By Mutual Consent Read online

  “Probably about six inches of—”

  “Joss!” The ice in her mother’s eyes told her she’d gone too far.

  “Sorry.”

  “Perhaps you could take her on some nice trips or something. Take her shopping now and again. Let her drive your BMW. Give her a nice allowance. I don’t know what else.”

  “Okay, enough. You make it sound like I’m trying to attract a candidate who’s about seventeen years old! For God’s sake, ‘let her drive my car’?” Joss returned to the table, her temper as hot as the fresh coffee in her mug. “This idea was ridiculous to begin with, and it’s getting more so by the second. I’m not interested. End of subject.” It was insane to think that some normal adult woman out there would actually be pleased to be Joss’s trophy, a kept woman who would be little better than a mistress.

  Madeline sighed unhappily. “Fine. What would you like to talk about?”

  “Want to go to the Titans game with me a week from Sunday?” Joss had been given two tickets by a fellow surgeon who’d forgotten it was his fifteenth wedding anniversary. His wife was not a football fan, which meant he’d had to get rid of the tickets in one hell of a hurry.

  “Hmm. That’s the twenty-sixth of October. Don’t you have that birthday party to go to? For Jack Pritchard?”

  Joss rubbed a hand over her face and groaned. “Oh, damn. I forgot about that.” Now she was definitely grumpy. Dr. Jack Pritchard was professor emeritus at the medical school and its longest-serving faculty member, even though he no longer practiced medicine or even taught anymore. A cramped office and a title had been given to him for life. He was surly and ill-tempered at the best of times, and Joss would rather pull out her hair one strand at a time than attend a seventy-fifth birthday party for the old coot. But all the department heads and sub-heads had been ordered to attend. “Why don’t you come with me, Mama? Pritchard at least tolerates you.”

  Madeline had the audacity to laugh. “You couldn’t pay me to spend an evening with that old so-and-so.”

  “You know, you could actually use a swear word once in a while. It won’t turn you to stone.” Madeline McNab was a genteel Southern woman—strong, fierce when she needed to be, polite to a fault—who belonged in the antebellum era. Swearing, or doing anything that resembled letting her hair down, was a rarity.

  “Oh hush. You young people more than make up for my failure to swear. But you see what I mean? A companion could help make Pritchard’s party much more tolerable for you. Maybe even enjoyable.”

  Joss buried her head in her hands. She should know by now that arguing with her mother was futile. If the idea of a trophy wife provided Madeline with a harmless little fantasy or some sense that she was helping Joss, then so be it, but Joss would never allow it to become a reality. She wasn’t that desperate. Or that much of a loser.

  Chapter Two

  Sarah Young glanced worriedly at her chest, then her lap, then her tidy heels. No spillages, no wardrobe malfunctions, nothing wrong that she could see. So why the hell was her father giving her that scowling, judgmental look across the table as though she’d missed curfew or had forgotten to clean her room?

  The petulant twelve-year-old in her wanted to challenge him, tell him to mind his own business, but it was far too late for that. Sarah had swallowed her pride a long time ago, starting when he’d bankrolled her undergrad degree at Chicago’s Institute of Fine Arts and then her two-year master’s degree in fine arts at Boston University. Four years later, he was still subsidizing her to the tune of about a thousand dollars a month—money she needed to augment her meager salary as a part-time instructor to freshmen in Vanderbilt U’s art department.

  She understood the trade-off all too well. If she was going to take his money, she had to take his crap too. Only tonight, she wasn’t feeling so philosophical about it. Annoyance and guilt mixed with the acid of the garlic and red wine in her stomach. It was a lousy way to spend her twenty-ninth birthday, and she resolved that her thirtieth would be a hell of a lot different. Next year at this time, I’ll have sold a few of my paintings, maybe commissioned something, and I’ll be paying my own freight. And I can tell Daddy to go to hell if I want. She didn’t want to think about how many times she’d given herself the exact same speech—every birthday and every Christmas for the last six years. Maybe longer. It was goddamned depressing.

