The Backup Plan (12 page)

Maybe it was what she needed. It was certainly better than sitting in her room watching one of the nightly reality TV shows where people actually had fun doing disgusting things like eating worms. Even appointment with Cord had to be preferable to that.

Before she could utter her decision, her mother swept in, looking innocent as a lamb. “Why Cord,” she said, surprise written all over her face. “I had no idea you were here.”

Dinah rolled her eyes. “Can the act, Mother, though I must admit if you'd ever decided to go on stage, I'm sure you would have excelled. The secret's out. I know you two plotted this.”

“Plotted what?” her mother asked, still maintaining the charade.

“To get me down here in a dress so I'd be all ready when Cord showed up.”

Her mother beamed. “You do look lovely. The dress is very flattering. Where are you two going?”

“We were just about to decide,” Cord said. “Ballroom appointment, disco night, or line appointment, Dinah?”

“Let me see,” she said thoughtfully. “Which one will give me more opportunities to step all over your feet?”

Cord grinned impudently. “You're selling me short, sugar. I've been dodging women's feet for a good long time now.”

“Yes, I imagine you have. Perhaps if you weren't so pushy, it wouldn't happen nearly so often.”

Dinah heard a strangled laugh and turned to see her
mother trying unsuccessfully to hide a smile. “What?” Dinah demanded.

“It's just that it's so wonderful to see those sparks back in your eyes,” she said. “I think Cord is good for you.”

Dinah didn't like the gleam in her mother's eyes one bit. “Don't get any ideas, Mother. The only thing Cord is good for is infuriating me.”

He gave her a bland look. “Is that so? I thought I'd just proved otherwise.”

Dinah avoided her mother's fascinated gaze. “If we're going, let's go before I come to my senses.”

“Anything you say, sugar,” Cord said meekly, then ruined the effect by winking at her mother.

Dinah turned to her mother. “If I come home driving his car and all alone, you'll know I've dumped his body in a ditch. Call a lawyer for me.”

“Happily,” her mother said. “But something tells me it won't come to that.”

 

That had gone well, Cord thought as he drove toward the club that had eventually been Dinah's choice. He was pretty sure her threats had been idle ones, especially after she'd responded to his kiss with so much passion.

Then again, passion tended to make women unpredictable creatures. Just to be safe, he wouldn't turn his back on her for a minute. Not that he wanted to. She looked hot in that dress with most of her long legs exposed. Thinking about those legs had kept him awake more nights than he could count.

“You really do think you're something, don't you?” Dinah muttered as they neared their destination.

“In what way?”

“Because you talked me into this.”

“I consider myself lucky, that's all,” he assured her.

She scowled at him. “Just don't get any ideas.”

“Such as?”

“That this is a date. That the kiss meant anything. That I'm going to sleep with you.” She gave him a meaningful look. “Ever.”

He swallowed a chuckle. “I'll keep all of that in mind.”

“Good.”

“Am I allowed to have a few fantasies?”

Her lips twitched. “Okay, fine. You can have all the fantasies you want as long as you don't give one second's thought to acting on them.”

“And what if you go crazy and try to seduce me? Am I supposed to resist?”

“It'll never happen,” she retorted.

“You seducing or me resisting?”

“The seducing part, so your resistance will never be tested.”

“Too bad,” he said sorrowfully. “I have excellent willpower.”

Her expression suddenly sobered. “Why are you doing this, Cordell?”

“What? Teasing you? Because it's so easy and it's so much fun.”

“No, I meant why have you turned me into some sort of project all of a sudden. You don't even like me.”

As he cut the car's engine, he stared at her with genuine surprise. “Why would you say a thing like that?”

“The way you've been acting ever since I turned up out at your place. You made no attempt to hide your disdain for me or the fact that you think I'm all wrong for Bobby.”

“You've got things all wrong. As for me not liking
the idea of you with my brother that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with
you,
” he said emphatically. “In fact, there are a lot of things right about you.”

She regarded him wistfully. “Such as?”

“You really don't know?” he asked, thoroughly bemused.

She shook her head.

“Now that really is pitiful,” he said sincerely. “Okay, let me lay it all out for you, Dinah, and I'm being sincere about this. This isn't just flattery so I can lure you into my bed.”

“I think we've already established that would be a wasted effort,” she said wryly. “What do you see as my good qualities?”

To Cord's surprise, she looked as if she were truly hanging on his words. Because of that, he chose his words carefully.

“You're beautiful and smart and brave. You have legs that could drive a man wild.” He slanted a look at her. “Me included, in case you were wondering.”

Her lips curved slightly.

