Travis's Appeal

“Let’s see,” Travis said, his eyes skimming along the contours of her face, “we’ve discussed kids and marriage, all before we’ve even kissed.” Was it his imagination, or did his throat tighten just a wee bit as he made his observation?

All the butterflies in Shana’s stomach lined up on the runway, bracing for take-off, then glided off into the horizon in unison as she drew her courage to her, draping it about herself like a blanket. Or a protective shield.

“There’s an easy solution for that,” she told him, then congratulated herself that her voice didn’t crack or tremble.

One arched eyebrow raised itself. “Oh?”

“Yes, ‘oh.’”

And then, before she lost her nerve, Shana leaned over into his space. Framing his face with her long, delicate fingers, she pressed her lips against his…

Marie Ferrarella has written more than one hundred and fifty novels, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website at www.marieferrarella.com.

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To Evelyn, and the Ghost of Christmas Past

Chapter 1

It was another typical day in paradise.

While the carefully made-up newscasters talked about “storm watches” and blizzards hitting every state both east and north of New Mexico, here, in Bedford, happily nestled in the middle of Southern California, the sun was seductively caressing its citizens with warm, loving fingers.

Travis Marlowe would have preferred rain. He wished for a gloomy, rainy day where the sun absented itself and illumination came from artificial sources rather than the incredibly bright orb in the sky.

Rain and gloom would have far better suited his current mood. Moreover, the lack of light would have soothed his present condition. He had no idea why his head hadn’t killed him yet.

It was true what they said. No good deed went unpunished.

All right, it wasn’t exactly a good deed. It was part of his job. Kind of. While the firm’s bylaws didn’t state that burning the midnight oil was part of the job, he still felt it was required—even if he was the only one doing the requiring.

Angry little devils with sledgehammers pounded along the perimeter of his temples.

That’s what he got for staying up most of the night, working out the kinks in Thomas Fielder’s revocable living trust and then deciding to sack out on the sofa in his office rather than driving home at almost five in the morning.

The firm, leather sofa, while perfectly fine for sitting, was definitely not the last word in comfort for sleeping. Not only his head, but his neck ached, thanks to the rather strange position he’d woken up in this morning. His neck felt not unlike a pipe cleaner permanently bent out of shape.

To add insult to injury, every time he turned his head, horrible pains shot out of nowhere, piercing the base of his neck and making Travis wish that he’d died sometime in the early morning.

But here it was, a brand new sunny day and he had to face it. And look relatively happy about it.

Taking the change of shirt and underwear he kept in the bottom drawer for just such an emergency, Travis hoped that a quick shower in the executive bathroom would help set him back on the right track.

“Go home,” his father, one of the senior partners for the family law firm where he worked, said by way of a greeting. A quick assessment had Bryan adding, “You really look like hell.”

Bryan Marlowe made no secret of the fact that he was quite happy that at least one of his four sons had followed him into law. Not a man to brag, it was still very obvious that he was proud of his son. Travis thought, if his father was telling him to go home, he must look like death warmed over—or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

“I’ll look better after a quick shower,” Travis promised. He was about to nod at the clothing in his arms, but stopped himself—and prevented another onslaught of pain—just in time.

Bryan snorted as his eyes traveled the length of his son. “That will be one hell of a rejuvenating shower.” Pausing, Bryan frowned. “Why didn’t you go home last night like everyone else?” he asked.

Travis shrugged, his broad shoulders moving beneath a light blue dress shirt in desperate need of an iron. “You know how it is. You keep telling yourself ‘Oh, just one more thing’…and then, suddenly, it’s morning. Or close to it.”

Somewhere on the floor honeycombed with suites, one of the attorneys slammed a door. The sound reverberated throughout the hall. Travis winced as the sound ground its heel into his head.

“Headache?” Bryan guessed.

There was no point in lying. “Yeah. A doozy.”

The answer just reinforced Bryan’s initial reaction. “Like I said, go home, Travis. Take a personal day and take that shower in your own bathroom.”

Travis had no desire to go home, where time hung too heavily on his hands. “I’m fine, really. Besides, never know when I might need one of those personal days. Better to save them.”

Bryan frowned. He had a case he wanted to review before his early morning appointment arrived, but as his wife Kate had taught him, nothing was more important than family. And right now, that meant Travis.

“I wish to God you needed to take one of those personal days. You know, Travis, when you told me that you wanted to go into family law, I don’t think there was a prouder father under the sun. I mean, I love all of you boys—and Kelsey,” Bryan tossed in his daughter’s name. Because she was the last born, and a girl, he had a tendency to place her in a category all her own, something Kelsey bristled at when he did. “And I’m proud of each of you, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was a little disappointed when Mike, Trevor and Trent didn’t follow me into the field. I always envisioned all five of us having our own company.”

