Rescued by the Millionaire
Cara Colter
Wanted: A second pair of hands!Daniel Riverton is handsome…and a confirmed bachelor. The only thing he finds more frightening than commitment? Children!When his neighbor Trixie Marsh appeals for his help with her mischievous twin nieces, his instinct is to steer clear. But there's something about Trixie that makes her hard to say no to….Against all expectations, Daniel's a natural with the twins, and Trixie can't take her eyes off her rescuer. Could Daniel be just what this house of chaos needs?
“Hey, don’t cry. It’s going to be all right.”
Daniel Riverton put his arms underneath her. She could smell the crisp, clean scent of him and feel the banded muscle of his arms as he slid them beneath her.
For a moment Trixie had to shut her eyes against a wave of dizziness. When she opened them she expected she would have a more realistic perspective of her rescuer.
Instead her first impression deepened. Now she could see him fully, and he really was the most mouthwatering man she had ever seen.
She knew he really was incredibly, heart-stoppingly handsome. Add to that her every sense tingling with the blissful awareness of life’s glories that a close brush with catastrophe could bring, and Daniel Riverton was irresistible.
“Please stop crying. I’ve got you.”
Rescued by the Millionaire
Cara Colter
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CARA COLTER lives in British Columbia with her partner, Rob, and eleven horses. She has three grown children and a grandson. She is a recent recipient of an RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award in the Love and Laughter category. Cara loves to hear from readers, and you can contact her or learn more about her through her website: www.cara-colter.com (http://www.cara-colter.com).
To my friend Debbie Kepke, who put the “try” in triathalon. Thanks for allowing me to be part of the journey.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE (#u9f0c3707-42f4-5c9e-aa6f-08ffa163b030)
CHAPTER TWO (#ud5cc02e9-584e-5672-bc95-8d6941120c79)
CHAPTER THREE (#u3aa44ccb-1cd2-580d-ac41-0932d6af2d07)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u157d7ec1-c842-5e88-81fd-bd6d42b40620)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
EXCERPT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
THE PITTER-PATTER of little feet.
Daniel Riverton lay on the sofa contemplating that saying with utter dislike. It seemed to him he had always heard that expression spoken with affection, usually by his mother who seemed to hold out the hope, despite all the evidence to the contrary—and her considerable contribution to his cynicism about romance—that he was going to provide her with grandchildren someday.
His mother. Twenty-two text messages today. Who on earth had taught her to text, anyway?
Urgent. Please call. Are you avoiding me?
At least the pitter-patter of little feet was providing something of a distraction from that. But obviously that expression would never be used with affection by anyone who had tried living below apartment 602 Harrington Place for the past four days.
Obviously that expression would never be used, period, by anyone being subjected to the actual pitter-patter of little feet. At three in the morning, when the owners of said little feet should be in bed, fast asleep.
As far as Daniel could tell, the owners of said little feet had woken up at about the same time he was getting home from a long, productive and wonderfully challenging day of avoiding his mother’s phone calls and looking after business at his company, River’s Edge Enterprises. Today, he had put in fourteen hours, had a light dinner with friends and come home just wanting the most simple of pleasures: a good night’s sleep.
At two in the morning he had moved from his bedroom after it had become evident the little monsters from upstairs were jumping on a bed located somewhere directly above his head.
But the pitter-patter of little feet had followed him. For the past hour they had been running in a frantic, tight circle right above his new location on the sofa. The light fixture above him—Swarovski, apparently—was trembling and shuddering ominously.
The condominium manager, Mrs. Bulittle, had been unsympathetic about his complaints. “Yes, Mr. Riverton, it is an adult only building, but people are allowed to have children visit.”
This said as if he, Daniel, the victim of the pitter-pattering, was the nuisance, as if he had said children shouldn’t be allowed in the world, not asked for the right to quiet enjoyment in his own premises, heavy emphasis on the quiet.
Temporary premises, thank goodness. The Harrington was an older building, surrounded with lilacs, rather than the more modern aesthetic for landscaping. Still, it had a sought-after southwest Calgary location right on the edge of lower Mount Royal.
The circa 1970 apartments had been converted to condos. Despite Kevin’s extravagant upgrades to this unit, it was more than evident no one had given soundproofing a thought back in the good old days.
Was it even possible to soundproof against such an onslaught?
While he was feeling annoyed with expressions, Daniel decided to add “never look a gift horse in the mouth” to his list. Three in the morning was a great time to compile lists of trivial sayings and to look gift horses in the mouth.
It had seemed serendipitous when his best friend Kevin Wilson, owner of 502, had been going overseas on a photography assignment for three months at the very same time Daniel’s own premises—a very upscale loft conversion that was completely soundproof—was undergoing a major renovation.
At the very same time he was going into hiding from his mother.
He owned the building. His loft apartment was right above his business, and he was the only person who lived in the building, a fact he would be a great deal more grateful for when he returned to it.