“Now, what else?” he said thoughtfully. “You're confident…or at least you used to be. I have a hunch that will come back to you once you put whatever happened in Afghanistan behind you. You always knew what you wanted and you went after it without letting anybody stand in your way. Who would have believed that a sheltered debutante would wind up being an internationally famous war correspondent? With your looks and brains, you could have been an anchorwoman in some nice safe studio, but you chose something a lot of men don't even have the guts to do. I admire that.”

“You do?”

“Well, of course I do. I can't say I didn't find it wor
risome when I'd flick on the TV and see you five feet from where some car bomb had been detonated, but I was as proud to know you as I imagine your mama and daddy were.”

She seemed stunned by that. “What about now that I'm home? Are you disappointed in me?”

Cord turned the question right around. “Are you disappointed in yourself?”

“Yes,” she admitted in a small voice.

“Why?”

“I don't know if I'm brave enough to go back.”

“Is that something you have to decide today or tomorrow?”

“No.”

“Then don't worry about it until you have to. Concentrate on healing.”

She regarded him with puzzlement. “I'm not injured.”

“Sure you are,” he said. “There's more than one way to be wounded in a war, Dinah, and stitches don't tidy up all kinds of wounds. And in case you still have doubts, neither will marrying the wrong man.”

He thought the conversation had gotten way too serious, even if she had needed to hear what he had to say. He deliberately winked at her. “Now, since you obviously have two perfectly good feet under you, let's go inside and dance up a storm and forget all this, just for tonight. Let's just be a couple of old…” He deliberately hesitated as his gaze locked with hers. “Acquaintances,” he said at last. “We'll be a couple of old acquaintances having ourselves a good old time.”

She nodded slowly, looking relieved. “Think you can keep up with me, Cordell?”

“I'm going to give it my all, sugar. I am definitely going to give it my all.”

And, though it was too soon to say it, he was looking way beyond whatever tricks she could come up with on the dance floor, too. He wanted Dinah to start thinking of the two of them in terms of possibilities.

D
inah hadn't danced—or laughed—so much since her debutante ball. In fact, this was better. Back then, she'd been filled with so much cynicism about the whole event that she'd hardly enjoyed the evening. The boy she'd taken had been awkward and as immature as most eighteen-year-old boys were. He'd had sweaty palms and pimples, as she recalled.

She glanced across the table and saw that Cord was studying her curiously.

“Taking a trip down memory lane?” he asked.

“How did you know?”

“For a woman who's trained to keep her expression neutral on the air, you really don't hide your emotions all that well. You looked a little sad.”

“Not sad,” she assured him. “Just thinking about my debutante ball debacle.”

“I thought that was the highlight of every little Southern girl's life?”

“Not mine. I thought it was an absurd waste of money, but my mother insisted it was an important tradition, so I went along with it. Maggie and I were determined not to
have a good time, so we invited the most inappropriate boys we could find.”

Cord grinned at that. “You didn't invite me.”

Dinah laughed. “On the inappropriate scale, you were way out of my league. Besides, I was determined to be miserable, not to give my mother a heart attack.”

“I remember you that night,” he said, catching her completely by surprise.

Dinah sorted through her memories of the ball, trying to recall Cord being there. An image finally came to mind of him with the quietest girl in their class. “Oh, my God, that's right. You
were
there. It was Mitzi Franklin's grand rebellion. Frankly, I didn't think she had it in her.”

Mitzi had been a shy, bespectacled girl that everyone pretty much ignored, Dinah included. Her arrival at the dance on Cord's arm had definitely stirred a fuss.

“I suspect you'd have been surprised about a lot of things about Mitzi,” Cord said. “Most people didn't give her much credit for charm or personality. The boys dismissed her because she wasn't stunning and didn't sleep with them. The girls were afraid they'd be tainted by being seen with someone they deemed ordinary.”

Dinah heard the censure in his voice. She knew she couldn't deny what he was saying. Her friends had been cruel. “Okay, tell me. What did we all miss?”

“That Mitzi had had a tough life. That she was shy and quiet because she stuttered until she was sixteen and had worked with a speech therapist for years. That she won a scholarship to Duke.”

“I knew about the scholarship,” Dinah said in her own defense. “It was the talk of the school. Everyone was astounded that she, of all people, would win a scholarship to Duke.”

“But did you know it was for music? The girl is a helluva singer.”

Dinah couldn't have been more stunned if he'd said it was for stripping. “You're kidding.”

“Not kidding. She's playing jazz clubs in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles now. I've caught her act a few times and I have a stash of her CDs at home. Remind me and I'll play them for you sometime.”

