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“He is over eighteen,” Dawn argued.
“But he didn’t enter the contest.”
“An insignificant detail.”
“There is no such thing as an insignificant detail,” Caitlin felt the need to point out.
Dawn stared at her for a moment and then dropped into the leather chair opposite Caitlin’s desk. Caitlin waited, knowing from past experience that Dawn wasn’t admitting defeat. She was plotting her next move.
“My senior editor posted the stats on the last issue, and I have to admit they’re pretty dismal.” Dawn’s smile was strained. “Subscription sales have declined ever since our competition decided to publish a cheaper version of the magazine. Jillian is hoping the annual makeover edition will turn things around. In fact, she’s hinted if that happens, she’ll think about making the contest a monthly feature.”
“With you in charge.”
“Possibly.” Dawn shrugged but couldn’t hide the ambitious gleam in her eyes. “But might I remind you, if there’s no increase in sales, there’s no makeover feature. And if there’s no makeover feature, there’s no need for a style editor.”
“I see your dilemma,” Caitlin said dryly.
“You can’t deny how much buzz this could create,” Dawn continued. “A man featured in our contest. The entry sent in by his twelve-year-old daughter. It’s fresh. It’s intriguing.”
“It has…potential.”
Dawn’s eyes sparkled. “And you have to admit, this guy…Devon Walsh…is mega-handsome. A diamond in the rough.”
Caitlin frowned. A diamond in the rough? Had she missed something?
“You see it, don’t you?” Dawn held up the photo. “He looks like an aging rock star. Silky dark hair. Mysterious eyes. Bad-boy stubble…”
Bad-boy stubble? Oh, please.
She’d definitely missed something.
“…unless you aren’t sure you could improve on this.” Dawn shrugged.
“Believe me, a shave would be an improvement,” Caitlin shot back, aware of her friend’s tactics but still a little offended that Dawn would question her ability.
“You’ve been hoping to increase your male clientele for the past few years. Who knows? If you can transform this particular frog into a prince, execs will be lining up around the block to schedule an appointment at IMAGEine.”
Caitlin thought the frog/prince analogy wasn’t exactly a fair one. Devon Walsh might be on the scruffy side but he did have great cheekbones. And she couldn’t deny that one of her goals included expanding her client base to include more men. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder if the whole thing wasn’t a setup.
“Are you sure about this? For all we know, Devon Walsh is a wannabe actor or model who put his daughter up to this, knowing we’d take the bait.”
Hook, line and show-me-the-rise-in-subscriptions sinker.
“Your cynicism is showing, my friend, but if it makes you feel better, pay Jennifer Walsh and her dad a visit to make sure this is legit before we sign on the dotted line. If it isn’t, we’ll go with your top pick. Plain and simple.”
Plain and simple.
It sounded good in theory. So why did Caitlin have the uneasy feeling that her life was about to get complicated?
Just before lunch, Devon Walsh noticed that an eerie silence had descended over the house.
An eerie silence could only mean one thing. His children were studying instead of playing.
He pushed his chair away from the desk and stalked toward the door as he formulated a slight variation of the lecture he’d been serving up like spaghetti over the past few months. A lecture he’d guarantee couldn’t be found in one of the numerous parenting books he’d been reading. The ones that gave advice on how to give children roots, wings and make them mind without losing his.
Devon was beginning to think the reason he hadn’t discovered a fool-proof parenting technique was because his children didn’t exactly fit the typical “kid” mold….
Sure, blame them. It’s not like you’re the poster child for Father of the Year….
Not that he wasn’t trying.
It’s just that three out of the four Walshes in the house weren’t cooperating.
He decided to track down Josh and Brady, his nine-year-old twins, first. Just the fact there were two of them doubled the volume and usually made them easier to locate. Jenny was the tough one. Shy and introspective, she could make herself practically invisible when she wanted to be. And she wanted to be. A lot.
Coaxing Jenny out of her shell was a challenge Devon didn’t feel prepared for.
Who was he kidding? Parenting was a challenge he didn’t feel prepared for.
Strength for the moment, right, Lord?
It had become his mantra over the past six months.
“Brady? Josh?” Devon veered to the right when he reached the foot of the stairs, assuming he’d find the boys in the parlor—a quaint, old-fashioned term for a drafty room with scuffed hardwood floors, uncomfortable furniture covered in itchy, burgundy velvet and heavy drapes that blocked out the light with the efficiency of an eclipse. For reasons Devon couldn’t begin to explain, it had become his children’s favorite room in the house.
He’d only taken a few steps in that direction when the twins materialized in front of him.
“Hi, Dad,” Josh said cheerfully.
Too cheerfully, in Devon’s opinion. And even if the chapter on “pushing boundaries” he’d read the night before wasn’t still fresh in his mind, he would have been suspicious.
Brady pulled his ever-present stopwatch out of his pants pocket and flipped open the cover. “You’ve got thirty-five minutes left to write, Dad. What’s up?”
“I was just about to ask you the same thing.”
“Ah…nothing much. Just hanging around.” Josh casually tossed a miniature football into the air and scrambled to catch it again. He missed and it bounced off his shoe and hit the wall. “Playing football. You know.”
Devon’s eyes narrowed. The boys had never shown an interest in any of the sports equipment he’d purchased. A decoy toy, no doubt about it.
“Where is Jenny?” Devon took a step toward the parlor and found his path blocked by identical brown-eyed obstacles.
