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“Dawn and I,” Brian corrected.
Tommy made a face but echoed his dad, “Dawn ’n I hit the water first try. Didja see us?”
“I saw.” Smiling, Brian ruffled his son’s hair. “Good job, buddy. You, too, Dawn. Now we’d better say our goodbyes and head for the airport.”
Tommy shook hands and Dawn gave hugs all around. A flirtatious one for the prince who’d tried his damnedest to get her to jet off to Corsica or Cannes or wherever with him. A friendly one for Joe. And one that came with a warning for Travis.
“You and Kate have spent too much time apart, Westbrook. Get your butt home quick and start working on that baby you guys have decided to produce.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The hugs for her two friends were fiercer and much longer. Brian waited patiently but Tommy’s forehead puckered into a worried frown when all three women teared up.
“I can’t believe our Italian adventure is over,” Callie sniffed. “We’ve dreamed about coming here for so long.”
“Ever since we watched Three Coins in the Fountain all those years ago,” Kate said gruffly.
“But we’ll be back.” Dawn gulped, tears flowing. “Someday.”
As worried now as his son, Brian shot Travis a quick glance. Kate’s husband merely rolled his eyes. “Don’t worry. They do this all the time. They’ll get it together in a moment.”
Sure enough, the tears stopped, the sniffles dried up and the smiles reemerged as Kate began planning an imminent reunion.
“It’s so awesome that Brian and Tommy live in Bethesda. Travis and I will be less than a half hour away. We can get together regularly. And Callie can come stay with us, too, until she lands a new job.”
“I don’t think so,” the brunette said with a flash of unexpected humor. “You two have that baby to work on. I don’t need to listen to the headboard banging—” she gave Tommy a quick glance and finished smoothly “—when you put the crib together.”
* * *
After another round of hugs, Brian finally ushered his two charges to the waiting limo. Moments later they were threading through Rome’s insane traffic on their way to Ciampino, the smaller of the city’s two airports.
The corporate jet was fueled and sitting on the ramp. The Gulfstream G600 with its twin Pratt & Whitney engines and long-range cruise speed of five hundred plus mph had been retrofitted by an avionics package specifically designed by EAS.
The sight of the sleek jet stirred familiar feelings of pride and a secret amazement in Brian. Hard to believe just twelve years ago he’d set up a small avionics engineering firm using his entire savings and a five-thousand dollar loan from his father-in-law. The first years hadn’t been easy. He was fresh out of the Corps with a new bride and more enthusiasm than business smarts.
Thank God for Caroline, he thought with an all-too-familiar ache. She’d provided long-range vision while he supplied the engineering muscle. Together, they’d grown Ellis Aeronautical Systems from the ground up. She hadn’t lived to experience the thrill when EAS hit the Fortune 500 list, though. She’d barely made it to their son’s first birthday.
Smothering the ache with a sheer effort of will, Brian greeted his chief pilot at the jet’s rear steps. “Thanks for the quick turnaround, Ed. Mrs. Wells made the flight back to the States okay?”
“She did,” the pilot confirmed. “So did the Italian medical team you hired to attend to her during the flight. They said to thank you for the extra week in California, by the way. After they got her settled, the first stop on their agenda was Disneyland, followed by the vineyards in Napa Valley.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Brian drawled while the pilot bent to bump fists with Tommy.
“Hey, kid. How’d you like Italy?”
“It was great! Me ’n...” Nose scrunching, he made a quick midcourse correction. “Dawn ’n I took a gondola ride in Venice ’n I went to the Colosseum in Rome with Dad. He got me a sword ’n helmet ’n everything.”
“Cool.” The pilot straightened and held out his hand to the third passenger on his manifest. “Good to meet you, Ms. McGill.”
“Dawn,” Tommy corrected helpfully. “She’s, like, a hundred years younger than Mrs. Wells so it’s okay for us to call her Dawn. She’s gonna come live with me ’n Dad.”
“She is, huh?”
