Her Bachelor Challenge
Autor
Cathy Gillen Thacker
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15
Chapter One
Chase Deveraux knew from the moment he got the summons to the Deveraux family’s Meeting Street mansion that it was going to be hard as all get-out to hold on to his temper. And that was never truer than when he walked in the front door and saw his woman-stealing brother Gabe standing next to the fireplace in the drawing room.
Gabe looked at Chase with his typical do-gooding innocence and said, “I can explain.”
“I’ll just bet you can,” Chase replied sarcastically, his temper escalating all the more. There were times he was glad he and his three younger siblings had all decided to settle permanently in Charleston, South Carolina, along with their father, instead of taking jobs at various places around the country as many of their friends had done. This wasn’t one of them.
He glared at his baby brother and pushed the words through his teeth. “The only problem is, I don’t want to hear it. Not after what I saw at noon today.”
“Maggie called me.” Gabe heeded Chase’s low warning tone. “It was a medical emergency.”
Chase lifted a brow in raging disbelief as he moved across the brilliant-blue carpet, embossed with gold stars. “One that required mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, no doubt.”
“I’d have thought you would have had more sense than that,” Mitch, the second oldest son, scolded their baby brother as he took off the jacket of his pearl-gray business suit and jerked loose the knot of his austere silver tie. “Seeing Maggie Callaway is bad enough, after what she did to this family two years ago.” Mitch grimaced in disbelief as he spoke for the group assembled. “But kissing her? In front of Chase? That’s low, Gabe!”
Amy, the peacemaker, as well as the youngest of the family, stepped into the breach. Maybe it was because she and Gabe were closest in age, but she was always quick to rise to Gabe’s defense. “Isn’t it possible that you misunderstood what you saw, Chase?” she asked anxiously as she fussed with the pink roses set out in crystal vases around the house. “After all, if it was a medical emergency—if Maggie fainted or something—maybe Gabe was just doing what had to be done. He is a doctor, for heaven’s sake!”
“Is that what happened?” Chase asked as he turned back to the increasingly guilty-looking Gabe. The old bitterness and betrayal cut him like a knife as he pushed away the mental image of Gabe and Maggie staring deep into each other’s eyes, even while Maggie had still been engaged to marry Chase! Not that it had mattered. In the end Gabe hadn’t suffered any qualms about betraying his brother. Then or now. Family loyalty was something Gabe apparently just didn’t have. “Did Maggie call you out to her beach house because she was feeling faint?”
Gabe said nothing.
More furious than ever, Chase continued, “Let me guess what happened next. You rushed over. She answered the door—swooned at the sight of you. And then you hauled her into your arms and laid a big one on her. All in the name of medical science, of course.”
Looking guiltier and all the more uncomfortable, Gabe dragged a palm across his jaw. “She didn’t faint.” It was his turn to push the words through his teeth as he moved toward the floor-length sash windows that graced both ends of the elegantly appointed room.
“Then what happened?” Mitch sank down on a Duncan Phyfe chair, which was covered in the same brilliant-blue-and-gold-star pattern as the carpet.
“I can’t really say,” Gabe replied with a reluctant shrug. “Beyond the fact that Maggie called me and asked me to meet her at her place, pronto.”
“For…?” Amy probed curiously, when Gabe didn’t go on.
“That’s confidential,” Gabe replied stiffly as he moved beneath the portrait of Revolutionary War hero General Marshall Deveraux.
“I’ll just bet it is.” Deciding he’d had enough of trying to play it cool, Chase went straight for his father’s whiskey and poured himself a shot.
Gabe met Chase at the bar. He helped himself to a club soda over ice. “Look, if you must know, she was talking to me about a medical matter.”
Chase knew his brother had worked hard to perfect his bedside manner during med school and residency, but this was ridiculous. “Is that how you minister to all your patients?” Chase asked, deliberately goading Gabe. “By kissing them?”
“She’s not my patient,” Gabe said hotly. “All I was doing was listening to her and offering advice.”
Chase would have liked to believe it was just that innocent. Just as he would have liked to believe that Maggie’s feelings for his brother had been platonic, from the get-go. Unfortunately that wasn’t true and he knew it. The minute Maggie had laid eyes on Gabe, her engagement to Chase might as well have been history. And that was a public humiliation Chase still found very hard to take, regardless of the fact that his feelings for Maggie, whatever they had been, had long ago faded to obscurity.
