Maybe This Time (2 page)

Andie shook her head and another chunk of hair slipped out of her chignon. “Psychotic breaks and setting fires,” she said, as she stuffed it back. “North, I teach high school English. I have no idea how to help kids like this. You need—”

“I need somebody who doesn't care about the way things are supposed to be,” he said, his eyes sliding to her neck. “I think that's
where the nannies are going wrong. I need somebody who will do the unconventional thing without blinking. Somebody who will get things done.” He met her eyes. “Even if she doesn't stay for the long haul.”

“Hey,”
Andie said.

“I would take it as a personal favor. I've never asked you for anything—”

“You asked for a divorce.” As soon as she said it, she knew it was a mistake.

He looked at her over the tops of his glasses, exasperated. “I did not ask you for a divorce.”

“Yes you did,” Andie said, in too far to stop now. “You told me that I seemed unhappy, and if that was true, you would understand if I divorced you.”

“You were playing ‘Any Day Now' every time I came up to the attic. As hints go, it was pretty broad.”

He looked annoyed, so that was something, but it didn't do anything for her anger. “There are people who, if their spouses are unhappy, try to do something about it.”

“I did. I gave you a divorce. You had one foot out the door anyway. Do we need to review that again?”

“No. The divorce is a dead subject.”
And the ghost of it is sitting right here with us.
Although maybe only with her. North didn't looked haunted at all.

“I realize you're getting ready to start a new life,” he went on. “But if you haven't made plans yet, there's no reason you couldn't wait a few months. You could use the money for the wedding.”

“I don't want a wedding, I want to get married. Why are you offering me ten thousand dollars a month for babysitting? You didn't pay the nannies that. It's ridiculous. For ten thousand a month, you should not only get child care, you should get your house cleaned, your laundry done, your tires rotated, and if I were you, I'd insist on nightly blow jobs. Did you think I wouldn't notice that you're still
trying to keep your thumb on me?” She shook her head, and the lock of hair fell out of her chignon again. Well, the hell with that, too.

He sat very still, and then he said, “Why do you have your hair yanked back like that?” sounding as annoyed as she was.

“Because it's
professional
.”

“Not if it keeps falling down.”

“Thank you,” Andie said. “Now butt out. Ten thousand is too much money. You're still trying to pay me off—”

“Andromeda, I'm asking for a favor, a big one, and I don't think the money is out of line. We didn't leave our marriage enemies, so I don't see why you're hostile now.”

“I'm not hostile,” Andie said, and then added fairly, “well, okay, I am hostile. You didn't do anything to save our marriage ten years ago, but every month you send a check so I'll think of you again. It's passive aggressive. Or something. You know the strongest memory I have of you? Sitting right there, behind that desk. You'd think I'd remember you naked with all the mattress time we clocked in that year together, but no, it's you, staring at me from behind all that walnut as if you weren't quite sure who I was. You have no idea how many times I wanted to take an ax to that damn desk just to see if you'd
notice me
.”

North looked down at his desk, perplexed.

“You hide behind it,” Andie said, sitting back now that she wasn't repressing anything anymore. “You use it to keep from getting emotionally involved.”

“I use it to write on.”

“You know what I mean. It gives you distance.”

“It gives me storage. Have you lost your mind?”

Andie looked at him for a moment, sitting there rigid and polite and completely inaccessible. “Yes. It was a bad idea coming back here. I should go now.” She stood up.

“She said the house is haunted,” North said.

“Excuse me?”

“The last nanny. She said there were ghosts in the house. I asked the local police to look into things to see if somebody was playing tricks, but they found nothing. I think it's the kids, but if I send another nanny down there like the previous ones, she's going to quit, too. I need somebody different, somebody who's tough, somebody who can handle the unexpected. Somebody like you. And you're the only person like you that I know.” Suddenly he was the old North again, warm and real with that light in his eyes as he looked at her. “They're little kids, Andie. I can't get them out of there, and I can't leave them there, and with Mother in France, I can't leave the practice long enough to find out what's going on, and even if I could, I don't know anything about kids. I need you.”

Ouch.
“I don't—”

“Everybody they've ever been close to has died,” North said quietly. “Everybody they've ever loved has left them.”

Bastard,
Andie thought. “I can't give you months. That's ridiculous.”

North nodded, looking calm, but she'd been married to him for a year so she knew: He was going in for the kill. “Give them one month then. You can draw your line under us, we don't need to talk, you can send reports to Kristin, hell, take your fiancé down there with you.”

“I'm the least maternal person I know,” Andie said, thinking,
Ten thousand dollars
. And more than that, two helpless kids who'd lost everyone they loved, going crazy in the middle of nowhere.

“I don't think they need maternal,” he said. “I think they need you.”

“A psychotic little girl and a boy who's growing up to be a serial killer. He didn't push his aunt off that tower, did he?”

“They're growing up alone, Andie,” North said, and Andie thought,
Oh, hell
.

The problem was, he sounded sincere. Well, he always did, he was good at that, but now that she really looked at him, he had changed.
She could see the stress in his face, the lines that hadn't been there ten years ago, the tightening of the skin over his bones, the age in the hollows under his eyes. His brother Southie probably still looked as smooth as a boiled egg, but North was still trapped behind that damn desk, taking care of everyone in the family. And now there were two more in the family, and he was handling it alone.

And two little kids were even more alone in a big house somewhere in the wilds of southern Ohio.

“Please,” North said, those gray-blue eyes fixed on her.

“Yes,” Andie said.

He drew a deep breath. “Thank you.” Then he put his glasses back on, professional again. “There's a household account you can draw on for any expenses, and a credit card. The housekeeper will clean and cook for you. If you come by tomorrow, Kristin will give you a copy of this folder with everything you need in it and your first check, of course.”