He’d been talked into the renovation when he’d been seeing an interior designer, Angelica. He’d already known they weren’t going anywhere as a couple, and so had she. They both had extraordinarily demanding professional lives—the pitter-patter of little feet not even a blip on either of their radars—but he had liked the bachelor chic of her design, a design notably lacking a Swarovski crystal chandelier.
The renovation had now outlasted the relationship by several weeks. The breakup had been amiable, as were most of his breakups.
When he had complained to the manager about the noise in 602 for the third time, Mrs. Bulittle had sniffed and said, “It’s not as if Mr. Wilson hasn’t had a noisy party or two.”
Daniel was pretty sure he’d heard the slightest touch of smugness in her voice, which was possible since Mrs. Bulittle lived directly below 502, in 402.
She had no doubt suffered a night or two of lost sleep herself, since Daniel could vouch for the noisiness of several parties he had attended in this very apartment.
Ah, he and Kevin had enviable lives. Successful thirtysomethings, unattached, and pretty much devoted to keeping it that way, much to the chagrin of both their mothers!
Daniel, where are you staying during the reno of your loft? I can’t reach you. Is this any way to treat your mother?
Mom, I’m fine. Just busy.
He followed that with a couple of heart symbols. He liked texting! You could have the pretext of intimacy while being totally disengaged. To assuage the slight guilt he was feeling for avoiding her, he sent her flowers, thanking his lucky stars that her marriage to Pierre had landed her in Montreal and she loved it there and still lived there. If she was local and lacking his current address? She would be camped out in his office!
* * *
Kevin was an internationally known photographer, Daniel the head of River’s Edge. His company was a software engineering firm that had developed some of the best technologies used in the Alberta oil fields.
In recent years, Daniel had applied his considerable ambition and business acumen to real estate, and investing in young companies that he thought had potential. So he was not accustomed to being brushed off by a building manager, who had told him, with a certain mean satisfaction, “I’ll give you the tenant’s name and phone number. You talk to her.”
The her in question was Patricia Marsh. When Daniel called, he had to shout to make himself heard over the caterwauling in the background. She’d sounded harried, exhausted and she had been totally apologetic. Her nieces were visiting. They were from Australia, the difference in times meant they were having trouble settling into a normal routine.
She had promised changes, and Patricia Marsh had possessed one of those lovely, husky voices that might have inspired belief in one less jaded than himself. He had ended the call on a curt note—probably more because of being harassed by his mother than anything to do with Patricia Marsh—but oh, well.
None of the promised changes had materialized, so he was less and less sorry for the curt note.
It was day four—make that night four—in the combat zone. There was sudden silence above his head, but instead of enjoying it, Daniel noted that his headache felt permanent, and his shoulders were bunched up with tension.
So, the visiting children were having a little break right now. He wished he could appreciate the silence, and he tried to. He closed his eyes, willed himself back to sleep.
He was closing the Bentley deal tomorrow. Months of groundwork were coming to fruition. He needed to be razor-sharp and ready. He needed his sleep. But instead of sleeping, he contemplated the silence with deep suspicion, like a soldier waiting for the firing to start again.
Five minutes. Then ten. Then fifteen. At half an hour of blissful silence, he took a deep breath, and allowed himself to be lulled into a sense of security. The knot in his forehead relaxed ever so slightly and he felt his shoulders unwind.
Tomorrow, he’d go get a hotel for the duration of the children’s visit. He’d been to that nice boutique hotel across from the Bow River at the invitation of a visiting female executive a few years back. They had luxurious, quiet suites. He remembered there were great jogging paths at Prince’s Island. He could run in the morning before he went to the office—
His eyes closed. Ahhh. Bliss.
* * *
Trixie Marsh’s eyes fluttered open, and for a moment she just felt the utter contentment of having rested. But the moment was fleeting.
It was very dark in her apartment. Was she sitting up? She felt deeply disoriented.
The twins! She had not rested properly since the arrival of her four-year-old nieces.
Even as she’d worried about her own twin sister Abby’s seemingly impulsive plan to drop off her children, she had been thrilled to have time with Molly and Pauline. She had envisioned finger painting and building with Play-Doh, romps in the park and bedtime stories. Trixie had envisioned time with the twins as a glimpse at the life she always wanted for herself.
And really she should have known better! The life she had always wanted for herself was really the life she had always had growing up: surrounded by family and laughter, a sense of safety and belonging.
Always had, until her parents had been killed in a car accident the year she had graduated from high school. Since then, it seemed the more she chased after what had once been, the more it eluded her like a ghostly vision, growing dimmer with each passing day of her life.
As it turned out, her nieces preferred their finger painting on the walls. And on each other’s faces. And on the cat. They liked eating Play-Doh and they loved that this unusual dietary choice made for very colorful poop.
They didn’t listen to Trixie ever, they were up all night and the man in the apartment below her—it couldn’t be that Daniel Riverton, could it?—was complaining. In a voice so sexy it made Trixie’s heart hurt!
“Enough,” she snapped at herself, out loud. It occurred to her it was night and her apartment was eerily silent.
