Hero For the Asking (Reed Sisters: Holding out for a Hero 2)

Summer's giggle when she opened the door and eyed his attire tipped him off that something was up. He grinned, eagerly looking for his date. His grin widened when he found her. She had dressed funky.

He slowly examined her from head to toe. A gray felt fedora sat atop her light hair, which she wore in a glorious frizz to her shoulders. A loose, unstructured charcoal-gray linen jacket that Clay had helped Summer select as a gift for Derek was pushed up to Spring's elbows and hung almost to her knees. Her bright pink blouse was open at the collar so that the man's pink-and-gray spotted silk tie was knotted at about the middle of her chest. Light gray slacks were pleated baggily at her slender waist, narrowing from the knees to tightly grip her ankles. Her feet were tied into heeled black lace-up half-boots. She wore enormous turquoise-and-silver earrings, a chunky matching choker and a thick black leather belt with a gaudy silver-and-turquoise buckle. Facing him with a smile that contained equal parts of shyness and bravado, she looked beautiful.

"I am in love with this woman," he remarked aloud, almost as if he were commenting on the weather. And he knew his words were the truth. He watched in amusement as her face turned almost as pink as her shirt.

"I thought you said you were going to dress funky," Spring accused him.

He frowned down at his suit. "I am dressed funky."

"Spring, he's wearing a tie," Summer pointed out with a grin. "The only part of his outfit that's not funky, for Clay, is the tennis shoes."

Spring shook her head, causing her crimped curls to sway around her face. "San Francisco," she muttered, then glared at Clay. "Okay, let's go."

He couldn't resist throwing an arm around her shoulders and giving her one hard hug. "We're going to have so much fun!" he told her cheerfully.

"Yeah," she answered with a resigned sigh that he found greatly amusing. "Fun."

* * *

The play that Clay took her to turned out to be a junior-high-school production of You Can't Take It With You, which happened to be one of Spring's favorite plays. She didn't tell him so. Nor did she give in to the impulse to tease him when she noticed him squinting a bit as he read the program, though her professional mind made a note to ask him later if he'd had an eye examination recently.

Instead, she sat back and enjoyed, chuckling at the more-enthusiastic-than-talented performances from the young teenage actors. Or, rather, she appeared to enjoy the play. It wasn't easy with Clay sitting close beside her, taking advantage of every opportunity to touch her. When he wasn't patting her arm, he was squeezing her knee. As the performance went on, the squeezes moved gradually up her thigh until, at the beginning of act three, she was forced to catch his hand and return it firmly to his own lap. She tried very hard to look as if his touches annoyed her, when actually they turned her into Silly Putty.

With admirably few forgotten or blown lines Alice and Tony pledged their undying love, Grandpa Vanderhof congratulated himself on outsmarting the government, Penelope and Paul Sycamore went on with their happy, eccentric lives and the play ended. Spring applauded warmly as the flushed young actors took their bows.

"Want to go backstage?" Clay asked, draping a casual arm around Spring's shoulders.

"You know someone in the cast?" she inquired with interest.

He nodded noncommittally and led her down the aisle, never breaking physical contact. Though she told herself that she wished he'd stop touching her, Spring was fully aware that she made no effort to pull away from him.

To say that Clay knew someone in the cast was a monumental understatement. Clay knew everyone in the cast. And they quite obviously idolized him. Forbidden by school policy to call him by his first name—this was the very school where he worked, Spring discovered—they called him Mr. Mac. They teased him about his unusually conservative clothing, glowed with pride when he congratulated them on the success of their performances and competed avidly for his attention. The boys all tried to emulate him. The girls were all in love with him. Watching him with the kids, Spring felt herself slipping into a similar infatuation.

When Clay introduced her to the cast, Spring was glad she'd dressed so oddly, though she'd chosen her "funky" outfit just to prove to Clay that she wasn't as prim and humorless as he'd teased her about being. The kids seemed to accept her easily as his friend, even showing their implicit approval by teasing her about her Arkansan accent.

Declaring himself to be near starvation, Clay took her out to eat when they left the school. The tiny Italian restaurant he selected was tucked away in an obscure section of the city, far from the usual tourist paths.

Lulled by the pleasant evening and marvelous food, Spring found herself chattering easily, more comfortable on a date than she'd been in a long time. Clay stayed on his best behavior, seemingly fascinated with stories of her childhood in Rose Bud and her optometry practice in Little Rock. Conversation turned to mutual interests, and Clay grinned more broadly each time they found something in common—favorite books, movies, music, television programs.

"It's Kismet," he declared at one point. "Our tastes are so similar. There's absolutely no reason not to have an affair."

She shook her head reprovingly at him, taking his words as a joke. "What about our taste in clothes?"

"What about it? You look great tonight."

"But I don't look like me tonight. I only wore these things to surprise you."

"I know you did. But I like the way you dress when you're being yourself, too. Your prim little outfits dare a man to rip them off you."

He laughed when she blushed vividly.

"The least you could have done," she complained, struggling to keep up with him, "was to dress in your usual outrageous manner after asking me to go funky. You look so...so normal in that suit. And it really wasn't necessary to wear a tie to a junior-high-school play."

He looked crestfallen, though his eyes twinkled with secret amusement. "Don't you like Morgan?"

She lifted a questioning eyebrow. "Morgan?"

"My tie."