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Aaron Bradley’s gaze moved to Susan and rested on her a moment before he spoke, as though he thought he might analyze and understand her first.
It surprised her when she saw the slight shift in his eyes from open friendliness to cautious reserve. Had he been able to read her resentment?
He held Ringo in one arm and offered her his free hand. “You must be Susan,” he said closing his hand over hers. It was large and warm. “We spoke last night on the phone. I’m Aaron Bradley, Dave’s brother.”
She smiled politely. “Yes, I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry for yours.” He withdrew his hand and angled his chin toward the church. “I can’t believe I missed the memorial service.”
“Crisis at the office?” she asked. The question had been a little glib, and she saw in his eyes that he’d noted that.
“Fog in San Francisco, actually,” he replied after a moment, his voice quiet and controlled. “My connecting flight got socked in for a couple of hours.”
“Aaron,” a male voice called from behind Susan. “Hi. I’m sorry about Dave.”
Aaron’s grim features brightened into a smile as he extended his hand again. “Micah! How are you?”
A big dark-haired man in a cashmere coat came around Susan to shake hands with Aaron Bradley. “I’m good,” he said. “I was hoping I’d get a chance to see you, but when you weren’t in church, I was afraid something prevented you from coming.”
“I was just telling Susan that my flight was delayed by fog in San Francisco. Susan, I’d like you to meet Micah Steadwell, an old school friend of mine. Micah, this is Susan Turner, Dave’s wife’s cousin.”
Micah took her hand and brought it to his lips to plant a kiss on her knuckles. His courtly behavior was a surprise, but didn’t seem like an act. He was a man, she guessed, with a unique style.
“Hello Ms. Turner,” he said gravely. “I’m so sorry about your cousin.”
“Thank you, Mr. Steadwell,” she replied.
Micah turned to Aaron. “Are you taking the boys home with you?”
Aaron indicated Susan with a jut of his chin. “No, Dave and Becky wanted Susan to have custody.”
Micah nodded. “Of course. Well.” He clapped Aaron on the shoulder. “I own the Knight Club now, near the Princeton Shopping Center. I’d like you and Susan to come as my guests before you go home. I know you don’t feel like partying, but I’d love to treat you to dinner if you have time.”
Aaron shook his head apologetically. “Doesn’t look good. I’ll only be here a couple of days. But I appreciate that you came, Micah.”
“Sure.” Micah shook his hand again and handed him a business card. “We’ll have to stay in better touch. Mom and Ross said to say hello.”
Aaron nodded. “Give them my love.”
“Will do. Bye, Ms. Turner.”
As Micah left Aaron pointed behind him to the limousine, the liveried driver waiting by the rear passenger door. “Susan, let me take you and the boys home.”
She pointed to a man and woman standing off to one side, waiting. “Those are friends of Dave’s and Becky’s who drove us to the church. They’re waiting to—”
He handed Ringo back to her. “You get the boys into the limo and I’ll explain.”
He had covered the few steps to the waiting couple and was already smiling and shaking hands before she could protest. As large drops of rain began to fall, accompanied by a low rumble of thunder, she herded the other three boys toward the limo with her free hand.
The driver, a rotund older man with a cheerful expression, opened the door for them and held Ringo for her while she climbed inside. Then he handed the toddler in.
The boys were immediately pushing buttons opening and closing windows and the privacy panel, turning on the small television, discovering the wine decanter and glasses.
Since she’d arrived in their home, Susan had learned that a mother of four boys should be equipped with eight arms.
She was still trying to reclaim control when Aaron climbed into the limo and sat opposite her. He took the crystal stopper from Paul, replaced it in the decanter, closed the windows, turned off the overhead light, then found cartoons on the television.
The boys were instantly glued to it. Susan scrambled around to buckle seat belts. Aaron glanced at his watch. “Nearly noon,” he said. “Should we go to lunch?”
“Uh…” She had an instant image of the ordeal mealtime had been during the past few days. John ate nothing, Paul ate everything, George made designs with his food, and Ringo preferred to see his food on the floor. And while all this was going on, the boys harrassed each other mercilessly. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Socially, I mean.”
