Bait & Switch Read Free Page A

ever had the displeasure to meet.” He even liked her voice. If she sang, she’d be an alto. Maybe a tenor. “I was stupid to believe you.”
    “Uh, I’m sure you’re not stupid,” Mitch stammered.
    “How dare you disagree with me after what you did.”
    “What did I do?” Mitch asked. Stupidly, he instantly realized.
    Her full mouth narrowed in a thin line, and her dark eyes flashed. “You’ve got a lot of nerve to ask that. Why, oh why, did I ever get involved with you?”
    “You’re involved with me?” Mitch gaped at her. For an instant, he felt as though he’d won the lottery. Cary teased him about his dearth of dates, but the reason was because he seldom ran across a woman he wanted to ask out. For this woman, though, he’d brave a minefield. Then the reality of what was happening crashed down on his sleep-addled mind.
    This enchanting blonde wasn’t involved with him. She was involved with Cary, who’d told him not much more than twenty-four hours ago that he didn’t have a girlfriend.
    Knowing Cary, of course, it was possible she wasn’t his girlfriend. She could be the latest in the long string of women he’d wronged.
    “I swear, Cary Mitchell—”
    “Mitch,” he interrupted. She was looking at him as though he were crazy, which he probably was for agreeing to impersonate his brother in the first place. But he wasn’t going through the next two weeks answering to a name that wasn’t his. “Call me Mitch.”
    “Mitch?” She shook her head, and the strands of her short hair danced. “You’re saying you want me to call you Mitch when I yell at you?”
    Mitch couldn’t help smiling. Even spouting venom, she was so darned cute. “I don’t want you to yell at me at all. I want you to call me Mitch all the time.”
    The space between her eyebrows narrowed. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
    “You didn’t ask.”
    “You’re trying to distract me.”
    “No, I’m not,” Mitch said.
    Something that sounded like a horse whinnying broke the morning quiet, and Mitch looked out in the narrow street in front of the house. It was a horse whinnying. A large horse that had a mate and was attached to a small carriage loaded with tourists staring at them.
    “Did you know,” Mitch said, inclining his head toward the street, “that we have an audience?”
    She heaved a sigh that sounded long suffering. It was then that Mitch noticed the white shirt she wore with khaki shorts was imprinted with the logo “Dixieland Carriage Tours.”
    The blonde was the tour guide.
    “When I spotted your car in the driveway, I told them we were stopping here because this building is a classic example of the French Huguenot style of architecture,” she said.
    Mitch frowned. “Really? It looks like a simple row house to me.”
    “It is.” She all but hissed at him. “See what you made me do.”
    “Listen. . .” He was about to call her by name when he realized he didn’t know what it was. As spitting mad as she was, it would be unwise to try to pry any information from her.
    Cary would know what this was all about, though. Cary, who was only a phone call away.
    “Would you excuse me?” Mitch asked.
    “Excuse you? I’m in the middle of yelling at you.”
    “You can start again when I come back. Promise. But there’s something I have to do.”
    He tried to shut the door but she stilled it with a hand and stomped into the house.
    “You are doing something,” she sputtered, looking more adorable by the second. “You’re being yelled at by me.”
    Mitch stifled a groan. How was he supposed to get information out of Cary if she listened in on the conversation? He started to head for the bedroom and his cell phone when he remembered it was out of juice and he’d forgotten his charger. His gaze ping-ponged around the house for the land line.
    “Where’s the phone?” he asked before realizing why he shouldn’t.
    With a puzzled nod, she indicated a phone perched on an end table in the living