Belonging to Taylor (5 page)

"Uh-huh. I'm his receptionist this year."

"This year?" he managed blankly.

"Yes, I—Oh, hold on, will you?"

The receiver buzzed in his ear for a few moments; then Taylor was back.

"Sorry, the office is busy today. Why don't you come for dinner? You can go on over to the house; I'll be off in a couple of hours. If you'd like to, that is."

The last diffident sentence got him. "Oh, what the hell. Should I bring something for dinner?"

"Just willing hands," she told him softly, and hung up.

Trevor stared at the receiver in his hand for a moment, then
thoughtfully cradled it. With rueful self-mockery, he wondered how on earth a logical, analytical lawyer could have gotten in so deeply over his head.

He continued to wonder about that while he was driving the Jeep out of the city and into the suburb where Taylor lived. But whenever he'd begin to wonder too deeply, a pair of vivid blue eyes would intrude. Trevor finally dispensed with the useless reflection, understanding wryly that neither logic nor analysis was going to produce an answer this time.

Jessie was beside the Jeep almost as soon as it stopped in the drive, and she had Trevor's hand in hers when his feet had barely touched the pavement.

"Oh, I
knew
you'd come! Hurry, Trevor, we have to get Jack before Solomon brings her kittens down and I've practiced a new song—would you like to hear it? You
do
like music, don't you?" She threw the last question anxiously over her shoulder, towing him along behind her like a tiny tugboat pulling a battleship.

Trevor laughed, but something about the moppet touched him in a way he'd never been touched before. It wasn't just her ridiculous sentences or apparently wild mood swings; he sensed that she needed something from him, something her clearly loving family couldn't provide. And he wondered if Jessie of the "least ability" felt that lack more than her family realized.

He kept his voice casual and friendly when he answered her anxious question, determined to do nothing to set up barriers between himself and the child. '"I love music, Jessie; 1 took piano lessons when I was your age."

Her gray eyes were neither vague like her mother's nor brilliant like her father's, but were distinctively her own: deep smoky pools that brooded one moment and gleamed with a disconcerting wisdom the next. But they flared brilliantly when he claimed some knowledge of music.

"You know music? Really?"

A bit uneasily, Trevor sought to dampen her enthusiasm in the gentlest manner possible. As the side door banged just behind them, he said carefully, "It was a long time ago, Jessie. I haven't played in years."

"But at least you
know,"
she said intensely. "No one else
here knows. Oh, they all love music, but they can't play even a note. Not even Daddy, and he has clever hands."

Thoughtfully, Trevor noted that Jessie's sentences became much less tangled when she spoke of music. He filed that knowledge away in his mind as they entered the cheerfully cluttered den and were immediately addressed by Sara, who was sitting between Jamie and Dory on the couch.

"Jamie closed the laundry room door so Jack can't get out. Hurry and sit down; Solomon wants us to meet her babies."

Pulled firmly down beside Jessie on the love seat, Trevor wondered distantly why no one had thought to close that door yesterday, then silently chastised himself for trying to make sense of anything in this house. But he couldn't help wondering how they could be so sure the cat was about to present her kittens for inspection. Did cats even
do
that?

The Shannon cat did.

She came around the corner just then, ignoring the poodle, which was sitting very still by the doorway. In a measured tread so careful that they could almost hear the music of a march, she entered the room—a tremendous Siamese cat with comically crossed blue eyes and a pure white kitten held securely in her mouth.

Like everyone else, Trevor found himself sitting very still and gazing at the mother and child with respectful eyes. He watched as Solomon gently deposited the kitten on the carpet squarely in the middle of the room, then sat down and gazed—or, at least, appeared to gaze—at Sara.

"How lovely, Solomon," Sara said instantly.

The cat released a peculiarly contented rumble, picked up the kitten, and marched regally from the room. She was back moments later with a kitten, and the little ceremony was repeated.

After she left with the fourth kitten, Trevor could no longer repress a burning question. "How do we know she isn't bringing the same kitten down every time? They're all identical."

Sara's vague eyes focused on him reprovingly. "Of course she isn't, Trevor. A mother knows her children."

Meekly, Trevor watched the fifth repetition of the ceremony. But when the cat had disappeared, he had another question. "Does she do this with every litter?"

"Oh, yes," Sara answered.

"Then why doesn't she wait for the whole family to be here?" Instantly, he felt abashed at the question, telling himself it was ludicrous to suppose the cat could count people or reason. But Sara's answer made his question quite logical and sane by comparison.

"To tease Luke, of course."

"I beg your pardon?" he managed.

"Luke won't let her hide the kittens. He always finds them. So Solomon shows them to the rest of us to get even with him."

"Oh." Trevor decided that there was absolutely nothing he could do with that explanation but accept it. Rather like the way, he reflected, he could only accept his absorption into this ridiculous family.

When
Taylor came into the house some time later, she
found him in a room off the den, seated in a comfortable chair with Dory nestled confidingly in his lap as they both listened to Jessie play the baby grand piano.

Trevor sent her a quick smile—instantly returned—but said nothing as she came to perch silently on the arm of his chair. And they listened intently as Jessie completed a rather difficult sonata with an expertise belying her young age. As soon as she'd finished, he asked, "D'you compete, Jess?" He'd adopted the diminutive of her name at her request.

She turned on the bench to regard him with bright eyes. "No, never have. I just love to play. D'you ... think I'm good enough to compete?"

He replied with total honesty. "I went to a West Coast competition last year for kids under eighteen; if you'd competed, you would have won."

