Mine 'Til Monday by Ruby Laska

sixteen years old. It wasn’t the birds and the bees—Simon Taylor had dispatched a wealth of information on that subject with perfect ease years earlier.
    This subject made Simon far more nervous, however. He’d summoned his son to join him after dinner one summer night. Mud had waited with uneasy curiosity as his father paced back and forth in the screen porch, smoking, hemming and hawing. Finally he dropped to one of the wicker chairs, bent forward with his elbows on his knees, and looked Mud in the eye.
    “Women are trouble,” he’d declared without preamble. “They have this way of knowing things. They can sense weakness. They— if you let them get to you, see, they’ll take you for a fool and then leave you standing there not knowing what hit you.”
    Though his father was speaking in general terms, Mud had an uncomfortable feeling he knew who his father was talking about.
    He certainly wasn’t describing any of the women who came around Galeworth House. And he only knew of one woman who’d left his father before his father could leave first.
    “I didn’t want to let her go, you know.” His father’s voice was deep and husky when he spoke again. Maybe it was the tobacco—maybe not. “I thought of her every day of that damn war. Wrote her letters. All kinds of crap, any thought I had during the day, I wrote it down and sent it off to her. You know, when I got back she told me she’d quit reading ‘em. Said they depressed her.
    “Course that was the least of what she had to say to me. I’d never met my boy. Never met you. Took one look at you, and...” Simon’s voice trailed off, but Mud knew enough to know that a declaration of love rested in the words Earl didn’t finish speaking, and it warmed him, even as he waited in uncomfortable anticipation for his father to finish the story.
    “Anyway she had everything all ready to go. Wouldn’t look at me, just showed me these boxes full up of your stuff, your diapers and bottles and whatever. Then she gave me my ring back and it was only then I saw she was wearing a different one. She was wearing another man’s ring when she gave me the heave-ho, and me having dreamed of this moment for months and months like some stupid jerk.”
    It pained Mud to hear his father tell this story, but it also fascinated him, because it revealed a side of the man he’d never seen before and, as it turned out, he would never see again. A man who took chances with love, a man who gave his whole heart.
    In a strange way it comforted Mud. Women, he’d come to understand, were not to be trusted. Not even his own mother had loved him enough to stay. But his father, at least, had once loved. And that meant something.
    But what?
    Simon had done okay. He’d been burned only once before he’d resolved never to let a woman get to him.
    Well, Mud would go him one better. He wouldn’t let it happen even once.
    What he’d started with Dorothy was dangerous. Their attraction was powerful, made even more so by their history, begun in innocence so long ago. He’d let the flames get out of control, until they threatened to burn down his resolve. But he’d take care of that.
    There was tonight, tomorrow, and he’d do his part. He owed her as much. But it was going to be a new man who escorted her, who pretended to be her fiancé. A man who knew how to keep his distance.
    And then it was going to be a quick good-bye.
    Mud cursed under his breath, and scrubbed harder.

 
     
     
     
    CHAPTER SIX
     
    Dorothy closed her eyes, took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and fixed a smile on her face.
    “Lovely party,” she gushed.
    Only then did she open her eyes and regard herself in the mirror.
    Nope. Still not right. The smile was all wrong. Inauthentic, overly—something. Oh, well. It was going to be hard work tonight, being “on” for the party when she felt like mooning around her room. Her own room, at home, where she could properly nurse a heartache.
    She tried