“We’ll go to a fast-food place,” he countered, “where they’re used to dealing with messy kids. And the kids might enjoy the playland thing, get to blow off some steam.”
That was true. “All right.” She glanced at his expensive raincoat. “But you might want to cover yourself in plastic. There’s food over everything when they’re finished eating.”
He shrugged off the warning. “Winston,” he called through the open privacy screen, “Find us a Burger Hut.”
“You got it, Mr. Bradley.”
The boys made a pretext of eating, but once they spotted the maze of wide plastic tubes through which other children chased each other, food was secondary to the desire to join them. Ringo, mercifully, had fallen asleep in Susan’s lap.
“Can we go now, Uncle Aaron?” John pleaded. The other two boys jumped up and down in anticipation.
Aaron deferred to Susan. It was a diplomatic gesture she could appreciate in sentiment, but considering the boys seemed suddenly to revolve in his orbit, it was an empty concession.
But she would have to deal with them when he was gone, so she took control. “Yes, you can, but no punching or kicking or you’ll have to come in. I’ll be able to watch you through the window.”
They nodded in unison, pushing and shoving each other before they even got to the door that led to the covered play area.
AARON STUDIED the young woman across the table from him as she shifted the child from the crook of her arm to lean against her breast. Where her silky black blouse plunged into a V neck, her skin was alabaster in contrast. Her eyes were dark and soft, with shadowy patches under them as though she was very tired. Her cheeks were pink, her lips the color of Chianti, and the whole berries-and-cream look of her was set off by thick dark hair that was caught back in a knot.
She didn’t like him. He’d sensed that the moment he stepped up to her at the church. He smiled privately at the realization that Dave and Becky had probably told her that he didn’t visit often enough, didn’t keep in close enough touch.
“When I expressed concern for the children last night on the phone,” he said without preamble, “you told me that Dave and Becky’s will makes you the children’s guardian.”
She met his eyes directly. “That’s right. I hope that doesn’t offend you.”
He suspected she added that as a concession to good manners.
He shook his head. “Not at all. I wish I was equipped to care for four children, but I’m really not. I travel a lot, I work long hours…” He laughed. “And my housekeeper swears.”
“A man?” she asked.
“No, a woman. Heart of gold, but a strong opinionated lady. Beebee likes to think she runs my life. And the lives of whoever comes in contact with me. Anyway, I know how much my brother loved his family. If he and Becky put the boys in your care, I know you have to be a model of motherhood.”
She made a scornful sound. “Hardly. But I have a house and a steady job and I made a promise to Becky.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a carpenter,” she replied.
He was sure he’d misheard her. “A carpenter. Like on a construction site?”
“Not anymore.” Ringo stirred and she patted his back until he resettled himself, his lips open in an oval like a little fish’s mouth. “Now I have a weekly-TV cable show for women on how to use tools, do small repairs, simplify difficult or heavy jobs. I’m sponsored by Legacy Tools on the Crafters’ Channel.”
He found that fascinating. He wasn’t much of a handyman himself. “Well, good for you. But that must take a lot of time. What’ll you do about the boys? Can you afford to hire help?”
She raised an eyebrow, her expression at once indignant and imperious. She opened her mouth to reply but he cut her off before she could.
“I wasn’t questioning your household management or your ability to care for them. I was just wondering if there was something I could do to help.”
“Thank you,” she said, “but I understand you’re pretty busy with your business and your…your…”
He might have helped her had he known what she was trying to say. Since he didn’t, he simply waited.
“Your…life-style,” she finally finished with a slightly aggressive tilt to her chin.
“My life-style,” he repeated trying to remember when he’d last had time to have one.
“You know,” she said looking a little uncomfortable, though she seemed determined to ignore such a feeling as she went on intrepidly, “Your parties. Your women. Your nude sunbathing with Mariah Havilland.”