  A birthday card sat in the center of the table, the evening’s coup de grace. When she was a kid, Sarah had looked forward to her present being a surprise. One year it was a compact car. Another year it was a pearl necklace. The last ten years, since she’d gotten serious about her education and career as an artist, her birthday present consisted of an envelope containing a healthy check from her father’s personal account. It was a good chunk of her living expenses for the remainder of the year, and now it sat as a visible reminder of Sarah’s inferiority and weakness.

  “Shall we order dessert?” her stepmother Linda asked helpfully. She often played the mediator between them, and over pasta she had tossed little warning looks at Sarah. Which were well intentioned but of absolutely no help.

  A waitress armed with a smile so fake it threatened to crack her face in half carried a candlelit cake to the table. Sarah dutifully blew out the candles one at a time, the same as she’d done at every birthday dinner, including her childhood ones at the neighborhood Chuck E. Cheese. By the age of eleven she’d rebelled, threatening that she’d celebrate no further birthdays unless they took her to grown-up restaurants.

  As sternly as if she’d forgotten to genuflect in church, her father said, “You didn’t make a wish, Sarah.”

  “Yes I did,” she lied, resisting a good eye rolling, but barely. Every birthday, she wished for her paintings to sell or for a worthy gallery to come calling, and every year her wish was another catastrophic letdown. There was no point in paying lip service to this wishing business anymore.

  Sarah’s father cleared his throat and nodded severely at the envelope. “I feel I must warn you first, Sarah. You’re not going to like what you see in there.”

  Linda’s gaze strayed to her hands, the floor. Anywhere but at Sarah.

  Sarah opened the envelope, quickly scanned the card and looked at the check she’d pinched between her fingers. It was for less than half as much as usual—enough to keep her going for four, maybe five months. She smiled as politely as she could manage, thanked them and ignored the ominous voice in her head that told her she’d better start looking for a real job.

  “Don’t you want to know why the check is smaller this time?”

  Sarah didn’t want to talk about money with her father. She hated the way he always framed the discussion in a tone that characterized her as lazy, unmotivated, wasting her time with her paints and canvases and her “useless degrees.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m grateful. Thank you.”

  She could see he wasn’t going to let it go, that the check was his way of initiating a serious discussion. Well, not a discussion. A lecture. He’d squared his shoulders in that courtroom posture he was so well practiced at, and his jaw was set in that uncompromising way that indicated it would strictly be a one-way conversation. “You’ll be thirty in a year, Sarah. It’s time you grew up and took a proper job. It’s time I stopped supporting you.”

  In theory he was right, but there was no reasonable way to discuss the subject with him. He wanted her to abjectly agree with him. He wanted her to take an office job—his law firm could help her he’d told her so many times she’d lost count. His other standard suggestion was that she teach elementary or high school students full time. But she’d sooner choose the office job than teach kids who weren’t serious about art, who only took the courses because they could goof off in class. Nothing appealed to her but what she was already doing, and she wasn’t yet ready to “grow up.”

  “Sarah, darling.” Linda stood up, placed her napkin neatly on the table. “Come to the ladies’ room with me and help me get something out of my ey
e, would you?”

  At the sink, Sarah grumbled, “Thanks for the rescue.” They were alone in the large, marble tile washroom.

  “I wish I could have warned you, but I only learned of the amount this morning.”

  “It’s okay. I don’t blame him.” He was never going to respect her work until it provided her a living wage because that was the way he measured a person’s worth. And she would make a living from her art one day. She was getting better at it every month, every year, and she was making strides selling a few small pieces here and there the last couple of years. A couple of galleries in town and one in Memphis had shortlisted her as a candidate for sales and exhibitions, and while they’d ultimately passed on her, she was sure that with a little more time, she could convince them.