Her gray eyes glowed brilliantly. "Really?"

"I think you'd have won, Jess. I really do."

Jessie bounded up, excitement lighting her small face. 'Taylor, d'you think Mother and Daddy'd let me?"

Taylor was smiling at her. "Why don't you ask them? Mother's digging up flowers out back; Daddy went out there when we came in."

Instantly, her sister raced from the room.

"Digging up flowers?" Trevor queried dryly.

Before she could answer, Dory wiggled from his lap, saying in her gruff little voice, "I want to watch Daddy comb his hair." She looked sternly at Trevor, her hand on his knee. "You won't go away?"

"Not for a while," he said gently, and watched her leave the room before he looked up at Taylor plaintively. "Digging up flowers? And what's that about your father combing his hair?"

She grinned faintly. "It's a little game Mother and Daddy play. At least I think it is, since it's been going on as long as I can remember. The flower bed's Daddy's, you see; he can get anything to grow. And Mother can't tell a flower from a weed until the former's bloomed, which they haven't as yet. So every day during the spring Mother wanders out to the flower bed just before Daddy's due home. And when Daddy comes in and is told by someone—Jamie today—that Mother's in back with a trowel, he lets out an anguished groan and bolts out there to save his flowers."

Fascinated, Trevor said, "What does he say to her?"

"Always the same thing. He takes the trowel away from her very gently and asks if she'd mind fixing him a cup of coffee. Then when she comes into the house, he rakes his hair with both hands—the 'combing' Dory was talking about— and hides the trowel in the garage."

"How's her coffee?" he asked, remembering Sara's ineptitude in the kitchen.

Taylor laughed. 'Terrible! Daddy says it's strong enough to raise the dead; he pours it in the flower bed when she isn't looking. It seems to be a dandy fertilizer."

Chuckling, Trevor reached quite unconsciously to pull her down into his lap. "You have a remarkable family, lady."

"Never dull, anyway," she responded, smiling, utterly relaxed in his lap.

He realized then what he'd done. For a moment, he looked bemusedly at their positions, she on his lap and he with one arm around her shoulders and the other lying possessively across her thighs, then closed his eyes for a moment. "I knew it'd happen," he said mournfully.

"What?" she asked, polite, her hands resting on the arm across her thighs.

"I knew you'd entice me into this loony bin!"

"/ didn't call
you,"
she reminded.

"Didn't you?" his voice was rueful. "Now I know how Ulysses felt."

"If you're referring to a siren song; I'll point out that I've never warbled a note in your direction."

"You bewitched me!"

She giggled. "If it makes you feel better to think that."

"It makes me question my sanity slightly less than I would otherwise." he admitted wryly.

"Better bewitched than intelligently unresisting, huh?"

"Bewitched or not, I
am
resisting," he claimed stoutly. "For instance, I am manfully ignoring the ridiculously demure picture you present sitting on my lap wearing a skirt and frilly blouse."

She looked down at herself for a moment, then said thoughtfully, "Yes, you are, aren't you? I'll try for sexy rather than demure next time. Only this, you understand, was for Daddy's patients—not you."

"Oh, of course."

"They wouldn't feel very comfortable with a siren in the office."

"Perfectly understandable." He cleared his throat, deciding it would be better to change the subject. "Speaking of which, you said something on the phone about being your father's receptionist this year?"

Predictably, she didn't need the question to be clarified. "That's right. I've done something different every year since college. The first year, I went to France as—believe it or not— a governess to the young daughter of an American couple who were transferred over there for a year. The second year, I worked as an executive assistant to the manager of an American oil company based in Saudi Arabia. Since then, I've worked here in Chicago—first as a veterinary assistant, then as a private security guard."

Trevor lifted both brows as he gazed at the slender, dainty lady on his lap. "A private security guard?"

"Never judge a lady by her inches," Taylor advised serenely. "Daddy taught me karate as soon as I could walk, and boxing some years later. And since he's an expert marksman and has an
excellent collection of guns upstairs in his study, I can handle weapons quite well."

"But a
security guard?"

"Seemed the thing to do at the time. I like doing different things. As a matter of fact, I'm up for a job in Australia after the first of next year."

"Doing what?"

She grinned. "Assistant to a lawyer. I have some paralegal training."

He lifted only one brow this time. "If you go to Australia," he pointed out, "you can hardly marry me. I don't want to live down under."

"I said I was up for the job, not that I'd accepted it."

"But you'd be bored anyway, living with a dull lawyer like me."

"Oh, I don't know," she said easily. "I'm sure I'd be able to bear up under the strain."

"I work late most nights—"

"I love to read."

"—and take a vacation only every other year—"

"You obviously need a wife to make you take better care of yourself."

Trevor showed her a mock frown. "Right. Just a gentle little woman who could shoot me or throw me over her shoulder if she felt like it."

"My temper's not
very
bad," she explained anxiously.

"I can see it now. I'd be in a bad mood—we all have them, after all—and you'd read my mind and do something rash."

"No, because I'd
know
you were in a bad mood and understand."

"I'd snap at you, and you'd cry."

"There is that," she admitted ruefully. "It'd be just the thing to set me off, too."

Shaking his head, Trevor murmured, "Worser and worser."

"Not exactly traditional wife material, am I?" she mourned.

"Well, you can cook."

Taylor brightened. "I can, can't I? I can sew, too. And I'd never get mad if you brought home someone unexpectedly for dinner."

"You wouldn't?"

"Certainly not. A man's home is his castle."

A little wryly, Trevor said, "But I bet you'd expect me to clean the moat."