Stepbrother At Last Page 7

  I guessed I had to go out there and talk to him. It wouldn’t have been right to slink out of the restaurant and let him think his date had stood him up. I hoped that after all these years we could catch up on each other’s lives and not delve into anything from the past. So I took a deep breath and walked towards him.

  “Hello?” I said, sounding like an idiot, like I’d answered the phone instead of said hi to someone I knew.

  “Are you Casey?” he said, standing up. When I nodded, his face broke out in a huge smile, and he sort-of discreetly looked me up and down. “Nice to meet you, Casey,” he said, sounding like he really meant it. I drank in the sight of him, the wavy dark hair and warm brown eyes, the wide shoulders thick with muscle under a trim suit jacket. Seven years had changed him, but he was every inch the man I remembered.

  “Mick?” I said, barely able to get the word out. It was like he didn’t recognize me.

  “Yes, Mick Branson,” he said, and put his hand out for me to shake, so I just went ahead and shook it. His hand was warm and firm, and the warmth traveled right up my arm. My body, that traitor, responded to him instantly, with a wave of desire that went straight to my core. I could hardly breathe.

  Somehow he had moved around the table and was holding out my chair, and I couldn’t even remember letting go of his hand. I sat down, in a daze. “You okay?” he said, smiling.

  “Yeah, I just…. I guess I’m a little nervous.”

  “Oh sure, blind dates are tough,” he said.

  “Do you go on a lot of them?” I asked, wondering how it was that he didn’t know me.

  “I don’t know about a lot. It feels like a lot. Maybe once a month, is that a lot?”

  I laughed. “It’s about twelve more a year than I go on.” I was having this conversation with about a tenth of my brain, while the rest of me was silently freaking right out.

  He laughed too, and then he looked me over for a long minute, and I was sure he recognized me. But no, because he said, “How do you know Jim and Shannon?”

  “Well, Shannon has been my friend since high school. I grew up here.” I figured now he’d say, Oh yeah, you’re my stepsister Kathy. But still no.

  “Really? I didn’t see you at their wedding,” he said.

  “No, I had to miss it. I was still in Ethiopia.”

  “Oh yeah, the Peace Corps. That must have been a trip, huh? What were you doing over there?”

  The maitre d’ came back with a bottle of wine. He showed it to Mick, who nodded, and then the maitre d’ opened the bottle and poured a little bit into two glasses. He gave one to each of us, and I half expected Mick to say, No, she’s underage. Mick tasted the wine, swirled it all around in his mouth like they do in movies and nodded to the waiter again. They both looked at me, so I tasted it, swished it like mouthwash and nodded too, feeling like an actress in a play. The maitre d’ poured us each a full glass and left.

  I half-whispered, “I don’t know a thing about wine. So this could be really good Kool-Ade for all I know.”

  He laughed hard at that and said, “Believe me, Casey, it’s very good Kool-Ade.” He chuckled some more and then said, “Why don’t we order, and then you can tell me all about the Peace Corps.”

  I picked up the menu that had been lying there. My heart sank when I saw the prices. I was pretty sure he was going to pay, so it wasn’t that, but the idea of spending that much money on one meal—I couldn’t do it. To my extreme embarrassment, I started to shake a little.

  “I’m not very hungry, I don’t think,” I managed to say. “Maybe I’ll just get an appetizer.” Even the appetizers were in the twenty- or thirty-dollar range though.

  He looked up at me sharply. “Don’t tell me you’re dieting,” he said. “If I date one more girl who can’t eat because she imagines she’s too fat….” Mick gazed into my face for a minute, and then in a voice like a caress, a voice I still heard in my dreams, he said, “What’s wrong, Casey?”

  “It’s just—this is going to sound crazy—the prices on this menu! If we order wine and apps and entrees…the total…. It could probably buy enough food to feed my whole village in Ethiopia for a week, maybe longer.” I could hear that my voice was wavering. I took a deep breath so I wouldn’t start crying in the middle of a fancy restaurant.

  I couldn’t quite figure out the look on his face. Finally he said, “That doesn’t sound crazy. It kind of makes you sound like…a decent human being.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make a big deal about it. I just got back two weeks ago, and…I just don’t think I can do this.”

  Mick looked at me steadily all this time, and then tapped his chiseled upper lip with his forefinger. “I’ll tell you what. I want you to have a really good time tonight, without worrying about this. What if—however much we spend on dinner tonight, I’ll donate the same amount to the Peace Corps or whatever your favorite charity is. We’ll even send it right to that village if you want to.”

  I blinked a few times. “Really?”

  “Yeah. I’ll even write the check right here at the table and we can drop it in the mail on our way home, if you don’t believe me.”

  “Oh, no, I believe you! I just…. I’m surprised.”

  “Of course you know what that means, don’t you?” he teased.

  “Um. What?”

  “That if you really want the donation to mean something, you have to order the most luxurious, most obscenely expensive things on the menu. You can’t skip dessert. You have to really commit to being lavish and extravagant.”

  I felt a smile start small and grow bigger and bigger until I was grinning across the table at Mick. He was doing the same thing right back at me. The longer we sat there, the bigger we smiled until the whole thing started to seem funny. Soon we were chuckling and truly laughing as we looked into one another’s eyes. He groped for my hands across the table and I joined my hands with his until our laughter went back to smiles again, and then nothing was funny any more. We were just two happy people holding hands. I was feeling pretty wonderful until I remembered with a jolt that this was Mick and he didn’t know who I was at all. I gently let go of his hands and the moment passed.

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