“When we move to our new ’partment, will he live there?”
“No, it’ll just be the two of us. Just us girls.”
Kaylee frowned, and she wiggled her foot making it nearly impossible for Jane to tie her shoe. “I want him to live with us.”
Jane groaned inwardly. “He can’t live with us, sweetie. He’s not part of our family.”
“Why not?”
“Because…because families are made up of mommies and daddies and children and…and…” Oh, God, how did she explain this?
“Max could be my daddy.”
Oh, boy. “Kaylee, you already have a daddy.” A rotten daddy, but Jane still hoped that Scott would straighten up and form a decent relationship with his daughter once the sting of the divorce had worn off. She wouldn’t do anything to ruin that for the future.
“But my daddy’s not here.”
“True, but that doesn’t mean he’s not your daddy.”
“Then I could have two daddies. Joanie at school has two daddies.”
Ay-yi-yi. “Kaylee, please, can we talk about something else? Max is a good friend, and he’s my boss, and we owe him a lot, but he’s not your daddy and he doesn’t live with us.”
Kaylee’s big blue eyes welled up with tears. “Why not?”
“Oh, baby.” She gathered her little girl into a hug and squeezed her tight. “I know it’s tough that we don’t have a daddy living with us. But I’m your mommy and I love you enough for all the daddies in the whole world. A hundred daddies couldn’t love you the way I do.”
Jane braced herself for a tantrum, but it didn’t come. Instead, Kaylee cried quietly, almost silently, as if her heart had just been broken, and maybe it had been. Maybe she finally understood that her daddy wasn’t coming back. Jane had thought her daughter’s transition from two parents to one had gone a little too smoothly.
It was all Jane could do not to cry herself. Seeing her daughter skin a knee or bump her head was hard enough; Jane died a thousand deaths every time anything hurt her baby. But seeing her with her first real, true emotional hurt was almost more than Jane could stand.
By the time she arrived at the Montessori school, Kaylee had stopped crying, but she still looked and sounded sad and nothing Jane could say would cheer her up-not even promises to take her to her favorite pizza place.
Miss Martha, Kaylee’s teacher, waved from the porch as Jane got Kaylee out of her car seat.
“Give me a hug, and I’ll see you at five-fifteen at Mrs. Billingsly’s.”
Kaylee hugged her, but trouble still brewed in her eyes. “Mommy, will you ask him?”
“Ask who what?”
“Ask Max if he wants to be my daddy.”
Now Jane’s eyes did fill with tears. “I can’t, sweetie. I know you don’t understand, but the world just doesn’t work that way. But he can still be your special friend.”
Kaylee firmed her mouth in a mutinous line, clearly not buying the comfort Jane offered. She ran off toward Miss Martha without a backward glance.
Jane got back behind the wheel and moved the car forward, but she didn’t go far. She turned onto the first quiet side street she saw and parked while she pulled herself together.
She spent several minutes parked there, working through every conceivable solution to this problem, and every time she reached the same conclusion.
This wasn’t going to work. If she didn’t want to disappoint her daughter over and over and over again, she was going to have to stop seeing Max.
It was best to find out now, she reasoned, before they’d gotten in too deep. But then she realized she was kidding herself. They’d been involved since the moment she’d walked into his office looking for a job-maybe from the moment he’d first flirted with her, earning Scott’s wrath. Yes, they’d only recently consummated their feelings in bed, but that didn’t mean what they had was slight or shallow.
She was already in deep. And she had to get out.
Not only was she losing Max, but she was losing her job, as well. Oh, Max wouldn’t fire her. At least, she didn’t think he would. But it would be too painful to continue working so close to him when she couldn’t have him.
She would have to resign.
“EDDIE!” Max spotted his older brother at the baggage claim. They strode toward each other, shook hands in a contest of who could squeeze harder, then broke down and hugged.
“Man, you look great,” Eddie said. “You got a tan!”
“I got that before I started the agency,” Max said. “It’s fading fast now that I’m working eighty-hour weeks.”
“I hear ya.” Eddie, dressed in perfect business casual, grabbed his leather clutch from the baggage carousel. “That’s all. Where to first?”
Max thought it a little odd that Eddie was letting him call the shots. Normally Eddie was an in-charge kind of guy, scheduling his time down to the minute. Max half expected his brother to produce a typed itinerary and had rehearsed how he would insist that he had his own schedule to keep-meetings and obligations. Max was the in- charge guy now, and he wanted his brother to know it.
But Eddie didn’t try to control anything. He followed Max to the parking lot, praising the mild weather, the beautiful flowers still in bloom, the palm trees, the scent of the ocean.
“You really did move to paradise,” he said, almost to himself, as he wedged his bag behind the seats of Max’s ’Vette.
“It wasn’t paradise in the summer,” Max added for the sake of argument. “It was hotter than hell, even with an ocean breeze. But the winters are supposed to be great. So where to? Your hotel?”
“I…I thought I’d stay with you.”
“Hey, great. No problem.” Another departure. Eddie hated bunking with relatives. He traveled a lot and was accustomed to first-class hotels with twenty-four-hour room service and a concierge.
Eddie grinned. “Let’s get some breakfast, then. Take me to that greasy spoon you’re always going on about.”
“Old Salt’s?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
Max resisted the urge to ask who this man was and what he’d done with Eddie. Something was up, but Eddie would reveal it when he was ready. Max only hoped it wasn’t some elaborate hoax to get him to come back home.
During breakfast, Eddie kept gazing out at the ocean, sometimes looking perplexed, and sometimes with a faint smile on his face. He probably couldn’t imagine why Max had thrown away his six-figure income to run a small- potatoes agency in a Podunk town.
“So, are you going to show me your company?”
Max hesitated. While his agency was upscale compared to most businesses down here, it was almost laughable compared to the opulent Remington Industries headquarters in Manhattan.
But then he shrugged. He was proud of what he’d built so far, and he was just getting started. He had competent and loyal employees in Carol and Jane…ah, Jane.
Damn, he couldn’t afford to think about her right now. He had to be on his toes. Eddie had an agenda, and Max wanted to step carefully so he didn’t fall into any traps.
A few minutes later, as Eddie entered the reception room of the Remington Agency and looked around, Max watched his brother closely. He seemed to take in everything and was probably mentally calculating the cost.
Carol smiled serenely from her desk. “Good morning, Mr. Remington,” she said in her most polite, obsequious voice for Eddie’s benefit. She didn’t know who Eddie was and assumed he was a client.
“Carol, this is my brother, Eddie. He’s visiting from New York.”
Carol stood and extended her hand. “Oh, now I see the family resemblance! How nice to meet you. Can I get you some coffee?”
Eddie took her hand and held her gaze for several seconds. He had the ability to make anyone he talked to feel like they were the most important person in the world. It was one of the things that had earned him his nickname,
