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A few of Mitch’s cabinet doors were open; she closed them. She wandered into the family room, tucking the breakfast-room curtain into place as she went.
The house had good bones. In the family room, there was a big stone fireplace that took up most of the end wall. Built-in bookshelves stood on either side of it, but there weren’t many books there. Instead, there were photographs, and there were lots of trophies. The big hockey star was obviously proud of his trophies and not much of a reader. There was a big-screen television, some comfortable leather chairs, a set of barbells askew on the floor in front of the fireplace. The whole place needed a good dusting.
She saw open French doors to her left, and a lot of sunlight shining through them. She wandered over and stood in the doorway looking in. It was a huge room, modern and light, apparently new. Various exercise machines—expensive, professional-looking models, were arranged in front of floor-to-ceiling mirrors. There was a weight bench and even more weights. At the rear, a wall of sliding glass doors led to a deck and hot tub. Beyond the deck, a lawn, white with frost, sloped down to a pond, which was brilliant blue in the early-morning sunshine.
Well. Mitch’s house might be messier than she’d expected, but it was expensively fitted just the same, and those trophies—and this room—showed plenty of ego.
Just because some judge put blood and money over love, Mitch had been given the opportunity to raise Crystal…and he was making a mess of it.
She heard an automatic garage door opening. Finally. She heard him open the outside door, then a friendly whine of the dog. When he opened the door to the kitchen, she was already walking back to meet him there.
He was leaning down, with a big hand on the collar of the dog…horse. The animal strained, whined again, looked at her. Mitch said, “I guess this is as good a time as any to meet Face-off.” He nodded toward the dog.
“Okay.” She stopped in her tracks, her gaze riveted on the dog. She swallowed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dog that big.” Crystal, you poor thing, having to deal with this beast, on top of everything else!
Mitch’s head was bowed. One hand still held the dog’s collar, another scratched behind its ears. The dog quieted some, but still eyed her. “He’s big, but he’s gentle. He’s never growled at the kids, let alone bitten anyone.” The scratching continued, big, competent hands, blunt fingertips buried in the dog’s glossy fur.
“Well, as long as he doesn’t bite,” she said uncertainly, taking a few cautious steps forward. “But if he doesn’t bite, why do you have that death grip on his collar?”
She was almost upon him, so close she could smell the sharp cold that radiated off his leather jacket. He looked up, and she found herself staring into his eyes.
Brown eyes. She remembered those eyes. As deep and rich as dark, polished wood, set in that arresting face of strong features. She looked away quickly.
Mitch said, “Face-off doesn’t bite, but he doesn’t seem to know how big he is, either. If he gets the chance, he’ll knock you down and lick your face.”
She shuddered, and he gave her an odd look. “You don’t like dogs?”
“Well, I’ve never owned one.”
She was close now, and she could see the weave of Mitch’s sweater, revealed in the open vee of his partially unzipped jacket, and her traitorous mind conjured that bare chest. Quickly, she bent toward the dog, put out her hand. The dog made her nervous. That’s why her stomach was doing double flip-flops now.
Mitch said, “Every kid should have a dog.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She gave Face-off a tentative pat. At the contact, the dog quivered, sniffed. She forced herself to pat his head again. Her hand was close to Mitch’s now. Oh, yes, the dog was making her nervous, all right. “Dogs are so messy.”
“Messy is okay sometimes.”
I guess you’d know.
She continued to pat Face-off. Slowly, Mitch relaxed his grip. The dog started to surge; she jerked back. Mitch pulled him back in line.
Face-off submitted to the restraint. But he looked up at her with a droll expression on his face, as if ready to make friends in the only way he was permitted, given Mitch’s hand on his collar. His tongue came out, pink and wet and soft-looking, and something in Jenny went suddenly, unexpectedly soft in response. The tongue looked twice as wide as his face; despite her unsettled stomach and the close proximity of a very large, attractive man, that lolling tongue was suddenly comical. She looked down into the dog’s round, friendly eyes. “Is that dog…” She hesitated. “Is that dog smiling at me?”
