Blame It on Paris (18 page)

After the cleanup, they took five minutes to just stand in the doorway of the room and admire their handiwork.

“Well, it's not like anyone could turn this place into a spread for
House Beautiful,
but we do good work, don't we?” She really was in awe. It hadn't taken
that
long to paint the sucker—four hours or so? And it looked so much better. She'd been telling herself that she hadn't minded going from a nice apartment, filled with decent furniture and matching towels and her own colors, to living like a college student, but that was a lie. She'd been depressed up the wazoo.

Will said, “We still need to get rid of the tarps, get the bed moved back and all that. But I'm voting for a break first.”

His theory was a predinner ice-cream cone. Kelly thought she was in no shape to be seen in public, but he looked adorable, with the streak of cinnamon-colored paint on his neck and another spot in his hair. Kissably adorable. Not that kissing him was on her mind.

Cotton-candy ice cream was. Her favorite flavor. And once he handed her a double-decker cone, he asked if she'd been in contact with her father since she'd left Paris.

“When he asked for that DNA test, he royally ticked me. But I went to a doctor, did a swab at a lab and had the results sent directly to my father's Paris address. Then I stewed.” Her tongue swiped at the ice-cream cone. Man, it was good. “We had exchanged e-mail addresses the first time I met him. I thought that was interesting. I mean, obviously he didn't want mail or phone calls to come to the house from me. By giving me an e-mail address, I didn't know if he was trying to prevent direct contact or trying to keep a door open. Anyway…”

“You've been writing him?”

She nodded. “I don't know if I want a relationship with him—or vice versa. But I'll be damned if he gets to pretend that I don't exist, now that we both know about each other. And it still bugs me, that my half brothers believed I was after his money. So I started sending him a post every couple of days. Telling him things about my life, who I am. Not asking for a response.”

“Has he responded?”

She shook her head. “The e-mails haven't come back, so I assume he got them. I mean, I realize he could have blocked me, or just deleted the e-mails without reading them, but there's nothing I can do about that. The only thing I have power over is keeping the door open. Even if he doesn't want to believe I exist, I still feel this…need. To know more about him, about that side of my family. Like, what were my grandparents like? Are there any family-related health issues? That's part of who I am. Who my kids will be, too.” She almost got an ice-cream headache, she had devoured the cone so fast. But then she sighed. “The whole thing has had me in a muddle. Cripes.
I've
been a muddle since this all started—”

“All right, all right. We'll go shopping.”

“Huh?” She blinked in surprise.

It was his turn to sigh, one of those heavy, testosterone-laden sighs. “You think I don't know when I'm being set up? It's okay. I get it. You've had a rotten time for weeks. And now you've ended up working like a dog on a Sunday, a day you should have spent relaxing. Obviously you need some kind of female pick-me-up. So where are we stuck going? The mall?”

His face said it all, that he considered shopping to be the ultimate sacrifice. “How about a movie instead?” she asked.

“A movie?”

The look of relief on his face almost made her burst out laughing. “When I'm stressed, I love to see a movie, any movie. Of course, we've still got paint on our clothes.”

“Dried paint. And not that much.”

It was hysterical, she thought, how willingly he'd do anything to get out of shopping. And even more interesting, how he'd just shown up and fit into her life all day as if he belonged there.

Her heart started aching. And the ache had intensified by the time she was sitting next to him in the dark theater, stealing his popcorn, shoulder-touching, knee-brushing, smile-sharing.

Desire, suppressed all day, appeared, ugly, annoying and refusing to disappear. She didn't want this yearning, this need to be with him. She told herself that she wouldn't mind so much if the whole thing were just about sex.

Sex was just sex, after all. Even when it was fantastic, fantabulous, fantilicious sex. Sex was only dangerous. It wasn't petrifying, like when doing ordinary things like painting a room and going to a movie felt impossibly right.

A bunch of blood and guts showed up on the movie screen. Kelly chewed on a nail. She wasn't going to start believing that the fantasy was real. This wasn't Paris. They were home now. Reality was reality. He was from a very, very rich background and had family problems beyond her ken. She was having identity issues of her own, not even counting how fractious her family relationships currently were.

So she ate his popcorn and she forced her mind off sex and she told herself, several zillion times, that the fantasy was over. When that didn't work—as they were walking out of the theater—she tried the one subject that should have been guaranteed to jam him up.