  “You know, if it was up to me…”

  “I know.” Sarah patted Linda’s arm. She liked Linda and had never been one of those bratty teenagers who gives nothing but grief to the woman her father marries. At least Linda was loyal—something her biological mother was definitely not. Sarah had essentially been raised by her father from the time she was ten, after her mother decided living in Tennessee was holding her back from what otherwise would have been a spectacular acting career. California was calling her, she’d said in the terse, one-page note she’d stuck to the fridge. Since then, Sarah had seen her mother on television once, in a Ford commercial driving a minivan full of kids. What a joke that was, pretending to be a soccer mom. She was a mother from hell, and Sarah had no intention of ever having a relationship with her again.

  “I want to help, Sarah.”

  Sarah shook her head. “No, I don’t want you going against Daddy’s wishes and sneaking me money.” Linda had already helped her over the years by convincing a few of her wealthy friends to buy some of her paintings. Linda had, in many ways, been more supportive of her career than her father.

  “Well, there might be another way.”

  “Like the lottery?”

  “No, not the lottery. Do you know who Madeline McNab is?”

  “The name vaguely rings a bell. Isn’t she one of your luncheon ladies?” Sarah winked. “Or should I say, a member of your mint julep club?” There were eight or nine influential Nashville ladies who got together monthly on the pretense, Sarah guessed, of discussing philanthropic missions. Linda had once confessed that the lunches usually stretched to an afternoon of mint juleps made with Tennessee’s finest whiskey and discussions that ranged from books to celebrity gossip to politics. Oh, and charitable causes, of course, but they were almost an afterthought.

  “Part of Vanderbilt’s medical school is named after her husband.”

  “Oh, right, that’s where I’ve seen the name.” Sarah tapped her temple. “Wait, I get it! I can donate a kidney or some other organ for cash. Is that your idea?”

  Linda threw her head back and laughed. “Where do you come up with these wild ideas?”

  “Buy me one of your famous mint juleps and I’ll come up with more.”

  “Oh no, not a chance. I suspect some of your wild ideas would get me arrested. Or divorced.”

  The specter of her father and his dim view of her tightened her stomach. “Daddy is certainly immune to my ideas.”

  “Don’t you worry about him. There might be another way. A part-time job, so to speak.”

  “I already have a part-time job. If I take another one, there’ll be no time for me to paint.”

  “But this would only be a few hours a week.”

  “And it pays well?”

  “I think it could potentially be very lucrative. If you play your cards right.”

  “And what would I be doing, exactly?”

  Linda hushed her voice, even though all the stalls were empty. “Madeline’s daughter needs a…you know, an escort from time to time.”

  “You want me to be a call girl?” Sarah felt her eyebrows pop straight into her forehead. Escort was one of those icky words that really meant prostitute. It also meant that the only thing you were good for was sex. “And you think I’m the one with the wild ideas?”

  “No, not a call girl. Not like prostitution, for goodness sakes. Her name is Joss McNab, and she’s a heart surgeon like her father was. She’s involved in the medical school too, and she needs an escort to take to receptions and functions. Someone who looks good. Someone smart and fun. Someone exactly like you.” Linda reached out and touched a few strands of Sarah’s long, lush red hair. “You’re really gorgeous, you know. And you’re a great conversationalist.”

  “Wait a minute.” Sarah shook her head to clear it. “This Joss woman wants a trophy wife to take to boring, stuffy dinners and receptions? No thank you.”

  “It’s only every once in a while, according to her mother. And you like people and socializing. And it could help you work up potential clients for your paintings.”

  That got Sarah’s attention. Socializing with doctors and other professionals could be exactly her ticket to selling more paintings. People like that had money, connections, and they’d need art for their elegant mansions and fancy offices. “Is this woman willing to pay me to do this?” Sarah still couldn’t quite fathom what Linda was suggesting.

  “Yes. I’m assured there would be some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement.”

  Sarah removed her lipstick tube from her bag and began touching up her lips. “I don’t know, Linda. It sounds strange. I mean, do people actually pay other people to be their friend? Or to be their pretend girlfriend? It’s damned weird, if you ask me.”

  “Apparently in some circles, yes.”

  “This Joss McNab. She’s not some pervert or serial killer, is she?”