He laughed. “Now, I wouldn’t have taken you for a subscriber to the Reporter. And if you were, I still wouldn’t have taken you for the kind of woman who’d stare at a grainy photo of a man’s backside to determine who it belonged to.”
“It was identified,” she said coolly, “in the caption.”
“So you saw the naked backside,” he said, “and then stopped to read the caption? I wonder if Dave and Becky knew you could be titillated by such things. And then I suppose you read the whole story.”
“No, I didn’t read—”
“That’s too bad,” he interrupted, beginning to enjoy this exchange, “because you’d have discovered that in the nature of their deceptive headlines and captions, it wasn’t my backside at all, but that of her personal trainer.” He grinned. “I was flattered, though, to have been mistaken for an athlete.”
She heaved a long-suffering sigh. “I was simply trying to turn down your offer of help because I know that your life isn’t…conducive to…”
He loved watching her struggle for the right words. It took the edge off her duchesslike demeanor and added a fluster that she hated and he found amusing.
“Yes?”
“To a wife,” she said a little loudly.
“But I wasn’t asking you to marry me,” he said seriously. “I was offering to—”
“I know that!” she said in a harsh whisper. She swallowed and said icily, “I mean that you’re too busy to father children.” Her eyes closed and color crept up her throat as she obviously realized how that comment could be taken.
He didn’t even have to say anything to win that one.
But she seemed determined to get it right. “I mean,” she said with great patience, “that your offer to help—however kindly meant—would only complicate your life.”
“I meant,” he corrected “that I’d like to help you financially, though, of course, I’d be available for whatever else the boys needed.”
“Don’t you live in Seattle?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s 3300 miles away.”
“I have a jet.”
“Of course you do.”
Okay. Now he was getting annoyed with her. “You seem to resent the fact that I’m successful.”
“No, I don’t,” she retorted. “I resent the fact that you think you can solve all my problems with your genius touch or your money!”
SUSAN COULDN’T BELIEVE she’d said that aloud. He was staring at her in confusion.
She looked for the boys in the play area to avoid his eyes. She saw the kids crest the slide, then disappear down it in a laughing rush.
Aaron reached across the table to turn her face toward him when she continued to ignore him.
“Do you not want to take the boys?” he asked with a gentleness that surprised and unsettled her.
Guilt rose out of her chest to strangle her. She had to clear her throat to be able to reply. “I do want them! I do!”
“Because you promised Becky.”
“Because they need me, and because it’s the right thing to do! I’m just…a little…”
“Scared.”
“Yeah.” There was a certain relief in admitting it, even to him. Then she felt the weight of the trusting child in her arms and knew the three wild boys on the slide needed her, too, even though they didn’t understand that. So she pulled herself together. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t do just fine once I get the hang of it and the boys are enrolled in school and settled into a routine.”
She didn’t like the way he was looking at her, as though he’d found a chink in her armor. As though she wasn’t quite what he’d thought her to be and he was now concerned about his nephews.
She was about to assure him that the boys would be fine with her when the door from the play area flung open and John and Paul tumbled in. They rolled along the tile floor, punching and kicking at each other all the while.
“Paul gots a bleedy mouth!” George announced. He was dancing around his brothers like a referee at a wrestling match. “’Cause John kicked him in the face!”
Susan tried to sidle out of the booth with Ringo still asleep against her, but Aaron was already pulling the boys apart, holding them away from each other with a hand to each jacket front.
Aaron pointed John to the booth and held the wriggling screaming Paul to examine his mouth. He dabbed at it with a clean handkerchief.
“Looks like he knocked out a baby tooth,” Aaron said, lifting the boy into his arms. “I’ll take him into the men’s room to wash his mouth.”
Paul clung to his neck, crying pathetically.
“I didn’t do it on purpose!” John shouted after him. “I was coming down the slide after him and he stopped at the bottom and turned around. He got my foot in his face, but I didn’t kick him!” When Aaron and Paul disappeared into the men’s room, John turned to Susan and said imploringly, “I didn’t! It was an accident.”
“Yup,” George confirmed. “An assident.”
