Читать книгу And Baby Makes Six - Linda Markowiak - Страница 8

MITCH WAS running late again. He had an eight-thirty appointment this morning with one of the high-school coaches to discuss the possibility of Serious Gear supplying all the sporting equipment for next year’s football program. Setting the meeting so early this morning had seemed like a good idea when the guy had called yesterday. Mitch had figured to get a jump start on the day, make a good sale before he’d even opened for business.

But last night, he’d been out until after 2:00 a.m., working on Luke’s slap shot and helping Luke’s minor league team, the Northern Lights, with practice.

Now he stood in his kitchen and raked a hand through his hair and tried to shut out the sounds of his kids. They were arguing again—or goofing around—who could tell the difference?

“Gotcha, Squirt.” Ryan put another Froot Loop on his spoon and flicked it at Jason. The bit of cereal hit Jason on the nose.

“I’m gonna get you for that.” Jason jumped off the counter stool and grabbed the open box of cereal. Dancing away, he held the box out temptingly, then snatched it to his chest when Ryan made a grab. “I’ve got the ammo.”

Ryan dodged Tommy, who was going to the refrigerator for another gallon of milk. Ryan grabbed Jason by the shoulder and swung the younger boy around. Jason kept up the taunts.

Mitch had finally had enough. “Cut it out,” he said at the same time Luke said, “Quit that.” Mitch looked up from where he was loading the dishwasher and shrugged at his eldest son as Jason and Ryan kept at it. Neither Mitch nor Luke were big on mornings; too many late-night practices at the rink had done in mornings long ago.

The kitchen floor was sticky; Mitch had felt it on his bare feet. The kids must have spilled milk again. Someone must have turned down the furnace; the air in the house felt chilly on his bare chest.

Weren’t millionaires supposed to live better than this?

Jason was still teasing Ryan. When Jason’s elbow hit Tommy’s cereal bowl and sent the empty bowl skidding across the counter, Mitch finally said, “That’s enough!” He marched over and held out his hand for the cereal box.

“Aw, Dad, I was finally getting to him,” Jason pleaded. Face-off was begging at his feet. Face-off loved Froot Loops.

Mitch ruffled the hair on his youngest. “You’ll get him next time.”

Ryan did a sneak attack and grabbed the box. Cereal flew. Face-off gleefully chased the windfall. Crystal’s kitten—which had been observing the shenanigans from the safety of a chair back—puffed out her tail and took off.

Mitch turned to Ryan. “Give me the box. Now.” After a couple of moments to see if Mitch really meant it—why did they always do that?—Ryan finally handed it over.

He peered inside. “You guys are done here. You’ve eaten your way clean through two boxes, and you’re going to be late for the bus. Luke doesn’t have time to drive you, and neither do I.” Absently, he scooped up the crumbs of cereal from the bottom of the box and fed them to Face-off, who’d finished his vacuum routine and sat before Mitch with his big wet tongue hanging out. Then Mitch crumpled the box and tossed it toward the trash.

As he started for the stairs, it dawned on him that Crystal was missing. “Hey, where’s Crystal?”

For a second, the boys, arguing about something, didn’t seem to hear him. Then the room got very quiet.

Not a good sign. He looked at the boys, who were looking at each other.

Luke said quietly, “Okay, what happened?”

“Nothing.”

“No clue.”

“How would I know?”

They were looking everywhere but at Mitch or Luke. From the bottom of the steps, Mitch bellowed, “Crystal!” She didn’t answer, and alarm ran through him. Before he even realized where he was going, he was halfway up the stairs.

She appeared at the top of the stairs. Slacks and a flowered sweater, a toothbrush in her hand.

He stopped dead. She looked so normal. “Are you all right?” he asked foolishly.

She nodded, but she had this fearful, pinched look on her face, the one she often got around him.

“Oh. I just wondered—” She was still looking at him. He said, “You’re running late.”

Her face crumpled. “I slept too long,” she said in a small voice, and Mitch had the horrible thought that she was going to cry.