“So it went so bad with your dad that you can't even talk about it?”

She must have worn him down, because this time he didn't even try to duck. “It probably could have been worse, but I don't know how.”

When he didn't come through with any details, she said, “Okay. I have an idea.”

“What?”

“Ask me to dinner. With your parents. Pick a nice place, but more ordinary than ultrafancy. You know. Comfortable, with nothing about the atmosphere to add stress. They'll come because they'll be worried about what kind of girl you're seeing, so the heat will be on me instead of you. And it'll give me a chance to get a take on your dad. Maybe I could be of more help if I knew the players face-to-face.”

“That's really a dumb idea,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” She thought again. “I can't tomorrow or Thursday. I'm clocking a ton of extra hours, trying to make some extra money. But Wednesday night would work well. Say six-thirty?”

They'd just stepped off the curb, crossing with the light, aiming for the parking lot across the street. People were milling all over the place, some exiting the theater, others going to dinner.

When Will grabbed her arm, her first assumption was that there was a problem—like she hadn't been paying attention and there was a car headed toward them.

She glanced around, yet there didn't seem to be any sudden cars in their way. And when she looked back at Will, his expression had turned sober…as if that first touch between them was all it had taken to create a conflagration within him. As it had for her, too.

His arms swooped around her.

Her arms wrapped around him.

His mouth claimed hers in a hot kiss that went on and on and on. She claimed his mouth right back, asking for more, needing more, demanding more.

Tension and tenderness swirled between them. She couldn't smell anything but him. Couldn't see anything but him. Couldn't feel anything but him. “Will,” she said softly, full of longing. He answered with another wild, slow kiss.

A car honked.

Then another.

Then a semitruck—loud enough to wake the dead.

She pulled back from him, startled at the sudden appearance of other people, cars, trucks. They were in the middle of the road, for Pete's sake.

And this wasn't Paris.

W
ILL FIGURED
this dinner with Kelly and his parents was going to be as much fun as, say, cuddling up to a hornet's nest. Suffering a flat tire in Alaska in the dead of winter. Having your wisdom teeth pulled.

He pulled into Kelly's driveway, then positioned the rearview mirror so he could fix his tie.

He hadn't worn a tie in years. He hadn't done
stress
in years. He'd been doing just fine in Paris, leading a devil-may-care life, strolling through each day, getting his Ph.D. in irresponsibility. Nothing had been wrong with his life. Nothing!

He scowled in the rearview mirror, found a cowlick in the back of his head, scowled at that, and was just slamming out of the car when Kelly showed up at the front door.

He stopped in midstride.

She looked damned adorable. Not remotely like her, but damned adorable. She was the textbook model for a Woman Meeting the Parents. She'd tamed the curls, pulled them all back somehow. The white top was sleeveless, natural for the balmy night, but the high neck was suitable for a nun. A navy skirt danced around her knees, not too short, nothing wild. The sandaled heels showed off bare legs, but weren't too high. Her toes and nails both had a soft pink polish that matched her lip gloss.

She was using the blue-and-white scarf he'd given her in Paris as a shawl.

Her face, apart from looking breathtakingly beautiful, had a scared expression on it.

As she headed for him and the car, she took in his own scared expression and laughed. “We're one heck of a pair.”

“You have nothing to worry about. They'll love you.”

“Yeah, right.” She moved close and shook her head as she reached for his tie. She fumbled with it for several minutes, while he stood there, liking her hands on him, liking her near, recognizing her perfume as the scent he'd had made for her. He noticed that he was harder than a rock…and before dinner with his parents.

Finally she laughed and looped the tie from around his neck. “This is dumb. Why do you need a tie? It isn't you.” She threw the tie into the backseat, tilted up long enough to brush his lips with a completely unsatisfactory kiss, then darted around the car to climb in the passenger side. “What'd you do to your hair?”

She reached over, pushed down the cowlick, and when that didn't work, licked her hands and used the spit.

“I can't believe you did that,” he said.

“I can't believe I did, either. Would you quit looking so nervous? This is going to go just fine.”

Oh, yeah.
Just fine,
like her living in that dive because of him. Just fine, like her tearing up her whole life because he'd promised himself that sleeping with her wouldn't hurt anybody. And yeah, she had needed to shake the turkey, aka Jason, but that wasn't the point.

