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“Girls,” she said, and then, when they didn’t even glance her way, a little louder, “Girls! Could you move to the table with that?”
They both ignored her.
He looked at her. “Are they always like this? I mean they seem a little—”
He hesitated, lost for words.
“Precocious?” she suggested.
“Um—”
“Cheeky?”
“Um—”
“Spirited!”
“Right. Spirited. Like savages. When’s the last time their hair was combed?”
It sounded so judgmental! She was feeling like a failure anyway, she didn’t need him pointing out her inadequacies!
“They won’t let me comb their hair,” she said, hearing the defensiveness in her own voice. “Abby is on a horseback trip through the Canadian Rockies. I haven’t been able to contact her to verify if it’s true.”
“If what’s true?”
She lowered her voice. “They said only their d-a-d-d-y combs their hair.” She spelled it because the mention of the word was enough to send both girls into fits.
“Like the our-mother-lets-us-do-this-all-the-time story, that one also doesn’t exactly have a ring of truth to it.”
“And you would be an expert on when children are telling the truth, because?”
“Because I am a man without illusions,” he said comfortably. “I am a cynic about all things, and a ruthless judge of character as a result. The cute factor of small children has no sway over me. In fact, just the opposite.”
He didn’t like children! A wave of gratitude swept her. He was not, then, the perfect man, no matter how exquisite his finger on her temple had felt! Not even close!
“So,” he continued smoothly, “you know how you can tell those two girls are lying to you, Miss Marsh?”
She glared at him, not giving him the satisfaction of answering.
“Their lips are moving.”
“That seems unnecessarily harsh.” She defended her nieces despite her horrible inner concession that he might well be right. “Besides, if you thought you had noise complaints before, Mr. Riverton, you should have heard Molly when I tried to take a brush to her hair. It sounded as if I was killing my cat.”
It was the first time she had thought of her cat since this debacle started.
“Oh! My cat! The apartment door isn’t open to the hallway, is it?”
He took a step back from her and craned his neck. “I think it is.”
She had a sudden awful thought that Freddy might have slipped out the door in all the ruckus. He’d been unhappy since the arrival of the girls. How unhappy? Would he have taken advantage of the open door to explore a larger world? Find a new home?
“But I don’t think you have to worry about your cat. He hightailed it down the hallway toward the bedrooms when I came in. I suspect he’ll remain there for at least a month.”
At the risk of seeming like an eccentric who was way too concerned about her cat—which, she thought sadly, she probably was—she said, as casually as she could, “I’ll just go check on him.”
But once again, her effort to get up caused her to gasp in pain.
Daniel Riverton, who had known her all of ten minutes, sighed with long suffering. “Don’t move.”
But I don’t want you to see my bedroom! Those lace curtains apparently said run to men. But the words caught in her throat. She did need to know Freddy hadn’t escaped.
She listened as Daniel went and shut the front door, then imagined him entering her bedroom. The whole time she’d been painting and hanging curtains Trixie had loved the safe, cozy feeling she was creating.
Home.
But ever since Miles had cast a jaundiced eye on it—as if her decorating style represented everything that was wrong with her—she hadn’t liked it anymore.
Now she had new plans! The space would be a more accurate reflection of the new her: vibrant, cosmopolitan, the antithesis of dull.
She had even purchased the paint for this vision of the new her, but somehow she just never got around to it.
Understandable, she told herself. Life was beyond busy.
And yet, with Daniel Riverton prowling her premises, she had a sudden fervent wish she had gotten the redecoration of her bedroom done. She didn’t want him to see it, as it was. In the world according to Miles, it said way too much about her.
Boring.
Trixie wished she didn’t care what Daniel thought of her. Too late. She already did!
“The cat is under the bed,” Daniel said, coming back into the room, “And just for the record, he’s nasty, too. And he really looks like he stuck his paw in a socket.”
She scanned his face to see if he had drawn any conclusions about her, and was relieved he seemed to have focused on the cat. So she would, too!
“He’s a Persian.” Trixie stuck her chin up defiantly in the face of the fact her whole life looked like a chaotic mess to Daniel Riverton, a man who radiated a certain aggravating calm, control. “He needs to be groomed. Unfortunately, he hasn’t come out of hiding since the arrival of you know who.”