“Then what were you doing giving her mouth-to-mouth?” Chase demanded, trying to push the image of the two standing on Maggie’s doorstep, wrapped in each other’s arms, out of his mind. If that wasn’t a sign of some ongoing clandestine rendezvous, he didn’t know what was!
“That kiss you saw today just happened,” Gabe countered hotly. “We didn’t plan it. Any more than you planned to be driving by at the exact second I was saying goodbye to her.”
“I see. It was an accident. Just like your stealing Maggie away from me just two days before our wedding and then dumping her the moment her wedding to me was officially off was an accident.”
Gabe glared at Chase in frustration. “I couldn’t get involved with her after what had happened to our family!”
Chase snorted derisively as he choked down a swallow of fine Southern whiskey. “Too bad you couldn’t have decided that before you wrecked my wedding plans,” he fumed.
“If anyone wrecked your wedding plans, Chase, it was you.”
Chase set his glass down with a thud. He turned away from the sideboard and asked ever so slowly, “What did you say?”
Gabe’s eyes gleamed with temper. “You heard me. If you’d just paid one-tenth the attention to Maggie that you pay to your work at the magazine…”
Chase flushed. Was it his fault Maggie had led him to think she was a low-maintenance woman, when the truth was she was anything but? “If she’d wanted me to sit around listening to her all the time, I would have done so!” Or at least he would have tried, Chase amended silently, knowing as well as everyone else in the room that he had a very low tolerance for chitchat.
“A woman shouldn’t have to tell you that,” Gabe shot back, looking even more peeved.
That wasn’t Chase’s experience with the fairer sex. The women he dated couldn’t have cared less about scintillating conversation—they wanted passion and sex. Period. Besides, he’d never been able to read a woman’s mind the way Gabe could.
“Now listen,” Amy broke in, anxiously wringing her hands, “Chase and Maggie’s breakup was probably bound to happen, anyway. Because of the Deveraux family legacy—”
Chase and Gabe groaned in unison. “Not that again,” Chase said, shooting an exasperated look at his little sister.
“Amy might have a point,” Mitch said with extreme civility. He looked at Chase sternly, acting more like the older brother. “If you and Maggie had managed to marry and live happily ever after, you would have been the first Deveraux to do so in three generations.”
Chase scowled. “Our failed betrothal has nothing to do with the curse put on our great-aunt Eleanor.”
“Tell that to everyone who’s had their love life wrecked for no reason in the past sixty years,” Amy countered. “And then tell me the curse hasn’t carried over to the next Deveraux generation!”
Gabe glared at Chase, even as he addressed his remarks to his two calmer siblings. He downed the rest of his club soda in a single gulp. “I still say I had nothing to do with the breakup. If Chase and Maggie had been meant to marry, they would have. Curse or no curse. And nothing I said or did or didn’t say or do would have stopped them from tying the knot.”
“You just keep telling yourself that,” Chase said sarcastically. He’d had some miserable days in his life, but he’d never been more hurt and humiliated than he was the day Maggie had walked out on him and their wedding. For he’d known then that it wasn’t just his divorced parents or brother Mitch—who was also divorced—who were unable to find and keep wedded bliss. People just didn’t stay together in this day and age. They didn’t find happiness in the act of permanently joining their life with another’s. Hell, nowadays they were lucky if they could even make it to the altar and say “I do.” And learning that lesson the hard way had made him stop trying to find the “happily ever after.” Instead, it made him look to the immediate present for his happiness, and no further.
“Moreover,” Amy continued passionately as she stuck her hands in the front pockets of her pastel coveralls, which were embroidered with the name of her decorating business, “Chase needs to get over the way Maggie walked out on him and be glad she came to her senses before they entered into a marriage that most likely would have ended in divorce, anyway. And most important of all, he needs to stop trying to seek revenge for Maggie’s actions on the whole female population!”
“And how am I doing that?” Chase demanded furiously, incensed to find Amy—who could usually be counted on to soothe the wounded egos of all three of her brothers—scolding him, too. It wasn’t as if he promised women anything but what he could give them, which was today!
Amy gave him a droll look as she explained, “You do that by turning women into objects in your magazine and trying to nail every female in Charleston.”
