“You just did,” he pointed out, rising from the table. “This was very good,” he told her, as if he was measuring out each word carefully, taking them out of some invisible bank account and leaving a deficit in their wake.
Kennon watched him leave the room, heading for the stairs. She did her best not to let her frustration show in her face. No matter what he thought, she was really going to need to speak to him about the house. Decorating was a matter of personal taste—in this case, his. She wasn’t about to impose her own aesthetics on him. Aside from perhaps a fondness for blue, she had a feeling that their individual preferences would most likely clash fiercely.
“He doesn’t mean anything by it, Miss. He’s just hurting.”
Edna’s voice floated in from the living room, cutting into her thoughts. Giving the girls a quick, fleeting smile, Kennon cocked her head and looked around the side into the living room.
Edna was sitting up on the sofa, propped up exactly where she and the girls had left her. The plate Kennon had brought out to her earlier lay on top of the black-lacquered folding TV tray, which she’d brought with her expressly for Edna’s usage until the nanny was literally back on her feet.
After first encouraging the girls to have another serving, she left them to finish their dinner and crossed over to the living room and Edna.
“I understand,” Kennon said, lowering her voice so that it wouldn’t carry. “But I need to know what Dr. Sheffield wants me to do with the house besides just ‘fill’ it.”
The girls had heard her anyway. “I’ve got pictures,” Meghan volunteered happily.
Kennon’s attention instantly shifted. Something was far better than nothing. “You mean pictures of your old house?”
Ignoring her older sister’s pointed scowl, Meghan nodded. “Daddy said to pack away our pictures, but I wanted them with me so I could look at them. Mama gave me the album. I didn’t want to throw it away or lose it,” she explained.
Gutsy little thing, Kennon thought with admiration. Simon Sheffield seemed as if he was capable of casting a large shadow over his children. Secretly defying the man took courage.
“Daddy didn’t want you to throw it away, stupid,” Madelyn chided. “He just wanted to put everything we wanted to keep into that big storage place.” Seeing that her sister still didn’t grasp the concept of what she was saying, Madelyn explained what storage was. “It’s a big room for all our stuff, but it’s not in the house.”
Meghan didn’t look as if she believed what she was being told. “Then where is it?”
“Someplace else,” Madelyn told her, this time letting her shortened fuse show.
Pictures would definitely help, Kennon thought. But she wasn’t sure just how much they’d help until she had a basic question answered. Did the surgeon want to get away from everything that reminded him of the life he’d lost, or would he want to recapture that feeling? Or would it be a blending of old and new?
She definitely needed help in coming to the right conclusion.
“Why don’t you two carry your plates to the sink?” she suggested.
The two were instantly on their feet, grabbing up their plates as well as the silverware they’d used. Both acted as if bussing a table was a treat rather than a chore. Kennon couldn’t help wondering if the doctor knew how lucky he was.
She turned toward Edna. She’d given the girls the chore so that she could talk to the nanny privately. The questions in her head were multiplying. “You said that Dr. Sheffield was still hurting. Over his wife’s death?” Kennon guessed.
“Yes.”
She could see by the look in the older woman’s eyes that this was not an easy subject for her either. The doctor’s wife must have been a very special person to merit such fierce love and loyalty.
“He blames himself,” Edna told her simply.
“Why?” Kennon could think of only one reason. “Was he to blame?”
“No!” Edna cried with feeling. “It’s because she took his place.”
“His place?” Kennon echoed. She tried to make sense of the answer. “You mean like on a plane?”
Taking a deep breath, Edna started at the beginning. “Dr. Sheffield belongs to Doctors Without Borders. He joined because Dr. Nancy wanted him to. He was supposed to go to Somalia but at the last moment, his last triple-bypass patient took a turn for the worse a few hours after the surgery. The doctor didn’t want to leave the man in someone else’s hands, so Dr. Patterson—that was Mrs. Sheffield’s professional name—told him not to worry. She said she’d go in his place.”