“You don't have to do this,” he said for the dozenth time.

“A free meal? At Joseph's?” She named the ritzy restaurant that his mother had chosen. He smelled her scent again. It hovered around her neck, like a peek of cleavage or a flirting smile. She wasn't giving him flirting smiles or cleavage. It was just the perfume. “If you think I'd turn down a great dinner like this, you've got another think coming. But you have to relax, Will. You look like you're ready to climb the walls.”

“I'm perfectly calm,” he snapped. Guys weren't nervous. Guys were calm in a crisis. Guys took charge. Guys were tough.

When they walked into the restaurant, the tuxedoed maître d' hustled forward to take care of them. Will tensed all over again. He and Kel were early, but he should have guessed his father would arrive even earlier. Aaron, being a classic control freak, liked to study the stage, maneuver where everyone would sit, get all the details set up the way he wanted them.

His father stood when he saw them approaching. Kelly's face lit up as if she recognized her new best friends. “I couldn't wait to meet you two,” she said warmly.

She reached out and hugged Aaron, as if she'd been hugging him all his life, then bent down to hug his mom, who was dressed—how did women
do
that?—in navy and white just like Kel.

She turned back to Will and said, “I'm in love. You told me I'd like them, so I should have guessed I would on sight.”

He'd never heard such bullshit. He'd never said anything of the kind. But Aaron was beaming—of course. His father had always been putty in the hands of a female.

Whatever seating Aaron had planned, Kelly chose the chair between Will and his father. Drink orders were taken. Kelly said she was having whatever his mom was having but, on discovering that was a martini, blushed like a bride and said maybe she'd better stick with wine.

“So how did you two meet?” Barbara asked.

Will braced. The grilling had begun. But Kelly seemed primed for it.

“Will saved me. I'd just gotten into Paris, hadn't even recovered from jet lag, when this mugger grabbed me. He took my purse, every valuable thing I had, scared the wits out of me. Will could have walked on by, but thank heavens he stepped in. I had no passport, no money, no way to even call home, and I was scared….”

Aaron shot him the first look of approval that Will had seen in, well, somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-five years.

“Where do you work, dear? Do you live with your family?”

Kelly named her firm. “I'm a forensic accountant. I love it. Some days I think somebody created the job just for me. And no, I don't live with my mom, although we're really close—and I never knew my dad. For a while, I had a stepdad, a really super guy, but most of the time when I was growing up, there was just my mom and me. I moved out on my own after school. It seemed time for my mom to have her own life, without feeling she had to take care of someone else all the time.”

Will caught his father and mother sharing a half dozen glances. They approved. In fact, by the time their meals were served, Will wondered if he could just put his chin in a palm and nap. He'd known Kelly was sneaky before this, of course, but he'd never dreamed her skill level was this high. Somehow everything she said made his parents believe she was God's gift to their son's life.

Actually, she
was
God's gift to his life. He'd just never seen that sneaky streak of hers show up in his favor before.

Somewhere between the after-dinner brandy and the French pastry choice of desserts, his mom laughed softly, and charmingly went straight for the throat. “So…are you and Will serious?”

“Now, honey, you've been hounding the girl with questions all through dinner. Let her be,” Aaron said, shooting Kelly an I'll-help-you-out-here-darling expression.

“It's all right. I don't mind answering anything,” Kelly said disarmingly. “The truth is, Will and I have only known each other for a short time. Neither of us wants to rush into anything impulsively. He flew home especially for your birthday, Mrs. Maguire, not for me. But yes, we've been seeing each other. And even though that's going great, there's nothing to guess at yet.”

“I love how you handle yourself, dear,” Barbara said warmly.

“I'm a big believer in honesty,” Kelly said as she slid her bare toe up his pant leg under the table. It was an acrobatically challenging thing to do when she was sitting next to him. Normally he wouldn't have thought her toes could bend at that angle. “Really, though, I'd much rather hear more about
your
family. And your business, Mr. Maguire. Everyone knows about Maguire's in South Bend, but I have no idea how your family got into it, how it all happened, if you are from here generations back and all….”

That was it. His dad was happily occupied for dessert, coffee and two brandies, while Kelly sat, looking rapt and enthralled.

His mom didn't want to leave. His dad didn't want to leave. Kelly didn't seem to want to leave.