“I do. I do know who. Speaking of which, where is their...um...hair groomer? D-a-d?”
“Australia. He and my sister are getting a d-i-v-o-r-c-e.” Which, Trixie was fairly certain was at the heart of all the trouble with the twins. The impending divorce of their parents, the disintegration of their world.
It seemed like the wrong time to plan a trip, which had made Trixie slightly suspicious. And although Abby had not said so, Trixie was fairly certain her level of excitement about her return home to Canada and her adventure in the Canadian Rockies might have involved a new beau, met over the internet.
“I feel like they’ve formed a little team, and they are taking on a world they feel quite angry with,” she said. Why had she told him that? It fell solidly in the he-didn’t-need-to-know department, especially since he had already declared himself a cynic who did not have any kind of soft spot for children.
But for some reason, Trixie wanted to convince him of the innate goodness of her nieces.
“A little team? They’re like rampaging Vikings!”
There! That was a good lesson in confiding in him, or trying to coax the compassionate side of him to the surface. He didn’t have one! His attractiveness, which had started as an eleven on a scale of one to ten, should be moving steadily downward.
It wasn’t. Which made Trixie realize she was more superficial than she would have ever believed possible!
“But it is a good cautionary tale,” he decided, cocking his head thoughtfully toward the twins. “Anybody contemplating matrimonial bliss should just have a look at this. People should really think about endings rather than beginnings.”
She found that very cynical, but since it was precisely the attitude she hoped to adopt toward her life, she said firmly, “I agree, totally.”
He regarded her for a minute, and that sinfully sexy half smile lifted a corner of his mouth again. “Somehow, I doubt that,” he said.
She was flabbergasted by his arrogance. How could he possibly think he knew anything about her given both the shortness and the unusual circumstances of their meeting?
“And why would you doubt that?” She made sure her voice was very chilly.
“Because, Miss Marsh, everything from the color of your toenails, to the little—” he squinted at her, “—teddy bears frolicking across your housecoat tells me you are not cynical. Your devotion to your cat, the abundance of eyelet lace and lilac paint in your bedroom and your determination to believe the best of that pair of matched bookend fiends wrecking your sofa, tells me a great deal about you.”
Oh! He had noticed the bedroom. And he hadn’t liked it any better than Miles!
“I’m redoing my bedroom,” she said. “I even have the paint. And a picture on my fridge door.”
She glared at him, hoping he would take the hint and be quiet, but he did not take the hint at all.
“You are,” Daniel Riverton declared with aggravating authority, as if she hadn’t said one word about redoing her bedroom, “a little old-fashioned, somewhat innocent and extremely hopeful about the goodness of the world and your fellow man.”
He shuddered slightly as if those qualities were reprehensible to him.
She knew she would regret him seeing her bedroom!
“You think I’m boring,” she said.
“Boring?” he looked puzzled.
She rushed on. “You make me sound like a complete Pollyanna. I happen to be a totally independent woman.”
“Ah, fiercely independent,” he said, amused rather than convinced. “Let me guess. You’ve had a setback. A man, I would guess. You’re disenchanted. You’ve put all your dreams of babies, a golden retriever, a cozy little house with a wading pool in that backyard, on hold. Temporarily.”
Her mouth worked but not a single sound came out. She was in shock. It was true. That was the world she dreamed of, the world of her childhood, the place she longed to go home to.
Her whole world had just been clinically dissected in so few words. Was he right? And she did still long for those things, though it felt like a weakness to want a life so desperately that clearly others saw as unexciting.
Miles had been right, though he had taken his sweet time arriving at the conclusion Daniel Riverton had reached in seconds.
Irritatingly, Daniel was right about almost all of it. No wonder he was so good at business. He could read people and situations with startling accuracy, if a rather ruthless lack of sensitivity.
But Trixie was determined he be wrong about the most important part of it. The temporarily part of it. At least she hoped he was wrong! No! She knew he was wrong!
“Not that any of that is of any interest to me,” he decided before she could get her protest out. “We need to talk about getting you some medical attention.” He winced as one of the twins used a jam-covered hand to smooth a curl out of her face.