Mitch looked up, obviously startled. “You see it, huh? It’s the weirdest thing, a dog smiling, but he does. When we were looking around at the shelter for a pup, I didn’t really want this one—I knew with those paws, he was going to be huge. But he smiled at the kids, and that was all it took for them to want him, so…” His eyes met hers, and he was suddenly grinning.
Oh, he had a great smile, sure and confident, with strong, square white teeth. It set off the regularity of his features, sent lines arcing from the corners of his eyes. Caught by that grin, she started to smile back. Another little skitter of nerves, of awareness of his closeness, brought her up short. “We need to talk about Crystal,” she said quickly.
“Sure. Right.” Mitch’s smile disappeared. “Let me lock up Face-off again.”
“If you don’t mind.” The animal might be smiling, but she didn’t need paws on her good silk blouse.
He put the dog in the laundry room, and Jenny quickly recovered her composure.
He came back into the kitchen. “Okay, time to talk. Would you like to sit down? Would you like a cup of coffee? Hey, how about some breakfast? I bet you didn’t have breakfast, and if the kids have left any cereal, or eggs, I could take a stab at frying a couple of eggs—”
Even the thought of something frying in the morning was enough to send her looking for the bathroom. “Thank you, but I’m fine.”
It occurred to her that Mitch might be nervous, too. But he had little reason to be. He had Crystal, and this incident, bad as it had been, would be hard to prove. The girl’s e-mail had arrived at Kyle Development yesterday, a few hours before the door had been shut on orders of the bankruptcy court. Lord only knew where her computer had gone. Besides, she was pretty sure this one incident wouldn’t be enough to get a judge to change custody.
“Would you like to sit here or in the family room?” Mitch asked now.
Was he stalling? “Here’s fine,” she replied.
“Oh, okay, now about that coffee…” His voice trailed off as he stood in the kitchen, looking around with a slightly bewildered expression on his face. “Did you clean up?”
“A little.”
He frowned. “You didn’t need to do that.”
“Somebody needed to.”
The frown got deeper. “I was going to handle it.”
She felt her eyebrow rising.
He noticed. “Okay, we’ll skip the coffee and get right to it.” He came over to the table and took the chair opposite hers. “You’ve obviously got your back up about this. I understand you were upset, and I know the trip up here isn’t easy—I just made it myself two weeks ago. I feel bad you felt you had to come, and I sure wish Tommy hadn’t left the phone off the hook all night long, or you could’ve called, and a five-minute conversation would have taken care of everything.”
His voice picked up speed. “The kitchen was a mess this morning. But we weren’t expecting visitors.” His back was straight, his broad chest rising above the table, his hands resting, palms down, on the surface.
She was very aware of him, but she forced herself to respond calmly. “It’s none of my business how you live, except that it has an impact on Crystal.” Her own voice was crisper than his. His had had a sort of reasonable, aw-shucks quality to it, as if he was inviting her to make light of what was a very serious situation. “This is a very serious situation,” she told him. She sounded good and prim, just like her mother, but good and prim was called for in a…serious situation like this.
A line formed between his eyes.
“I don’t think the kitchen was actually unsanitary, but added to the real problem here—”
“Crystal is okay,” he said quickly.
“This time, but that’s not the point. There are, as I see it, two points here. First, that the boys were too rough with her. Either they haven’t been told what the rules are for playing with a little girl, or they disobeyed them.”
He started to speak, but she lifted a hand and cut him off. “The other issue is more important. How is it Crystal got that upset and you didn’t know about it? She’s just lost her mother. She’s scared and vulnerable. Are you talking to her?”
“I talk to her.”
“Then how come you didn’t know that she was this upset? She was bleeding, she felt bad enough to send me an e-mail, of all things, and you didn’t even know about it.”
He got up abruptly. The chair skidded hard on the floor. He turned and walked a couple of paces toward the window. Instead of looking out, he turned to face her. She realized again just how tall he was.
“Look.” He shoved a hand into the pocket of his jeans. “It happened after school yesterday. Like most people, I work in the afternoons. It’s no different than if she got hurt after school and you were at work. It was such a nothing incident that she’d forgotten about it by the time I got home last night. She ate dinner, she did her homework, she didn’t mention a thing. I’m not a mind reader.”
