dangerously, “You’re mine, Chandler,” before heading back out to the microphone; a statement that cheered Ryan not a bit.
“Good luck, Charlie!” other bachelors called out as Charlie Armstrong’s number was called and the pediatrician hiked up his jeans, tried to rearrange his paunch somewhere closer to his chest, and stepped through the opening in the curtain.
He was met by a roar of approval and the band’s vocal rendition of Garth Brooks’s fast-paced “Something with a Ring to It.”
The crowd, as the saying goes, went wild.
And the bidding only got hotter when Charlie began singing along to the music.
“Two hundred!”
“Three-fifty!”
“Six! Six!”
“One…thousand…dollars.”
Ryan raised his eyes toward the ceiling, running that last, definitely authoritative voice through his head, processing it, and then pushed through the crowd of bachelors peeping through the curtain to take a look for himself.
He’d been right. Good Lord, he’d been right. There she was, his grandmother, standing right at the end of the runway, waving her checkbook in the air.
“Going…going…sold, for one thousand dollars!” Marcia crowed from the podium, bringing down the gavel she’d probably borrowed from her father, the judge.
One thousand dollars. And Ryan was next. How was he going to top one thousand dollars?
Hell, did he want to?
Not really.
“Number 22!” Marcia called out, and Ryan took a deep breath, then stepped through the curtain. Strobe lights immediately blinded him as the room went dark except for the wildly moving colored lights that danced around the stage while the band—really pushing it now—tried their hand at the theme from Jaws.
Ryan fought a compulsion to turn and run for his life. Only the fact that Allie was no longer standing at the end of the runway—and making faces at him or something equally horrible—kept him going.
“Here we are, ladies, one Ryan Chandler. Tall, dark, sinfully gorgeous. And R-I-C-H, ladies. Oh, my goodness, yes. Could he be anything else but extremely talented? Ryan? Take a stroll down the runway, please, as I open the bids at…three hundred?”
The bids got to seven hundred quickly, with Ryan stiffly looking out over the crowd, his eyes concentrated on some vague point in the far distance. Marcia had the top bid, and it appeared that no one else wanted to go against the chairperson on this one—not if they wanted to be invited back next year.
And then, as Marcia was saying, “Going…going…” another voice piped up from the rear of the room. “Eight hundred!”
Marcia stopped the gavel in midslam and, with narrowed eyes, looked out into the darkness. “Eight-fifty,” Marcia muttered from between clenched teeth.
“Nine,” came right back at her. Closely followed by a giggle.
Ryan turned at the head of the runway, and started walking back toward Marcia. Interesting. The woman was so sleekly blond, so very controlled. And now, suddenly, her cheeks were flushed, her lips thin with anger.
He didn’t know who had dared to overbid her, but whoever it was, he was certainly enjoying himself, which he just as certainly had never expected to do.
“One…thousand…dollars,” Marcia said, throwing back her head, exposing the length of her throat, the height of her arrogance.
The answer came in less than a heartbeat. “One thousand five hundred. Oh, the heck with it—two thousand even!”
The crowd, which had gone silent, began murmuring, shuffling in their seats as they turned to see who was doing the bidding.
Ryan turned with them, putting a shielding hand to his forehead to try to see through the ridiculous strobe lights.
All he saw was a bright red head and a wide, happy grin as Marcia, bred never to cause a scene, brought the gavel down. “Sold! Please go to the registration desk to write your check and meet your bachelor.”
Applause broke out, as Ryan had brought in the largest donation of the night thus far, and he saw Allie standing right up front again, having appeared there like a genie out of a bottle and clapping for all she was worth, giving out a few good “cowgirl” yells while she was at it.
She’s enjoying this! I’m really going to have to hurt that woman, Ryan thought as he went back through the curtain and accepted the back-slappings and “you dog, you” congratulations of the other bachelors.
As another bachelor stepped through the curtain, this time to the strains of “Young at Heart”—a fitting song for the eighty-year-old George McDonald, chairman of the board of the hospital—Ryan made his way through the crowd in search of his grandmother.
He found her at the registration desk, having gone there right after the bidding on Ryan, she told him, in order to pay for Charlie and arrange their date.
“How…why…what the devil do you think you’re—”
“Oh, Ryan, close your mouth,” Allie scolded. “I’m not looking for romance, if that’s what you think. Charlie Armstrong is the best pediatrician in town, and Jessica’s babies need the best pediatrician. I’m only buttering him up, considering that I’ve heard he’s not taking new patients right now—which will change when we’re done speaking, I assure you. Besides, Charlie is taking Western line dancing lessons, and I want him to take me with him.”
Ryan shook his head. “Do you ever just do anything, Allie? Or does everything you do have a purpose? And, that being said, are you going to let me in on the purpose behind putting me up on that runway tonight?”
Allie reached up, patted his cheek. “I just want you to have some fun, darling. Live a little, loosen up. Ah, and here comes your date now. Isn’t she…different. Be nice, Ryan. She’s probably more fragile than she looks.”
“She’s hardly built like a linebacker, Allie,” Ryan said out of the corner of his mouth as Janna stopped, bent from the waist to untangle her skirt from her boot, showing off the limber grace of form inherent in her long-waisted, dancer-slim body.
“Yes, but that flamboyant coloring, those clothes. I think she’s hiding behind them a little, Ryan, to make up for some courage she lacks. In fact, I’m willing to wager she’s had her heart broken at some time.” She patted his cheek again. “But you’ll fix that, won’t you?”
“I’ll fix—damn,” Ryan ended. He was talking to the air, for Allie was already back in the crowd, hanging on Charlie’s arm and making the pseudocowboy look good for it.
“Hi, again,” Janna said as she walked over to stand in front of him. “Quite the mad bidding war, wasn’t it? I was going to give up, but the auctioneer was so sure she had you that I just knew I had to rescue you. You can thank me later, unless you really wanted to be caught in her clutches for a whole day and evening. Besides, I was also being selfish. You’re the tallest man here.”
“Tall.