“Until Mrs. Wells gets back on her feet,” Brian interjected smoothly.
Ed Donahue had flown executive-level jets too long to show anything but a professional front, but Brian knew interest and speculation had to be churning behind his carefully neutral expression. One, the auburn-haired beauty could get a rise from a stone-cold corpse. Two, she was the first living, breathing sex goddess to fly aboard EAS’s corporate jet.
As she demonstrated when she followed Tommy up the steps and ducked into the cabin. The slinky, wide-legged pants she’d worn to the ceremony at the Trevi Fountain clung to her hips and outlined a round bottom that made Brian’s breath hiss in and Ed’s whoosh out.
Gulping, the pilot made a valiant recovery. “I’ll, uh, recompute our flight time once we reach cruising altitude and give you an updated ETA.”
“Thanks,” Brian said grimly, although he’d already figured that no matter what the ETA, he was in for a long flight.
* * *
He’d figured right.
Over the years he’d worked hard to minimize his time away from his son by combining business trips with short vacations whenever possible. They’d taken a number of jaunts to Texas, where EAS’s main manufacturing and test facility was located. Several trips to Florida so Brian could meet with senior officials in the USAF Special Ops community, with requisite side trips to Disney World. The Paris Air Show last year. This summer’s excursion in Italy.
As a result, his son was a seasoned traveler and very familiar with the Gulfstream’s amenities, every one of which he was determined to show Dawn once they’d gained cruising altitude. Brian extracted his laptop and set it up on the polished teak worktable while the eager young guide started his tour by showing her the aft cabin.
“It’s got a shower ’n toilet ’n the beds fold down,” he announced while Dawn surveyed the cabin through the open door. “Watch.”
“That’s okay, I... Oh. Cool. Twin beds.”
“One for me ’n one for Dad. There’s another bunk up front. Ed ’n his copilot take turns in that one on long flights. But you kin have my bed,” he offered generously. “I sleep in my seat lotsa times.”
Brian glanced up from the spreadsheet filling his laptop’s screen and met Dawn’s eyes. The laughter dancing in their emerald depths invited him to share in the joke. He returned a smile but for some reason didn’t find the idea of sharing the aft cabin with her quite as amusing as she obviously did.
“I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on,” he told his son. “Why don’t we let Dawn have the cabin to herself and we guys will hang here tonight?”
“Okay. C’mon, you gotta see the galley.”
When Tommy led her back up the spacious aisle, Brian caught her scent as they went by. It was faint, almost lost in the leather and polished teakwood of the cabin, but had teased him from their first meeting in Venice. It drifted to him now, a tantalizing mix of summer sunshine and lemons and something he couldn’t identify. He tried to block it out of his senses as Tommy gave her a tour of a well-stocked galley that included a wide selection of wines, soft drinks, juices, snacks and prepackaged, microwavable gourmet meals.
The pièce de résistance, of course, was the touch screen entertainment center. On every long flight Brian gave fervent thanks for the video games, TV shows and Disney movies that snared his son’s attention for at least a few hours.
“You just press this button here in the armrest ’n the screen opens up.” Buckled in again, Tommy laughed at Dawn’s surprise when a panel in the bulkhead glided up to reveal a sixty-inch flat screen TV.
“We’ve got bunches of movies.” He flicked the controls and brought up a menu screen with an impressive display of icons. “If you want, we kin watch Frozen.”
“Right.” She gave a small snort. “And how many times did we watch it in Venice? Four? Five?”
Tom looked honestly puzzled. “So?”
“So let’s see what else is here. Ah! Beauty and the Beast. Do you like that one?”
“It’s okay.”
“Only okay?”
“All that love stuff is kinda gross.”
“It can be,” she admitted with a wry grin. “Sometimes.”
“We’ll watch it if you want,” Tommy offered manfully as he handed her a pair of noise-canceling Bose earphones. “Here, we hafta wear these so Dad kin work.”
