Fool for Love: Fooling Around\Nobody's Fool\Fools Rush In (22 page)

Driving his car soothed him. The worst was over,
he assured himself. He would set Claire's mother straight, the
Globe
piece would fade from the city's collective memory as some juicy new scoop took its place, and he'd get back to being one of the city's most desirable bachelors. And maybe he'd let Rex Crandall continue living with his body fully intact.

He felt even better when he drove down Bradford Street, cruising past the neat three-story brick buildings until he found the one with Claire's address. No parking spaces were open on the narrow street, but before he could switch on his hazard lights and abandon his car long enough to ring the bell, she appeared in the doorway, her hair vibrant in the glow of a streetlamp, her hands plunged into the pockets of a green wool blazer and her legs appearing wonderfully lanky in snug-fitting black jeans. Mark wondered what she'd look like in a dress, with her legs exposed.

He wondered what she'd look like naked.

Forget it. She wasn't his fiancée, his girlfriend or even his date for an evening. She was just a lady having trouble communicating with her mother. Nakedness would not be a part of the evening's activities.

“I was watching for you,” she said, pulling open the passenger door before he could get out of the car to open it for her. “I knew you'd never find a parking space. It's awful on this block.”

“Do you have a car?” He recalled her telling him about the speeding ticket she'd gotten while rushing to the hospital in Framingham to see Rex.

She nodded, set her purse on the floor at her feet and buckled her seat belt. “I pay to park it in a lot.
I really should just get rid of it, for all the money I spend on parking.” As he eased into gear, she seemed to become aware of her surroundings. “It's an old Hyundai. Nothing like this.”

He tried to suppress his grin. “You like this car?”

“It's spectacular. It smells new.”

“It is.” The hell with suppressing his grin. “First new car I ever owned. I thought it would fit the image of a top-five bachelor.”

“It does,” she said, settling back into her seat.

He wondered if she meant that as a compliment. He wondered why he cared. He wondered why her legs kept drawing his attention when he had to stay focused on the traffic and the mission before them. He wondered why the new-car smell didn't appeal to him as much as Claire's smell—something faint and flowery and utterly feminine.

“What do I need to know about your mother?” he asked to distract himself from her fragrance, her legs and all the rest of it.

Claire reflected for a minute before answering. “She's stubborn. And she desperately wants me to get married. Both my sisters are married—and Frannie is younger than me. My mother considers it a tragedy that Frannie got married before I did.”

“So you have two sisters?”

“Frannie and Liz. Mary Frances and Mary Elizabeth. I'm Mary Claire. If my mother gets riled, she'll call me by my full name.”

Weird, he thought—three sisters all named Mary. “How about your father?”

“He died six years ago,” she said.

“I'm sorry.”

“He was a great guy. A city cop. He died in the line of duty.”

“Really?” Mark wanted to pull off the road and give her a hug, just for having endured such a tragedy.

She smiled. “He wasn't murdered. He was directing traffic at the scene of an accident during a snowstorm. A passing motorist lost control of her car and hit him. I mean, it was terrible, but at least we didn't have to relive the whole thing in the newspapers and the courts.”

“I guess.” He still wanted to hug her.

“My mother is an administrative assistant at an insurance company, and she gets a widow's pension. She spends her free time worrying about when I'm going to get married. I wish she'd get married herself. It might make her stop obsessing about me.”

“If you'd like, I can have Rex link her to someone during his next radio show.”

“Please don't,” she said dryly, then laughed.

He laughed, too. And spent the rest of the drive to West Roxbury thinking about how much he enjoyed the sound of her laughter and wondering what it would be like to hug her.

C
LAIRE'S MOTHER
hadn't roasted an extra chicken for Mark, but she might as well have. She welcomed him into the modest Victorian house Claire had grown up in as if he were a long-lost relative. Of course, he
would
be a relative if he married Claire. But they'd journeyed here to make certain her mother understood that that wasn't going to happen.

“Come, sit in the living room,” she said, practically ignoring Claire as she tucked her hand into the crook of Mark's arm and dragged him inside. Trying not to laugh at her mother's aggressive hospitality, Claire followed them into the living room. She found its shabby familiarity consoling. The furniture never changed, the carpet faded incrementally and the framed photos displayed on the fireplace mantel froze her sisters, her niece, Megan, and Claire herself in ages now long out of date. One photo featured her parents on their twenty-fifth anniversary—three years before her father's death. The air smelled faintly of lemon, not from her mother's chicken recipe but from furniture polish. She must have dusted the place today. In honor of Mark's visit, probably.

“I'm so pleased to meet you,” her mother babbled, even though Claire hadn't yet introduced them.

“Mrs. O'Connor—”

“It's Mary Maude,” she corrected him. “You can call me Maude. Now, would you like coffee, tea or sherry?”

“Nothing, really, I—”

“Fine. Sit down.” Her mother nudged him toward the sofa. “I've got cookies.”

“Cookies?” he whispered to Claire once her mother had disappeared. “And what's the thing with Mary?”

“She likes the name,” Claire whispered back. “You'd better sit. She'll get mad at you if you don't.”

