Blame It on Paris (27 page)

One look at her and he knew that was true. She was what he needed, all he needed.

“Hey,” she fussed, “are you listening?”

“Of course I'm listening.” She was herding him from project to project at the speed of sound. First, she'd shown him the hardwood floors—newly sanded, ready for a choice of finish. She'd chosen a finish, wanted him to approve. It wasn't the cheapest, but she'd done research and believed it was the sturdiest. That was a yes.

Then she'd picked out models for a new fridge and dishwasher—more easy yeses. Then to the bathroom. She was showing him samples of tile colors.

“So pick,” she said.

“One of those blues,” he said. “Whatever you think.”

“They're all blue, Will. You're not going to be any help to me at all, are you?” It was a rhetorical question, he figured, since Kelly was already moving on to a new subject. “I can't
tell
you how thrilled my mom was with the present you picked out for her. When did you get so brilliant?”

“She liked it, huh?”

“Are you kidding?” The present had been a gift certificate to a florist, where two coral rosebushes were being saved for her. “My mother was beside herself. You won fifty million brownie points with the neighborhood, besides.” She frowned when she heard a noisy engine sound outside. “UPS, it sounds like. I'd better—”

“Of course, go….”

Actually it was FedEx, and when she came back in moments later, he started with another subject they had to cover. “Kelly, I'm stuck on Sunday for my mother's birthday party.”

“Well, of course you are. I'm going. All three of your sisters called me. I'm picking you up before church.”

“Um, problem there, because I'm not going to church. Which the family knows perfectly well.” He could smell his sisters' interference. Kelly would have no reason to know his family had set up her “picking him up” as a maneuver to get him to church. Kelly undoubtedly believed she was helping in some way. He would have explained the situation, but he suddenly caught her expression.

She'd opened an official-looking envelope, looked at the contents and suddenly her face lost color.

“What's in there?” he asked.

“Nothing. Just the lab results.” She tossed the paper into a patchwork basket of other toss-out mail by the door.

“What lab results?”

“The DNA test. I had it done when I got back from Paris. I told you about it. I told the lab to send the results to my father's address, not to me. I didn't want or need to see it. I couldn't care less,” she said swiftly.

“Whoa.” She'd dismissed the report as if it were nothing, which it most certainly wasn't, emotionally or legally, for her. But she moved on as if determined to stick to her conversational agenda.

“Anyway, what if I pick you up, say around quarter to ten on Sunday…because if you're at your mom's that night, then you wouldn't have to drive me home later. Besides, I don't know if you want me to stay through the whole day.”

“It's white tie.” Will lifted his voice to be certain she heard this devastating news.

She only lifted a brow. “I've never worn ties. I'm guessing they'll let me in in a dress.”

Then he remembered that she wouldn't likely be allergic to dressing up the way he was. “I'll pick you up,” he said.

“But it'd be inconvenient for you,” she argued.

He was suddenly aware they were arguing about who was doing the driving, and somehow the fact that he wasn't about to attend a mass had gotten lost in the scuffle. So had everything else. And someone had just turned on a noisy power drill upstairs. “Wait a minute. This lab report you just got—that means your dad now knows for sure that you're his daughter?”

“Will, I told you I've been e-mailing my dad ever since I got back from Paris. He hasn't returned a single note. Not a word. He either doesn't want a daughter or he doesn't want me. If he actually needed DNA as proof, then as far as I'm concerned, he can jump in the pond…and I mean that big pond between the continents. Now about the electricity—”

“Kel. No one was talking about electricity.”

“But we should have been.” She motioned vaguely toward the kitchen. “The guys blew a fuse when they first started working. I just put in another one, but it kept blowing, and the house is of an age, you know, so I called an electrician, asked him to check out the electrical system. Now, I can't imagine you wanting to spend any money you don't have to, but if this were my house, I do believe you should—”

Her cell phone rang at the same time someone knocked on the front door. She threw up her hands at the same time he threw up his. “You get the phone,” he said, “I'll get the door.”

He glanced at his watch before pivoting around. Almost one. He
had
to be back for a meeting at one-thirty. They hadn't finished up all her house questions; he'd had no chance to tell her what had happened with John Henry at work. He had a whole lot more to say about her dad situation, and she probably wanted to know more about the party arrangements on Sunday. And all that was just life stuff. They hadn't had two seconds to talk about
them.

She'd said she'd go to Paris with him. She really, really had. Obstacles or no obstacles, surely they'd get a chance to talk about the one subject that mattered?

Impatiently he answered her front door, only to find the lunkhead, alias Jason, who was close to the last person in the universe Will had the patience for right now. And he could hear Kel on her cell, her voice tone indicating she was dealing with a business call.

It looked like dealing with Jason was on him.

Oh well, Will mused, and stepped outside, meticulously closing the door behind him. As kindly as an old friend, he greeted Jason with, “Hey, I'll bet you had the mother of all headaches last Saturday.”

Poor guy winced. “I did. That's what I was here about. To talk to Kelly.”

“She's tied up. We're both about to head back to work.” Jason didn't look like such a hothead by bright sun in the middle of the day. He looked more like, well, just a decent guy. Buttoned down, for sure, but nothing really wrong with him except that Will noted the fresh haircut, the crisp look of a new shirt. That wasn't for a Wednesday workday. The dude was spiffed up for Kelly.

Not gonna happen.

Jason seemed to finally realize something along that line too, because he said gruffly, “I guess I owe an apology to you, too.”