Plus enough did not come out enough. It came out a garbled eblubluk. There was something in her mouth. It felt almost as if her cat, Freddy, a long-haired Persian, was nestled close to her face. She went to brush him away.
And that’s when Trixie realized she was trapped. Her arms wouldn’t move. And neither would her legs.
Suddenly, panic rising, it came back to her.
“Auntie,” Molly said, blinking her huge brown eyes at her, “this is our favorite game. Our mommy lets us play it. You sit in the chair, and Pauline and I go around and around you with the roll of toilet tissue.”
It had seemed harmless enough. And quiet, too. What she had not been counting on was the almost hypnotic effect of her nieces moving silently around and around her, pink tongues caught between little teeth in concentration.
What she hadn’t realized was the depths of her own exhaustion, and how relieved she was that they were being quiet.
What she hadn’t realized was that enough of that tissue could bind like steel. It wasn’t just tissue. She could taste the fluff of quilting batting in her mouth.
Frantically, Trixie pulled at her limbs. She was stuck fast to the chair.
Endless scenarios began to run through her head. None of them had a happy ending. She was going to die. She just knew it. Her whole life was flashing before her eyes: she and Abby growing up in their matching clothes, unwrapping gifts at the Christmas tree, baking cookies with their mother, at the cottage...and then the knock on the door.
So sorry, an accident.
And Abby marrying and moving to Australia.
And Trixie being so alone.
And so when Miles, her one and only boyfriend, had said, Move in with me, I’ll look after you, there had been no choice involved, really.
And when he left, he hadn’t given her a choice, either.
For a moment, she pictured him bursting through the door, rescuing her, admitting the error of his ways, giving her back her dreams.
Trixie blinked hard. That’s how she had gone through her whole life. Acting like someone else was in charge of her dreams. Acting as though she had no choice.
Now was she going to die the same way? As if she was powerless? As if she had no choice. No! She was going to fight and fight hard.
It wasn’t just about her. Her nieces were in peril, too. They could all perish here if Trixie didn’t act and act quickly.
She began to rock the chair.
Bang.
It sounded like an explosion, not a subdued pop, more like a mortar round had gone off right in Daniel’s trench. Whatever had hit the floor above his head had hit it so loudly the crystals in the chandelier clanged against each other dangerously. Daniel jumped up off the sofa, his heart beating fast.
He waited for the sound of running feet to start again.
Nothing.
The hair on the back of his neck rose. And he knew, to the pit of his stomach, something was wrong upstairs, in the apartment above him.
He paused only at his own door to shove shoes on his bare feet and then Daniel raced out of his apartment, down the hallway and up the steps.
Outside 602, he asked himself what he was doing. If he was so sure something was wrong, why not call 911?
And say what? I was busy composing a list of inane sayings and then, guess what? I heard a bump in the night!
He stood outside the door for a moment, listening. He found the silence eerie, and the hair on the back of his neck would not sit down. He knocked on the door. There it was—the pitter-patter of running little feet. But nothing else. No other sounds, including the one he was listening for, the husky, lovely notes of an adult voice, someone in charge.
He knocked again, louder, more insistent.
After a long pause, and more of the pitter-patter, the door handle squeaked. The door slid open two inches, catching on the chain lock.
Nobody appeared to be there.
And then he looked down.
Two identical solemn faces, smeared with tears and what appeared to be red berry juice, were pressed against the crack in the doorway, and the tiny girls regarded him warily.
“Is your, uh, mommy here?”
“Mama goned.”
The Australian accent was noticeable. It looked like they were going to close the door.
“Aunt!” he remembered. “Is your aunt Patricia here?”
“Auntie’s name Trixie.”
He was starting to feel exasperated, but a sound from in the apartment, muted, but very much like a whimper, made the hair on the back of his neck stand up higher.
“Get your aunt for me,” he said, trying for a note of both sternness, to instill obedience, and friendliness to try and overcome whatever they had heard about the danger of strangers.
Two sets of identical liquid dark eyes exchanged a look.
“She’s dead,” one offered.
“Unlock the door. Right now.” He fumbled for his cell phone, always in his shirt pocket, and realized he wasn’t even in a shirt. He was standing in the hallway in a pair of plaid pajama bottoms, and his best shoes and nothing else.
Not exactly the person children would or should unlock the door for.
“Please?” He tried for a sweet note. It came as unnaturally to him as if he was speaking through the sickening fluff of candy floss. He tried to smile in a friendly fashion.
The children were fooled—it made him uncomfortably aware of how totally vulnerable children were—and one of them ventured a tiny smile in return while the other stood on tiptoes and tried to reach the chain that barred the door.
“Can’t reach.” And that was that. The little minx looked as if, now that she had made somewhat of an effort, she was going to shut the door.
“Get out of the way,” he ordered. “Stand way back from the door.”
The pitter-patter of running feet told him he had, somewhat surprisingly, been obeyed. Either that, or they had totally lost interest in him and run off to play. He threw his shoulder into the door, and the flimsy chain snapped with barely a protest, and the door crashed open and hit the coat closet door behind it with an explosive bang. Daniel was propelled into the darkness of the apartment.