Brian had long ago perfected the ability to concentrate on his laptop’s small screen despite the colorful images flickering on the bulkhead’s much larger screen. He did a pretty good job of focusing this time, too, until Dawn kicked off her shoes. Angling her seat back, she raised the footrest, crossed her ankles and stretched out to watch the movie.
Startled, Brian stared across the aisle at her toes. Each nail was painted a different color. Lavender. Pink. Turquoise. Pale green. Pearly blue.
He didn’t keep up with the latest feminine fashion trends. He had no reason to. But he was damned if he could concentrate on the production schedule for EAS’s new Terrain Awareness Warning System with her tantalizing scent drifting across the aisle and those ten dots of iridescent color wiggling in time to the music.
Chapter Two (#uc4506a2a-fb07-5693-9559-7c2700573e81)
Tommy conked out after a supper of lemon-broiled chicken, snow peas and the inevitable mac ’n cheese. The Gulfstream’s soft leather seats were twice as wide as regular airline seats, so they made a perfect kid-size bed. Dawn covered him with a blanket before accepting his dad’s suggestion that she move across the aisle and join him for an after-dinner brandy.
“My assistant was kind enough to pack and ship the personal items Mrs. Wells will need during her rehab,” Ellis told her over snifters of Courvoisier. “She also contacted the cleaning service we use to let them know you’ll be filling in as Tom’s temporary nanny. They’ll have the guest room in the gatehouse apartment ready for you.”
Dawn didn’t miss the slight but unmistakable emphasis on “temporary.” Warming the brandy between her palms, she studied the CEO she’d met for the first time only last week. He’d discarded the coat and tie he’d worn to the ceremony at the Trevi Fountain and popped the top two buttons on his dress shirt. The satiny sheen of the fabric deepened the Viking blue of his eyes but didn’t make them any warmer.
“You don’t like me very much, do you?”
He was too good, Dawn thought with grudging admiration, and way too smooth to show surprise at her blunt question.
“My son thinks you’re totally awesome,” he said with a neutral lift of his shoulders. “And Kate and Callie would peel a strip off anyone who dissed you. With those endorsements, what I think doesn’t matter.”
“Bull. What you think is the only thing that matters when it comes to your son.” She tipped the snifter and let a trickle of smoky fire burn its way down her throat before picking up the gauntlet again. “So why do you go all fudge-faced whenever I walk in the room?”
“Fudge-faced?”
“Fudge-faced. Poker-faced. Pie-faced. Take your pick.”
He sat back, fingering his drink. “Okay,” he said after a pause. “I’ll be honest. Tommy’s got two sets of very loving grandparents. He considers Mrs. Wells his third grandmother. What he doesn’t have is a mother. Although...”
Intrigued, Dawn watched his mouth twist into something dangerously close to a smile. Amazing how such a simple realignment of a few facial muscles could transform him from a cool, aloof executive into someone almost human.
“I should warn you he’s made several valiant efforts to fill the void,” Ellis admitted. “The first time wasn’t so bad. After several less than subtle attempts at matchmaking, his pediatrician gently let him know that she was already married. This last time...” He shook his head. “Let’s just say his kindergarten teacher and I were both relieved when the school year ended.”
Dawn knew Ellis had run a background check on her. She’d done some Googling of her own.
“I went online and saw some of the hotties you’ve escorted to various charity functions in recent years,” she informed him, lifting her brandy in a mock toast. “From the adoring looks on their faces, any one of them would’ve been happy to fill that void.”
The smile disappeared and the cool, distant executive reappeared. “Tommy’s void maybe. Not mine. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to work.”
Oooh-kay. She’d put her foot in it that time. Maybe both feet.
Subtle probing these past few days had confirmed that Tommy retained only a hazy concept of his mom. His father’s memories were obviously stronger and more immediate.
Tossing back the rest of her brandy, Dawn retreated to the luxuriously appointed aft cabin. She stood beneath a hot, stinging shower for some moments before slithering between what felt like 700-thread count Egyptian cotton sheets. The tail-mounted engines reverberated with a mind-numbing drone that soon rocked her into a deep sleep.