  Linda frowned at her, but Sarah could tell she was trying not to laugh. “No, she’s not some crazy person.”

  “Does she have hygiene issues? Hairy ears? Bizarre social habits?”

  Linda raised an eyebrow at her.

  “Okay, fine. I’m just wondering why she has to pay someone to attend functions with her, if she’s a doctor and all. And probably richer than Daddy.”

  “Her mother says she doesn’t have time for a proper girlfriend, that’s all. And that she hates all this schmoozing and small talk that’s expected of her. She’s an introvert. Exactly what you are not.”

  Sarah sighed. “Well, growing up with Daddy, I’m certainly used to being a social butterfly.” After her mother’s departure from their lives, she was often her father’s escort and sometimes even his stand-in at parties and dinners until he hooked up with Linda.

  “You’d be great it at, and I told Madeline as much.”

  “Hmm, I swear this is sounding more and more like some kind of arranged marriage.”

  “Well, it is the South, after all.” Linda grinned. “Shall I tell Madeline you’re interested?”

  “If this woman wants me as her escort, I’m assuming she’s out?” Sarah had come out the minute she left Nashville for college and had never looked back. She wasn’t about to pretend she was straight for anyone. Or for any amount of money.

  “She is, although Madeline says she hasn’t had a proper girlfriend in years. So, you’ll do it?”

  Sarah thought of her father back at the table, the stern and unforgiving expression on his face, his eagerness to remind her of her bleak prospects for the future. What the hell. Flitting around on the arm of a wealthy doctor couldn’t be as bad as a job at her father’s law office. Nothing was that bad! “Fine, I’ll try it once. That should be enough to convince both of us that it’s a stupid idea.”

  “Great, I’ll email you the details. Now let’s get back to our table before Peter sends a pack of dogs after us.”

  Chapter Three

  “I’ve got to hand it to you, Joss. You sure do know how to keep your success with the ladies a secret around here.”

  Joss gaped at Rob Spalding as he stuffed olives into his mouth like a man who hadn’t eaten all day. Which he probably hadn’t. Rob was always running in a million directions, absent minded to t
he point of sometimes forgetting to eat, grabbing an apple—grabbing someone else’s apple, more like—while rushing to the lab, to the OR or to teach his next class. He was a genius with Vanderbilt’s new left ventricular assist device implant, but he couldn’t organize his way out of a wet paper bag when it came to things more mundane. Like eating.

  “What are you talking about, Rob?” Joss shouldered him out of the way so she could reach the shrimp platter. The only good thing about this dreadfully boring birthday reception for the grouchy old Jack Pritchard was the catering. She wouldn’t have to worry about throwing together a meal tonight or mooching off her mother.

  “I’m talking about your girlfriend, of course. Who else?”

  Joss’s shrimp slid off her suddenly unsteady plate and plopped unceremoniously onto the table’s white cloth. “Sweet Jesus. My what?”

  Rob stuffed another olive into his mouth, then tilted his head in the direction of the guest of honor, who was talking with a flaming redhead with dancing blue eyes and an elegance of movement that was bewitching. She was dressed conservatively in a blue, thigh-length dress, but the way it clung to her, revealing every smooth, full curve, suggested that her sexiness could not be camouflaged by such simple attire. She smiled graciously at the guest of honor, and, most shockingly of all, she was making the old bastard laugh.

  “Wow,” Joss muttered. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Pritchard laugh before.”

  “Laugh? How about smile?”

  Her attention drifted back to the mystery woman. Joss had never seen her connected to the medical school in any way. Or to the Vanderbilt Medical Center, where Joss spent even more of her time. The hospital employed thousands, but she would have remembered the gorgeous redhead. I would remember that hair and its threads of gold and copper. I’d remember those hands and the way they move so artfully when she talks. And that thousand-watt smile that’s kind and curious and hinting at an impatience to get on with life.

  Beauty and confidence and sincerity seemed to intersect in a stunning package, and if Joss weren’t such an introvert, she would beg someone this minute for an introduction.