A Match for the Doctor

by Marie Ferrarella

  “My stuff,” he repeated, watching Meghan and waiting for more explanation.

  “Your bedroom stuff,” Madelyn told him, casting a disgusted eye at her sister. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

  “It’ll be a surprise, all right,” he said. “A surprise for Miss Cassidy because I’m not getting any.” He gestured toward the rented bureau and the bed that had come from Castle Leasing. The store’s rather trite motto was good enough for him: Rent your castle’s furnishings by the month.

  “Girls, let your father get up and get dressed,” Edna admonished. She stood in the doctor’s doorway, waiting for the girls to vacate the room. “Doctor Sheffield needs to eat his breakfast before he can go shopping anywhere with you.”

  Simon groaned. Obviously the girls’ nanny had been indoctrinated by the Cassidy woman, as well. “Not you, too, Edna.”

  “Not me too what, Doctor?” Edna asked, looking at him with a puzzled expression on her face. Before the second round of vague verbal sparring could get under way, the doorbell rang. “Must be Miss Cassidy.” Edna brightened, as did the girls. “Incredibly punctual, that one,” she commented, withdrawing.

  Yeah, he thought. Even if you don’t want her to be.

  “C’mon along, girls.” Edna put a hand on each of their slim shoulders, guiding them out. “Leave your father in peace to get up and get dressed.”

  Simon seriously thought of ignoring everyone and just rolling over in bed. But he knew better. If he tried to go back to sleep, Meghan and Madelyn would make a return appearance, bouncing on his bed and tugging him out. For all he knew, that Cassidy woman might even join them. When had they stopped regarding him with quiet respect? He missed the old days, he thought grumpily.

  With a sigh, Simon sat up, threw off his covers and got out of bed. Feeling somewhat groggy, he made his way into the bathroom. After he showered and woke up, he promised himself, he would tell the Cassidy woman that his days of being dragged around to various stores were definitely over.

  But when he emerged twenty minutes later, showered, shaved and wearing a pair of dress slacks that were only a tad less formal than what he normally wore to the hospital, Simon never got a chance to mount his protest or attempt even so much as a minor defense.

  The moment he walked into the kitchen and his interior decorator saw him, she turned on her brilliant smile—a smile that just seemed to increase in wattage every time he saw her—and started talking.

  The woman’s mouth should be registered with the police department as a lethal weapon. Against it he never stood a snowball’s chance in hell. No one did.

  She mowed him down with her rapid-fire delivery. “I thought we’d get an earlier start this morning—just as soon as you’ve had breakfast.”

  Before she could say anything else, he got his word in edgewise. “Why earlier?”

  Simon sat down at the bar where Edna had placed his breakfast. Why she’d set it there rather than on the table where he usually ate was something he didn’t have a chance to ponder. It was only later that he caught on to the woman’s strategy. A counter and a stool created a feeling of brevity, of being in a hurry, like stopping at a diner where you went for a quick cup of coffee on your way to somewhere else.

  “Because Fine Furnishings for Less is a very popular place and it fills up rather early. Name brands, low prices, large selection, it’s got all the good things going for it,” she told him. He noticed that she had the girls hanging on her every word, lapping them up as if she was uttering some sort of sacred truth.

  “It’s supposedly a secret place,” she continued, “but everyone and his brother seems to have caught on to it. I know how much you hate crowds, so if we want to avoid running into one, we need to get there early.”

  He could think of another way to avoid crowds. By not going to begin with. But before he stated the obvious, he had another question to ask her. If he didn’t, it would drive him crazy all day.

  “How do you know I hate crowds?”

  He knew he’d never said as much, even though he actually did dislike finding himself surrounded by people, all but herded around like one of the cattle. It was beyond him why people enjoyed packing themselves in so tightly, pressed against their fellow man or woman in Times Square just to watch a gaudy ball fall for a total of sixty seconds. The only way anyone would ever get him there would be postmortem.