The corners of Travis’s mouth curved. “Marlowe and Sons?”

“Something like that,” Bryan freely admitted. “Still, one is better than none and your brothers all have done very well in their chosen fields.”

Travis was vaguely aware that he had someone coming in this morning, although the exact time escaped him. He needed to get ready. “Where’s this going, Dad?”

Bryan stopped, amused rather than annoyed at the prodding. “We’re lawyers, Travis. Roundabout is our regular route.”

Travis smiled indulgently. “Sorry.”

“My point,” Bryan confided, “is that you turned out to be more like me than I ever thought possible.”

Travis studied his father’s face. It was a face that, if he so desired, gave nothing away. “That’s a compliment, right?”

“Yes and no,” Bryan allowed. “Your dedication is admirable. The fact that you do nothing else but work is not.” Here, his son had turned out to be too much like him. The old him, Bryan amended silently. Because he was familiar with the signs, he wanted to help his son avoid the pitfalls. “Now, I know exactly how easy it is to get caught up in things because it’s easier to do that than face your own problems. Until Kate came along and pointed it out, I didn’t even realize I was doing that.”

He and his brothers were well aware of the significant changes his stepmother had brought into all their lives. She arrived and took over the duties that three other nannies had fled from in quick succession. Still, he didn’t want his father extrapolating that into his own life.

“I’m not working because I don’t want to face any problems, Dad,” Travis insisted. “I’m working because I like working.”

“It cost you Adrianne,” Bryan reminded his son quietly.

Travis paused and took a breath. Adrianne and he had been engaged for approximately two months—until she’d thrown the ring at him. “Adrianne and I weren’t a match. I’m lucky it ended the way it did. I actually dodged a bullet.” Better to break up before a wedding than after one.

Bryan thought of it from his son’s fiancée’s point of view. Living with Kate had taught him to see things from perspectives other than his own. “It would have been easy enough for a bullet to find you. You were always at your desk—or in court.”

Travis didn’t want to talk about the issue. It was in the past and just reinforced his initial feelings about relationships. Very few turned out and they weren’t worth the risk.

“Dad, things usually work out for the best. We weren’t right for each other. According to the grapevine, Adrianne’s with some guy now who can give her all the attention she wants.”

Travis was more his son than the boy realized, Bryan thought.

“You know, after your mother died,” Bryan said, referring to Jill, his first wife and the biological mother of his four sons, “I tried to bury myself in my work because I felt guilty. Guilty that I was alive when she wasn’t, guilty that there might have been something I could have done to save her, to keep her from going on that trip. And I was afraid to commit to anyone else—even you boys—for fear of feeling that awful, awful pain of being abandoned again. It took Kate to make me see that loving someone, leaving yourself open to love, was worth every risk you can take.”

Travis began to nod his head and stopped abruptly when the motion sent a dozen arrows flying to his temples. This was going to be one hell of a day, he thought. Still, he dug in stubbornly.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Travis promised. “Now, I really would like to take that shower.”

Bryan stepped to the side, out of his son’s way. “Turn the hot water all the way up. The steam might help your head.”

“Gotcha,” Travis said, heading toward the executive shower.

Not about to get into another discussion, Travis was just humoring his father. He knew from experience that with these headaches, the only thing that could help immediately was if someone gave him a new head. Short of that, it was a storm he just needed to ride out. Preferably in a room where the blinds were drawn.

Reaching the executive bathroom, Travis locked the door behind him and quickly stripped off his clothes. It took him less than a minute to adjust the water temperature. In the stall, he sighed, allowing the water to hit his back full force.

He appreciated his father’s concern about the direction his life was taking, he really did, and in the privacy of his own mind, he might be willing to acknowledge a germ of truth in his father’s supposition that he had a phobia about commitments. He was even willing to concede that it might be remotely rooted in his mother’s demise.

But he really did like his work a great deal and Adrianne, it turned out, just liked the prestige of saying that her significant other, soon-to-be-husband, was a lawyer. Not that Adrianne wanted him doing any lawyering on her time, and her time was anytime she decided she needed to see him.

He was better off without her. When he saw his brothers, who had all paired up this last year, if he felt a little isolated, like the odd man out, he gave no indication. He was happy for his brothers, happy each had apparently found the one person who completed their world.

But for him, it wouldn’t be that easy. Not because he wasn’t looking but because he felt it was far too early to be thinking of being with someone on a permanent basis. Someone who, if the whim hit, could leave. Granted, Adrianne had turned out to be an unfortunate choice, but she just proved his theory. He was better off on his own. Better off working, doing what he was good at.

But analyzing deep-rooted feelings and subconscious ones, that was Trent’s domain, not his. Trent was a child psychologist, like Kate. Trent was accustomed to multilayered thinking and digging deep. Travis liked things to be in black and white.

