A Hickey for Harriet & a Cradle for Caroline Read online

  Two brand-new stories in every volume…twice a month!

  Duets Vol. #97

  Popular Nancy Warren returns with a quirky DOUBLE DUETS about a couple of friends who make the headlines—and more!—when they each find Mr. Right. Nancy’s previous Duets novel, Shotgun Nanny, was “a fun, provocative, not-soon-forgotten tale with a wonderfully offbeat heroine,” says Romantic Times. This multitalented author is also published in Blaze and Temptation.

  Duets Vol. #98

  Matchmaking is the theme of both stories this month. Two-time Golden Heart winner Barbara Dunlop’s The Wish-List Wife is a fun story about a hero with a detailed list of qualities he wants in a woman. Trouble is, none of them fit the cute next-door neighbor he’s wildly attracted to! Toni Blake continues the merriment with Mad About Mindy…and Mandy, a story about a professional matchmaker heroine who dons a disguise in order to date a hottie client herself.

  Be sure to pick up both Duets volumes today!

  A Hickey for Harriet

  A Cradle for Caroline

  Nancy Warren

  Contents

  A Hickey for Harriet

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  A Cradle for Caroline

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Nancy Warren

  A Hickey for Harriet

  “Suck me.”

  “Are you sure?” Her words were like a blast from a cold hose. He wasn’t on a date with a sexy babe, he was administering a charity hickey to a woman named Harriet.

  “Yes, Steve.” The sound came breathlessly.

  Sighing, he rounded his lips and sucked her warm flesh, giving enough suction to guarantee a one-hundred-percent-genuine, no-turkey-baster-need-apply hickey.

  “Ah.” She gasped softly.

  He stepped back, satisfied that no one would be in any doubt as to what this mark was on her neck. Unable to stop himself, he leaned forward once more and kissed the red spot gently to soothe it. She tasted like oatmeal cookies just out of the oven. Warm and fragrant.

  “There you go. One hickey.” Steve grinned. “Reapply as needed.”

  A soft, if slightly unsteady chuckle answered him. “Thanks.”

  “Anytime,” he said. And the weird thing was, he meant it.

  Dear Reader,

  Did you have a dream when you were younger? Maybe something a little wacky that meant the world at the time? I would have loved to be a Broadway singing and dancing star. Since I can’t sing and never took a single dance lesson, it was never going to happen, but I absolutely love musicals, and whenever I watch a show a little part of me is up on stage—invisible, luckily for the rest of the audience. In A Hickey for Harriet, Harriet MacPherson gets her chance to fulfill a high school dream, and her life will never be the same. Thank goodness.

  In Harriet’s story you’ll meet some familiar friends from Hot Off the Press, my February 2003 Temptation novel. I hope you enjoy your time in Pasqualie, Washington, as much as I did.

  Hearing from readers always makes my day. Visit me on the Web at www.nancywarren.net or drop me a line at Nancy Warren, P.O. Box 37035, North Vancouver, B.C., V7N 4M0, Canada. If you include a stamped, self-addressed envelope I’ll send you a bookmark and an autographed bookplate.

  Happy reading,

  Nancy

  Books by Nancy Warren

  HARLEQUIN DUETS

  78—SHOTGUN NANNY

  HARLEQUIN TEMPTATION

  838—FLASHBACK

  915—HOT OFF THE PRESS

  HARLEQUIN BLAZE

  19—LIVE A LITTLE!

  47—WHISPER

  57—BREATHLESS

  This book is for Emma, who was born dancing, with love. May all your dreams come true.

  1

  HARRIET! You can’t call a beautiful baby Harriet, she’ll grow up wearing twinsets and kilts. Call her Ashley, Crystal, Jennifer, Britney, Macy…

  “Macy.” The name passed softly between gently curving lips as Harriet slowly woke and the last wisps of her dream faded. Fully awake, she cursed her name as she did most mornings she wasn’t running late for her job as copy editor at the Pasqualie Standard, Pasqualie, Washington’s broadsheet newspaper.

  A name like Harriet took the stuffing out of a person, robbed her of dreams. It was a name you couldn’t help but grow into as surely as you turned out to have a red tint to your hair, freckles and one front tooth that overlapped the other. Harriet Adelaide MacPherson. It was hopeless.

  With a name like Harriet, it was fate that she’d been raised by maiden aunts. That’s right—aunts. One wasn’t enough. She got stuck with two. Great-aunts in fact.

  Her mother had died giving birth to her, just as though it were still Victorian times. Death in childbirth had conjured Dickensian images and frankly encouraged the pair of maiden aunts to come up with a name like Harriet. Of course she was sorry her mother had died, but she’d never known her, after all, so Harriet couldn’t help being just a little resentful her mother hadn’t hung on long enough to name her only daughter.

  Still, Harriet was an optimist at heart. She pushed back the covers and rose, stretched in her flannel nightie and crept across her high-ceilinged bedroom to the ballet barre her aunts had installed for her years ago. Automatically, she put her feet in position one, held one hand gracefully outstretched, grasped the barre with the other and began her stretching routine.

