how to change with the times.”
“So Rent-a-Yenta is a dating service?” the cowboy asked politely. His voice was deep and rich, slightly raspy. It reminded Karma of Clint Eastwood’s but with considerably more expression.
Nate’s head bobbed up and down. “Yes, you might as well think of a yenta as someone who matches people up with their significance.”
The cowboy looked slightly confused.
Karma found her tongue. “He means their significant others,” she injected hastily.
“Hmm,” said the cowboy. He appeared to be thinking this over.
Two things occurred to Karma in the next stretch of thirty seconds or so. One was that she wanted to make a success of this matchmaking business that had so providentially and unexpectedly landed in her lap. The other was that this was a client—a real walking, talking, live client.
“Won’t you come into my office?” she asked, smooth as silk. Despite the bra in his pocket, this man needed her services. He’d said so.
“Sure,” said the cowboy. He had a way of smiling that lifted one corner of his mouth and cocked the opposite eyebrow, and the effect was intriguing.
“I’ll just amble along,” said Nate. “Leave you to business.” Karma knew he was running late for his daily game of pinochle at the café down the street.
“If I’m interrupting,” said the cowboy.
“No, no, you two go right ahead,” said Nate. He patted Karma’s arm. “See you tomorrow, bubbeleh.”
“Well,” Karma said as she watched Nate disappear in the throng of people on the sidewalk. She spared a look at the cowboy. He looked more resigned than eager, which was typical of the clients that she’d dealt with so far. She supposed that resignation was the last step before jaded. She hated jaded. It was so hard to win those folks over.
She aimed her brightest smile up at him. Up at him was a miracle, since she was almost six feet tall herself. Ever since puberty, her smiles had been mostly aimed downward. “Follow me,” she said.
Karma had been told that she had nice hips. This was a good thing, considering that the cowboy’s eyes never left them as they walked up the flight of stairs to the tiny cubicle that was Rent-a-Yenta. She’d rather have him staring at her hips, or, more accurately, her derriere, than, say, her feet, w
hich were overly large. Or her mouth, ditto. Or her breasts, which weren’t. That bikini bra in his pocket had looked like about a 38DD.
She dug the office key out of her purse and promptly dropped it.
The cowboy immediately bent down and picked it up. He didn’t immediately straighten, however. That took a while. His eyes moved up, up, studying her ankles, her calves, and what he could see of her thighs, which was probably too much considering the fact that her skirt was very short. She had a hard time finding clothes that were long enough.
“Thanks,” she said dryly as he handed her the key. At the moment that their hands touched, their eyes locked. His were the bluest eyes she’d ever seen. They were brilliant, sparkling like sunlight on the sea, heating up like a blue flame. They took her breath away.
She made herself shove the key in the lock, but the door opened before she turned the key. She’d better get that lock fixed one of these days, but it was low on her list of priorities since there wasn’t much worth stealing in the office at present.
The cowboy was right behind her. She followed his gaze as he took in the half-painted lime-green wall, the plastic bead curtain that screened off the supply closet, the TV alcove for viewing client videos. She supposed the decor was startling, but this was her style. After downsizing the office into a mere one and a half rooms due to lack of funds, she’d painted over plain vanilla walls, banished Aunt Sophie’s heavy mahogany desk, thrown out the dusty chintz curtains at the windows so she could look out at the multicolored pastel facade of the Blue Moon Apartments across the street where she lived.
“You—um, well, you could sit down,” she said.
He looked puzzled. Oops! She’d forgotten that she’d sent the couch and client chairs out for cleaning yesterday. The only places to sit were on a couple of floor cushions that she’d brought over from her apartment and her desk chair.
Omigosh, she thought, if I sit in the chair he’ll be able to look right up my skirt.