Husband for Hire by Susan Wiggs Page A

exasperated.
    Rob was stunned. Yet at the same time, without quite knowing why, he put his checkbook away.
     

    T HE SUN WAS GOING DOWN as Twyla carried the quilt table to her truck, Brian trotting along beside her. An evening chill sharpened the air, bringing with it a low warble of birdsong and the green scent of fresh-cut grass. She had avoided Rob Carter all the rest of the day, watching the festivities with a sense of nervous energy and impending disaster. Each time he seemed inclined to approach her, she busied herself with some chore or other, even volunteering for a stint at the lemonadebooth. Finally, when the last bachelor had been auctioned off, it was time to go.
    Brian, who had made a full recovery from the motion sickness, had spent the day playing, eating, shouting and throwing things with his friends. He’d ignored the auction itself, showing no interest or understanding of its purpose. He didn’t know what Mrs. Duckworth and Mrs. Spinelli had done. That was fine with Twyla, since she wasn’t going to make Rob Carter go through with it, anyway.
    Near the end of the auction, Brian had caught an inkling of what was going on. Visiting her at the lemonade booth, he’d asked her, “If someone buys one of these guys, does the guy have to do whatever she says?”
    Twyla had smiled. “Within reason.”
    “For how long?”
    “I imagine they work that out between them.”
    “So they should make the guys stay here and be the dads, right?”
    A six-year-old’s logic was hard to contradict. She shouldn’t have asked Brian, but she did. “You think these boys all need a dad?”
    “Yeah.”
    She hadn’t dared to ask the next obvious question: What about you, Brian? Do you need a dad?
    She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer to that.
    “Sammy Crowe says Mrs. Spinelli bought that guy named Rob, and that he’s supposed to do whatever you want.”
    “Lucky me,” Twyla said. “You got any ideas?”
    “Are you kidding?” Brian’s face had lit up. “I got a million of them.”
    She’d tried to subdue his enthusiasm, warning himthat there had been a misunderstanding, but the whole weird situation was hard to explain.
    “Church tomorrow, sport,” she said now, opening the door to the old Apache, buckling him in and covering him with a blanket. He took out his favorite Dinotopia book and opened it, yawning hugely. She knew that within minutes, he’d be sound asleep.
    As Twyla walked around the front of her pickup truck, she had the unsettling sense that she was being watched. She caught a daunting reflection in the glass of the windshield, glaringly gold from the setting sun. She set down the folded card table and turned. There stood Dr. Robert Carter with his gleaming dark hair and an expectant half smile, watching her in a way no man had watched her in a very long time—with interest and appreciation and maybe just the slightest hint of tenderness. He looked, she had to admit, exactly like the type of man someone would pay twelve thousand dollars for.
    “Look,” she said, in a rush to get the words out. “I didn’t have anything to do with this crazy idea. I had no idea what Sugar and Theda were up to. I want a date with you as much as I want the heartbreak of psoriasis.”
    Holding the rolled-up quilt under one arm, he studied her for a disconcertingly long time. He was probably a good doctor, she reflected. He wasn’t embarrassed to stare at people.
    “I’ve never been compared to a case of psoriasis,” he said.
    In her nervousness, she laughed. “I don’t mean any insult, it’s just—” She broke off, nodding with a lame smile as one of the Quilt Quorum ladies crossed the parking area, eyeing them inquisitively.
    “Let’s step over here.” Rob gestured at the end ofthe parking area, where a grassy slope angled downward toward the soccer field.
    “There’s really nothing to discuss,” she said. People were heading home now, a number of them pausing to study her and Rob with