A huge cat, long haired and gray, shot out of the closet, yowling with indignation. White fluff, an inch deep on the floors, floated in the air behind the cat as it skittered around a corner and disappeared into one of the bedrooms.
Daniel could only hope one of the neighbors had heard the ruckus and would have the good sense to call for help.
“Patricia?” he called. “Patricia Marsh? It’s Daniel Riverton, your neighbor from downstairs.”
He heard that little whimper again. The layout of the apartment was identical to Kevin’s, so he got his bearings, moved swiftly past the kitchen and down the short hallway. He burst into the living room. His every step seemed to stir clouds of something off the floor.
The children, obviously identical twins, sat in complete darkness on a brightly patterned sofa by the window, peering at something they held between them.
“Don’t be frightened,” he said. One of them glanced up at him with a look that appeared defiant, not the least frightened.
He wasn’t sure about kids’ ages, since children were the segment of the population that, thankfully, he had the least to do with. He thought maybe these little girls were four or five.
They were dressed in identical white nighties, but that was where any perception of innocence ended. Their hair was black, wildly curly, long and tangled. They looked like children who had been raised by wolves.
As if to underscore that perception, one lifted up her bright red hand, berry-stained like her face, and licked it.
“Where’s your aunt?”
Despite the fact the layout of the apartment was identical to Kevin’s, Daniel found himself feeling disoriented by the mess. It seemed as if it had snowed inside. That white fluff was everywhere. It covered the floor, and floated in little clumps. A closer glance showed him dozens of envelopes were scattered, like so much debris, among the disarray.
Just off the living room, in the dining room alcove, in the middle of that sea of mail and white fluff, was an overturned dining chair.
With a mummy attached to it. Again, the scene was so surreal, he felt disoriented, his mind grappling with what was going on.
Then mummy whimpered.
Daniel raced over and dropped to his knees. All that was visible through one tiny slat in layers and layers of white—toilet tissue?—were the most incredible eyes he had ever seen, as midnight blue as the heart of a pansy, fringed with dark lashes that had teardrops that sparkled like diamonds clinging to them.
He said a word out loud that he was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to say in front of children.
Even ones who looked like little ruffians straight off the set of Oliver Twist.
CHAPTER TWO
TRIXIE MARSH SAW his shoes first. They were, without a doubt, the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. And it wasn’t just because the shoes were Berluti either.
And Trixie knew shoes. She had knelt in front of thousands and thousands of pairs of very good quality men’s shoes, patiently pinning the hemlines of trousers, handmade by her former employer, Bernard Brothers—Miles’s family’s business—one of the most sought after makers of custom men’s clothing in Calgary.
Daniel Riverton—she would have known it was him, because of the shoes, even if he hadn’t announced himself at the door—crouched down beside her.
This was a first! Reality better than a dream! Because she had dreamed of being rescued by Miles, and really there was no comparison. None at all.
Miles, was, well, ordinary. Daniel Riverton, was, well, not ordinary.
His eyes intensified her feeling that she was experiencing beauty as she never had before. They were a color deeper than sapphire, the astounding blue of deep, deep ocean water.
But it was the fact they were tinged with concern, and a certain take-charge expression, that made her gasp—muffled as it was by the bindings over her mouth—with heartfelt wonder. Just as she had been contemplating death, the knock had come on the door. It was like a fairy tale: a knight rescuing a maiden from an ignoble fate.
“Hey, don’t cry. It’s going to be all right.”
Again, her feeling of being in an altered state, where everything glowed from within, intensified. His voice was astounding, deep and sexy and a little rough around the edges. And it wasn’t because she knew it belonged to one of the most up and coming businessmen in Canada, either!
It was because she had spent the past half hour contemplating all the dreadful possibilities that could result from the pickle she had found herself in.
It was only because he was her rescuer, her knight, her prince, that her every sense was on high alert, that she found his voice so unbelievably sensuous. Wasn’t it?
As she lay there, helpless to do anything but try to blink back tears, wrapped head to toe in tissue and gauze that held her fast to her overturned chair, Daniel Riverton put his arms underneath her. She could smell the crisp, clean scent of him, and even through the thick layers of tissue, she could feel the banded muscle of his arms as he slid them beneath her. With easy strength he righted the chair.
For a moment, Trixie had to shut her eyes against a wave of dizziness. When she opened them, she expected she would have a more realistic perspective of her rescuer.
Instead, her first impression deepened. Now, she could see him fully, and he really was the most mouthwatering man she had ever seen.
She knew he really was incredibly, heart-stoppingly handsome. Add to that her every sense tingling with that blissful awareness of life’s glories that a close brush with catastrophe could bring? Daniel Riverton was irresistible.
“Please stop crying. I’ve got you.”
Again, the words seemed to shine, to be illuminated, as beautiful as any she had ever heard.
I’ve got you.