“No problem at all,” Will said genially. “I'm glad we met. I know we'll run into each other again. Your family's important to Kelly. You both share a lot of friends.”

“We do.”

Jason stood there, as if wanting to push for another chance to see Kelly, but eventually he started shifting his feet. When Will failed to offer more conversation, he scratched the back of his neck, checked a button on his shirt. Finally, he worked up the guts for a blunter approach and said straight out, “Are you and Kelly…” but then couldn't seem to finish the question.

“Yes,” Will said, which covered the complete answer as far as he was concerned.

“She'll always be my first girl,” Jason said, with the same note of beer-courage stubbornness he'd tried out on Saturday.

“I know she will. And it's a good memory for her, hope it is for you. But she'll be my last girl, and I like my place in that line.” Will didn't make it sound like a challenge or a warning. He just stated it like the eternal, irrevocable, irrefutable, undeniable fact that it was.

“Yeah. I get that feeling.” Jason's voice was barely audible. “Well, tell Kelly—”

“I will. She'll be relieved you were okay after Saturday.”

“I don't want her thinking that I wanted to make a scene,” Jason said.

The hell he didn't. But Will, because he was practicing restraint brilliantly at that moment, didn't push. “Hey, it's okay,” he said magnanimously.

A moment later, the front door opened with Kelly looking bewildered, as if she'd been searching all over for him and couldn't imagine where he was. Jason was pulling out of the driveway and Will was waving goodbye to him.

Kelly took one look and started giving him that foot-tapping, hand-on-hip type of posture.

“What?” he said. “I was totally, one hundred percent nice! You can ask him!”

She said nothing.

“I mean it. Kel, it's obvious he's a decent guy. He was embarrassed about Saturday. I tried to make him feel better.”

Kelly murmured, “In a pig's eye.” But she kissed him. He'd been good as gold, maybe better, and yet he somehow got a kiss when he lied to her? And it was a good kiss.

When she leaned back and opened her eyes, she was smiling, their pelvises still glued together. “Why would I bet a week's salary that he won't be back?”

“I have no idea. Since I was so nice to him. But I do think it's conceivable that this is the last time he's going to try seeing you alone the way he did today.” He added, “That's just a guess, of course. I have no basis whatsoever to think that, really. I just—”

“We're on a front porch in the middle of a busy neighborhood, so quit being so damned cute. I can't seduce you here. And we both have to be back at work besides.”

“I was being cute, huh?”

“When you're not being a male chauvinist egomaniac, you can be a little cute,” she qualified.

“And you were thinking about seducing me, huh? Right out here in the open?”

“Would you quit sounding so delighted?” But just then, one of the workers yanked open the door with a question, effectively interrupting them as nothing else could have.

 

K
ELLY THOUGHT
later that she should have known she was inviting trouble. It was the same-old, same-old with Will. They had fifty million things conspiring to keep them apart. His dad. Her dad. Both of their nosy, interfering families. In her case, an insane work schedule, complicated by trying to live in a house with a half dozen construction projects going on. And in Will's case, being swallowed by the magnitude of handling his father's business.

But somehow, when they managed even a few minutes together, they seemed to have fun anyway. They seemed to feel fierce, wild, wonderful desire anyway. They seemed to laugh anyway.

So it was extra frightening, when she heard stones hitting her window at four o'clock on Friday morning, that she wasn't even thrown. All right. She was a
little
thrown. Bleary-eyed, she crawled out of bed, grabbed her cell phone, punched in 9-1-and then peeked out the corner of the window to see what was going on.

And there was Will, standing in the dew-soaked grass. He was wearing a suit, as far as she could see in the dark—a serious going-to-work suit. And grinning up at her like a hyena.

She threw open the sash—no easy thing to do on the old windows in the upstairs bedroom—and leaned out. “You're mad. Stark raving mad. And I'm having you committed.” First, though, she clicked off her phone.

“Can you come down and play?”

“Of course not. It's Friday morning. I get two more hours of sleep before I have to get up and work all day. Do you have anything against rest? Sleep?”

“This is important. And it includes breakfast.”

She sighed. “Give me five.” She closed the window and got in gear—splashing water on her face, brushing her teeth, throwing on gray slacks and a pale blue top, hardly a great work or play outfit, but who could think at four in the morning? She was lucky she remembered shoes, and was still brushing her hair when she jogged outside.

“I don't talk this early, and for damn sure, I shouldn't be expected to be nice,” she warned him.

“I understand.”

“You'd better have a good reason for this.”

“I understand.”

“And I haven't even put on makeup, so don't be looking at me.”

“Yes, ma'am. I won't look.” He added hastily, “Although you don't need makeup to enhance your extraordinary beauty, anyway.”

“I'm not receptive to malarkey this early in the morning, either.”

He made the childish gesture of zipping his lips, making her want to laugh, but she didn't. She held on to her cranky mood for at least four more minutes. Maybe five.

“What in God's name are you up to?” she demanded when he pulled up to the Notre Dame football stadium. A light rain had started up, which made the golden dome glisten bright and magical.

Will looked up at the rain, though, and muttered, “Hell. This may not work out quite as planned.”

“In case no one ever mentioned this to you, the stadium's locked. You can't just walk in there at all hours.”

But somehow or other—Will wouldn't admit how, which made Kelly fret that the means might not be kosher—he produced a key. By the time he was maneuvering the lock, he was also carting a monster-sized box and an umbrella. Naturally she grabbed the umbrella. It was obvious he couldn't juggle everything at once.