“You've kept in touch with Mitzi?” She didn't like how that made her feel not only a bit jealous, but small and shallow. Out of some ridiculous teenaged social prejudice, she'd apparently missed out on knowing someone interesting and talented enough to fascinate Cord.

“Sure, we've kept in touch. We had a lot in common. We were both outsiders.”

Dinah had never thought of Cord as an outsider, except in the way he'd insisted on being. She'd always thought his isolation had been a deliberate choice, not the result of being shunned. Given the way kids were, maybe one thing had spawned the other.

“We weren't very nice to you, were we?” she asked.

“You weren't,” he admitted, then gave her a roguish grin. “A lot of other girls made up for it. The badboy, outsider thing seems to be a magnet for some women.”

“Still?”

“Hard to call myself an outsider, when I've got a company doing business with some of the oldest, most revered names in Charleston society. Even your mama finds me perfectly respectable these days.”

“I suspect my mother's like every other female on earth. She's fascinated with that aura of danger you exude. She certainly made the safe choice when she
married my father.” She couldn't help wondering if it was a decision her mother had come to regret. Was that what was causing the tension between her parents? Now that both Dinah and Tommy Lee were grown, were they finding that there was nothing left to hold them together?

Cord's expression suddenly turned serious. “What about you, Dinah? You're the danger junkie. Do I appeal to you?”

More than she cared to admit, Dinah thought. The times they'd been together had revealed depths she'd never imagined. He was solid and kind in a totally unexpected way. That he'd championed a girl like Mitzi said a lot about his character. Oddly, that made him the most dangerous sort of man for someone who'd come home searching for solidity and strength and tenderness. She was beginning to see that she'd never given him nearly enough credit.

She was even beginning to see his betrayal as a desperate but well-meaning attempt to protect his brother from making a mistake. Maybe back then he hadn't been wise enough to understand the folly in interfering in his brother's life, but surely he'd learned from that mistake.

She gave him an impudent look. “You appeal to me enough to get out on the dance floor with you one more time,” she told him lightly. “Then we probably should get home. I imagine you need a lot of rest to keep up with my mother's demands.”

He laughed. “I can handle your mother on a couple of hours of sleep. You're the tricky one.”

“How so?”

“I understand your mother. She's a perfectionist and she knows her own mind. You're a little unpredictable.
Something tells me if I keep hanging around you, I'm going to be up to my eyeballs in trouble.”

“You're afraid of me?” Dinah asked, surprisingly pleased by that idea. No one had ever accused her of being too much of a handful before, not as a woman, anyway. As a reporter, she'd run across more than her share of skittish subjects who were afraid of the questions she might ask. She'd also encountered a lot of competitors who'd feared being beaten by her cut-throat ambition and talent. This, though, was new. She smiled at Cord. “I think I like that.”

“Of course you do,” he teased. “You're a woman who likes to control things.” He met her gaze. “But one thing you need to know about me, Dinah. I'm not one bit like my brother. I am not going to let you have your way, not all the time, anyway.”

The little shudder that washed over her at his words was not entirely unpleasant. In fact, it was downright loaded with anticipation.

 

Cord stood on the front steps of Dinah's house and looked down into her eyes. The combination of a little wine and some energetic appointment had made her unmistakably sleepy and just a little off her game. She looked so damned kissable that it was taking every bit of willpower he possessed not to devour that tempting mouth of hers. A kiss was also what she was clearly expecting. He figured she was long overdue for a little unpredictability from him.

“Good night,” he said softly, his gaze locked with hers. “Sleep well.”

A spark of indignation flickered for just an instant in her eyes. “Good night? Just like that?”

He hid his amusement. The tactic had worked like a
charm. “Isn't that usually what people say when one person's going inside and the other's going home? I thought I had that part of the dating thing nailed down.”

“What about a kiss?” she demanded.

That was definitely the wine talking, Cord concluded. “I kissed you before we went out,” he reminded her. “Though I'm happy to oblige, as I recall you gave me a very firm lecture at the time. Now you want me to do it again?”

“No, I do not want you to do it again,” she said, immediately contradicting herself once more.

He shook his head sorrowfully. “Is it any wonder men don't understand women? They keep changing the rules.”

“Forget the damn rules,” she muttered.

Before he knew what she had in mind, she grabbed his shirt and yanked his head down. Her mouth covered his and her tongue dove inside on his gasp of surprise. The kiss was hot and edged with just a hint of desperation. It made Cord's blood shoot straight from his brain to another part of his anatomy.