Chase shook his head in exasperation, knowing that the very well-paid models for Modern Man never complained about how beautiful they looked in the pages of his magazine. “Actually, that’s old news. I’ve moved on—” Chase quipped, knowing even as he spoke it wasn’t entirely false “—to the entire East Coast.”
“That’s not funny, Chase.” Amy scowled.
“It’s not supposed to be,” Chase retorted bluntly, using this—and every other opportunity that came his way—to shamelessly plug the premise of the notoriously lighthearted and controversy-inspiring magazine he had created just for guys. “Women are here on this earth for one reason and one reason only. To make guys happy.” And as far as he was concerned, guys were only there to make women happy. It was pretending otherwise, in his opinion, that made people so darn miserable.
“And that tally includes dear old Maggie,” Chase continued, deliberately ignoring the warning glare Gabe gave him. “Which is undoubtedly the reason Gabe rushed out to the beach house.” Chase turned to his brother and proceeded to hit Gabe where he knew it would hurt the most—Gabe’s legendary sense of duty. “Maggie was lonely. She was desperate.” And like the rest of us mortals, in urgent need of some happiness to call her own. “So she dialed the emotional equivalent of 911, and Gabe here, ever the good Samaritan, rushed right out to administer the much-needed and -wanted, obligatory mercy—”
Chase never had the chance to finish his sentence. But then, he thought, with a certain grim satisfaction as Gabe’s fist came flying up to meet him, he’d known for certain he never would.
BRIDGETT OWENS parked her Mercedes convertible at the rear of the Deveraux mansion and headed in the servants’ entrance. She paused just long enough to kiss her mother’s flushed cheek and ask, “What’s the emergency?”
Theresa Owens grabbed a floral-print apron from the drawer and slipped it on over her uniform—a plain navy-blue dress with a white collar. Tying her apron behind her as she moved, Theresa headed swiftly for the ancient subzero refrigerator in the corner. Quickly she pulled out a package of fresh crabmeat and another of cream cheese. “Grace is coming home.” Theresa checked her recipe and collected milk and horseradish from the fridge and an onion from the mesh basket on the counter. “Tom went to the airport to get her. All the children are here. And I’m short-staffed.”
“Where is everyone else?” Bridgett asked. Tom Deveraux had a chauffeur and a gardener, in addition to her mother, his full-time cook and housekeeper.
Theresa brushed auburn tendrils off her face with the back of her hand. “It’s their day off.”
“Mom, you should have a day off,” Bridgett said, wishing her mother would listen to her and give up working as a domestic. Especially now that it was no longer necessary. Theresa could retire and live with Bridgett and never have to worry about money or putting a roof over their heads again.
Theresa frowned as she measured ingredients into the casserole dish and stirred them together briskly. “Then who would cook for Tom?”
“Maybe he could order takeout?” Bridgett suggested as her mother slid the crabmeat dip into the oven to bake. “Or eat at a restaurant.”
Theresa wiped her hands, then restored order to the bun on the top of her head. “I have all the time off I need whenever I need it.”
Bridgett sighed, knowing she was about as likely to talk her mother into taking early retirement at fifty as she was to get her to change her hairstyle or stop wearing the “uniform” that Tom and Grace Deveraux had both told her years ago she did not have to wear. “Except you never take any time off,” Bridgett reminded her mother gently.
“Honey, I don’t have time to argue with you.” Theresa went back to the refrigerator for salad fixings. “I’m trying to put together a dinner party for six on thirty minutes’ notice. And Tom said it was crucial that everything be very nice.”
Bridgett zeroed in on the concern in her mother’s voice, even as she did what she had done for years, as the daughter of a Deveraux domestic—pitched in to lend a hand. “Did something happen?” Bridgett asked as she rolled up her sleeves and helped her mother make a dinner salad on the fly.
“I’m not sure.” Her expression increasingly worried, Theresa got out the food processor and set it on the counter. “But he said Grace might be upset when she gets here and he wanted all the children to be in attendance so they could talk to them together.”
A feeling of foreboding came over Bridgett as she watched her mother fit the slicing disk into the machine. Bridgett hadn’t seen much of Grace Deveraux since Grace had gone to New York City to host the Rise and Shine, America! morning news program fifteen years ago, but she cared about her nonetheless. She cared about all the Deveraux, just as her mother did. “Grace isn’t ill, is she?”