“Was she quieter than usual?”
“Crystal’s always quiet.”
No, she wasn’t. Crystal was a chatterer. She chatted about Barbie and books, about the sunshine and the smell of a hot screen door after a rain, about lightning bugs and princesses with diamond tiaras. “Oh, Mitch,” Jenny said softly.
She saw him take in a breath before he turned quickly toward the window. In the little silence that followed, he noticed where she had replaced the drapery. His hand ran along the tieback in a gesture that seemed oddly vulnerable. And that vulnerability mixed her all up inside. One part of her wanted him uncaring, unfeeling, so that she’d have to find some way to take Crystal back with her.
She shook her head to clear her thoughts. Mitch wasn’t about to give up the child, so Jenny had to set him straight. “You’ve got to be talking with her. You’ve got to try to understand her, give her a chance to express herself. You work, but you’ve got to make time for her, you’ve got to make sure the boys aren’t making so much noise that you can’t check on her.” Her voice started to shake. “You owe her that, after bringing her here and changing her life, and if you can’t see that, or if you can’t handle that—”
“I’ll handle it. I am handling it.” His grip tightened on the tieback. “This whole thing has been blown way out of proportion. The kids didn’t mean anything. Crystal will adjust, she’ll see that the kids just play a little rough.”
She heard the conviction in his voice, and she was puzzled. He had everything money could buy, he had three teenagers and a younger son, a life that might be easy materially but was hard in other ways. Surely he didn’t need a little girl.
What drove him to insist on claiming Crystal? Despite herself, she couldn’t help admiring his unexpected commitment when it came to Crystal.
He turned from the window and shrugged, as if he hadn’t been white-knuckled on that tieback after all. “If it would make you feel better, why don’t you stay a few days?”
“If that would make me feel better.”
“Yeah.” He put a hand back in his pocket, a casual pose again. “I don’t think this is a big deal. But you do, so why don’t you stay a few days and look us over? Maybe you’ll see we aren’t that bad.”
Everything about this place was that bad. Worst of all was that she was so conscious of him as a man. Conscious in a way she didn’t remember feeling about Delane, or even about her first love as a teenager. That puzzled her, too. She’d always been attracted to the smoothly handsome type, the kind who knew how to dress and what wine to order. She had a feeling Mitch would be happiest with a beer.
He gave her a grin and said, “After all, we’ve got a dog that smiles, so how could we be that bad?”
He paused, but before she could speak, he added, “You could spend time with Crystal. I know she’d really like it if you stayed. I realize you have a job with a lot of responsibility, but maybe you could get a few days off, now that you’re up here.”
She decided she didn’t want to tell him she was out of a job. “Sure. I could set things up. While I’m at it, if I could use your telephone, I could make reservations at the nearest hotel.”
That would cut into her suddenly constricted budget, but Mitch was right; she should stay. Crystal had been traumatized, whether he wanted to admit it or not. The social worker was supposed to be submitting her report, but Jenny would just as soon see with her own eyes how things were really going in this household.
Mitch said, “You could stay here.”
“Here? At your house?”
“Why not? It’s big enough. And there’s the whole guest wing, with Crystal using only one of the bedrooms.”
Somehow, she couldn’t imagine staying in his house. And he certainly couldn’t want her here, toting up stray Froot Loops in order to be able to tell the judge what pigs the Oliver men were. What was his game?
But he was looking right at her, straight and sincere, and she thought maybe it was no game, that he wanted her here for the reason he’d told her: for Crystal. She had to admit that staying here would be better for her finances. Besides, if she wanted to, she could tote up the Froot Loops, in case this custody issue wasn’t really settled after all.
“Thank you. I’ll stay, perhaps for a week or so if that’s all right.”
He nodded, one graceful nod from a handsome, athletic man. He let out another long breath, and she found herself doing the same, as an odd sort of prickle went up her spine.
A quick vision formed, of him rumpled and sleepy-eyed, in his sweatpants and nothing else, goose bumps highlighting muscles that were toned and…sexy.
Did he look that way every morning?
As he’d said, the house was big…but perhaps not big enough.
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