  Twenty minutes later she felt alive and ready to face the day. She showered, dressed, made her bed, carefully smoothing all the wrinkles from the bed-cover patterned in tiny pink rosebuds, and then descended the stairs and made her way to the old-fashioned kitchen.

  “Good morning, dear,” Aunt Lavinia said, glancing up from today’s copy of the Standard. Though she’d retired a decade earlier, Lavinia still dressed every morning in a crisply ironed blouse and one of her endless tweed skirts. She abhorred trousers for women and, even though the only makeup she wore was lipstick, she wouldn’t be seen at the breakfast table without it.

  The newspaper crackled as she turned a page and continued reading. She tsked and then turned to Harriet, tucking her chin so she could regard her niece over her reading glasses. “I can see you didn’t edit this piece.” She pointed to a long-winded editorial, which, thankfully, Harriet hadn’t in fact seen. “Three comma splices, two misplaced modifiers and a dangling participle.”

  “Whoever wrote it was certainly never a student of yours, Lavinia,” Aunt Elspeth said, dishing oatmeal into three bowls. She wore one of her flowered cotton housedresses, support hose to ease her varicose veins, and the sheepskin slippers Harriet had bought her last Christmas.

  A blue-and-white striped pitcher of real cream sat in the middle of the table; the aunts considered a brisk daily walk a certain antidote to cholesterol. A matching bowl contained brown sugar. A brown Betty full of strong English tea and three small glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice completed the breakfast.

  Harriet took her usual seat, the one she’d sat in since she was old
enough to sit, shook out her crisply ironed napkin and laid it on her lap.

  She should move out, Harriet thought, as she thought at least once each day. Then she scooped into her porridge, made exactly the way she liked it, and sipped the tea Aunt Elspeth passed her—already milked and sugared to her preference.

  Guilt smote her. She was the center of their lives. How could she leave them?

  “What are you going to do today, dear?” Aunt Elspeth asked, her kindly wrinkled face turned to her.

  “Never mind, Elspeth. Harriet’s twenty-three. She’s entitled to her secrets,” Aunt Lavinia said firmly.

  In a pig’s eye. Harriet swallowed her porridge. Twenty-three or not, it would never do to speak with her mouth full. “I’ve got field-hockey practice after work. I probably won’t be home until about seven. But don’t worry, I can get dinner out.”

  “Nonsense, dear. Don’t waste your money. I’ll put on something you can reheat when you get in.”

  “Don’t you have a date tonight?” Aunt Lavinia asked.

  The elder and bossier of the aunts, Lavinia was a retired history teacher whose formidable reputation was legendary in Pasqualie. She rarely asked a question if she didn’t already have the answer.

  The porridge hit Harriet’s stomach like a rockslide and she glanced up in horror. “Is that tonight?”

  “I would have thought you could keep up with your own social calendar, not rely on a seventy-seven-year-old woman to do it for you.”

  “I forgot,” she groaned.

  “It would be very poor manners to forget a social engagement to such a promising young man.”

  Harriet sighed grumpily. “He’s a mortician. How promising is that?”

  Aunt Lavinia stared at her as though she’d flunked a pop quiz. “The fastest growing segment of the population is seniors. I’d say his career choice was extremely intelligent.”

  Harvey Wallenbrau had lived in Pasqualie all his life. He was only a couple of years older than she so he wasn’t exactly a stranger. If his career choice was intelligent, it was the only thing about him that was. “He smells of formaldehyde,” she said, wishing she’d said no to a date arranged by her aunts, just once. She knew they loved her and wanted to see her happily married, but this matchmaking mania was getting to be too much. Aunt Lavinia needed a new hobby.

  “Oh, my stars, that’s right,” said Aunt Elspeth. She turned to the gardening club calendar hanging beside the stove. “He’s coming for you at eight o’clock.”

  She could get angry. She could tell them they had no right to interfere in her life. She could move out and get her own place. But all their dreams centered around her, and for some reason, Harriet tried to fulfill their youthful hopes for them. Maybe it was because of Aunt Elspeth’s well-known but never-referred-to disappointment in her youth, and the fact that Lavinia’s fiancé had been killed in World War II.

  But they loved her, and she loved them, and she’d get through an evening with a greasy-haired mortician somehow. So Harriet smiled brightly at them as though she’d spend all day looking forward to her date, already planning how she’d get out of having to agree to a second one.

  STEVE ACKERMAN was jogging past the bathrooms outside the Pasqualie Standard newsroom when he heard the cry of someone in pain. He glanced up, a hitch in his stride. None of his business, he told himself even as he paused.

  The cry was followed by a loud moan.

  It was coming from behind the door of the women’s washroom. Another moan followed by a whimper kept him rooted to the spot. Somebody could be sick or dying in there. What should he do?

  He glanced back into the newsroom, but at 7:00 p.m. on a Wednesday, it was quiet. The night news reporter was out on assignment and the night news editor was on the phone. There were no females on staff tonight.

  Pushing up his glasses, he knocked softly on the door. He knew he’d have to at least check on whoever was in the bathroom.

  “Is everything all right in there?”

  “Fine.” The single word should have reassured him, but it was delivered in a voice that even a dyed-in-the-wool jock like Steve recognized as tearful. He took a step away then cursed himself for a coward.