It wasn’t just that she had felt in way over her head since the arrival of her nieces. Even before that, she had been blindsided by Miles opting out of her dreams for the two of them.
She could still picture him frowning at her new bedroom curtains, soft white lace, saying This just isn’t what I want.
What isn’t to want? Trixie had cried. Begged as he packed his things, something grimly determined on his face, They’re only curtains.
But it obviously had not been about the curtains.
So, Trixie was trying to adjust to single life, trying get her fledgling business off the ground, feeling like she was back to square one, as alone as she had been since her parents died.
But this time determined to see her independence as an asset.
“I’ve got you,” Daniel said again, and the words were a shameful relief to someone who was determined to see independence as an asset!
His hand rested on her mummified shoulder, but even through all the layers and layers of padding, Trixie could feel something faintly electrical in his touch, something beyond strength and confidence.
She nodded, and willed the tears to quit spilling, but they wouldn’t. She saw her nieces sitting on the sofa, and the tears spilled harder. She had unwittingly put them in harm’s way. Some aunt she was!
“You look like the tire man in that commercial,” he said, attempting levity, probably because her tears were making him uncomfortable. When she had spoken to him on the phone he had sounded like a man who would be uncomfortable with tears—and she’d been close to crying then, too.
“You know the one?” he went on, in that deep, unconsciously seductive, comforting voice. “He’s totally made of tires? Only his eyes look out?”
She sniffled and swallowed, so trapped she could not even wipe her own nose. It was that thought—her helplessness in the face of nasal dribbles, as much as his attempt at lightness—that made her choke back more tears.
“Or maybe the Bisquitboy.” He was definitely trying to calm her, and his voice was intentionally without hard edges, soothing. “You know the one? He giggles when someone sticks a finger in his paunch?”
Of course she knew who the tire man was! And the pudgy little dough man. Trixie had always considered them both quite cute, but that was before she had been compared to them! But being seen as the tire man, or worse, the Doughboy, was humiliating on your first encounter with a devastatingly attractive man, even as his voice and presence strove to reassure.
Daniel Riverton was inspecting her carefully, trying to figure out where to start unraveling her.
One magazine had dubbed him Calgary’s most eligible bachelor.
Not that she should care! The last thing Trixie was in the market for was a man in her life. She was barely finding her feet after the breakup—make that dumping, a little voice in her head insisted—with Miles.
Still, even if you weren’t in the market, you’d have to be unconscious not to feel that little shiver of something in the presence of a man like Daniel Riverton, especially Daniel Riverton, in rescue mode, with no shirt on. Her eyes lingered on his bare chest.
Deep and smooth, golden, as if he had recently been somewhere warm.
The nearly naked Daniel Riverton decided on a starting point by her ear. He tried to rip through the layers of padded white.
“That’s stronger than I would have believed,” he muttered, and began to unwind the binding from around her head.
He was so close to her. She could see the amazing flawlessness of his skin. His scent—clean, masculine, sensual—tickled at her nostrils despite the fact they were still covered in several layers of tissue.
“Get me a pair of scissors,” he snapped at Molly and Pauline. His voice, to them, was brusque, but the quick efficiency with which he was unwrapping Trixie remained gentle.
“Not allowed—”
That would be Molly, always the leader of the shenanigans.
“Now you are allowed,” he said sternly.
Molly wasn’t about to let that go without challenging it. “Are you the boss over me?”
“You’re damned right I am,” he said. It was definitely the voice of a man who led a successful company and commanded dozens of employees, but Molly cocked her head at him, and narrowed her eyes.
But even a four-year-old could not miss the fact he was not a man to be messed with. She gave in with surprising ease. She slid off the sofa, followed by the ever faithful Pauline. Trixie heard them move a chair across the kitchen floor and start to dig in a drawer.
“So,” he said, his voice once again even and threaded with just a hint of amusement, “The mystery begins to unravel. What color of hair is that?”
“Auburn,” Trixie tried to say, hoping he had unraveled enough layers from around her face that he could hear her. It came out mumbo jumbo.
He frowned in concentration. “What?”
She tried again.
“Aw bum? Oh! All brown? With those big blue eyes, I expected you to be blonde. No, wait, I can see your hair now. It’s not all brown. It’s reddish, like whiskey aged in a sherry cask.”
Whiskey aged in a sherry cask? Good grief! This man knew his way around women. As if she hadn’t already guessed that!
He was talking slowly and continuously, as if he could sense the panic in her was still close to the surface, as if he had happened upon someone on the edge of a rooftop, and it was his voice that could talk them away from the edge.
He had to ruin her relishing the whiskey-aged description of her hair, by adding, “Your hair probably doesn’t usually stick out every which way, like this. It looks like you stuck your finger in a socket. Ouch! It is shooting off static, too.”
Trixie had recently had her long hair cut to a shorter length, mistakenly thinking that it would take less work. Instead, if it wasn’t tackled with a straight iron her hair looked very much like a gone-to-seed dandelion, waiting for someone to blow.