“That’s—uh, okay.” Don’t cry. “Listen, I can drive you if you miss the bus.”

“You’re not mad? You yelled.”

“I didn’t yell at you.”

“Yes, you did. I heard it from the bathroom. You yelled real loud. Crys-tal. I dropped the toothpaste.” Her lower lip wobbled.

“That was to see if you were okay,” he tried to explain. She didn’t look convinced, and he didn’t know what else to say—they seemed to have no conversation, no common ground at all, and she was so sensitive.

The doorbell rang.

Barking from Face-off, a call to the dog, the closing of the laundry-room door. Heavy, clumping feet heading for the hall. Then one of the boys called, “D—aaa—d.”

He was so relieved to have a reason to escape his niece’s scrutiny, he didn’t even consider the oddity of someone at the door at eight in the morning. He turned and headed back down the stairs.

“It’s some lady,” Tommy called as Mitch passed the kitchen doorway on his way to the front hall.

He had an appointment with a woman who was applying for the job of full-time housekeeper, but that interview was supposed to be at the store later. The door was agape a fraction. He pulled it open.

Jenny Litton stood on his doorstep, a small carry-on bag in her hand.

He froze, his hand on the doorknob.

“Is she all right?”

He blinked. “Huh?”

She said impatiently, “Crystal. Just tell me, is she okay? What’s wrong with her?”

“Nothing’s wrong with Crystal.” Hadn’t he determined that not two minutes ago? What in hell was Jenny Litton doing on his doorstep?

“Was she in the emergency room? What did the doctor say?”

Her southern drawl was hurried. He realized belatedly that the woman looked white as a ghost, and that her eyes were round and intent. That previously smooth-as-glass hair of hers was in tumbled disarray. She was wearing a suit, but the jacket was unbuttoned, and a silky scarf had come loose from some mooring or other and fluttered in the breeze. She looked like a pale butterfly.

A pretty butterfly. A sexy butterfly, if butterflies could be sexy.

An angry butterfly.

She was so pretty. That made him suddenly conscious of the fact he was bare-chested and bleary-eyed, and that he needed a shave. Besides, he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

“Please.” She held out a hand. “I won’t get you in trouble with the court. Just let me see her.”

When he didn’t immediately respond, Jenny seemed to make up her mind about something. Then she…charged him. She marched on him like a rookie defenseman, determined to send him flying into the boards. Stunned, he held open the door, certain that if he hadn’t, she would have shoved him aside.

Once in the doorway, she called, “Crystal. Crystal!”

“Miss Jenny!”

There was clatter through the house. Commotion. Then his niece was in the hallway, running so fast she skidded on the hardwood floor.

Jenny dropped her bag and knelt and grabbed her, hugging hard. “Oh, my Lord, you’re all right. Oh, my Lord…”

Mitch raised his eyes. All four of his sons were in the hallway now, and all of them were watching Jenny and Crystal. Jenny was rocking her, and there were tears on her cheeks. “Oh, sweet baby, I was worried sick. The phone was busy all night…I almost called the police…I caught the first plane I could…You’re okay…”

There was something about the scene that gave Mitch a stab of pure guilt. “Of course she’s okay,” he said gruffly. “You didn’t seriously think we’d hurt her, did you?”

She looked up at him, her blue eyes capturing his. “I didn’t think so, but when I got her e-mail—”

“E-mail. Crystal sends you e-mail?”

Crystal looked up at him fearfully, but when she spoke, she sounded just a touch defiant. “You never said I couldn’t send e-mail.”

He stared at her.

“It was only because I thought I was dying,” Crystal explained.

Dying?

He said, “Uh, Jenny, why don’t you come in and we’ll talk about this.”

Even as she straightened, he saw Ryan and Tommy start to slink away. “All of us.”

Before he could suggest the living room, which was the cleanest room in the house because nobody used it, Tommy motioned Jenny Litton into the kitchen.