  One peek, to ease his conscience, and he’d be out of here.

  He eased open the door, hoping to hell he wasn’t about to encounter “woman trouble” in there.

  He couldn’t have said what was going on, but it was the strangest thing he’d ever seen. The red-haired copy editor whose name he could never remember held a humongous syringe and was stabbing her own throat.

  For a second he feared she had the biggest drug problem he’d ever seen. Then he saw the big red rubber bulb and recognized the apparatus as a turkey baster.

  In the mirror he saw the girl’s eyes, big and blue-green and focused so intently on trying to see beneath her chin to the turkey baster that she was going cross-eyed. He saw her take her bottom lip between her teeth and bear down, then she let go of the plastic squeezie part. She moaned as the plastic pinched the tender skin of her neck.

  “That’s gotta hurt,” he said before he had time to stop himself.

  With a startled gasp, the girl’s eyes flew to the mirror and she stared at him in horror. The kitchen gadget clattered to the tile floor and rolled under a sink.

  “What are you doing here?” the girl cried, her hand slapping over the red mark on her throat, a blush suffusing her freckled face.

  “I heard moaning. I thought someone was hurt.”

  “Oh. That was very gentlemanly of you,” she said in a clipped, formal tone, as though she’d walked off the set of Masterpiece Theatre. “But, as you can see, I’m fine.”

  “You were basting yourself,” he reminded her, his curiosity engaged. “How fine is that?”

  She buttoned the top button of her sweater, though he didn’t see why she bothered. She was wearing another sweater beneath it, exactly the same but without buttons. She was one odd bird, that was for sure.

  She bent to retrieve her utensil and he noticed that she was wearing the ugliest green plaid skirt he’d ever seen. She leaned farther under the sink and the skirt rode up, revealing surprisingly sexy legs. An amateur athlete himself, he loved muscular legs on a woman and hers were toned and firm like those of a serious jogger. The sight gave him a jolt of surprise.

  She straightened and stuffed the baster in a big carry-all she’d placed on the counter beneath the mirrors. “I’m sorry I bothered you,” she said pointedly, which seemed to him to mean, There’s the door, pal. Use it.

  But he was a journalist, even if he was the only one in Editorial who didn’t consider sports journalism an oxymoron.

  Because he was trained to get at the truth, and because she seemed like a nice girl—under the drab outfit—he leaned a shoulder against the wall and asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Her color was fading, but not her discomfort; he could see it in her eyes. They were big and aqua, innocent and dreamy. She didn’t look nuts, but given his history of girlfriends—each one more psychotic than the last—he knew he wasn’t one to judge.

  “Well…” She seemed to hesitate, then with a determined nod, moved closer to him and lifted her chin, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “What do you see?”

  White, creamy skin, an elegant curve, a pulse beating. A smell that reminded him of his grandmother’s linen closet, flowery but comforting. “I see your throat.”

  “What about here?” she asked impatiently, jabbing her finger at the red spot on her neck.

  “There’s a red mark.”

  “What does it look like?” Her head tilted back and she pulled her double sweaters down—to reveal more of the flesh she’d been mauling.

  He considered. “Like somebody attacked you with a vacuum hose.”

  “It doesn’t look like a hickey?” she asked in a small, sad voice.

  “Not a bit like a hickey.” He couldn’t keep the amusement out of his voice. “Is that what this is about? You trying
to make your boyfriend jealous?”

  She laughed at that, bringing her head to the upright position and patting her sweaters back into place.

  “No. I’m trying to keep myself from getting one.”

  Privately he thought her wardrobe should do the trick. She looked like the girls who’d joined the chess club in high school and spent all their lunch hours in the library.

  Scary.

  “You’re giving yourself a hickey to keep from getting a boyfriend?”

  She sighed, a deep, tragic sound, and stepped back to lean against the white porcelain sink, her shoulders slumping. “There’s this man I don’t want to go out with.”

  Of course she was nuts; he found her attractive, so she couldn’t possibly be sane. His life wouldn’t be normal if he’d felt something for a regular woman. He’d seen this one plenty of times at work, and he vaguely remembered her from high school, but he’d never looked at her closely before to see the killer body tucked inside the dowdy package.

  He gave her the obvious advice in a hearty, no-nonsense tone. “Just say no.”

  “It’s not that easy. My two aunts set me up with him. They think he’d be perfect for me even though he’s a mortician and he smells of formaldehyde. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings so I said I’d go out with him. That’s why I need the hickey.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.” He had to admit this was the most amazing story he’d ever heard.

  “I’ll show them the hickey after my date and they’ll understand perfectly that I never want to see him again. No gentleman kisses on the first date,” she informed him.

  He couldn’t keep the amusement out of his voice. “Isn’t that kind of old-fashioned?”

  She smiled grimly. “Welcome to my nightmare.”

  He should simply say goodbye and leave this woman to her turkey baster and her mortician, but somehow he couldn’t make his feet walk out of the women’s bathroom. Even though he’d seen her here and there throughout his life, he could never recall her name, and here he was feeling as if he ought to help her out of a jam.