Now, her hair crackled under his touch as he unwound the tissue and batting from it.
“Electricity between us,” he said in that same mild, get-away-from-the-ledge tone of voice. Again, the light, teasing tone reminded her that he knew his way around women. So did the playful, faintly villainous wagging of the dark arrows of his brows.
But Trixie also knew he was one hundred per cent joking because there was no undoing a first impression. The tire man. The Doughboy. Someone whose hair looked as if they had stuck their finger in an electrical outlet.
“You have remarkably tiny ears,” he continued his calm narration. “Pierced, but no earrings. I wonder what kind of earrings you would wear? I’m going to guess nothing too flashy. Small diamond studs, perhaps?”
More like cubic zirconia, but if he wanted to picture her in diamonds, she’d take it as a bit of a counterpoint to the finger-in-the-socket remark.
She knew he was keeping up the one-sided conversation for her benefit only, and it did have a calming effect on her.
“Peaches and cream complexion, nose like a little button, no make-up. But if you did wear it? I’d guess a light dusting.”
Again, that sense that he knew way too much about women!
He had unwound enough of the tissue that he could stop unwinding and tear the remainder away from her face.
He regarded her with a surprised half smile tickling his lips. “And no bright red lipstick on those lips. They are quite luscious without it. In fact, I take it back. You look nothing like the tire man. Or the Doughboy.” His eyes moved to her hair, and the half smile deepened to a full one. “The electrical socket we can do nothing about.”
Her arms and hands pulled against the bindings. She was dying to pat her hair into place, but she was still bound fast. And aware, from the effort of trying to move, that something was wrong with her shoulder.
Still, she brushed that aside and gulped in a deep, appreciative breath of air. She wasn’t sure if she should say thanks, but before she had decided, he dropped the chatter and was briskly all business.
“Are you hurt?”
“Mostly my pride.” Her voice was a croak.
“Mostly?”
“My shoulder hurts,” she confessed, clearing her throat. “But not as much as my pride. I feel horribly stupid. Horribly.”
No, stupid did not cut it. She would have felt stupid if her neighbor, the lovely elderly Miss Twining had found her.
But to be found in this situation by Daniel Riverton?
While he was definitely the rescuer straight out of a dream, it was still absolutely mortifying. His picture had been gracing the cover of major business magazines for at least a year, including Calgary Entrepreneur which she subscribed to, and read avidly from cover to cover, since starting her own small business after being let go—fired, her mind supplied helpfully—from Bernard Brothers a year ago.
“What on earth happened in here?”
When he had introduced himself on the phone a few days ago, she had denied it could be that Daniel Riverton.
But, now with him standing in front of her, in the flesh—literally, she glanced greedily at his naked chest again—there was no denying it. And nothing—certainly not looking at his picture on the cover of a magazine, or listening to his admittedly quite sexy, if irritated, voice on the phone—could have prepared her for the man.
Maybe it was good she was tied to a chair. In her weakened state, four days with her nieces and now running on pure panic and adrenalin for the past hour—plus debilitating pain was shooting through her shoulder and arm—it was probably all that was preventing her from swooning.
Because he was literally in the flesh—his arms sleek and lightly muscled, his naked chest broad, and smooth, without a hair marring the silk of his skin, his pajama pants dipping very low on his hips, showing her that place where hard abs narrowed below his belly button, to an enticing V that made her mouth go dry.
No! she insisted on lying to herself, her mouth was already stuffed-with-cotton dry.
He had black hair, which looked impossibly well groomed even though he had obviously been in bed. And he had features so perfect it could have been the cover of GQ he had posed for rather than business magazines.
Or, with that perfect naked chest, one of those calendars that featured gorgeous men leaning on fire trucks or carrying saddles.
Trixie made herself look away from that, not that the perfect features of his face provided respite from the awareness of him that was thrumming through her veins.
Why did she feel faintly, ridiculously guilty that Miles had never made her feel this way? Miles had never rescued her from certain death, that was why!
Still, Miles with his pasty complexion and shock of thinning red hair, with his cute little tummy and pudgy limbs had been the antithesis of this man.
Daniel had high cheekbones, a perfectly shaped nose, a firm mouth saved from arrogance by the plumpness of his lower lip, a chin that was square and faintly dimpled.
His cheeks and chin were ever so faintly shadowed with dark whiskers, which added to, rather than detracted from, how gorgeous he was.
But it was his eyes that were absolutely mesmerizing. The magazine cover had not captured the true blue of them.
Trixie wondered, and hated herself for wondering, was this tingling awareness of Daniel the “something more” that Miles had left her in search of?
He began to unravel the rest of her binding, his way no-nonsense and firm. “There’s got to be a dozen rolls of paper on you.”
Trying to ignore the heated sensation being caused by his hands unraveling tissue from very personal places—that sizzling awareness of something more— Trixie tried to focus. He wanted to know what happened. Stick with the facts, ma’am!
“I was just so tired,” she said. “They never sleep. They’re from Australia. I mean Molly and Pauline are in a completely different time zone, as I told you.”