“If she gets mad at me, will she call me Mary Mark?” he deadpanned, his dark eyes dancing with laughter.

Claire pressed her hand to her mouth to keep from giggling. This was serious—her mother actually believed she and Mark were getting married—but Mark's nearness, his smile, his good humor about the awkward position made her far too grateful and relieved to be concerned.

Her mother emerged through the dining-room doorway, grandly bearing a glass platter full of bakery cookies, which she placed at the center of the coffee table. Mark glanced at Claire and she tipped her head slightly toward the sofa before sitting. With a nearly imperceptible nod, he lowered himself onto the cushions next to her.

Claire's mother beamed at them as she settled into one of the armchairs on the other side of the coffee table. She crossed one wool-trousered leg over the other, smoothed the waistband of her sweater over
her trim abdomen and patted her graying red hair into place. Then she gave Mark an expectant smile.

“Mrs. O'Connor,” he began.

“Maude.”

“Maude,” he corrected himself, then smiled. When Claire's mother favored a person with one of her megawatt smiles, that person's best recourse was to smile back. Mark seemed to understand this instinctively.

“Have a cookie,” she urged him.

He took one but didn't bite into it. “Claire told me you didn't believe her when she told you we weren't engaged.”

“It said in the
Boston Globe
that you were engaged.”

“What the
Globe
printed was accurate, up to a point,” Mark conceded. “It said we were spotted together at the Kinsale.”

“We weren't canoodling, though,” Claire interjected.

“That's true. We weren't canoodling.” Mark shot her an enigmatic look. His smile was still in place, but she sensed something solemn in his gaze, as if he wanted to debate the implications of the word
canoodling
with her.

After a moment, he broke his gaze away from Claire and turned his attention to the cookie in his hand. He flipped it over in his palm. He had large hands. Claire again recalled his touch when their hands had collided over the check at the tavern, and her unwanted response to that accidental contact.

“Claire and I are not engaged,” he said, so firmly Claire wondered whether he was trying to convince
her mother or her. “Yesterday at the Kinsale, that was the first time we'd ever met each other.”

“Like a thunderbolt,” Claire's mother announced. “That's how it was with me and my beloved Brian, may his soul rest. The first time we saw each other—in Mr. Giovanni's European history class at Marian High School—it was like a thunderbolt struck us both. From that moment, we knew we were meant to be together.”

“Our situation is a little different,” Mark said.

“We're not high-school kids,” Claire pointed out.

“The whole thing started as a practical joke,” Mark clarified.

“At our expense,” Claire added.

“Look at you two.” Claire's mother shook her head. “You're already finishing each other's sentences. I'm telling you, some things are just meant to be.”

Claire knew well—and resented—her mother's habit of hearing only what she wanted to hear and ignoring everything else. But Maude looked so hopeful, so open to the outlandish possibility that her daughter could have fallen in love with the complete stranger sitting next to her on the sofa. How could Claire be angry when her mother was so profoundly convinced that her spinster daughter had found a man?

Mark finally popped the cookie into his mouth. “Mm,” he grunted. “It's good.”

“Have another.” His mother inched the platter toward him.

He took two cookies and handed one to Claire. “They're really good,” he insisted.

She lifted it to her lips, aware that he was watching her taste it, as if her enjoyment of it was important to him. She ate it, nodded and murmured, “Very good, yes.”

Still watching her, he ate his cookie. Only after he'd swallowed did he turn back to her mother. “So, the thing is, Maude, we have no plans to get married.”

“Meaning what? You're going to live in sin?”

“Mom!” Claire rolled her eyes.

“Meaning,” Mark said, blessedly unruffled, “we don't even know each other. It's crazy to think we could be engaged.”

“So, you'll get to know each other.”

“That's not the point,” Claire said, impatience finally stirring inside her. “I told you we weren't engaged, and you didn't believe me. You said you wanted to hear it from Mark himself. So here he is, telling you the same thing I told you.
We're not engaged.
”

“Fine. You're not engaged.” Her mother leaned back in her chair and tapped her fingers together. “That will come in its own time. When you're ready, you'll get engaged.”

Claire wanted to scream. Exercising extreme self-control, she said, “I don't think—”

“Claire,” Mark murmured, covering her hand with his to silence her. “Your mother understands. We're not engaged.”

He was right. The woman had acknowledged that essential fact about Claire and Mark. They'd accomplished their task.

His hand remained on hers, sending a pulse of heat
up her arm and through her body. She was seated too close to him on the sofa. She was far too aware of him, his clean scent, the breadth of his shoulders beneath his unzipped leather jacket. Far too aware of his unbearably sexy smile and the strength of his fingers woven through hers.

But they weren't engaged. And eventually, when an engagement wasn't forthcoming, when months passed without Claire's even mentioning Mark's name, her mother would acknowledge the truth. She'd forget about the
Boston Globe,
and Claire would forget about the April Fool's Day radio broadcast.

Claire doubted she would ever forget about Mark Lavin, of course, but there wasn't much she could do about that. Except, maybe, to free her hand from his grip.

But touching him felt much too good. So, like the biggest April fool in the world, she kept her hand right where it was.