“She’s…somewhere.” Brady shrugged.
“Not here, though.” Josh’s ears turned red.
Devon suppressed a smile. Those ears gave him away every time. More reliable than a lie-detector test.
“Is she in the parlor?”
“No!” The twins’ voices blended together in an ear-splitting, off-key soprano.
Devon winced. He wasn’t in any hurry for the boys to grow up but he did look forward to the day their voices changed.
“Will you help us put together the train track, Dad?” Brady asked.
“You want to put together the train track?” Devon repeated. “Now?”
The twins nodded vigorously.
“Yeah.”
“We want to get started.”
“Let me get this straight. You’re talking about the model train that’s been sitting in the box since I brought it home? A month ago?”
Josh and Brady exchanged is-this-a-trick question frowns and then reverted to the silent mode of communication that had unnerved Devon when they’d first moved in with him. It had taken Jenny to put it in perspective.
“It’s a twin thing, Dad,” she’d said. “It’s like trying to figure out how peanut butter gets on the ceiling.”
And because the whole peanut-butter phenomenon was another unsolved mystery in his household, Devon took his daughter’s advice to accept what he couldn’t explain and move on. It was easier—and maybe a little safer—that way.
“We were waiting for the right moment.” Brady, official timekeeper for the Walsh family, grinned at him.
If it weren’t for Josh’s ears, now a deep shade of crimson, Devon might have fallen for it.
He decided right then and there to get a refund on every single parenting book stacked up next to his bed. Or maybe he should just chuck his next mystery novel and write a parenting book instead. At least it wouldn’t take long. He could probably finish the entire five pages in an hour.
The door leading to the parlor flew open and Jenny appeared.
“Is she here yet…?” A tiny squeak replaced the rest of the sentence when the girl spotted her father standing in the hallway.
Devon frowned. “Is who here yet?”
“Dad!” Jenny gulped. “What are you doing down here? It isn’t break time for—”
“Thirty-one minutes,” Brady supplied helpfully.
Devon’s gaze zeroed in on his daughter. “Did I miss something? Are we expecting company this morning?”
“N-no.”
“I’m not expecting company,” Josh interjected. “Are you expecting company, Brady?”
“I’m not expecting company—”
Devon’s head started to swim and he held up his hand. “Now that we’ve established the fact none of us is expecting company, maybe we should all go into the kitchen and rustle up something for—”
The doorbell interrupted him and Devon’s eyebrows shot up.
“Mmm. I wonder who that could be.” He took a step forward and all three children attached themselves to him like ticks on a deer.
“It’s probably the mailman,” Jenny said. “I’ll get it.”
“Yeah, Dad. You go upstairs and write. You still have…” It wasn’t easy but Brady managed to wrestle his stopwatch out of his pocket again and keep a death grip on his father. “Twenty-eight minutes until lunch.”
“Oh, this is much more interesting than lunch—”
A piercing shriek interrupted him, cutting through the last mournful notes of the doorbell.
Devon closed his eyes. “Josh, did you put Sunny back in her cage after breakfast?”
There was one long, supercharged moment of silence.
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
His children still clinging to him, Devon strode toward the door to revive whoever was on the other side. Because the way the morning continued to unravel, the poor woman—and the shriek had definitely been feminine—had probably fallen over in a dead faint.
Devon yanked the door open, ignoring the loud protests of his soon-to-be-grounded-for-life children—because according to the books, grounding was a perfectly acceptable form of discipline—and braced himself to find an unconscious woman sprawled across the welcome mat.
It was a woman, all right.
A very attractive, very conscious woman. Classic features. Glossy dark hair with a faint mahogany sheen. Eyes the same shade of blue as his favorite pair of jeans.
She was standing on the porch wearing a stylish black suit paired with ridiculously high heels.
And was holding Josh’s iguana in her arms.
Chapter Two
It was a good thing, Caitlin thought, that her youngest sister taught middle-school science. Because it meant Evie always had a veritable zoo of creatures living in her classroom—creatures she insisted Caitlin learn to appreciate by getting up close and personal with them when she visited.
If not for the benefit of that prior Wild Kingdom education, the sight of the two-foot-long lizard, curled up on the enclosed sun porch next to a sleeping dachshund of roughly the same size, might have really freaked her out.
As it was, the reptile had managed to wring a brief but embarrassing scream out of her. But that was only because the moment she’d dismissed the motionless creature as a realistic chew toy made out of some high-tech scaly fiber, it had come to life and barreled toward her as if she were a long-lost cousin. Apparently not caring that the closest kinship Caitlin could claim to a member of his species was the faux alligator-skin bag hanging in her closet.
Not sure of the creature’s intent but knowing that one assertive move deserved another, Caitlin had bent down and simply picked it up. The lizard then draped itself comfortably over her arm and proceeded to study the gold and sapphire earring dangling from her ear.
As she contemplated the odds of those intimidating claws not doing irreparable damage to her silk blouse, the front door opened. Judging from the expressions on the faces of the people crowded together in the doorway, she now had the honor of being the strangest creature on the porch.
One of the little boys, a mirror image of the other, darted forward, flashed a smile more mischievous than apologetic, and took the iguana from her.
Officially making it five—no, make that six because she probably should include the dachshund—against one.
Caitlin turned her attention to Devon Walsh—not only the tallest one in the group but instantly recognizable by his bad-boy stubble—and felt her heart skip a beat.
The photo hadn’t done him justice.
