The Villa

I'll be happy to send some selections to you for approval. I'll just check on Mr. MacMillan."
    "Thanks." She picked up a dress shirt blindly, stared hard at the cream-on-cream pattern.
    Not wasting a minute, she thought. Shopping for the honeymoon before the divorce is final. Spreading the word far and wide.
    Maybe, maybe it was best she'd be out of her usual loop in the city for a while. She wouldn't be running into people chatting about her father's wedding every time she turned around.
    Why was she letting it hurt her? And if it did, this much, how much worse was it on her mother?
    No point in raging, she told herself, and started through the shirts like a woman panning for gold in a fast stream. No point in sulking.
    No point in thinking.
    She moved from shirts to ties and had a small mountain of choices when Ty came out of the dressing room.
    He looked annoyed, faintly mortified and absolutely gorgeous.
    Take the farmer out of the dell, she mused, and just look what you got. Big, broad shoulders, narrow hips and long legs in a classic Italian suit.
    "My, my." She angled her head, approving. "You do clean up well, MacMillan. Leave fashion to the Italians and you can't go wrong. Call the tailor, Shawn, and let's get this show on the road."
    She walked over with two shirts, the cream-on-cream and a deep brown, held them up to the jacket.
    "What's the matter?" Ty asked her.
    "Nothing. Both of these will do very well."
    He took her wrist again, holding it until she shifted her gaze to his. "What's wrong, Sophie?"
    "Nothing," she repeated, troubled that he could see the worry brewing inside her. "Nothing important. You look good," she added, working up a smile. "All sturdy and sexy."
    "They're just clothes."
    She pressed a hand to her heart, staggered back a step. "MacMillan, if you can think that, we have a long way to go before we get close to middle ground." She plucked up a tie, draped it over the shirt. "Yes, definitely. How do the pants fit?" she began and reached down to check the waistband.
    "Do you mind?" Flustered, he batted her hand away.
    "If I was going to grope, I'd start lower. Why don't you put on the black suit? The tailor can fuss with you."
    He grumbled for form, but was relieved to escape to the privacy of the dressing room. Nobody was going to fuss with him for another minute or two.
    He wasn't attracted to Sophia. Absolutely not. But the woman had been studying him, touching him. He was human, wasn't he? A male human. And he'd had a perfectly natural human male reaction.
    Which he was not going to share with some tailor or a skinny clerk named Shawn.
    What he would do was calm himself back down, let them measure whatever needed to be measured. He'd buy everything Sophia pushed on him and get the ordeal over with.
    He wished he knew what had happened between the time he'd gone into the dressing area the first time and come out again. Whatever it was had put unhappiness into those big, dark eyes of hers. The kind of unhappiness that made him want to give her a shoulder to lean on.
    That was a normal reaction, too, he assured himself as he stripped off the chalk-striped and put on the black. He didn't like to see anything or anyone hurting.
    Still, under the circumstances he was going to have to stifle any and all normal reactions to her.
    He glanced at himself in the mirror, shook his head. Who the hell were either of them going to fool by dressing him up in some snappy three-piece suit? He was a damn farmer, and happy to be one.
    Then he made the mistake of looking at the tag. He'd never realized a series of numbers could actually stop the heart.
    He was still in shock, and no longer remotely aroused, when Shawn came chirpily into the dressing room with the tailor in tow.
     
    "Consider it an investment," Sophia advised as she drove out of the city and north. "And darling, you did look fabulous."
    "Shut up. I'm not talking to you."
    God, he was cute, she thought. Who knew? "Didn't I buy everything you told me to buy? Even that ugly flannel shirt?"
    "Yeah, and what did it cost you? Shirts, some trousers, a hat and boots. Under five hundred bucks. My bill came to nearly twenty times that. I can't believe I got hosed for ten thousand dollars."
    "You'll look every inch the successful executive. You know, if I met you when you were wearing that black suit, I'd want you."
    "Is that so?" He tried to stretch out his legs in the little car, and failed. "I wasn't wearing it this morning and you wanted