 

T
HEY LEFT
her mother's house an hour later. Claire would have been happy to leave as soon as they'd set her mother straight, but Maude was determined to regale Mark with stories of Claire's childhood: the Halloween she'd gone trick-or-treating dressed as a stop sign—“I've got to tell you, Mark, you've never seen a more adorable stop sign,” her mother had boasted—and the Christmas she'd given her older sister half a deck of cards and her younger sister the other half, so they'd learn to play better together. “Only seven years old,” her mother had boasted,
“and our Claire had the makings of a U.N. negotiator.”

Claire would hardly claim that her decision to divide the deck in half had indicated extraordinary diplomatic skills. As she recalled, she'd had only enough money to buy one deck of cards at the neighborhood dime store. A seven-year-old's allowance didn't stretch far in those days.

She doubted all these embarrassing stories about her past could interest Mark, but he was a polite guest and let her mother ramble while he munched on cookies. Finally, when her mother paused to catch her breath, he eyed Claire, arching one brow in a question. Claire took the cue and announced to her mother that they had to be on their way.

Maude walked them to the front door. She shook Mark's hand, hugged Claire, nagged her to phone more often and sent them off with the admonition that they should keep her informed of their plans, so she wouldn't have to learn such important things in the pages of the newspaper.

Claire didn't speak until they were driving down Washington Street, heading back to the city. Mark's car issued a subdued yet powerful hum, and the contoured seat hugged her back. She still felt the warmth of his hand holding hers, still felt the imprint of his fingers on her arm as they'd strolled down her mother's front walk to his car. His smile lingered, even though her mother was no longer with them and he didn't have to be polite anymore.

“You are a very nice man,” she said, trying to persuade herself that his kindness was the only reason his casual touches had gotten to her.

“You think so?” He glanced her way, then brought his gaze back to the road.

“You were so sweet to my mother. I know she can be aggravating.”

“All mothers can be aggravating. It's their job. It's
our
job not to let them succeed in aggravating us.”

What a sensible attitude. And a generous one. God, she had to stop thinking of all the things she liked about him. He was about to disappear from her life, now that they'd put this engagement nonsense to rest.

“So tell me,” he asked as he stopped for a red light, “how come your mother's so anxious to marry you off? It's not like you're that old.”

“In my family, twenty-eight is old,” she said. “My older sister got married when she was twenty-five, my younger sister when she was twenty-four.”

“That still doesn't make twenty-eight old,” he argued.

She shrugged. The light turned green and his car accelerated so smoothly, they might have been floating several inches above the asphalt. “I think my mother believes it's her fault I'm not married, and she feels guilty about it.”

“How is it her fault?”

“It's not, but she thinks it is.” Claire paused for a moment, unsure whether Mark could possibly be interested in hearing about this part of her life after he'd already sat through her mother's tales about Halloweens and Christmases past. The look he sent her implied that he was waiting for her to elaborate, so she did. “I was twenty-two when my father died. My sister Liz was in the midst of planning her wed
ding, which was only six months away. And Frannie was out in Chicago, at Northwestern University. I was in graduate school at BU, but my situation was pretty flexible at that time. My mother was a wreck, so I moved back in with her and took care of everything.”

“Everything?”

“The bills. The will. The insurance. Setting up her pension with the police department. Sorting through my dad's clothing. Getting my mother some therapy when the depression seemed to be winning. I spent two years holding her together and getting her back on track.” She stared out at the cityscape blurring past the window, letting the memories wash through her. She felt no bitterness, no regret. Those two years were simply a part of her life, like working in City Hall, and going to school, and dressing up as a stop sign for Halloween. “My mother thinks those years were my prime time for meeting guys. She thinks that because I returned home to take care of her, I missed my chance.”

“Do you think that?”

“Of course not. But it eats at her.”

He fell silent, weaving through the traffic, which grew denser and slower the deeper into the city they traveled. She wondered if he thought her family was dysfunctional or co-dependent or just plain nuts. She wondered if she'd said too much, if he thought she was some sort of martyr—which she'd never considered herself being during that period when she'd put her life on hold to help her mother through her grief. She wondered if he was just counting the minutes
until they reached Bradford Street, where he could drop her off and be rid of her forever.

They reached her block, and to her amazement, a car pulled out of a space just as Mark turned the corner. Mark nosed his car into the space without asking Claire if she wanted him to walk her to her door. He turned off the engine and swung open his door before she could say anything.

He was a nice man, she reminded herself. Nice men walked women to their front doors, even if such chivalry wasn't necessary.

Her building was halfway down the block. She slung the strap of her purse over her shoulder and climbed out of the car as he edged between his front bumper and the car in front of his to reach the sidewalk. He didn't take her hand or her elbow as they started down the street, which was fine. He'd probably only done that earlier in the evening to impress her mother.

Claire was sure he'd impressed Mary Maude O'Connor. She'd be hearing from her mother about Mark: “Why aren't you seeing him? What did you do to scare him away? He was a fine man, Claire, and you're no spring chicken…” and she'd have to explain, all over again, about the April Fool's Day joke.