“You know,” Trixie said, wanting to reassert her independence, to make him question his overly confident judgments of her, “don’t worry about it. If I need a trip to the doctor, I’ll manage to get us all down to the car.”
“Look, it’s not if, and I seriously doubt you can drive anywhere.”
He looked hard at her, hesitated, ran a hand through his hair. With the grim reluctance of a soldier volunteering for a tedious mission, he decided, “I’ll drive you.”
She planned to protest it wasn’t necessary. Then she moved her arm a fraction of an inch and the pain was so monstrous, she gasped from it.
He nodded knowingly. “I’m afraid you need my help, like it or not.”
“Not,” she muttered.
“I have to go get a shirt,” he said, looking down at himself as if he had just realized he was without one. “I’ll pull my car around, and call you when I’m downstairs.”
She had a sense of needing to get this situation under control—her control—immediately.
“No.”
Again, Daniel Riverton looked poleaxed, as if he had never heard the word no spoken to him. Or at least, Trixie suspected, not from female lips.
It gave her a certain grim satisfaction that she, who he considered to be utterly readable and utterly predictable, boring, in every way, had managed to surprise him.She enjoyed the sensation so much, that she said it again, even more firmly than the first time.
“No.”
CHAPTER FOUR
DANIEL RIVERTON REGARDED Trixie Marsh with annoyance. He probably should have kept his observations about her to himself. Now, her back was up. She had something to prove.
He sighed. She had really picked the wrong time to make a point. And the wrong guy to make it with.
“No?” Daniel lifted his eyebrow at her. “No to my pulling the car around? Or the shirt?”
She blushed scarlet, which he had known she would.
Despite the bruise on her forehead, the total lack of makeup and the housecoat from a cartoon series, with that crackling halo of rich whiskey hair and those perfect delicate features, including sinfully full, almost pouty lips, there was no missing that Trixie Marsh was a very pretty girl.
There was also no missing that she was that wholesome girl-next-door type, with wholesome girl-next-door type dreams that made him exceedingly wary.
Her eyes, even wide with pain, were clear and astounding, a blue that made him think, again, of dark purple pansies, and those blue birds that people insisted on associating with happiness. Her eyes also whispered at a hint of something that made him as uncomfortable as wholesomeness.
Depth.
But she was not his type. Despite the claim—he had barely contained a snort of disbelief—that she, too, believed people should look at endings rather than beginnings—she was blushing at her close proximity to a man with no shirt on.
He could see she was natural and unpretentious and probably subscribed wholeheartedly to happily ever after, even if she didn’t want to!
She was the type of woman who pampered her cat. She probably knew how to bake cookies and bread.
He had never—deliberately—gone out with a woman who showed any kind of domestic inclination.
Despite Trixie’s claim that her bedroom was going to undergo a transformation, it suited her perfectly now with its delicate shade of lilac, and impractical whites and laces.
She was the naïve type, easily fooled by the lies that children told her.
She didn’t look like she used much makeup, unlike his type, who used it expertly. And his type would never be caught dead in a housecoat with teddy bears on it.
Of course, his type wouldn’t take on child care, either, particularly not child care for a handful like the two little hoodlums sitting over there on the couch spreading jam to kingdom come.
“No to the offer of you escorting me to the hospital, not to you putting a shirt on,” she said, and her blush deepened—either because she had used the word escort—or because her gaze fell briefly to his chest. She seemed to remember she was drawing a line in the sand, and her expression became almost comically stern.
“Though of course you won’t have to. Put a shirt on. Because, you may be right that I can’t drive. But I can just call a cab. To get medical attention.”
“Okay,” he said, folding his arms over his chest, trying to hide his relief that those jam-covered little monkeys wouldn’t be getting in his car, which was new, and had hand-stitched white leather seats that had never had so much as a drop of coffee on them. “Call one. I’ll wait until it comes.”
She frowned. “Though the twins have to have car seats. My sister would kill me if they didn’t. Do cabs have car seats?”
“Do I look like the kind of man who would know if a cab provided car seats?” he asked. The women he dated also did not have children. Ever.
“No, you don’t.”
She managed to make that sound like an indictment.
“It seems to me, when your sister chose escape from her marauding children, she lost the right to dictate how emergencies would be handled.”