“Dr. Sheffield’s wife was a cardiovascular surgeon, too?” Kennon asked incredulously.
Edna smiled with pride, tears shimmering in her eyes. “My Nancy was a general surgeon. In a pinch, she could perform almost any kind of regular surgery that needed doing.” Edna’s voice grew very quiet as she added, “When the tsunami hit, she was one of the ones who was swept away.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry to hear that,” Kennon told her, genuinely feeling the woman’s pain. But Edna had caught her attention with what she’d said before recounting the abilities of the doctor’s late wife. “Excuse me, you said ‘your Nancy…’” Kennon’s voice trailed off as she waited for a clarification. The girls’ nanny couldn’t mean that the surgeon’s wife was her daughter. Could she? Dr. Sheffield wouldn’t be treating his former mother-in-law like one of the servants, would he?
The tears that shone in Edna’s eyes threatened to come spilling out. She blinked them back with effort, but a few fell, sliding down her cheek.
“I raised that girl from the time she was an infant. Both her parents were busy earning a living—much the way Dr. Sheffield and Dr. Patterson were,” she added. “Because we had such a close relationship, when her own two little ones came along, she asked me to take care of them.” She did her best to collect herself. “I was thrilled to be of use to her. I love those girls as if they were my own.”
Kennon didn’t doubt it. “I take it that by moving from San Francisco to Southern California, Dr. Sheffield felt that he needed a fresh start?”
Edna nodded her head. “He never said so in so many words, but that’s what I think, yes.”
Kennon was already processing what she’d been told. “Then what we’ll probably need is only the slightest touch of the past, with the main emphasis being on the future.” Having voiced her thoughts out loud, she looked at Edna to see if the older woman agreed with her.
The nanny took another deep breath, as if to push herself forward.
“I think that would be for the best. Miss Nancy would have wanted Dr. Sheffield to move on. She wouldn’t have wanted him to be this unhappy. She was always teasing him about being too serious,” she said fondly, remembering. And then she looked up at Kennon, as if appealing for her help. “This is way beyond that, and he needs to laugh again.”
Again. So the man was capable of actually laughing, Kennon thought. That was good to know. It meant that there was something for her to work with.
“Well, I don’t know if I can make him laugh, but we’ll really try to get him to smile again,” she promised Edna.
At that moment, Madelyn burst back into the room and headed straight toward them. Madelyn looked at Kennon pointedly. “Anything else?” the little girl asked.
Right on her sister’s heels, not to be outdone, Meghan echoed in a louder voice, “Yeah, anything else?”
For tonight, Kennon thought, she just wanted to immerse herself in the interactions of the family. Since the good doctor wasn’t down here with them, the girls—and memories of their mother—would just have to do.
Immersing meant blending in.
“Now I’m going to go and wash the dishes,” Kennon informed the girls as she got up off the arm of the sofa where she’d perched while talking to Edna.
“You wash dishes? By yourself?” Madelyn questioned, looking at up her uncertainly. “We’ve got a dishwasher that does that.”
“Don’t you have a dishwas
her?” Meghan asked her, pity in her young voice.
Kennon laughed and put her arm around the younger girl’s shoulders, pulling her in for a quick hug. “Yes, I do, but I never like to have things pile up in the sink so I wash them before there’re too many. Besides, running the dishwasher for one person just seems sort of wasteful to me. Don’t you agree?” she asked Meghan.
Thrilled to be asked for her opinion, Meghan nodded her head vigorously. Kennon had a feeling that the little girl would have easily agreed to anything that she suggested.
“You really have a way with them,” Edna told her with genuine sincerity. She looked from one little girl to the other. There was approval in her voice as she said, “You seem to bring out the best in them. Do you have any children of your own?” the older woman asked, curious about this new person in their lives.
Kennon shook her head. “No.”