Like the law.

Travis stood beneath the showerhead a bit longer, letting the hot water hit him and the steam build up within the black, onyx-tiled stall. Slowly, some of the tension began to leave his shoulders. It helped. A tiny bit.

He got out before he turned pruney.

“Your hair’s damp.”

Travis’s secretary, Bea Bennett, made the note. A small, thin, angular woman, she favored long skirts, sensible shoes and long, penetrating looks in lieu of arguing with her boss. She stepped into his office not ten minutes after he’d returned to it himself.

“The hair dryer died,” Travis told her.

The device had given up the ghost midway through drying his sandy blond hair, making it appear a little darker. With the hair dryer refusing to rise up from the dead, he’d run his fingers through his hair a couple of times, getting rid of any excess water. Travis figured the air would take care of the rest eventually.

Thin, carefully penciled-in eyebrows rose in mild surprise. “The one in the executive bathroom?”

About to nod, Travis refrained. The headache was still very much a part of him, the tiny respite in the shower a thing of the past the moment he stepped away from the hazy warmth of the stall.

“That’s the one.”

Bea frowned, shaking her head, a head mistress trying to decipher the mystery that was her student. “Don’t know what you people do with them. The one I’ve got at home’s lasted going on seven years now.”

Like everyone else at the firm, Travis was accustomed to the woman’s outspoken manner. Most of the time, he actually got a kick out of it. This was not one of those times. Migraine headaches made him less tolerant of eccentricities.

“Good for you, Bea.” He dug into his side drawer for the bottle of extra-strength aspirin. The aspirin that was powerless to relieve his headache. He took a couple of pills anyway. He had heard that if you believed something worked, it helped. He did his best to believe. Swallowing, he continued talking to her. “Now, did you come in here for a reason, Bea, or did you just want to bedevil me with your rapier wit and your arousing physical presence?”

Bea narrowed her eyes until the black marbles disappeared behind tiny slits. He didn’t know if she was doing it for effect, or if she was myopic.

“When I’m bedeviling you, Mr. Marlowe, you won’t have to ask if that’s what I’m doing. You’ll know it,” the woman informed him. Then, with a toss of her head, she switched persona, becoming the perennial secretary. “Your ten o’clock appointment is here.”

His ten o’clock. For a second, Travis drew a blank. He glanced at his calendar. He’d written a name beside the ten o’clock space, but it was now completely illegible to him.

“And he would be?” he asked, leaving the rest up in the air, waiting for Bea to fill in the blank.

“They,” Bea corrected. “And they’re outside in the reception area.” She gestured behind her toward the common area where all but the most elite of the firm’s clients waited.

Travis looked at the calendar again. It made less sense to him than before. He was really going to have to do something about his handwriting. “I need a name, Bea.”

She eyed him, a small, thin face behind dark-rimmed glasses someone had once said she wore for effect rather than necessity. “Any particular one?” she asked glibly.

They were going to play the game her way, or not at all, Travis thought. Again, he might have enjoyed it if not for the civil war going on right behind his eyes. “The potential client’s would be nice.”

She crossed to his desk and made a show of examining his calendar. “What the hell is that?” she asked, pointing to the writing beside the number “10.” “It looks like you dipped a chicken in ink and had it walk across your page.” She looked at him again. “Didn’t your parents teach you how to write?”

“They had more important things to teach me,” he told her lightly. “Like how to fire an insubordinate secretary.”

With a haughty little noise, she informed him, “I can’t be fired.”

His sense of humor was valiantly trying to claw its way back among the living. He was game. “And why’s that?”

He fully expected her to say something about having tenure, since she had worked here longer than anyone could remember. But then, since this was Bea, he realized he should have known better. Conventional arguments were not for her.

“Slaves have to be sold,” she informed him with a smart toss of her head. “And their name’s O’Reilly.” Bea paused to tap the calendar, as if that could somehow transform his handwriting into legible letters. “Shawn and Shana,” she added.

“Married couple?” he guessed absently. The borders of family law were wide, taking in a myriad of subjects. There were twelve attorneys in the firm, each with a specialty although their work did encompass many fields within the heading.

A short laugh escaped like a burst of air. “Not hardly,” she cackled before becoming serious again. “Not unless the old man’s into cradle robbing.” She considered her own observation and commented on it. “‘Course, a man with money these days thinks he could buy himself anything he wants.”

“How about a secretary who doesn’t give her own narrative to everything?” Travis suggested with a touch of wistfulness.

“Too boring.” A wave of the hand accompanied her dismissive shake of the head. Her eyes swept over his desk just before she crossed to the doorway again. “By the way, those’ll burn a hole in your stomach,” she told him with a disapproving frown, referring to the bottle of extra-strength aspirin on his desk. “If you went home at a decent hour, like everyone else around here, maybe you wouldn’t get those damn headaches of yours.”