Theresa shrugged. “I’m not sure Tom knows what this is all about, either. But you know how it’s been between the two of them since they divorced.”
“They can hardly stand to be in the same room with each other.”
“So if Grace called Tom and asked him to pick her up at the airport and bring her here, of all places…”
To the home the two of them had shared in happier times.
“It must be bad,” Bridgett concluded, reading her mother’s mind.
Theresa nodded.
And it was then, as she looked at her mother’s face, that Bridgett realized the real reason her mother had called her. Not because she needed help preparing dinner or carrying a tray of canapés. But because she needed moral support in dealing with whatever the fallout of Grace and Tom’s news. Theresa might insist on reminding herself daily in a million little ways that there was a huge class difference between the Owenses and the family Theresa had worked for since before Bridgett was born, but Theresa and Bridgett both loved all the Deveraux like family nevertheless. “How is Chase and everyone taking this?” Bridgett asked, knowing that Chase was likely to have a tough time with any calamity involving his parents. Maybe it was because he was the oldest, but he had taken his parents’ divorce thirteen years ago especially hard.
“I’m not sure,” Theresa said, jumping and grimacing at the big thud and shouting from the front of the house. Then the sound of glass breaking.
“Apparently,” Bridgett said, answering her own question, “not so well.”
There was another crash, even louder. Then the sound of Amy screaming.
“Oh, dear.” Theresa’s hand flew to her chest and she got a panicked look on her face.
“Sounds like another fight.” One of many, both before and after Tom and Grace’s divorce. Bridgett sighed. She put up a hand before her mother could exit the kitchen. “I’ll go, Mom.” She had experience breaking up fights. Why should this one be any different?
“DAMMIT, GABE, I don’t want to hurt you.” Ignoring the pain across his shoulder, where he’d caught the edge of the mantel, Chase staggered to his feet. He pressed one hand to the corner of his mouth, which seemed to be bleeding, and held Gabe at bay with the other palm upraised between them. “So back off!”
Gabe shook his head, his expression angry, intense, and continued coming, fists knotted at his side. “Not until you take back what you said about Maggie,” he stormed.
Chase smirked, not above taunting a self-righteous Gabe. “Right. Like you plan to take back sucking face with her?”
“That does it!” Gabe leaped over the back of the sofa, grabbed Chase by the shirt and swung again, his fist arcing straight for Chase’s jaw.
Chase ducked the blow and countered with a punch to Gabe’s gut. As he expected, it didn’t do much damage. Gabe had been ready for him, muscles tensed. Just as Chase was ready for the tumble over the upholstered Duncan Phyfe chair to the floor. Gabe landed on top of him, but not for long. Chase forced him over onto his back. He grabbed his brother by the front of his shirt, still seeing red. For the life of him, Chase didn’t understand why Gabe continued to defend—and apparently desire—the woman who had come as close to two-timing Chase as any woman ever would. Especially when Gabe had to know how hurt and humiliated Chase had been, both by the events and all the sordid speculation that had followed. Not that it had been any easier for Gabe and Maggie. Both their squeaky-clean reputations had been forever tarnished, too. And for what? It wasn’t as if the two of them had found any happiness, either. “Gonna give up now?” Chase demanded in frustration, wishing they could put this ugly episode behind them before it further destroyed their family.
“Not on your life.” Gabe scowled back, looking ready to do even more damage.
And that was when it happened. A shrill whistle split the air and two spectacular female legs glided into view. Sexy knees peeked out beneath a short silk skirt. His glance then took in slim sexy calves, trim feminine ankles and delicate feet clad in a pair of strappy sandals. Chase knew those legs. He knew her fragrance. And he especially knew that voice. It belonged to one of the most sought-after financial advisers in Charleston, South Carolina.
“One more punch, Chase Deveraux,” Bridgett Owens said sweetly, “and you’re going to be dealing with me.”
