Sunburst

Then it was gone, just that quickly. Morgan brought platters to the table with a flourish that announced a gourmet delight. It was impossible to tell what he would come up with when he was given free rein in the kitchen. Tonight the menu was Chinese-chicken, pea pods and peppers in a tangy-sweet sauce, rice and a salad she could guess Kyle’s reaction to, with sprouts, fresh mushrooms, some sort of raw fish.

“It looks delicious,” Erica hurriedly assured Morgan.

“When are you going home so I can have my cook back, Morgan?” Kyle questioned blandly.

Morgan only chuckled. “Listen, McCrery, you can’t survive exclusively on meat and potatoes. I’ve been trying to expand your tastes ever since we were in school together.”

“Don’t buy that,” Kyle told Erica. “When we roomed together, he volunteered to do the cooking if I’d do the general cleanup. If I’d known I was going to end up the sacrificial lamb as a result of that arrangement…” He shook his head. “I can remember the first ‘flaming’ dish he put on. Or put out, to be more accurate. The effect was wasted on his redhead of the moment. We ate smoke for a week.”

Erica chuckled.

“You’re out of your mind,” Morgan informed him. “I get sole credit for the fact that you’re alive today, McCrery. You were trying to survive on four hours’ sleep and potato chips.”

“The only time I was sick in four years was the day you tried out that Indian curry. You’d have thought we’d been drinking contaminated water.”

“It wasn’t that bad-”

“You were sicker than I was.”

Erica relaxed, familiar with their baiting of each other. Thunder crashed outside, lightning streaked a flight of stairs in the sky. She got up to close the long curtains at the front windows. When she returned to the table, she picked up her fork again, only to hear an insistent scratching at the back door. She did her best to ignore it. Blessedly, neither of the men seemed to hear anything. She was relieved to hear them bickering normally; at times lately, they seemed to have less and less in common with each other…

When her plate was empty, Erica got up as if her sole purpose were to set it on the counter. The counter, of course, was a stone’s throw from the back door. The cat was inside before anyone could notice-if the creature had only had the sense not to leap directly for Kyle. Morgan burst out laughing.

Nuisance, she had named the animal, and truthfully the feline looked as good as she was ever going to look after all Erica’s care. The cat was much fatter, her coat almost healthy-looking… But not now. Drenched, Nuisance resembled an oversized rat. Kyle glared down beneath the table, as the cat promptly wound itself damply around his legs.

“She likes you,” Erica said lamely. “Kyle, I couldn’t just leave her out in the rain.”

She quickly set down a saucer of milk to divert the cat, but Nuisance was already roaring a thunderous purr on Kyle’s now-damp stockinged feet. He glanced again under the table and gave a mock shudder of disgust for Morgan’s benefit.

“Cheer up,” Morgan advised. “They say you can at least temporarily ward off a woman’s maternal urges if you get her a pet. I have a feeling you two wouldn’t exactly appreciate a baby right now. A cat’s a hell of a lot cheaper.”

Something changed; Erica couldn’t define it. Kyle leaned back lazily in his chair, eyes riveted on Morgan. “Why on earth would you have the feeling we wouldn’t welcome a baby right now?”

Morgan shrugged. “Well, obviously, financially…”

Kyle shoved his half-full plate away from him, shaking his head mockingly at Morgan. “Sorry, Shane, but one baby wouldn’t be any more problem than one cat, financially or in any other way,” he said shortly, and gave another wry shake of his head at Nuisance, who was staring up at him adoringly. “Though Erica would have to find the mangiest feline in the whole country to take on. I had hoped she could keep her secret a little longer. I have a continual nightmare that, given the least encouragement, she’d have a dozen cats wandering all over the place.”

“Of all the unjustified, exaggerated…” Erica sputtered indignantly.

“Now you have been known to go overboard when you get started on a cause,” Kyle chided teasingly. “Particularly a lost cause…”

But she was watching, mesmerized, as his long arm reached down and his fingers lazily scratched the cat’s neck. When she bent down for a better look, his hand whipped back up to the table, but she wasn’t fooled. “You’ve been feeding her, too,” she accused.

“Never! A cat?”

“I thought we were going through an awful lot of milk.”

“Erica. I hate cats.” But his hand was sneaking down again and Erica smiled broadly at her big, tough, brooding Irishman.

“So that’s why you haven’t produced a little McCrery,” Morgan interjected harshly. “You think she wouldn’t want to stop at one.”

Erica’s head whipped around at his strangely abrasive tone. A tone that Kyle suddenly matched. “Still worrying about it, Morgan? You’ll be a godfather, all in good time. You’re the only one we know with enough money to be godfather to the brood Erica and I want.”

“And I’m sure they’ll all be black-haired, blue-eyed little Irishmen,” Morgan said sarcastically.

“You can bet on it.” Kyle smiled.

Erica could have turned water to ice cubes with her smile. The brood of children she wanted was news to her. The subject of a family seemed to have come out of nowhere, along with Morgan’s hostility and Kyle’s matching antagonism. Kyle had wanted her to himself in the beginning. He had made no secret of that, and it was exactly what she had wanted as well. He’d been a busy man, and she’d wanted every free minute she could have with him. Only for the past year and a half or so had her maternal urges become more insistent yearnings…but then his father had become ill. Children were important to her, but never as important as Kyle.

The men moved away from the table, went down to the living room, and Erica hurried to take care of the dishes. Morgan was as uneasy as a prowling cougar. Restlessly, he paced to the drapes and back to his chair; then he was up again to pour drinks for both men. Though they were talking about the progress of the building, Erica noted again a charged tension between the two men that never used to be there. She didn’t know what to make of it, but she had the curious feeling that if she didn’t get away from them, the whole brilliant happiness of the earlier afternoon was going to splinter like shattered glass.

She finished the last of the dishes, switched off the counter lights and scooped up the cat as she paused by the stairs. “Excuse me, will you two?” They were oblivious to her. Nuisance curled to her neck, encouraged by the rain- silken curtain of her hair. Upstairs, Erica sank into the chair in her own special corner of the room, feeling a sudden weariness as she reached for the basket of crewel beside her. As she worked with her hands, she felt the tension inside her evaporate. The lamp made a soft halo all around her in the peaceful room. The cat nestled at her side, batting interestedly at the bright yarn as she worked.

The men’s voices carried upstairs, but she paid no attention. Absently, she noticed that there were two packages still to be put away. She folded the negligee with care and shook out the dress before hanging it up, admiring both garments silently, crumpling the wrappings and tossing them in the wastebasket. The little noises blurred the sound of voices from below, until she sat down with her embroidery again.

“We’ve known each other a long time, yet only once, Kyle, did you ever really talk about your father,” Morgan was saying. “We were both drunk out of our minds, we had just sent a pair of twin blondes home. Do you remember?”

The cat’s claws instinctively tightened on Erica’s thigh when she stiffened. Kyle’s quiet voice had the kind of timbre that carried.

“I remember our sophomore year as a time when we took on everything in three-month binges, from philosophy to social causes to drinking. Hardly a time to put much stock in anything either of us said.”

“You said he was a failure. You were scared as hell of following in his footsteps. You washed floors to put yourself through school, waited tables, anything, McCrery, to make sure you had what you needed to get to the top-”

“My father wasn’t a failure,” Kyle replied curtly. “I thought that, yes. I thought a lot of asinine things when I was twenty. He refused to do what he didn’t want to do, and he lived as he chose to live. I no longer call that being