Bea knew everything that was going on in the office. She was better than a private investigator. He returned the bottle to the side drawer.

“I had no idea you cared, Bea.”

Bea paused in the doorway to smile at him over her shoulder. “Always said you were clueless,” she murmured before crossing the threshold. And then she stopped, turning around again. “By the way…”

The phrase hung in midair like one half of the old popular “shave and a haircut, two bits” refrain tapped out with knuckles hitting a hard surface. He gave in after less than a minute.

“What?” Travis prompted.

“Hang on to your socks.”

He blinked. “What?” he demanded.

Rather than elaborate, Bea merely smiled at him. Her eyes danced with delight over her enigma. “You’ll understand,” she promised.

With that, she left the room.

In her wake, half a beat later, Travis’s latest clients entered. His ten o’clock appointment, Shawn O’Reilly and Shana O’Reilly.

And Bea was right. Travis could feel his socks suddenly slipping down his ankles. Curling. Along with the hairs along his neck.

Shawn O’Reilly looked like a modern, slightly wornout and pale version of a department store Santa Claus. But it was the young woman beside him, Shana, that Travis instinctively knew Bea had issued her warning about. Shana O’Reilly looked like something Santa Claus might have left beneath the Christmas tree of a deserving male if the latter had been exceptionally good, not just for the year, but for the sum total of his entire life.

Chapter 2

Travis stopped breathing.

To his recollection—and he was blessed with a mind that forgot absolutely nothing—Travis had never seen a more beautiful woman in his life. She was tall—about five-seven—slender, with the face of an angel and long, straight blond hair that brought to mind the phrase “spun gold.” Her eyes were crystal-blue, and she moved like whispered poetry as she crossed the room.

Belatedly, Travis remembered that he was endowed with a rather pleasant, articulate voice and that remaining silently frozen in place like a plaster statue in an abandoned corner of a museum did not go a long way in inspiring confidence in clients.

Mentally shaking off his trance, Travis rose to his feet. Rounding his desk, he paid for the quick action with another breath-snatching salvo of sharp pain firing across his temples.

Travis silently congratulated himself for not wincing. It would have made for a terrible first impression. People didn’t expect their potential lawyer to wince when he first met them. At the very least, it would have conjured up a myriad of questions over his abilities.

“Hello.” Putting on his widest smile, Travis extended his hand to the heavyset man. “I’m Travis Marlowe.”

“Shawn O’Reilly,” the man responded genially, then nodded his head toward the ray of sunshine on his right. “And this is Shana. O’Reilly,” he added the surname as if it was an afterthought, then followed it up with, “My daughter.” He actually beamed as he made the announcement.

Not that the man probably hadn’t been a decent-looking sort in his youth, a hundred pounds and several chins ago, but this was definitely a case of the apple falling miles away from the tree. He and his brothers looked like a composite of their late mother and their father, while his sister, Kelsey, looked like a miniature version of Kate. Travis was fairly certain that Shana O’Reilly had to take after her mother because, other than the bright, cheerful, electric blue eyes, not a thing about her even remotely brought Shawn O’Reilly to mind.

“Hello,” Shana said, extending her hand to him.

She had a voice like a low blues melody, sinfully seductive.

No surprise there. It took Travis a second to take her hand and shake it. Holding her hand, he experienced an almost overwhelming reluctance to release it again.

What the hell was going on with him, he silently upbraided himself. He was too young to be going through a second adolescence and too old to be going through his first one.

They were right, he concluded, those people who said that you weren’t at your best without a full night’s sleep. He was obviously not operating with all four engines burning.

Out of the corner of his eye, Travis saw Shana’s father glancing toward one of the two chairs positioned in front of his desk. Shawn O’Reilly looked like a man trying to decide whether the chair would accommodate his girth without mishap or groaning, or the sofa would be a wiser course to follow.

Travis nodded toward the sofa. “You might find the sofa a bit more comfortable, Mr. O’Reilly,” he suggested. “I know I do.”

His words brought out an even wider smile from Shana. His breath went missing for a full thirty seconds. It was like standing beside an early morning sunrise.

Travis glanced down at her left hand. No ring.

Sunshine permeated his inner core.

Pleased at the suggestion, Shawn turned around and sat down on the sofa. Soft tan leather sighed all around the man’s considerable form. Shana took a seat beside him, shifted slightly and crossed her legs, her white skirt hugging her thighs. Travis forced himself to look away. He wouldn’t be able to form a coherent thought for several minutes if he didn’t.

Grabbing one of the two chairs that stood facing his desk, he swung it around and sat down opposite his potential clients. A small, glass-topped coffee table took up the space between them.