* * *
With the six-hour time difference between Rome and Washington, DC, and the fact that they’d flown west across several time zones, the Gulfstream touched down at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport at almost the same hour it had taken off. Bright autumn sunshine greeted them after they’d exited customs and crossed to the limo waiting in the executive car park.
Brian preferred to drive himself most of the time, since EAS headquarters was located only a few miles from his home in a shady gated community in Bethesda. After a long flight like this one, though, he was just as happy to let Dominic fight the rush-hour traffic that would already be clogging the city streets.
Once again, Tommy made the introductions. And once again, a longtime EAS employee had to struggle to keep his jaw from dropping as he was introduced to the new nanny.
Temporary new nanny, Brian wanted to add. Temporary!
He kept his mouth shut and Dominic managed to keep his tongue from hanging out as he stashed their luggage and slid behind the wheel.
“George Washington Parkway’s still pretty clear,” he advised Brian. “We should beat the worst of the rush-hour traffic.”
When they exited the airport to access the parkway that would take them west along the Potomac River, Tommy graciously pointed out the sights.
“That’s the Pentagon,” he announced, then swiveled in his seat to indicate the monument across the Tidal Basin. “’N that’s the Jefferson Memorial. Thomas Jefferson was a president. Number...uh...”
“Three,” Dawn supplied when he appeared stuck. “Actually, I know DC pretty well. I attended school at Georgetown, just a little farther upriver.”
“You did? What grade were you in?”
“I was a grad student. That would be, like, grade seventeen.”
“Seventeen?” His eyes went big and round. “I’m just starting first grade. Does that mean I gotta do...um—” he gulped in dismay “—sixteen more grades?”
“Maybe. If that’s what rows your boat.” She slanted Brian a quick glance. “Ask your father how many he did.”
He gave his dad an accusing stare. “How many?”
“More than seventeen,” Brian admitted apologetically. “But I didn’t do them one right after another. I took a break when I went into the marines and didn’t start grad school until after I got back from Iraq. Your mom took some of the same classes I did,” he added in an instinctive attempt to keep Caroline’s memory alive for her son. “She was working on a Master’s Degree in chemical engineering at the time. That’s where we met.”
“I know. You told me. Look! There’s the Iwo Jima Memorial. They were marines, too, weren’t they, Dad?”
“Yes, they were.”
Brian had no desire to keep Tom anchored to the past. And he certainly didn’t want him to mourn a mother he’d never really known. Yet he found himself fighting a stab of guilt and making a mental apology to Caroline for their son’s minimal interest.
* * *
Damned if he didn’t feel guilty all over again when they crossed the Potomac into Maryland and approached the suburbs of Bethesda and Chevy Chase.
Caroline had spent weeks searching for just the right neighborhood to bring up the big, noisy family she and Brian wanted to have. Six months pregnant at the time, she’d visited local schools, shops and churches to make sure they were international as well as fully integrated. She then spent hours with an architect designing updates to the home they’d purchased. Brian could see her touch in the lush greenery, the bushes that flowered from spring to late fall, the mellow brick and mansard roofs she’d insisted reminded her of their Paris honeymoon.
After she’d died, he’d thought about moving. Many times. The house, the detached gatehouse, the garden, the curving drive all carried Caroline’s personal stamp. But he’d stayed put, pinned in place these past five years by EAS’s rapidly expanding business base and the fact that this was the only home Tommy had ever known.
He told himself there was no reason to feel disloyal for bringing Dawn here to live, even temporarily. So she was young and vivacious and gorgeous? No big deal. All that mattered was that she’d clicked with Tommy. His son had been so shaken by Mrs. Wells’s accident. Terrified she might die on the operating table, like the mom he couldn’t really remember. Brian would have hired a dozen Dawn McGills if that’s what it took to ease his son’s instinctive fears.