  Kennon didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she looked at him and the expression in her eyes said everything, as well as expressing amusement that he even asked anything so basic.

  She could see he was still waiting for her to volunteer her answer. “You get, let’s just say, ‘quieter,’ in direct proportion to the number of people in the immediate vicinity,” she finally told him.

  Okay, he had another weapon in his arsenal. “You know, my room is fine just the way it is.”

  That was a matter of opinion. Early Unmatchable was not a style and it definitely didn’t go with what she was slowly doing with the rest of the house.

  “It’s the last holdout,” she told him. “The other bedrooms have all been remodeled and decorated.”

  She’d had a general contractor she dealt with from time to time do a little basic rewiring and touch-up painting to complement the decor she’d chosen. Meghan, who had trouble sleeping alone at night, now shared her slumber with her favorite storybook cartoon characters, who smiled down at her from the walls. Madelyn’s bedroom was all frills and femininity. Even the guest room was completely redecorated in warm yellows with a touch of light grays, suitable for male or female visitors.

  And Edna’s bedroom was reminiscent of her Irish roots, right down to her eyelet bedspread and warm, light green colors.

  Simon’s room was the last holdout, a bastion of chaos meeting style-challenged. She intended to change that.

  “The object was to furnish the rooms,” he reminded her. “My bedroom’s furnished.”

  “With rented furniture.” She said the word as if it was synonymous with pestilence and plagues. “In a year you will have paid far more than the furniture is worth.” He’d probably done that in the first month, she thought. “Far more than if you’d bought your own. There’s no point in throwing money away, Doctor.”

  His eyes met hers. Were those golden flecks he saw amid the green? “So now you’re my financial planner?” he asked her. The question sounded more amused than annoyed.

  That wasn’t her intention—she was just trying to appeal to his sense of frugality. Anything to get him to send the furniture back where it came from.

  “I wear a lot of hats in this job,” she told him glibly.

  “No, you don’t,” Meghan piped up. “You don’t wear hats at all.” And then she scrunched up her face as she tried to unravel the puzzle. “Are they in your trunk?” Excitement entered her eyes as she asked, “Can I see them?”

  “That’s another figure of speech,” Madelyn said knowingly, her eyes shifting toward the woman she clearly viewed with a serious case of hero worship. Raising her eyebrows, Madelyn looked at Kennon with a silent question, her rosebud lips forming the word right?

  Nodding, Kennon slipped her arm around each girl as she positioned herself between the two counter stools they were perched on. Counter stools that had taken a lot of negotiating on her part to get the girls to agree on. Each girl, it turned out, had her own sense of style.

  As for Simon, he had said yes to every one she had pointed to, displaying absolutely no preference, the exact opposite of his daughters. He’d just wanted the experience to be over.

  For whatever reason, he seemed determined to make things difficult for her, she’d thought, because without preferences—other than not wanting anything to be Early American—he’d given her nothing to work with. Nothing was just as bad in its own way as everything.

  She was just as determined to make this entire house work. Late last night, she’d decided that the style she was going for was eclectic, something different for each room. But each room s
till would be in harmony with itself and, in a different way, with the others.

  “I have a feeling that you’re going to like this place,” she told him. She saw Edna smiling to herself in the background. As usual, the nanny was on her side in this.

  “What I’d really like is to have my Saturdays back,” Simon responded.

  Briefly, he debated volunteering to be on call next weekend just to get out of being shanghaied like this another Saturday. So far, because he was the “new kid,” the other surgeons had deliberately kept him out of the rotation as an act of kindness on their part, but having been there a month now, he wasn’t that new. And if it got him out of traipsing around stores, looking at furniture that made no impression on him—one piece was as good, or as bad, as another—so much the better.

  Madelyn glanced down at the tips of her shoes, stoically bearing what seemed like a rejection. But Meghan was feistier than her sister and met her father’s words head-on.