Not that she wouldn’t have wanted to have children. Several children. But before there were children, there had to be someone who could be a good husband, a good father. And if he could actually make her heart skip a beat or two, well, so much the better. If she was going to dream, she might as well go all the way.
“I never met the right man,” she told Edna. And with that, she closed the subject.
“Were you the oldest in your family, then?” Edna asked. “The one your mother depended on to look out for the others?”
There were no others. Her parents were divorced before she could get any siblings. She had always regretted that. A lot of her time as a child had been spent imagining what having a brother or sister would have been like. Even inventing an imaginary one when she was very young.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Edna,” she said with a smile, “but I’m an only child.”
“Then it’s a true gift you have,” Edna pronounced. “You’ve been blessed.”
She didn’t know about being “blessed”—it was just something that came rather naturally to her. Maybe it was even born out of that desire for a sibling. But before she could say anything to the contrary, Madelyn had caught her by one hand while, not to be left out, Meghan took hold of the other.
“Then we’ll help you do the dishes,” Madelyn declared.
Amused, Edna laughed. “Like I said, Miss Cassidy, you’ve got a gift. You’re not all that bad at healing, either.”
Kennon looked at her quizzically over her shoulder as she was about to be pulled away.
“I’m feeling much better, thanks to you and your chicken soup,” Edna told her.
“If that’s the case, that would be more due to the chicken than to me,” Kennon told her. She wasn’t one to take praise unless she believed she really deserved it. All she’d done in this case was try to make the woman feel a little better—and comfort food had always accomplished that for her.
The next moment, Kennon found herself being taken off to the kitchen again by her pint-size helpers. It was time to address the dishes in the sink.
“And modest, too,” Edna said to herself with an approving nod. “I think you’d like her, Nancy,” she said softly under her breath.
When Simon came down from his study an hour later, he expected to find the kitchen in darkness and his daughters either in their room for the night or in the family room, taking advantage of the fact that he wasn’t around. He was rather strict about the amount of time they could spend watching television.
He was rather strict about most things when it came to his children.
Instead, he found the kitchen ablaze with light. Not only that, but he heard the sound of laughter coming from there, as well.
Curious, he went to the source. And discovered that the woman he’d just hired as his decorator was there, sitting at the head of the table, with his daughters flanking her on either side.
Schoolbooks were spread out on the surface of the table and, from what he could discern as he drew closer, the girls were doing homework—with a little help from the overly effervescent blonde.
Laughter, he realized as he listened and allowed it to warm him, was a sound that had been missing from their lives for much too long.
He’d been right in his earlier assessment. Apparently he’d not only hired a decorator but a sorceress, as well.
Chapter Seven
Out of the corner of her eye, Kennon saw Simon walking into the kitchen.
Even if she hadn’t, she could tell he’d entered the room because of the way Madelyn and Meghan reacted. They became a little more subdued, a tiny bit less relaxed. A little more anxious to please. It was obvious to her that they loved their father, but were hemmed in by not quite knowing how to behave around him. As for the good doctor, he wasn’t exactly cold—she could sense that he did care about his daughters—but he was reserved, as if he was following some sort of a strict code that only he was aware of.
Meghan saw him first. “Daddy, Kennon’s teaching me to write,” she declared proudly.
Simon was paying a none-too-shabby tuition so that Meghan and Madelyn would receive the best parochial education possible. Even so, he’d been debating getting a tutor for the younger one because Meghan was having a harder time learning than her sister ever had. Apparently all he’d had to do to insure her improvement was get his house decorated.
He looked at the woman who had burst into his life like an unforecast hurricane. “Master chef, gifted teacher, instant nanny and, oh, yes, a top-flight decorator.” There was a touch of sarcasm in his voice as he ticked off the talents she’d displayed today. “Anything you can’t do, Miss Cassidy?”
