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“Well, it’s after seven.” She stood up and set aside the book she’d been reading. “The poor woman said she had been here since eight. She has a life—unlike you, apparently. So, I told her to go on. We all shouldn’t have to suffer. She has to cook for Tom.”
“Who’s Tom?”
Isobel gave a long-suffering sigh. “Her husband.” She shook her head. “Poor man, on his feet all day. I didn’t know they still had beat policemen in New York City. I’m glad to know they do. It makes the city seem a much friendlier place.” She looked at him brightly. “Don’t you think?”
Finn’s mouth opened and closed. He felt like a grouper, hooked, beached and gasping for air.
Strong’s husband was called Tom? He was a policeman? He’d never known any of that. In fact all he’d learned about her in the seven years she’d worked for him was that she was never sick and she made things run smoothly in the studio even when the rest of the world was going to hell in a handbasket all around him.
He glanced around, trying to get his bearings. One of the twins was peering at him through the lens of a turn-of- the-century Kodak camera he kept on a shelf by the door. “Here now,” he snapped. “Put that down.”
This twin didn’t seem nearly as skittish as the other one. She set the camera down, but she didn’t dodge behind Isobel Rule’s skirt. Instead she regarded him solemnly. “Why?”
“Because it isn’t a plaything.”
“I wasn’t playing.” Unblinking green eyes met his.
“What were you doing?”
“Framing ogres.”
“Tansy!”
Finn’s gaze flicked up at Isobel’s dismayed exclamation. He saw a deep rose color suffuse her face, blotting out the freckles. And what a color it was.
“It’s what you told me to do,” the one who was presumably Tansy protested, looking indignant. “You said to iso—islo—”
“Isolate,” Isobel supplied resignedly.
Tansy bobbed her head. “Uh-huh. Isolate scary things and they wouldn’t be so scary anymore,” she finished, slanting a glance in Finn’s direction. “You’re right.”
He felt like baring his teeth at her. “Don’t scare you anymore, huh?” he said to the child.
Tansy shook her head resolutely.
He turned his gaze on the twin peeping out from behind Isobel. “What about you? Are you scared?” He saw Tansy fix her sister with a hard look.
“N-no,” the other one, obviously Pansy, replied.
“You ought to be.”
“Mr. MacCauley!” Isobel’s blush deepened: Or was it anger causing that color?
He turned a bland smile in her direction. “Yes?”
“Stop trying to frighten them! You should be ashamed of yourself, flaunting your ferocity before small children!”
“Flaunting my ferocity? Is that what I’m doing?”
Isobel Rule pressed her lips together. Then she turned to the children. “He’s teasing,” she told both girls firmly.
Finn frowned. “Now, wait a minute—”
“You were quite right to frame him, Tansy,” Isobel went on, ignoring him. “You were clever to see that he’s not really fierce at all.”
“The hell I’m not!”
All three of them turned their gazes on him, the twins with jaws sagging, Isobel with her brows drawn down in obvious displeasure at his language. He scowled at her. But even as he pretended he didn’t care, he felt the hot tide of embarrassment creeping up his neck and rued a complexion that, even tanned as it was, would allow Isobel Rule to see his blush.
He muttered under his breath and turned away. That was when he came face-to-face once more with Strong’s empty chair and remembered he didn’t have anyone to stick the twins with.
Except—and here his gaze slid sideways—Miss Isobel Rule.
Was she a miss? He looked a little harder, trying to see if she was wearing a ring, but she had her hands in the pockets of that circus tent he supposed she called a skirt. Their gazes met.
“Well, I can’t keep them,” Finn said abruptly.
“Meg said—”
“Not for the first time, Meg is wrong.” He waved hand around the studio foyer. “Do you see any dolls? Any blocks? Any puzzles or playthings? No, you don’t. Why? Because this is not a day-care center. I repeat, hot a day-care center! I can’t take them.” He did a quick lap around Strong’s desk for emphasis, stopping square in front of it to face Isobel Rule and her two worried-looking charges. He didn’t let his gaze linger on them.
“You’re their uncle,” Isobel said quietly. “They have no one else.”
“They have you.”
“Me?” she squeaked.
“Why not you? You brought them.”
“Because I got shang—because Meg asked me to,” she amended with a quick apprehensive glance at the girls.