“Well,” Will said heartily, “I'm afraid it's past ten, and an early workday tomorrow for Kelly—”

“Oh, that's all right, Will. I'm having a great time.” But Kelly suddenly shot a charmingly stricken look at his parents. “Although I know how long we've been sitting here. If I'm monopolizing your evening—”

“You have to be kidding, honey,” Aaron said warmly.

Past eleven, the three of them were still merrily chatting and laughing and sharing stories in the parking lot. Will had had his keys out for ten minutes, Aaron for about the same time. Starlight sparkled in Kelly's hair, on her animated smile when she hugged his mom, his dad.

Everybody had a hugfest.

Aaron hugged him, as well, and vice versa. Will knew damn well the other night's harsh words had not been forgotten, but he'd been raised a certain way. No personal problems showed up in public. The Maguires were a united family.

By the time he climbed into the car and turned the key, he was more wiped out than if he'd climbed Everest
and
K2. Five straight hours of racquetball couldn't be this tiring.

Kelly nestled in, and although she pulled on her seat belt, she managed to curl in the seat with her legs drawn up like a tired puppy's. The brilliantly happy smile she'd had all evening suddenly disappeared in a long, lazy sigh.

“Okay,” she said, “I've got a better picture of the whole situation now.”

“Huh?” She went from the dazzling, sweet, shy, guileless charmer of a new girlfriend to businesslike in two seconds flat. Except for the curled-up legs. That was pure Kel. “They loved you. Not that that's a surprise.”

“They didn't love
me.
They'd have adored any woman you brought home. They'd have groveled at my feet, even if I showed up in a rhinestone cowboy hat and hooker heels and had kin in jail.”

“Say what?” He couldn't imagine where she was getting this.

“Will. If you fall in love with someone from
here,
they think you'll be motivated to stay in South Bend. They'd do cartwheels and handsprings, anything, everything, to get you to stay.”

Okay. He got that. “They still loved you.”

“I liked them, too.”

“You didn't see my dad's manipulative side, though. Don't be thinking all the arguing is my fault.” When she didn't immediately respond, he glanced at her. “What?”

“I was just thinking…”

“Why does your ‘just thinking' strike terror in my heart?”

She grinned, but the humor faded quickly. “Do you know why it's tough for you to communicate with your dad?” She answered her own question before he could have a chance. “You're so much alike.”

“Not in this universe.”

“You're both ambitious, driven. Both very bright. Both the kind of man who has to work for himself, because neither of you could take orders from anyone else. You both take terrific care of those around you but don't let others take care of you. You've both got a charming, public side. You both treat women and men differently. You're Galahads with women, but with men in business, I'm guessing you're both cutthroat.”

“This is all fascinating. You got all that from one filet mignon and two brandies?” He added, “I'm not remotely driven. I could sit around and do nothing forever and be perfectly happy. Quit it,” he said sharply.

But she didn't. She started laughing and wouldn't stop. Worse, it was damn clear that she was laughing at him. “Will,” she gasped, “you're a born business tiger. I'm sorry you don't realize it, but c'mon. Get a grip. Anything you do, you put out five hundred percent.”

“I do not!” Where did she get this crap?

“It's really no wonder your dad wants to turn over the business to you. And yes, of course, I can see why that's a problem for you. Hard to imagine how you could work for your dad. It'd be like putting two tigers in the same cage. A major uh-uh. But the thing is…he knows how good you are. He knows that you could run a business, any business, and be fabulous at it. So it's totally natural that he wants you to follow in his footsteps. You're a natural—”

“The one thing in the entire universe I don't want to do—the
only
thing—is run his business. Much less be manipulated or tricked into doing it. I won't,” he said.

She didn't hear a word he said. In fact, she was still laughing when they got to her place. And yeah, of course he walked her to the door and stood there until she was safely inside, but for the first time since knowing her, he didn't kiss her. Or even want to.

When she closed the door, he sighed and told himself it was a relief—to be so damned mad he didn't want to jump her.

She'd gotten everything wrong, misunderstood everything. For some stupid reason—even though he'd never wanted or allowed sympathy from anyone in his life—he'd just wanted a little taste of it from her. Some compassion. Some empathy. He'd really believed she'd listened to what he tried to tell her.

Instead she'd waltzed right in, schmoozed his parents, and now seemed to think she had answers to everything. One dinner. Hell. He not only didn't want to jump her, he didn't even
like
her at that moment.