Andie sat there for a moment, a little stunned that she'd said yes. She'd felt the same way after he'd proposed.

“I'd appreciate it if you could go down as soon as possible.”

“Right.” She shoved her hair back, picked up her purse, and stood up again. “I'll drive down tomorrow and see what I can do. You have a good winter terrorizing the opposing counsel.”

She headed for the door, refusing to look back. This was good. She'd given back the checks and cut the connection, so she could spare a month to save two orphans. Will was in New York for the next two weeks anyway, and he'd come home to a fiancée with no debt, and then—

“Andie,” North said, and she turned back in the doorway.

“Thank you,” he said, standing now behind his desk, tall and lean and beautiful and looking at her the way he'd used to.

Get out of here.
“You're welcome.”

Then she turned and walked out before he could say or do anything else that made her forget she was done with him.

•  •  •

After Andie left, North sat for a moment considering the possibility that he'd lost his mind. He'd had the résumés of several excellent nannies on his desk, and he'd hired his ex-wife instead.
Fuck,
he thought, and deliberately put her out of his mind, which was difficult since she'd mentioned blow jobs. Which were irrelevant because he and Andie were over, had been for ten years.
Blow jobs.
No, she was right: Draw a line under it. He went back to work, making notes on his newest case as the shadows grew longer and Kristin left for the night, definitely not thinking about Andie, his black capital letters spaced evenly in straight rows, as firm and as clear as his thinking—

He stopped and frowned at the page. Instead of “Indiana” he'd written “Andiana.” He marked an
I
over the
A
but the word sat there on the page, misspelled and blotted, a dark spot on the clear pattern of his day.

There was a knock on the door at the same time it opened.

“North!” his brother Sullivan said as he came in, his tie loosened and his face as genial as ever under his flop of brown hair.

Say hi to Southie for me,
Andie had said. It had been ten years since anybody had called Sullivan “Southie.”

“You look like hell.” Sullivan lounged into the same chair Andie had taken and put his feet on the desk. “You can't work round the clock. It's not healthy.”

Your whole life isn't the damn law firm, North,
Andie had said a month before she'd left him.
You have a life. And you have me although not for much longer if you don't knock off this I-live-for-my-work crap.

“I like my work,” he said to his brother now. “How's Mother?”

“Now that's health. That woman was built for distance.”

North pictured their elegant, platinum-haired mother running a marathon in her pearls, kicking any upstarts out of the way with the pointed end of her heels as she crossed the finish line. She'd been thrilled when Andie left.

“It's you I'm worried about,” Sullivan was saying. “You're working too hard, too much on your plate, trying to run the whole practice with Mother gone—”

“My plate is fine. However, I am in the middle of—”

“No, no, it's time I helped out.” Sullivan smiled at him. “I've been thinking about what I could do, but I figure you'd fall on your number two pencil before you'd let me help with the practice.”

North looked down at the black pen mark that made “Andiana” such a blot. A number two pencil would be a good idea if he was going to start making mistakes.

“So I was thinking of something a little more in my area and out of yours,” Sullivan said. “People. You're not a people person, North. I am.”

“People.” North turned the top sheet on his legal pad over so he didn't have to look at the blot.
Andiana. What the hell?

“You remember those two kids that second cousin left you a while back?”

“Yes,” North said, fairly sure that had been a rhetorical question, although with Sullivan, you never knew.

“I thought I might drop in, check on things for you, see how they're doing.”

North looked up at that. “You want to ‘drop in' to the wilds of southern Ohio to visit two children you've never met.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Sullivan grinned at him. “I want to see the house.”

“The house isn't worth anything. It's in the middle of nowhere.”

“It's haunted.”

“Sullivan, there are no such things as ghosts,” North said, and for a moment he was twelve again and Sullivan was six, staring wide-eyed into the room where their father was laid out in his coffin.
He's not going to sit up, Southie,
North had said then.
He's dead. There's no such thing as ghosts.

“I know that,” Sullivan said now. “But I want to see a house that everybody thinks is haunted.”

“ ‘Everybody' being a nanny who got bored and wanted out.”

“Other people have thought so, lots of rumors. So I thought I'd go down there and talk to some of the people. See what's going on.”

“And how did you find out about these rumors?”

“I did some research for a friend of mine. She's interested in hauntings, and she looked me up at a party and talked to me about the house and, you know, it
is
interesting.”

“She,” North said, Sullivan's motives becoming much clearer now. The combination of a shiny new hobby and a shiny new girlfriend must have been irresistible.

“Kelly O'Keefe. The ghost thing is fascinating. I've talked to—”

“Kelly O'Keefe?” North thought of the tiny, sharp-faced, sharp-tongued newscaster he'd avoided after one viewing. “The little blonde with the teeth on Channel Twelve?”

“They're very good teeth,” Sullivan said, going for indignant and missing.

“They look like they were very expensive,” North said, and remembered Andie the first time he'd seen her, her big eyes dancing, her curly hair wild, her wide smile flashing her overlapped front teeth. She'd never had her teeth fixed.

“Well, you need good teeth for TV.”

“True.” That had been the first thing his mother had said about her.
For God's sake, North, get her teeth fixed.

“The close-ups are murder,” Sullivan said.

And he'd said,
I like her teeth. I like everything about her. And now you do, too, Mother.

Sullivan was looking at him oddly. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” North said.

“Okay. Well, then, I'd like to take Kelly down there and look into the ghosts. I can check on the kids for you while I'm there.”

“I'd prefer you didn't,” North said bluntly. “I don't see Kelly O'Keefe being a good experience for them.”