He followed his sons, Crystal and Jenny, and then stood behind Jenny in the doorway. He was standing so close to her he could see the distinct colors of gold in her hair. Its disarray had exposed part of her neck. He saw the clasp of her pearls on skin that looked tender and white.

Quickly, he raised his eyes. That was a mistake, too, because he found himself seeing his kitchen through her eyes. A kitchen that probably horrified Miss-Perfect-Pearls. There was a scratching sound intermingled with whines as Face-off begged to be let out of the laundry room.

Six cupboard doors were open. Four bowls of milk were on the counter. Splashes everywhere. Errant Froot Loops. A crumpled cereal box. Two teaspoons, upside down in little puddles of milk. An empty cardboard box that had held last night’s pizza—it was too big to fit in the trash can, so the boys always waited for him to carry it to the garage. Schoolbooks, backpacks on the table. Lunch fixings—peanut butter and an open jar of jelly, chips, yogurt—he’d learned that it was best to pack the kids’ lunches the night before, but who could remember? One of the cords that held the draperies back on the big sliding doors in the eating area had come loose, and the draperies just…hung there on that side. When had that cord come undone?

Jenny moved into the kitchen, and any minute now those high heels of hers would hit the sticky patch…

He was going to mop the floor as soon as he had a chance. He was going to make the boys pick up after themselves. He really was going to make lunches the night before, from here on out.

But first he had to find out why Crystal had thought she was dying.

Jenny refused his offer to sit. He introduced her to the boys as a friend of Crystal’s. They hovered around the fringes of the room like groupies hanging out at the locker room after a game, looking everywhere but at Jenny and Crystal.

Mitch lounged against the counter, a deceptively casual pose. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Why did you think you were dying, Crystal?”

She took another look at Jenny, who squeezed her shoulders.

In a small voice, she told about the football game of the day before.

“It was touch,” Ryan said quickly, and Mitch made a slicing motion with his hand to cut his son off before he could explain further.

“It was touch,” Crystal agreed. “But they touched real hard. They made me bleed. Then they made me promise not to tell. But before dinner, my arm stopped bleeding. I sort of forgot I sent the e-mail. But before I went to bed I wanted Miss Jenny to come. I want Miss Jenny to come before I go to bed every night.”

That guilt came again, along with pressure in his chest. She still wanted Jenny to come and take her away? Crystal called her every night, but Mitch hadn’t known she went to sleep wanting anybody other than her mom, and he couldn’t bring back Kathy.

He raked a hand through his hair again. Where was that absolute certainty that he was doing the right thing that had gripped him all the way to South Carolina, the sensation that had gotten him through his sister’s funeral and the decisions that followed?

“Let me see your arm,” Jenny said in her slow southern drawl, a drawl that by its very slowness seemed comforting. She sat Crystal in a chair and knelt beside her as she carefully pulled up the girl’s sleeve.

“It’s scratched,” she said in the same tone he imagined she’d use for “It’s broken.”

He peered down.

“It bled and bled,” Crystal said earnestly. “Or I wouldn’t bother Miss Jenny.”

Jenny gave her hand a quick squeeze. “Sweetheart, you’re never bothering me.”

Mitch looked the boys over real good. “Okay, which one of you had the lamebrained idea of playing football with a little girl?”

“It was touch,” someone said again.

“Touch or not, which one of you came up with this one?”

Tommy pointed at Ryan, Ryan pointed at Tommy. Mitch sighed and said, “I thought I told you to be nice.”

Tommy said, “We were nice. It’s how we’re nice. We play with the Squirt, we play with the kid.”

Mitch quelled the urge to throttle him. Then Jenny got a tight-lipped look about her that irritated him. He’d just bet that Miss Jenny Litton didn’t like his kids any more than she liked him. In a flash, he went from wanting to throttle his sons to wanting to defend them in front of this judgmental woman. If she walked across that sticky spot on his floor and dared to say anything—

“Dad? There goes the bus.” Luke, who’d been silent up till now, pointed out the window.