“Mr. Riverton—”
“You can call me Daniel,” he said, a way of letting her know that since they were going to be stuck with each other for a while, there was no sense being formal.
She hesitated for a moment, and then the resolve firmed in her eyes. “Well, then, Daniel, you can just leave. I can handle this.”
Something about the way his name sounded on her lips made the back of his neck tickle just enough that he regretted taking down the slight barrier of formality that had existed between them.
Formality? He didn’t even have a shirt on! Which was probably all the more reason to be formal! He realized he, who was known for his nearly ruthless ability to maintain focus under stress, was becoming distracted.
He also realized he was negotiating with a woman who had suffered a bump to the head, who was in pain, who was exhausted, and who had no hope of “handling” this! His own resolve firmed.
“Well, then, Trixie—” he ignored the shiver at the back of his neck when he said her name, “Enough is enough.”
“Excuse me?” She looked mutinous, but he didn’t care.
“Negotiations are over,” he told her, inserting steel into a voice that had made men who had built empires quake. “Since we—” we, his mind noted, as in for better or worse “—we are in this together.”
How had that most guarded against of phrases, for better or worse, slipped by his guard? His boyhood had been peppered with that awful phrase, his mother pursuing a dream that he had realized was unattainable. How is it possible she never had?
The last time he had actually spoken to her, she was at it again.
It’s different with Phil. We’re going to get married in June. I had this wonderful idea. Instead of a maid of honor, what if I had a man of honor? What if it was you?
What if it wasn’t? He’d gone into hiding. And text-only mode. She didn’t know, but the new cell phone number he’d given her? Just for her, so he could get through his day without having to sift through her bombardments to get to business items.
“Are you okay?” The mutinous expression on Trixie’s face was replaced with one of genuine concern.
He glared at her. The injured party was asking him if he was okay?
“Since we don’t know what to do with the demons if I call an ambulance, hand over your keys. Presumably your car has the junior demon seats in it?”
She scowled at him, the concern evaporated, thank God. He needed to just get the job done. Trixie Marsh was dead on her feet and her face was white with pain. He turned to the twins.
“You two—”
“Their names are Molly and Pauline.”
“You two, Molly and Polly—”
“Their mother hates that,” she offered.
He cast her a glance that clearly said he didn’t care what their mother hated, and turned his attention back to the girls.
“Go and get that jam cleaned off of you.”
They looked up from their feeding frenzy, paused.
“Right now.” He made his voice deep and stern and no-nonsense.
To his relief, the twins scurried off, and moments later he heard water turn on. He turned his attention back to Trixie. Her mouth was hanging open with surprise. She snapped it shut when she saw him watching her.
“Beginner’s luck,” she said. “They don’t generally listen that well.”
“I’m used to being listened to. So, give me your keys. Your car is?”
He could tell she was considering proving he was not always listened to, but she knew her options were limited. With ill grace, she struggled to get off the chair. He put his hand on her uninjured elbow to help, but she shook him off with irritation.
In light of the shiver on the back of his neck when she had said his name, irritation was a good thing.
She managed to find her feet. She went and plucked her keys off a hook in the kitchen.
“It’s the little red one.”
Somehow he had already known. That the car would be little. And red. Eminently suitable for a woman with teddy bears on her housecoat and a lilac-painted bedroom and cute little pink toenails. Not a car the kind of women he liked drove: sporty, sleek, expensive.
Not one of whom had ever made the back of his neck tickle by saying his name!
“I’ll go put on a shirt and bring the car around to the front door. Can you meet me as quickly as possible? Can you manage them?”
“Of course I can manage them,” she said a little huffily.
“It’s just that you haven’t really, so far.”
“Oh!”
Ah, the bliss of her irritation! He turned and went out the door before she used her good arm to find something to throw at him.
Trixie watched the door shut behind Daniel Riverton. Her heart was beating way too fast, and she was aware she was breathing in his lingering scent!
What was wrong with her? He was arrogant. Bossy. Take-charge. Too sure of himself.
Dreamy. He was absolutely dreamy.
“Stop it!” she told herself. She was just exceedingly vulnerable. He had rescued her from a precarious situation. It was probably natural to feel this ache of awareness. Her senses were heightened, her every nerve felt as if it was strung taut, tingling with sensitivity!
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