Which meant that she was as much one of Meg’s victims as he was. That, in ordinary circumstances, would have made him feel sympathetic toward her. In the present situation, he wasn’t above taking whatever advantage he could get. “You should have said no.”
“I thought you were expecting them.”
He snorted. “You thought I agreed to baby-sit? You thought I said, sure, just drop ’em off, they can sit in the foyer and watch me shoot all day?”
“She said you shot wildlife,” Isobel replied faintly.
Finn’s hands tightened in a strangling motion. “She’ll burn in hell—”
The girls gasped.
Isobel shot him a furious glare. “That’s enough. Now you’ve terrified them. She’s not going to burn anywhere, girls,” Isobel assured them. “She’s fine. And you’re going to be fine, too. Your uncle is simply upset. Obviously he isn’t as flexible as one might like.” Another accusing glare sailed in his direction. “That doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you and want you—” here she nailed him with a look that promised instant death if he contradicted her “—he just needs to get used to the change in his life.”
“Our lives,” Finn said, determined to salvage whatever he could of the mess she was making of his life.
A tiny frown line appeared between Isobel’s dark brows. “What do you mean?”
“You want things fine? You want the girls calm and settled and reassured? Fair enough. But it isn’t just my life that’s changing. If they’re mine for two weeks, they’re yours, too, Isobel Rule.”
CHAPTER TWO
SHE went with him.
Only because the twins—even Tansy who was by far the braver of the two—looked horrified at the slightest hint that she might abandon them to the questionable mercies of their uncle Finn. And because she felt morally obliged to make sure Finn MacCauley’s bark really was worse than his bite.
And wasn’t it nice someone involved had a moral or two? Izzy thought irritably as she hurried to keep up with him as he strode along Amsterdam Avenue.
Like his piratical forebears, Finn MacCauley had done considerably more barking and bossing on the way uptown. He’d snapped at the girls when they dawdled. He’d grumbled about having to herd them all into a taxi when the subway was so much faster and cheaper.
“Not with luggage,” Izzy had argued. And then he’d groused about having to manhandle their bags in and out of the cab when he’d finally managed to flag one down. They had to disembark two blocks from his Upper West Side apartment because they were caught in a hopeless traffic jam, and now he was complaining about having to walk slow enough that six-year-old legs could keep up.
Izzy glanced around now, made sure the girls weren’t looking, then kicked him in the shin.
“Sh—eee!” Finn hopped on one foot and bit off something she was sure would have singed childish ears. “What the hell—heck—are you doing?”
“Shutting you up.” She gave him a saccharine smile. “How’m I doing?”
Finn looked nonplussed, then faintly guilty. He glanced back at the twins who were gawking at a boy on in-line skates weaving at breakneck speed through several lanes of still stalled traffic. “They aren’t paying any attention,” he muttered.
“They were. And you weren’t making them feel welcome.”
“They aren’t.”
She kicked him again.
“Ow! Damn it!” He bent to rub his shin and glowered at Izzy’s sneakers. “Have you got steel-capped toes in those things?”
“Don’t I wish,” Izzy murmured. She fell into step beside him as he turned the corner and slowed his pace considerably. “I’m sure you’re upset,” she said, feeling a little guilty now herself at what she’d done. “But you don’t have to take it out on the girls. It’s not their fault their mother’s a—” She cast about for a suitably polite word.
“Flake?” he supplied. “Ditz? Irresponsible idiot? Or would you like me to think of something stronger?”
Izzy tried to hide a smile. “Well, I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but...”
“I would,” Finn said darkly.
Izzy knew the voice of experience when she heard it. “She doesn’t mean to be quite so irresponsible. Meg is a dear, really,” she offered. “Sweet, funny, eager...”
“Generous?” Finn suggested ironically.
This time Izzy couldn’t suppress the smile. “In her way.”
Finn snorted. He cut in front of her, bounding up the steps to a brownstone halfway up the block, then dropped the duffels on the stoop and fished a key out of his pocket. The twins pressed against either side of Izzy, watching him as he unlocked the door and held it open. “Third floor,” he told them. “Forward march.”
