Adopt-a-Dad

“No.” He took the shampoo from her and emptied half of it into the tub. Socks almost visibly flinched. “I’m soaked to the skin already, and there are fleas doing the backstroke in here. Hunting and killing is man’s work. Clear out, lady, while I do the dreadful deed. I’ll bring him out to you after I’ve toweled him dry.”

“Are you sure?” Jenny gazed doubtfully at her bedraggled mutt, who looked even more doubtfully at her. “Poor Socks. He looks so sad.”

“He’s sad!” It was all Michael could do not to utter an expletive. “I’m itchy, I’m half drowned and I’ve been told I’m adopting a dog who’s half Shetland pony and half goat-and he looks sad!”

“I guess I can leave you to your fun,” Jenny said, chuckling. “I’ll plug in the hair dryer in your doggy salon-I mean, in your living room-and wait for you there.”

She ducked and bolted for cover as a sodden towel whizzed straight at her head.

DOG SALON or living room? Ha! It was neither. Michael’s living room looked as if it had never been used in its life. White shag carpet, white sofa, glass coffee table with designer fruit bowl and designer fruit.

Jenny picked up an apple and took a bite, amazed to find it was real. His housekeeper must go to heaps of trouble with this fruit bowl, she thought, selecting and arranging each piece like an artwork. She grinned as she looked down, suppressing an almost irresistible urge to take a bite from every piece and leave it like that.

“Cut it out, Jenny Morrow,” she said. “You let Michael’s beautiful artwork be.”

But the fire was a different thing. It, too, looked designer perfect, with pine cones and logs set in artful symmetry. The firebricks in the back were still white. It really hadn’t been used. Austin’s climate was mild in fall and winter, but Jenny was still feeling the dampness of the riverbank, and the thought of crackling logs was definitely appealing. After all, she was going to live here, too.

No more apologies.

She took a match from the beautiful white ceramic container on the white mantel and watched guiltily as the flames flickered into life. Then she stuck her bare toes out to the warmth and sighed with sheer sensual pleasure. Yes!

That was how Michael found her when he hauled the towel-dried Socks in from the laundry room. She was sitting staring into the flames, and for once, his living room looked lovely.

No. Jenny looked lovely.

She glanced at him, her eyes dancing in the firelight. When she held out her hands to greet her wet dog, Michael felt his gut wrench in a way it never had before.

“I… He’s all yours.” Heck, his voice sounded strangled. “I’ll just go take a shower myself.”

He practically bolted out the door, with Jenny looking strangely after him.

IT TOOK MICHAEL twenty minutes to shower, anoint his various bites and regain his composure. When he returned, he found a transformation of gigantic proportions.

Dirty, flea-ridden and starved, Socks had looked appalling. When he was wet, every rib had stood out and he looked bedraggled and sodden, all big eyes and droopy ears.

But now, blow dried and brushed with love… Michael stopped at the living room door and stared.

Socks would never win any pedigree dog prizes, but his coat was a gorgeous honey color. His ears were a mass of rippling silken fur, and the rest of his coat would soon match. Jenny was lying full length on her side on the carpet before the fire, still in his red bathrobe, gently stroking the dog’s matted fur over and over. The two of them made an amazing splash of color in the golden firelight.

Jenny had a brush in one hand and a hair dryer in the other, and there was a pair of businesslike scissors on the floor beside her. She picked them up as he walked in and waved them in his direction.

“Great. We need one person on brush and one person on scissors. He has king-size mats under his tummy. They stink like crazy when you put them on the fire.”

Michael blinked. The tableau before him was almost surrealistic.

Socks, however, was enjoying himself to the hilt, sitting up in front of the fire as if he was on show. When Jenny mentioned his matted fur, he tucked his head under his chest and looked down, as if inspecting his belly for himself. And then he returned his gaze to Jenny.

Good grief. The dog was practically purring.

I would be, too, Michael thought, dazed, staring at them in stunned amazement, if Jenny was brushing me!

It was a ridiculous thought. Somehow he shoved it aside and knelt to take the scissors from Jenny’s hand. Their fingers brushed briefly as she passed them to him, and the feeling was like an electric shock striking right through his body. It was as much as he could do not to pull away as if burned.

“Oh, Michael, you’re flea-bitten.” She looked sympathetically at the red splotches on his chest. He’d hauled on a pair of jeans but left his chest bare, all the better to apply calamine lotion. She reached out a finger to touch, but he pulled back. No way.

“You…you must be, too.” He sounded like an embarrassed schoolkid. Why the heck wasn’t she feeling this strange charge between them?

“Nope.” She grinned. “Or not very much. You must be fatter. They always chew the fat ones first.”

“Right.”

“It’s true,” she said seriously. “My dad always said that.”

“And he was a flea expert? I though you said he was a miner.”

“His hobby was entomology.” She gave him a cheeky look. “An entomologist is someone who studies insects.”

“I know what an entomologist is,” he said, goaded.

“Sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry at all. “I just thought, you being American and all…”

“You’re saying my knowledge of the Queen’s English isn’t all it ought to be?”

“I expect you’ll get it right sometime,” she said kindly. “Just as soon as you learn to spell.”

“Yeah, right.” It had been a major source of conflict between them in the months she’d been his secretary. She’d type center as centre. He’d change it, and she’d patiently change it back again. He’d given up in the end, letting her spell as she darn well pleased, and he gave in now. Anything for a quiet life!

“Okay. Okay. So what’s a coal miner doing with a hobby like entomology?”

“Contrary to what Gloria believes, being a miner didn’t make my father ignorant,” she said. She glared, defying him to argue. “There was no money to educate him, so my dad left school after grade eight, but he kept right on learning.”

“He studied insects in his spare time?”

“So did my mother,” she said proudly. “They wrote a great research paper that’s still widely acclaimed all about the habits of bumblebees. I remember hours and hours with my parents, tracking individual bumblebees-only we kept getting them confused. It’s very hard to tell one bee from another, you know. Unless…” Her voice grew thoughtful. “Unless you’re another bumblebee, I guess.”

“You’re probably right.”

She didn’t seem to notice his amusement, or the way he was watching her. He couldn’t keep his eyes from her.

“In the end my father roped them with a piece of fine thread, and we’d run around the garden with our chosen bumblebee tied on our line like a kite,” she told him. She chuckled. “It was a good piece of research. There aren’t many kids whose dad gets home from work, grabs his string and heads out to the garden to rope bumblebees.”

“I can see that,” Michael said faintly. He hesitated, still watching the firelight flickering over her face. “It’s a good memory to have.”

“It’s part of me,” she said softly, lifting a tuft of Socks’s hair for inspection. “Cut here, Michael. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I mean, my parents-they’re part of who I am, and if this little one inside me starts following bumblebees, then I’ll be really proud. I’ll know where it comes from.”

She paused, as if unsure whether to continue. But she did. “Don’t you feel that about your own birth parents? That you need to know them-that there’s a part of you missing?”

“No,” he said flatly. “I don’t need them.”

“I’ve learned not to need my parents, too,” she told him sadly. “I had no choice. But every morsel of