Yes, fathom why I seem to annoy you so much, Kennon thought. She wasn’t about to say this out loud and merely rose to her feet. “I’ll let you know if and when it comes up.” Aware that she had stayed far longer than she’d intended, and most likely in the doctor’s opinion had more than overstayed her welcome, Kennon looked at her self-appointed assistants and said, “I’ve got to be going now.”
The girls both looked disappointed that she was leaving. “Oh, do you have to?” Meghan pouted. “I want to write some more.”
“Practice for me,” Kennon encouraged. “And yes, I really do have to go now. But I’ll be back tomorrow,” she promised the sisters. When she saw the uncertain look in their eyes, she sensed that they’d had promises made that had been broken. It wasn’t much of a leap for her to guess who had broken them. She tried to reassure the girls. “We have work to do, remember?”
Clearly surprised at how quickly his daughters had taken to this almost total stranger, Simon asked, “What kind of work?”
Kennon gathered her things together and deposited them in her purse. She snapped the lock. “The girls and I are going to look over a few catalogues I’m bringing over for them so we can get some ideas on how to decorate their rooms.”
He hadn’t planned on seeing the woman again so soon. They hadn’t even worked out the terms of her fee yet. Not that money was a problem. That was definitely at the bottom of his list of concerns. “I suppose I’ll have to pay you extra for that.”
“Maybe I should pay you,” she countered. When he looked at her quizzically, she said by way of an explanation, “Your daughters are charming, Dr. Sheffield, and a lot of fun to be around.”
And I have an idea that you would be, too, if you gave yourself half a chance.
She raised her voice so that it would carry to the living room. “Good night, Edna. I’m glad you’re feeling better.” Turning to her younger pupil, she said, “Remember, Meghan, practice your F’s. They need just a tiny little bit of work before they’re perfect.”
Meghan clearly lapped up the praise. The spark in her eyes showed a determination to follow the instructions to the letter. “Yes, ma’am,” she agreed cheerfully.
“See you tomorrow, Madelyn,” Kennon said warmly. “Good night, Doctor,” she murmured with a nod toward him, then, picking up her purse, she headed toward the front door.
For a moment, Simon stared after her, feeling a little disoriented and bemused, like som
eone who had survived a sudden, unexpected attack of unseasonable weather. He supposed, in the final analysis, it was a lucky thing that the woman had just happened by here this morning instead of, say, next week. It had made things a lot easier for him.
He thought of Edna. It was doubtful that the nanny would be completely well by morning. And he would have to get down to the hospital early. Tomorrow was the day he would meet with the other members of the Newport Cardiovascular Group.
He needed someone to take care of Madelyn and Meghan. Again.
Coming to life, Simon hurried after Kennon. “Miss Cassidy—”
Surprised to hear him calling her, Kennon turned at the front door and looked behind her. The doctor crossed to her with some alacrity. She waited until he was almost next to her, then said, “It’s Kennon.”
Why was she telling him that? “I know your first name.”
All this formality on his part definitely made her feel uncomfortable. “And if I’m going to be working here for you, I’d like you to use it.”
“‘If?’” he questioned. Was she having second thoughts? Was this going to turn into a ploy for more money after all?
“Figure of speech,” Kennon conceded. “I think I can do your house justice, Dr. Sheffield.”
The different ways a house could be decorated was not even remotely high on his list of priorities. His main requirement was that it didn’t stir up any memories for him—and that it didn’t wind up being too cluttered.
“Yes, I’m sure you’ll do a fine job.” He was about to let it go at that, then decided to give her the only rule he wanted her to adhere to. “As long as the decor isn’t Early American.”
Finally, she thought triumphantly, an opinion. “You don’t like Early American?”
Actually, he didn’t. But because his late wife had favored Early American, everything in their house had been decorated in that style. There were four-poster canopied beds both in the master bedroom and the girls’ bedroom, and distressed tables served as accents in the various rooms. The kitchen table and chairs looked as if they could have come straight out of George Washington’s home. So had everything else in the house. He had wanted something more modern, but had kept his peace.
A Match for the Doctor Page 7