His apartment, Izzy saw when he ushered them in, stretched from the front of the brownstone all the way to the back. Once she was sure it had been a warren of dark tiny rooms. Now it was one huge airy expanse with tall windows at the front and French doors opening onto a small terrace at the back. The kitchen area, on the street end, was small but efficient, with stark white cupboards and dark green tile countertops above which hung a rack with a row of well-used copper-bottomed pots and pans. In the center area, where they had come in, was a wide general living space with a gleaming hardwood floor accented by bold geometrical design, black and white area rugs and a huge modern black leather sofa and matching chairs and photos, not of seven-foot technicolor bimbos, but black-and-white studies of loons on a quiet lake, deer eating quietly in a clearing, and one lone wolf howling at the moon. Izzy stared, her attention caught.
“Move it or lose it, lady,” Finn grumbled behind her and pushed her farther into the room with the duffel bags, then kicked the door shut. He dropped the bags and straightened, wincing dramatically.
“They weren’t that heavy,” Izzy said tartly. “I carried them all the way through the airport.”
Finn muttered under his breath.
Izzy ignored him, continuing her perusal of his apartment, never having seen anything quite like it. She’d lived in the same San Francisco Victorian since she’d been orphaned and gone to live with her grandfather when she was seven. It had been cluttered and tumbled and homey. Nothing at all like this.
Against the corner provided by the back of some kitchen cabinets and nearly hidden by, heaven help her; a tree, she spied a steep wood and steel circular stairway ascending. At the terrace end of the room Izzy saw a warmer, more intimate arrangement of furniture with color this time—imagine that. There was a daybed, overstuffed chair, a bentwood rocker and several book-shelves—though it was clearly all high quality, not the mishmash of old and new, battered and worn, that still sat in her grandfather’s house. Beyond the French doors, a terrace, with a small table and two chairs, overlooked the back gardens of the block. Not much, perhaps, but considerably more aesthetically pleasing than the row of dustbins she saw from her bedroom window every morning.
It was, all in all, quite out of Izzy’s league.
“Finished gawking?” Finn asked. His arched brows mocked her.
Izzy felt her color deepen. “It’s what you get when you invite bumpkins home with you.”
Finn’s deep blue eyes gave her a once-over, making her wish the floor would conveniently open and swallow her up. Then he turned to the girls. “You’ll be sleeping upstairs,” he said as he hoisted the duffel bags up once more. “Come on.”
Izzy hung back until Finn turned, halfway up the stairs, to bark, “You, too. You’re not sleeping down there.”
“I’m not sleeping anywhere,” she said. “I’m leaving. I—”
“You leave, they go with you,” Finn said implacably. “I told you that.”
“But I can’t stay! I have a life.”
“So did I.” Past tense.
They stared at each other, neither speaking for a long moment. Then Finn asked, “What life? What brought you to New York?”
“I’m going to get married,” Izzy said.
“You?” He looked her up and down with such obvious disbelief that Izzy wanted to smack him.
“Yes, me,” she said flatly. “Want to make something of it?”
He smiled. “Have you picked a groom, yet?”
Which was what, his way of saying he didn’t think any man in his right mind would marry a girl like her? Izzy ground her teeth. “Yes, I’ve picked a groom. And I intend seeing him yet this evening. So if you’ll excuse me...”
Now it was Finn MacCauley’s turn to grind his teeth. “You can’t,” he said. “Not yet,” he added. “At least help me get them settled. Have dinner with us. Read them a story. Get them to bed.” He was looking just a bit desperate.
Izzy chewed on her lower lip. She wanted to get to Sam’s before it got too late in the evening. He wasn’t even expecting her. She hadn’t told him for sure what day she was coming. She’d wanted it to be a surprise. But she felt a certain obligation to the girls, too. Even if Finn MacCauley had been the best uncle in the world she’d have felt a little apprehensive about leaving them with a man she didn’t know. And as much as she might like to discomfit a man as arrogant as Mr. Wildlife MacCauley, well...it was wrong to take her irritation out on the girls.
“Until they’re in bed,” she said.
Finn let out a pent-up breath. He looked at the two little girls who stared up at him in unblinking fascination. “Follow me,” he told them and led the way up the curve of the stairs.
Izzy stared after him, heard him growl something at the girls, and hurried to join them. “Be kind,” she said.
“Nobody’s being kind to me.” Finn pointed the girls toward one of the bedrooms. “Which of these bags is yours?”