  “Don’t you like being with us, Daddy?” she asked.

  The question caught him off guard. So much so that for a moment, his brain scrambled about for a way to answer the question with a dignity that would still allow him to avoid hurt feelings.

  “Yes, of course I do, but—”

  There was no room for a disclaimer. Taking her opportunity, Kennon instantly broke in, saying, “You live in the house as a family, you should all have a say in how it’s decorated, even if each bedroom is that family member’s personal…kingdom.” She was going to say domain but she wasn’t sure if the girls would understand that. “Think of it as a bonding experience,” Kennon coaxed him.

  Simon had to force himself to look away from her mouth. Another reason to try to distance himself from these Saturday excursions. He was spending too much time with this woman, allowing her to get under his skin, something she seemed to be able to accomplish even when they were in a crowd.

  If he bonded more with any of them, in his opinion, he would need superglue remover. “I think we’ve bonded already.”

  She smiled, a flash of sympathy in her eyes. The good doctor was not unlike a lot of men when it came to shopping, but since this was so important to his girls—and helpful to her—she wasn’t about to willingly let him off the hook. In her heart, she knew he couldn’t mind that much. If he minded, he wouldn’t be coming along. Simon Sheffield didn’t strike her as the kind of man who did anything he didn’t want to do.

  “There’s not all that much more of the house to do,” she promised him, then added, “once you find a bedroom set you like.” The words like and dislike really had no meaning or importance to him when they were applied to something like furniture. Disinterested, Simon still knew better than to tell her to pick for him. She’d only send the ball back into his court, along with a lengthy lecture about building memories or something like that. Better to just give in and go.

  Finally finishing the serving of pancakes that Edna had placed before him—predominantly with no memory of the actual act of eating—Simon got off the stool.

  He sighed, resigned. “All right, let’s get this over with.”

  “Your displeasure would sound a lot more believable if you weren’t smiling,” Kennon whispered to him as she passed by, herding the girls out before her.

  “I’m not smiling,” he protested, raising his voice so that it would carry out to her.

  “’Fraid you are, sir,” Edna confirmed quietly as she approached and collected the plates from the counter. She gave him an amused look just as he walked out of the kitchen.

  Simon caught his reflection in the foyer mirror.

  Damn, Kennon was right. He was smiling and he wasn’t even aware of it. It was getting so that he couldn’t depend on anyone, he thought darkly.

  Not even himself.

  A long, contented sigh escaped Kennon’s lips.

  She was exhausted, but happy. The day had turned out to be extralong, but it was definitely worth it. She felt exhilarated, because she felt she’d accomplished a great deal today.

  She was not as confident as she pretended to be about getting him to put a stamp of approval on a complete bedroom set and actually mean it. But the shop she had brought Simon and the girls to had so many different selections that if they hadn’t found something there, she would have been tempted to finally throw in the towel and admit that they would never find his furniture.

  But there was no need for surrender. Simon had found something he actually liked.

  As it turned out, Dr. Sheffield had been won over by a bedroom suite reminiscent of early California furniture. Massive and powerful looking, the set, surprisingly, was not all dark wood and oppression. While not light, the hue of the wood was somewhere in between the two extremes. A compromise of light and dark.

  Seeing it, and Simon’s reaction to it—his interest was actually piqued—led Kennon to believe that the bedroom suite was a great deal like Simon himself. The man had a dark exterior, but underneath—when he would allow someone to experience that side of him—something within was lighter, more sensitive than first met the eye.

  She just had to keep scratching at his dark surface to bring it out—for the girls’ sake, she silently emphasized, since ultimately it was his daughters who had to live with the man. After this assignment was over, in all likelihood she would never see Simon Sheffield again. So whether or not he learned how to unwind, how to allow his softer, kinder side to come through, made no difference to her.

  The hell it doesn’t, a small voice whispered in her head as Kennon automatically glanced in a mirror that was mounted on the dining room wall.