“And as I could not help but notice!” This said a touch grimly.
“It was your phone call that made me so anxious to not be noisy. I had just gone to sleep. They woke me up jumping on the bed. Then they wanted to eat. Then they wanted to play this game.
“They said their mother let them play it all the time. I was to sit in a chair, and they would wrap me in toilet tissue. I just didn’t see the harm. I was desperate to keep them quiet.”
For you.
Even though she hadn’t said it out loud a sardonic smile touched the glorious curve of his mouth. “Ah, yes, the complaining neighbor.”
“Not that I was blaming you,” she said hastily.
“That’s good.”
“Though you were very intimidating on the phone.” He was still very intimidating. So she tossed her head and added, like a woman not easily intimidated, “And a little rude.”
“I get that way when I’m sleep deprived. So, if you could just continue with your little story.”
Her little story? She was beginning to find her rescuer a bit aggravating. He was just one of those men. So supremely self-confident, so sure in his own skin, that it grated slightly. Daniel Riverton was a man who compared a woman’s hair to whiskey, and guessed at her earrings, as a matter of course.
Still, she did, possibly, owe him her life, so an explanation was in order.
“So they were going around and around me, each of them with their own roll of tissue. They were concentrating very hard, and they were being very quiet, for once, and I was very grateful for that. But it was terribly hypnotic. I must have nodded off. I can’t believe I did that! But I’ve been working all day, and up all night with them, since they arrived, and I just drifted off. And when I woke up, I was trapped. I couldn’t believe how strong it was. You’d think you could just rip through tissue, but, as you can see they got into my quilting stuff, too—”
She was blathering and she noticed he was more focused on the task of releasing her than her “little story.” She shut her mouth with a snap. The twins, finally, arrived with a pair of scissors and he made quick work of the rest of the bindings, seemingly not even noticing that she had stopped talking.
She watched the dark silkiness of his hair as he bent over her, cutting away the twins’ handiwork. As she had suspected, it wasn’t just tissue. He cut through quilting batting as well. Sometime after she’d gone to sleep, the twins had helped themselves to things from her workroom. She noticed an inch of white fluff floated above the floor of the entire living room and knew they had finally succeeded in getting into her bags of cotton stuffing.
Since they had arrived they had been begging her to play with the bags of snow.
And the envelopes—orders—that she had stacked so neatly on her desk, afraid to open them, were strewn from one end of the apartment to the other. She groaned, and he followed her gaze.
“You get a great deal of mail,” he said. He stooped and picked up an envelope. “It’s addressed to Cat in the Hat. What’s that about? Your hair?”
“My hair?”
“Sorry.” He grinned with apologetic charm. “It does kind of have that wet cat look about it. A wet cat pulled from a hat.”
“I thought it looked like I put my finger in an electrical socket.”
“I’m rethinking it,” he said, regarding her so intently she could feel heat burning up her cheeks. “A wet cat who stuck its paw in a socket?”
“Oh! Is it that bad?”
“I’m just teasing you. Sorry.”
She was being teased by the Daniel Riverton? Life certainly had some unexpected twists and turns in it. She contemplated this one. She contemplated that she seemed to like being teased.
Her relationship with Miles could not have been called playful. And she hadn’t been aware, until this very moment, that that was a lack.
He brushed a hand over his eyes and apologized again. “You aren’t the only one who is exhausted.” He cast a look of unveiled annoyance at her nieces. “So why are you getting mail addressed to the Cat in the Hat?”
“It’s a long story.” For a delirious moment she pictured herself pouring it out to him. Who better to share it with? A successful businessman—
“Perhaps another time, then,” he said with utter insincerity, reminding her of the arrogance right under the surface of all the charm...and teasing. “I think we’ve got you free, Miss Cat-in-the-Hat.”
And that would be his cue to leave, and never glance back. Certainly, he would not want to hear about all her production woes with a company that would be so teeny next to his it would be like a mouse standing beside an elephant.
No, closer to a flea.
“You are surprisingly tiny under all that,” he said, letting an enormous ball of tissue drop from his hands as he inspected her. “At least I think you are.”
Despite the fact her freedom meant she would probably never see her neighbor again, Trixie was relieved beyond belief to be loose, and even more relieved that she had on a perfectly respectable, if somewhat bulky, housecoat that she had made herself.
The housecoat might have left her tininess in question, and made her want to call out her weight to him as further proof she was not in any way related to the Doughboy. But this situation could have been even more horrible if she hadn’t had it on. What if she’d been sitting here in her pajamas, a pair of boy-style shorty-shorts and a camisole?
That would take the embarrassment of this already horrendously embarrassing situation to a brand new level.
She shook each limb experimentally, hoping to be able to dismiss him. But she couldn’t help but wince when she shook her right arm.
“That hurts?” he said, watching her way too closely. “It’s the one you fell on when you toppled the chair, isn’t it? You’ve got a mark on your temple, too. Right here.”