Damn. “Luke, can you drive the boys? I’ll take Crystal to the elementary school before I head for the store. I’ve got a meeting there, but I’ll ask the guy to reschedule. I won’t be long,” he said to Jenny. “Then I can come back and we’ll talk.”

She seemed to perk up a little at that. He tried not to sigh. His experience with women was limited, but he remembered how Anne had always liked to talk about stuff like this. He went up to grab a sweater, deciding he’d have to shave when he got home. He swiped a hand across his chin and felt the stubble there. Great. He sure hated mornings.

When he got back downstairs, Jenny was helping Crystal into her coat. “Will you be here when I get home from school?” Crystal asked Jenny, her eyes bright with hope.

Jenny looked up at Mitch. He nodded.

“Sure. You bet I’ll be here.” Crystal threw her arms around Jenny’s waist, and Jenny bent and hugged her tight, before releasing her to Mitch.

“Can you manage to get her to school in one piece, or would that be too much to ask?” she whispered as he was walking out the door.

“The boys were just playing.” But he shut up after that. He understood that she was upset. The e-mail must have really scared her. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Oh, by the way, don’t open the door to the laundry room. The dog’s in there. He’ll probably just go to sleep.”

As he turned the key in the Jeep, he thought of how Jenny looked, pretty and fragile. But that was deceptive. She had a will and a mouth to follow up on that will. He was going to have to do some real smooth talking.

He frowned and looked in the rearview mirror at Crystal. She was sitting in the back seat, and she was smiling a little, looking out the window.

When had he last seen her smile? Not since she’d left South Carolina, he realized.

JENNY THOUGHT briefly about trying to create some order in this kitchen, but quickly changed her mind. Cleaning up here would be…presumptuous, not that she guessed that would be a word they’d use in this house. Not that she’d bet Mitch would even notice. He hadn’t even noticed that Crystal had cut herself playing football. Football! So what if he hadn’t been home? He should have seen that Crystal was upset when he’d got back last night.

She looked around the kitchen. What had they had here, anyway? A food fight?

She was still fuming about Crystal, about the scare that had brought Jenny halfway across the country without much more than the clothes she wore. She picked up a sponge and squirted some soap on it, then began to attack the kitchen counter with short, vehement strokes. She was probably going to ruin her nails on his kitchen counter. And her stomach was doing the usual morning flip-flops.

And she couldn’t stop thinking about a certain man’s bare chest, those clearly defined muscles, the dark hair that glistened and curled, about the goose bumps on all that bare skin. He looked so…physical. Male.

Not her type, of course.

Her sponge knocked a piece of cereal off the counter. Glad for the diversion, she picked it up and threw it into the disposal.

Over the past two weeks, she’d tried to picture Mitch Oliver’s house. He’d described it to Crystal. An old farmhouse that’s been added on to a lot. She’d had her own mental picture of that house—white and meticulously cared for, a green roof and shutters, kind of like the houses rich people had in the Hamptons. Pretentiously unpretentious.

Jenny’s mother had been a maid in a house that was pretentious, a little Tara, big white pillars and all. It was fake, just as these rambling farmhouses were fake in their own way.

Fake, she told herself. Fake.

She hadn’t had a really good look at the outside of Mitch’s house. She’d been too worried about Crystal, too afraid that she’d miss the turn, that the directions she’d got at the gas station were wrong.

But she’d got a bit of a look. The house was big, and it was white, and the green shutters were surely there. But there was something so unpretentious about it that it hadn’t registered until now that Mitch’s house appeared to be the genuine article—a big old farmhouse.

Okay, it wasn’t pretentious. But it was a mess. Why would someone with all his money want to live like this? She forced herself to stop picking up bits of cereal. Let him clean his own kitchen.

She tossed the sponge into the sink and took a look around. It was very odd, being alone in a house of a man she hardly knew. There was a hush. The dog in the laundry room must be sleeping; she didn’t hear so much as a sigh.

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.