  She’d never cared for lies. Why was she lying to herself now?

  The answer was simple. It was a matter of self-preservation. Because she was really attracted to Simon and she knew it wouldn’t lead anywhere. He had his work and his daughters. And his heart belonged to his late wife. There was absolutely no room in his life for anything else. If she entertained even so much as a glimmer of a hope, she was an even bigger idiot than she’d been when Pete had walked out on her, leaving her with a bruised ego and a bleeding heart.

  It was time to go home, she told herself. Her work was definitely done for the day. But as she prepared to leave, Edna gave her a sympathetic once-over.

  “You look tired, Miss Cassidy. Why don’t you stay awhile, catch your second wind? Stay for dinner. Have a nice cup of tea while you wait—you can put your feet up on that new hassock you and the doctor picked out,” Edna added.

  The hassock. The woman made it sound as if shopping had been a mutual experience. But it hadn’t been. If ever there was a reluctant shopper, it was Simon Sheffield. And it was her job to get him to pick things out. She was getting paid, in effect, to pressure him.

  “I think I’ll have to pass.” She glanced in Simon’s direction. He was on the sofa, his eyes shut. Apparently she and the girls had completely tired him out. “I’m sure that Dr. Sheffield would like nothing better than to get me out of his hair for the evening,” Kennon said with a small, disparaging laugh.

  And probably for longer than that, she added silently.

  A deep voice rose from his side of the room. “No hurry.”

  Startled, Kennon all but did a double take. The man made her jumpy, she realized. For oh, so many reasons. “I thought you were asleep,” she told him.

  “Apparently I’m not,” he contradicted. Sitting up, he rotated his shoulders, shrugging off the tension that harnessed them. “Why don’t you take Edna up on her offer of tea? And dinner,” he added. “Unless, of course, you have plans.”

  He was actually asking her to hang out with them? Or had they somehow slipped into an alternate universe? “No,” she managed to murmur. “No plans.”

  “All right, then it’s settled,” he told her. “Dinner and tea, not necessarily in that order.”

  Even the smallest feather would have succeeded in knocking her over with absolutely no effort at all.

  Chapter Nine

  “Here, dea
r, the tea as promised.” Edna placed an oversize mug in Kennon’s hands. “It’s chai tea,” she told the young woman. “Helps relax you,” she added with a smile.

  “What will relax me,” Kennon said, already getting up off the stool where she had been planted only minutes ago, “is to help out with dinner.”

  “Me, too,” Meghan chimed in, mimicking Kennon’s tone.

  “I want to help, too,” Madelyn immediately pro tested.

  Edna laughed quietly. “I am reminded of that old saying about too many cooks spoiling the soup,” she said, her glance taking in all three of them.

  “But it doesn’t apply here,” Kennon was quick to assure her.

  “I was just about to say that,” Edna agreed, an amused smile curving her lips.

  It wasn’t long before Edna was ushered off to a chair, to sit on the sidelines as an observer in her own domain. “I feel like a bump on a log, sitting here,” she complained to Kennon.

  “A much loved, honored bump,” Kennon assured her. Since she was here, she wanted to feel useful, and that meant taking some of the burden off the older woman. “You do double duty as their nanny and the housekeeper, as well as the chief cook. You deserve a little time off. Besides, I like cooking and the girls like helping me, right, girls?” She glanced to the duo for backup.

  “Right.” Meghan nodded her head with vigor.

  “Right,” Madelyn agreed, bobbing her own head up and down.

  “See?” Kennon said to the nanny. In her opinion, she’d just won her argument. “So you just sit back and relax. We’ll do all the heavy lifting.”

  “What are we lifting?” Meghan asked, looking around the kitchen.

  By now, Madelyn had caught on to Kennon-speak. “That’s just another figure of speech, stu— Meggie,” Madelyn abruptly switched gears, refraining from calling her sister stupid when Kennon gave her a warning look. “Right, Kennon?”