He touched her on the bruised flesh of her temple. His touch was exquisite. Tempered, almost tender, despite the powerful energy in it.
Imagine a mere fingertip making her feel like that! Miles’s touch never had.
It made the years of spinsterhood and devotion to her company, which she had recently sworn to, seem like they could use some second thought. It looked as if they might be unbearably lonely. Not to mention boring.
Not to mention, she might be missing something she had never experienced. She had a certain breathless awareness of Daniel—tickling along her every sense—after just a few moments with him, that she had never experienced before.
What if Miles had been right? What if there was something more? What if he’d done them both a favor?
After months of nursing her resentment against her former boyfriend, the thoughts felt like a betrayal—of herself! Daniel was looking at her way too closely, as if her sudden confusion and self-questioning were an open book to him. His finger still rested with exquisite tenderness on the bruised flesh of her temple. “Are you going to be all right on your own?”
CHAPTER THREE
FURIOUS WITH HERSELF, Trixie moved her temple away from his fingertip.
How unfair was that? That Daniel Riverton had stumbled upon the very question she had been secretly asking herself while outwardly declaring her contentment in her new life of independence?
But suddenly, the questions all seemed different. It wasn’t just could she manage her own business and look after herself and her apartment and her nieces? It was, could she live without feeling the way his touch on her temple had made her feel?
He was talking about right now, Trixie reminded herself sternly.
Was she all right? The truth was Trixie was not all right. The unexpected twist her life had taken had made her feel rattled right down to her pale pink-painted toenails.
“I’m fine.” This was said as much to herself, and her life plan, as it was to him.
Stubbornly, anxious to get her night and her life back under control, Trixie tried to get up from the chair, but pushed with that right arm. A startled gasp of pain left her lips. She sat back down, feeling horribly like she might faint.
He was on his knees beside her in an instant, his hand on her arm.
She closed her eyes against two kinds of pain. One, the pain swimming in her arm like a snacking shark, the other the pain of being so close to such a devastatingly attractive, nearly naked man in such horrible circumstances.
He prodded and tugged gently. “I think your arm might be broken,” he said. “Or dislocated? Maybe at the shoulder.”
“But my arm can’t be broken! Or dislocated. I’m barely managing the twins now!” she wailed. The admission was out before she could stop it. Fresh tears pooled in her eyes, and he frowned at her, troubled.
“Where’s your phone? Your arm is in bad shape, and you’ve had quite a knock on your head. I’m calling an ambulance.”
“No.”
“No?” His eyebrow shot upward in shocked surprise, as if no one had ever uttered that word to him. Which seemed like a distinct possibility.
“I mean you can’t,” she stammered, and then stronger. “I mean, I can’t.”
“Well, I can, and you are, so live with it. The phone, please?”
It penetrated the fog of her pain and her relief over being rescued that Daniel Riverton was a man just a little too accustomed to getting his own way. And as tempting as it was to have someone taking charge in a situation like this, she couldn’t just give in. She had responsibilities!
“What about my nieces?”
His gaze shifted to Molly and Pauline. The next time she was thinking how attractive he was, she would remember that look. What kind of person looked at innocent children with such undisguised dislike?
Though, much as she hated to admit it, her own view of their innocence was slightly tempered now that they had tied her to a chair with near catastrophic results!
“I can’t go in an ambulance,” Trixie announced firmly. “What would happen to them?”
“Can’t you call somebody to stay with them?” He was frowning at the girls, again, making no effort to hide the fact he found them faintly horrifying. She followed his gaze.
They had a jar of strawberry jam open and were scooping out the sticky red substance with their hands and licking it off. On her sofa. Which, while not new, was one of her nods to her new life, recently reupholstered in a bright, supermodern pattern of large orange and red poppies on a white backdrop, that try as she might, Trixie couldn’t quite get used to.
Could she call somebody to stay with her nieces? It was obvious her arm was going to need medical attention.
Trixie contemplated calling Brianna. Her closest friend lived on the other side of the city, which was strike one. It would be at least forty-five minutes before she could be here. And Brianna would have to be at work in just a few hours, which was strike two. But strike three? Brianna had been nearly as horrified by the twins as Daniel Riverton was.
They are absolute terrors, Trix, she had said, part way through a play date with her own son, Peter. How are you going to survive this?
Apparently without any help from her friend, who had protectively installed Petie in his car seat and driven away well before the scheduled end of the play date.
“I’m afraid I haven’t anyone to call,” she said.
“Mrs. Bulittle?” he suggested helpfully.
She shuddered. “My twin sister, Abigail, would kill me if I left them with a stranger. I think she demands criminal record checks on everyone who is around her children.”
“Amazing,” he muttered, casting her a look that she interpreted as meaning there are two of you, really? But then he cast another glance at the jam-covered twins. “I think they could give the most hardened felon a run for his money.”
She wanted to tell him that wasn’t funny, but she just didn’t have the energy, and it was close to true, anyway. Both she and Daniel watched as one of them—she was almost certain it was Molly—casually wiped a sticky hand on the sofa.
“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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