Missionary Daddy

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“We could meet here.” Tiffany’s round face was excited. A green marker in hand, she pointed around the Youth Center. “There’s plenty of room. And I would so love to go back to school this fall with a new, slimmer body.”

“Well, I’m a slave driver, let me warn you.”

Nikki grinned, the black lipstick a startling contrast to her white teeth. “We’re tough. We can take it.”

“Okay, then,” Sam replied, shaking loose glitter onto a clean piece of paper. “I’ll check with Caleb to be sure it’s okay. Maybe I could help you get started before I return to work.”

“Planning on leaving soon?” a masculine voice asked. Eric popped open a cold Coke and took a long drink, his eyes watching her over the rim.

“Sam’s going to start an aerobics class for us,” Nikki said. She slid another bite of melon into her mouth and smiled around it.

“Maybe.” Sam softened the reminder with a smile. “I said I’d check into it.”

“Nice of you, but if you’re headed back to Chicago, how can you do that?”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t have any set agenda at the moment except for a few things I can fly to and be back in a couple of days.”

Never mind that the agency was hounding her to do more public appearances for Style. But even the gig to hand out an award at some Hollywood awards program couldn’t tempt her to leave Chestnut Grove right now. Maybe she was burned out.

Eric scraped a chair away from the table and straddled it, leaning both arms on the back. The Coke can dangled from his strong, masculine fingertips. “Eventually, though, you’ll go back to Chicago.”

He seemed almost insistent.

“I haven’t decided yet exactly what I’m going to do.”

“What do you want to do?”

The question, much like something he would have said in Africa, surprised her.

“I’m reevaluating.” She wasn’t sure how much to tell him. Sometimes when they talked, he seemed genuinely interested. At others, he appeared to be judging every word and finding her unworthy.

“What’s to reevaluate? You have a great career that pays well. You get to travel all over the world. People know your face.”

“Sometimes that’s not a good thing.”

“Poor little rich girl?” he asked.

She studied his expression to see if he was making fun of her. He wasn’t.

“It’s not that. It’s having people make assumptions about me because of what I do for a living.”

The answer caught him off guard. He waited two beats before smile lines crinkled around his eyes. “I think you just took me down a notch.”

“Not intentionally. I’m an average person, Eric. Not a face. Not a celebrity. Just a person.” She capped the red glitter with a snap and reached for the blue. “How’s the booth coming?”

“Almost finished.” He motioned toward the structure with his Coke can. “Do you think we should paint it or leave it raw?”

Sam looked toward the girls for their opinion. “What do you think, ladies? Paint or not?”

The girls exchanged looks and Sam tried not to sigh in exasperation. Every time she and Eric spoke, the teens started up again. Before anyone could answer, a scrawny, hawk-nosed man entered the room.

Sam tensed. Her interior decorator. Why was he here? She thought they had everything settled with remodeling her suite.

“Miss Harcourt.” In his usual fit of hyperactivity, the man rushed to her. “I need your opinion.”

“At this time of night? Really, Dennis, you work too hard. You should go home and relax.”

“It simply cannot wait until tomorrow. I’ll be up all night fretting if we wait. When you left this afternoon, I was all aflutter, worrying what to do.”

Sam stifled a sigh. The decorator with his finicky ways and temperamental demands was wearing thin. Trying her best to remain positive and polite, she asked, “What’s wrong this time?”

Drawing up in a stiff, pigeon-chested stance, Dennis sniffed. “You know, of course, that I’ve designed rooms for other well-known clients. When I did the Manhattan suite for JLo, she gave me complete carte blanche.”

Sam longed to crawl under the table. The last thing she wanted was for Dennis to name drop in front of Eric and the kids. Her parents had hired the decorator as a gift to her, but sometimes she wished she had done the job herself. More than that, she wished she could cancel the entire renovation. She hadn’t wanted or needed the expensive work.

Dennis tossed his hands into the air. “I can’t work under these conditions.”

Sam glanced around at the group of fascinated teens and then at Eric. He seemed to be studying his sweating Coke can with unusual interest.

“Exactly what can I help you with, Dennis?”

“Your carpenter, that Jonah Fraser fellow, painted the east wall of the sitting room today. It’s blue. Robin’s-egg blue, a shade that simply will not work behind your mask collection.”

Oh, please.

Sam counted to ten before answering. In her business she worked with finicky people all the time. A people pleaser, she wanted to make all of them happy.

“I know you want perfection, Dennis, and the rooms are coming together beautifully, but the paint Jonah used is the color you and I chose last week.”

“It doesn’t work. We have to get something else. You’ll hate it and my reputation will be ruined. Ruined, I say.”

Sam rose from her chair and gently guided Dennis toward the exit. She could feel Eric’s gaze on her back.

“Everything will be fine, Dennis. I’m sure with your exceptional creative talent, you’ll think of a way to make all the elements blend together. That’s why we hired you. Your reputation for turning the ordinary into the magnificent is impeccable.”