A Pretend Proposal. Jackie Braun

stomach took a roller-coaster-worthy plunge. Is that what she wanted to happen? She wasn’t sure. They didn’t know one another well enough. Yet. Even if everything she knew about him so far, she liked. Except … “He’s anti-commitment,” she told Mel.

      “Come on. Did he actually say that?”

      “Yep.” Elizabeth nodded. “He made it clear in no uncertain terms when we had dinner the first night that he has no plans to settle down. Ever.”

      “All men say that.”

      “No. He means it.” Her heart squeezed as she relayed what Thomas had told her the previous night about his parents, the horrifying car accident that had claimed his mother and his father’s subsequent alcoholism. “He thinks of love as a disease, a chronic one is how he phrased it.”

      Mel nibbled the inside of her cheek, uncharacteristically quiet. At last she said, “In his defense, he had a tough break. He was a kid when the accident happened and so it was easy for him to see love as the reason his father is the way he is. But that doesn’t make it so. His father suffers from a disease all right. Alcoholism. That’s why he basically abandoned his son. The accident might have been the trigger, but.” She lifted her shoulders. “The poor guy. It’s no wonder he turned out so gun-shy.”

      “I know.” Elizabeth sighed again. “I wish he could be just a jerk, though. You know?”

      “Yeah. A garden variety misogynist would make your situation less complicated,” Mel agreed. “You could always tell him that you’ve reconsidered your bargain and want out. We can find another way to make Literacy Liaisons’s endowment a reality.”

      “I’ve thought about that, but I’ve committed myself.” Ironic laughter followed her statement. “At least one of us is capable of doing so.”

      “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

      Elizabeth hesitated only a moment. “I’m sure. It’s only for a matter of days. This time next week, Thomas and I will have gone our separate ways.”

      Yet that thought brought precious little in the way of comfort, a fact Elizabeth tried to ignore.

      “Well, at least your eyes are wide open,” Mel said.

      “Yep. Wide open. There’s no changing someone who doesn’t want to change. You can push and prod and you just wind up shoving them further away.”

      “Are you okay?”

      “Sure. I like Thomas, and I’m definitely attracted to him, but it’s not as if I’m in love with him or anything,” she hastened to assure them both. “Right now, I’ve got paperwork to catch up on.” She swiveled in her seat and began typing her password as Mel started for the door.

      “Elizabeth?”

      “Hmm.” She glanced up from her computer screen in time to catch Mel’s worried frown.

      “Your eyes, I know you said they’re wide open, but prop them that way with toothpicks, ‘kay?”

      In lieu of toothpicks, Elizabeth got down to business. Personal business. There would be no meandering conversation during dinner tonight, she decided. That was too much like what occurred on real dates. Nope. She would treat this like a job interview even though, technically, she’d already been hired. She created a file and made a list of questions she needed answered. Then she spent the next fifteen minutes ruminating over what more to tell him about herself.

      She decided to break the information down into likes and dislikes. Since he already knew her preferences when it came to movie genres, directors and actors, she started with music, moved on to authors and completed the entertainment category with board games, adding in the dislike category her disdain for the computer variety.

      From there she moved on to her basic values, causes beyond literacy that she supported and a very brief sketch of her education, since he already knew she’d attended State. She considered attaching her high school and college transcripts, but that seemed overkill.

      As for her childhood, Thomas had met Howie and she knew that as a child he’d owned a cockatiel named Hitchcock. She jotted down the names of the guinea pig, flop-eared rabbit and pair of very long-lived goldfish she’d had while growing up.

      When it came to her parents, she filled in their vital stats, leaving out their lack of a marriage certificate and their other free-spirited oddities. As for her brother, she touched on Ross only briefly, in part because she knew so little about him these days, including his whereabouts.

      She swallowed thickly and touched his name on the computer screen. She missed him. As always, she wondered if he ever would decide to come home. Unlike her parents, she did not view her brother’s vagabond lifestyle as freedom even if it was a kind of escape. No, Ross had run away. It didn’t matter that he’d been five months shy of eighteen years old at the time, close enough to adulthood, according to their parents, to make his own choices.

      “He’s happy,” Delphine had claimed at the time. “You like school and you were smart enough to get a scholarship. But not everyone’s cut out for book-learning and college, Lizzie.”

      Skeet had seconded the opinion. And why not? Their father had gotten by on charm and luck, working odd jobs to raise his family. More often than not he’d been paid under the table. If at times they’d had to live with relatives or crash in friends’ apartments that was okay in his book.

      It’s all good. That was Skeet and Delphine’s mantra.

      But they weren’t to blame for Ross’s leaving. No that fell squarely on Elizabeth’s shoulders. Where their folks hadn’t been tough enough on Ross, Elizabeth had been unyielding in her nagging after he quit school.

      “You’re squandering your life,” she’d raged during that final argument before he’d left home for good. “You’re going to end up penniless, homeless.”

      “Mom and Dad have done just fine.”

      “That depends on your definition of fine, Ross. How many times would we have wound up in a shelter if not for friends or family opening their homes to us? In the meantime, the job market has only gotten more competitive.”

      “You’re competitive enough for all of us.” He hadn’t intended it as a compliment. “When are you going to accept that I’m not smart like you?”

      He was smart, every bit as bright as she was. Intelligence and literacy didn’t go handin-hand. But she’d nicked his pride and had put him on the defensive, a mistake she never made these days with Literacy Liaisons’s clients.

      If she hadn’t been so critical of Ross, so self-righteous and pushy, he would have been comfortable confiding in her what their parents had long known. Ross could barely read above a third-grade level. Instead, he’d bolted without speaking another word to her.

      Thomas thought her cause noble. He thought she was so selfless in starting up her nonprofit and wanting to see it survive. Indeed, last night he’d told her she was perfect.

      Elizabeth knew the truth. She was anything but.

      After that steamy encounter in her living room, Thomas worried that he would have a hard time keeping his hands to himself the next time he saw Elizabeth.

      He worried that once again he would be compelled to satisfy his curiosity where she was concerned. And that was all this was, he assured himself, a really severe case of curiosity.

      What else could it be?

      Of course he liked her. It was impossible not to. She was smart, ambitious, interesting and all of that. A little voice in the back of his mind kept reminding him that brains and spunk had never proved such a huge turn-on in the past. Nor had he ever found himself this wildly attracted to a woman he would describe as cute and petite.

      And then there was that tantalizing glimpse of pink lace he’d spied beneath her blouse. The memory of it was eating away at his peace of mind. Like a rip in the paper