THE FIRST THING Chase thought was that Bridgett Owens hadn’t changed since he had last seen her. Unless it was to get even better-looking than she already was. Her long auburn hair had been all one length when she’d gone off on her phenomenally successful book tour three months ago. That soft-as-silk hair still fell several inches past her shoulders, but now it was layered in long sexy strands that framed her pretty oval face. She’d done something different to her eyes, too. He couldn’t say what it was exactly, though he figured it had something to do with her makeup, because her bittersweet-chocolate eyes had never looked so dark, mysterious or long-lashed. She was wearing a different color of lipstick, too. It made her lips look even more luscious against her wide, white orthodontics-perfect smile.
She was also dressing a little differently.
Maybe it was because she also ran a private financial-counseling service out of her home and hence felt the need to present a serious, businesslike image to the public that she’d worn suits that were so tailored and austere it was almost ridiculous. Today, however, she was wearing a silky pencil-slim skirt that was so soft and creamy it looked like it was made of raspberry-swirl ice cream. With it she wore a figure-hugging tank top in the palest of pinks and a matching cardigan sweater. The overall effect was sophisticated, feminine and sexy. Too sexy for Chase’s comfort.
“Honestly,” Bridgett continued, seeming to scold Chase a lot more than Gabe, “aren’t you two a little old for such nonsense?”
Chase scowled. The last thing he wanted—from anyone—was advice on how to handle the restoration of his pride. “This is none of your business,” he fumed, still holding tight to Gabe’s shirt.
“The heck it’s not!” Bridgett charged closer, inundating Chase with the intoxicating fragrance of her perfume. “When it’s gonna be my mother explaining to your parents what happened to all the priceless furniture here!”
“No explanation needed,” came a deep male voice from somewhere behind them.
Every head turned. There in the portal stood Tom Deveraux, dressed in a dark business suit, pale-blue shirt and conservative tie. Coming in right behind him was Chase’s mother, Grace. As the two of them stood frozen, looking at their two brawling sons, it was almost like going back in time for Chase—before his mother had moved to New York City. Before the estrangement between his mother and father, which neither he nor his siblings really understood to this day. To the time when they had been, for whatever it was worth, a family that was united, even in times of strife. Nowadays it seemed that all they had left was the strife. And the heartache of a once-loving family that had fallen apart.
“I suppose we don’t even have to ask what was the reason for this,” Grace said wearily, touching a hand to her short and fluffy white-blond hair.
Chase immediately noted the strain lines around his mom’s mouth, the shadows beneath her blue eyes, and his heart went out to her. Something had happened, he thought, and it was bad enough to bring his dad to her side again.
“If the two of you are fighting like this, Maggie Callaway has to have something to do with it,” Tom surmised frankly, clearly disappointed in both of them.
Neither Gabe nor Chase said anything.
Bridgett offered Chase her hand. Though hardly ready—or really even willing—to end the brawl with his woman-stealing brother, Chase took the assistance Bridgett offered. And, to his mounting discomfort, found his old pal Bridgett’s manicured hand just as delicate in shape, strong in grip and silky soft as it looked.
Tom continued shaking his head at everyone in the room, then settled on Mitch and Amy. “You couldn’t have stopped this before they broke half the vases in the room?” he asked them.
Amy made a face and brushed her long hair, a dark brown like Tom’s, from her eyes. “It’s sort of a long story, Dad.”
Mitch shrugged his broad shoulders. “Amy and I figured they were going to come to blows again, no matter what. Better it happen here. Where they’re unlikely to get arrested or otherwise bring dishonor to the Deveraux name.”
Tom looked at Chase and Gabe. His lips thinned in disapproval as he demanded, “What do you two have to say for yourselves?”
“Not a thing,” Chase muttered, resenting being questioned like this at his age, even if he and Gabe did deserve it.
Gabe grimaced, looking at that moment like anything but the good Samaritan he was. “Me, neither.”
Tom turned to Bridgett. “At least you were trying to break it up.”
Bridgett smiled at Tom respectfully. “Someone had to. And since I have…I think I should excuse myself.”
“No reason for that,” Grace said, putting up a staying hand before Bridgett could so much as take a step out of the drawing room. “You’re family, Bridgett, you know that. Besides, I have something to tell you all,” Grace added, just as Theresa came into the room, a silver serving tray of hot crabmeat dip and crackers in hand. “Sit down, everyone.” Grace waited until one and all complied, including Theresa, before she continued reluctantly, “I wanted you to hear this from me before it hits the airwaves.” Grace paused, took a deep breath. “I’ve been fired.”
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