Just as his head started to swim from the lack of oxygen, she released him just as unexpectedly. “
That's
how you say good-night,” she declared emphatically, then swept past him and went inside, slamming the door behind her. She was obviously very pleased with herself.

Grinning at her display of pure sass, Cord leaned on the doorbell. She threw open the door, and Cord picked her up, hauled her against his chest and kissed her until they were both gasping for air. Satisfied, he set her back on her feet. She looked thoroughly dazed and not half as sure of herself.

“I like my way better,” he said, then walked away.

Damn, but this was turning out to be fun.

 

As soon as Cord got home, he called Dinah on her cell phone so he wouldn't wake the rest of the family.

“Sweet dreams,” he said for the second time that night.

“You confuse me,” she responded, sounding genuinely bewildered. “Same here.”

“Really?”

“Yes, Dinah,” he said patiently. “Just when I think I have you all figured out, you go and do something surprising.”

“Such as?” she asked. “I need to know. Maybe I shouldn't do it anymore.”

Cord laughed. “Oh no. I'm not telling. I like your kind of surprises.”

“You must be talking about the kiss,” she concluded.

“Definitely memorable,” he agreed. “But that's not it.”

“Then what? I didn't do anything else.”

“Sure you did.”

“What?”

“You let me get away with coming back for more. Next time, I'll have to see what else I can get away with. Something tells me kissing's just a warm-up for us.”

“I don't think so.”

“Why not?”

“I'm not ready to start anything with you or anybody else,” she said, her tone suddenly stone-cold sober.

“You were ready to marry my brother,” he reminded her.

“That was different.”

“You're going to have to explain that one to me. You don't think marriage is more serious than a little fooling around just for fun?”

She fell silent then.

“Dinah? Is this about the man you claim doesn't exist? Are you feeling guilty for some reason?”

“No,” she said with evident sorrow. “There's no reason to feel guilty. Not anymore.”

“What does that mean?” he asked, troubled by her somber tone and the odd logic that marrying Bobby was somehow less of a betrayal than sleeping with him would be. And why would she be considering either if there was a man out there somewhere who meant some thing to her?

She sighed deeply, but ignored the question. “Good night, Cord. Thanks for taking me appointment.”

He could tell that was all she intended to say on the subject, though he couldn't begin to imagine why she was so reticent. Was she sparing his feelings? Or her own? Something told him he needed to get to the bottom of that, quite possibly for both their sakes.

 

The question of the mysterious man in Dinah's life was still on Cord's mind in the morning. He knew she was lying to him. What he couldn't figure out was why she'd bothered. It wasn't as if there was any reason to keep a secret about the past. They didn't owe each other a lot of detailed explanations about their prior love lives. Not yet, anyway. Maybe the time for full disclosure would never come.

He had to admit he was more attracted to her than ever even though they would never get seriously involved. He didn't do serious, not even for Dinah Davis. Everyone in South Carolina Low Country knew that.
Dinah had her ground rules. He had his. From what he'd seen with his own mama and daddy, there was no such thing as happily-ever-after and marriage was the kiss of death to any kind of fun.

Besides, he had always attracted wealthy women who were drawn to him for his dangerous reputation but weren't interested in anything more. He'd achieved a lot, but in certain circles it would never be quite enough.

Still, he'd never been able to get past the fantasy of someday fitting in. He'd always thought that if and when he decided he wanted marriage, he would be able to marry someone with class, someone like Dinah, who'd always been out of reach. Since the odds of finding such a woman were a million to one, he'd learned to get by on his own.

Oddly, Dinah seemed more available to him now. He couldn't help feeling that the woman who'd become identified around the globe with courageous reporting was as vulnerable and fragile as a wounded bird. It made him feel surprisingly protective.

But he couldn't help her if he didn't know why she'd come home and what or who it was she'd left behind. Before he could do any research on that topic, though, he had to get his brother safely out of town.

He was in the kitchen, half dressed and drinking his second cup of coffee when Bobby wandered in. He looked like a man who'd had a rough night.

“What happened to you?” Cord asked. “Did the party go on till all hours?”

“No, the party ended at a perfectly respectable eleven o'clock. I spent the rest of the night battling with Rianna over the wedding.”

“What now?” Cord asked, though he'd heard just about
every variation on the subject he cared to hear. Still, it was evident Bobby needed to get this latest round off his chest.

“She wants to turn it into some sort of elaborate ceremony fit for a queen or something,” Bobby said with dismay. “It's gotten completely out of hand. I told her to shave down the guest list, forget about the doves and hire something smaller than a symphony orchestra. She told me I didn't love her or I'd understand how important this is to her.”