LITMIR.BIZ

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pale. The woman wasn’t even wearing lipstick, although her lips were naturally pink…and full…and looked great against her teeth as she smiled…as she was smiling now.

      Whoa! Hold it! She’s just different, that’s all. Way different. Too different. Practically a late-night test pattern for a color television.

      “I snagged this from a passing waiter,” he said at last, once he’d realized he was staring. And she’d known it, he could tell from the smile on her face, the sparkle in her eyes. “If you want, I could go look for him?”

      “No, that’s all right. I’d really rather have a soda, anyway,” she answered, then stuck out her hand. “It’s Janna. Janna Monroe. And you’re…?”

      “Ryan Chandler,” he answered, automatically taking her hand in his, surprised by the firmness of her grip. “Are you here for the auction?”

      Her eyes were doing it again. Twinkling. “Yep,” she said, retrieving her hand, which he had somehow forgotten to let go. “I’m here looking for a good man. Are you a good man? It’s hard to tell, especially as you really look like you’re hunting for the nearest way out and a quick run for the border.”

      Ryan smiled in spite of himself. “That obvious, huh? The truth is—” and why he was telling her the truth he’d never understand “—my grandmother set me up…signed me up, that is. But it is for a good cause.”

      “Well, that’s good. Getting roped into it is understandable. Volunteering to be auctioned off like a prize horse or something is…well, it’s sorta weird, don’t you think?”

      Charlie Armstrong passed by at that particular moment, dressed in jeans as Marcia had said. What she hadn’t said was that he was also wearing a homespun white shirt, a black leather vest, cowboy boots and a bright-white ten-gallon hat. And if that wasn’t a hunk of chew ballooning out the side of his cheek, Ryan was a monkey’s uncle. Especially since good old Charlie took that moment to spit into the paper cup he carried with him.

      He wore the number 21 on his vest.

      Charlie Armstrong was, in “real life,” a pediatrician, and fifty-five if he was a day, though he looked sixty. But tonight? Tonight he was Kid Armstrong, King of the West, chewing tobacco, wearing too tight jeans, middle-aged paunch and all.

      It was pitiful. And sort of funny.

      Ryan looked back at Janna as Charlie sashayed through the crowd, to see her rolling her eyes and laughing in pure delight. “I don’t know. Do you think I should bid on him?”

      “It would be a pity bid, to hear the committee chair’s opinion,” Ryan said, then was immediately embarrassed for himself. Still, this wasn’t exactly cutting up Charlie, or cutting him down. It was just a little good clean fun in the midst of a night that promised to be less than enjoyable. “He’s really a good guy, you know. His wife left him two years ago, and I think he’s just starting to get out and about again.”

      “And doing it with a real flair,” Janna added, giggling some more. “Well, I’ve got to move on. I’m looking over all the tall ones, you understand.”

      “Tall ones?” Ryan repeated, but Janna Monroe was already gone, disappearing into the crowd, although he could still see her flaming red head as she moved along. Then he shrugged. She was probably looking for the tall ones because she was tall herself. She probably wanted a man of some size, for dancing, for whatever.

      Whatever?

      Ryan grabbed another glass of wine from a passing waiter. What would be whatever?

      He reluctantly went off in search of Marcia, and a list of the rules.

      Ryan stood behind a portable curtain, conjuring up tortures for his grandmother. Date for a Day?

      That might have been the original name, but Allie had forgotten to tell him that name had been changed. The auction was now dubbed Yours for a Day, and the possibilities that opened up to inventive minds had packed the ballroom.

      There were rules, of course, and he’d found a listing of them in the foyer, on the registration table. One rule, actually. It just said that everything had to be “mutual.”

      Now, to define mutual. Mostly, to define everything.

      He’d tell his grandmother he thought he saw a wrinkle next to her nose the next time she smiled. Yeah. That would do it. Allie would be looking in mirrors for days, trying to see that same wrinkle, and it would serve her right, considering it was her mission in life these days to do everything necessary not to look like anyone’s soon-to-be great-grandmother.

      But, for right now, all Ryan wanted to do was get out of here. Get up on the runway, listen to himself be auctioned off, and get out of here. He was number 22, and there were sixty-three bachelors. Did he really have to stay after his number was called?

      Yeah, and like whose team of wild horses was going to keep him here?

      Once the bidding started, it became pretty heated a few times, especially when the band had broken into Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?,” and Bob Rogers, one of the senior partners in the prestigious Rogers and Whitcomb Securities Inc., no less, had begun stripping off his artfully draped beige sweater and wiggling his pelvis at the women. Hit heartthrob Ricky Martin comes to Allentown, complete with banker-striped tie. Scary, that’s what it was. Positively scary.

      Okay, so Ryan had laughed along with everyone else, but Bob had pulled in nearly one thousand dollars for the children’s wing. A person could forgive a lot of inane nonsense for one thousand bucks, right?

      There had been a short intermission, during which the ladies had nibbled on small cakes and tea as they sharpened their bidding skills for the next round, and now the second bidding session was about to start.

      Marcia, who had indeed taken on the role of master of ceremonies with a will—and a little more verve than necessary, to Ryan’s mind—was counting heads behind the curtain, making sure all of the second round of bachelors had shown up. She spied Ryan, winked at him, and whispered dangerously, “You’re mine, Chandler,” before heading back out to the microphone; a statement that cheered Ryan not a bit.

      “Good luck, Charlie!” other bachelors called out as Charlie Armstrong’s number was called and the pediatrician hiked up his jeans, tried to rearrange his paunch somewhere closer to his chest, and stepped through the opening in the curtain.

      He was met by a roar of approval and the band’s vocal rendition of Garth Brooks’s fast-paced “Something with a Ring to It.”

      The crowd, as the saying goes, went wild.

      And the bidding only got hotter when Charlie began singing along to the music.

      “Two hundred!”

      “Three-fifty!”

      “Six! Six!”

      “One…thousand…dollars.”

      Ryan raised his eyes toward the ceiling, running that last, definitely authoritative voice through his head, processing it, and then pushed through the crowd of bachelors peeping through the curtain to take a look for himself.

      He’d been right. Good Lord, he’d been right. There she was, his grandmother, standing right at the end of the runway, waving her checkbook in the air.

      “Going…going…sold, for one thousand dollars!” Marcia crowed from the podium, bringing down the gavel she’d probably borrowed from her father, the judge.

      One thousand dollars. And Ryan was next. How was he going to top one thousand dollars?

      Hell, did he want to?

      Not really.

      “Number 22!” Marcia called out, and Ryan took a deep breath, then stepped through the curtain. Strobe lights immediately blinded him as the room went dark except for the wildly moving colored lights that danced around the stage while the band—really pushing it now—tried their hand

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