“That Scot. To him, all is pennies and nickels and bright, shiny dimes. When did coin ever soothe the soul?”
Hot chocolate and cookies soothed the soul, and watching James tutor Twyla through the intricacies of third-grade math had also gratified some need Vera couldn’t describe to herself, much less to her friend.
“Twyla got on well with James,” Vera said, recovering the thread of the conversation. “He’s patient, he has a good sense of humor, and he’s bright.”
Brilliant, probably—a CPA and an attorney, for pity’s sake. Why hadn’t some equally brilliant lady lawyer snatched him up?
“Children know whom they can trust,” Olga observed. “When will you bring my Twyla to visit?”
“Not this week,” Vera said, pouring the boiling water into her mug. “We’re supposed to get snow by the weekend.” Thank heavens, because Olga would expect Vera to play for her, and that she could not do—yet.
“You have that great, noisy beast of a truck,” Olga scoffed. “In Russia, we had mountains of snow, and managed it with mere horses and a nip of vodka. You must not be afraid, Vera. You can no longer play like a young girl, and that’s good. The music will sort itself out.”
Vera took a sip of tea and scalded her tongue.
“I’m practicing.” Practicing hour after hour, with a single-minded concentration she’d not had as a younger musician.
“Better that you invite that young man over for more than hamburgers. Play him the Chopin. If he can listen to Chopin, that will tell you much.”
“You have a naughty mind, Olga. Twyla is summoning me to Pride Rock.”
“Pride, something you could use more of. Sweet dreams, my Vera, and come see me.”
Click.
Olga was a force of nature, but a mostly kind one. She’d made her points—stop hiding, book more concerts, dip a toe in the waters of flirtation and frolic—then retreated with a verbal hug and encouraging wink.
The idea of playing Chopin for James had an intriguing appeal. He’d looked sexy, patiently explaining one simple concept after another to the child, until an entire process had been made clear.
His patience, his generosity, his kindness to somebody else’s little girl, they’d been sexy.
Not his smile, his broad shoulders, or his big, competent hands—those had been a little unnerving.
But his kindness, that had been sexy. Vera added a dash of honey to her tea and ventured another sip, the temperature now perfect for a chilly night.
She hadn’t found anybody or anything sexy in years, but James Knightley in her kitchen with a pencil behind his ear…
Interesting.
* * *
“How’s my niece?” James asked.
“She’s asleep,” Trent said into the phone. James had known Trent left the office to heed a summons from the school nurse, so Trent had been expecting this call. “We hit the urgent care on the way home from school, and Merle’s on antibiotics. Grace brought home all Merle’s homework, and life is good.”
Trent had just finished giving the same report to Mac. Hannah’s parents would probably call next.
“Grace holding up OK?” James asked.
“She had a similar bug a couple of weeks ago, so I expect she’s safe for now. You got that order to Vera Waltham?”
“I did,” James said, his reply holding a touch of evasion only a brother would have sensed.
“But?”
A pause, and Trent could hear James rearranging word choices, polishing the facts to a higher shine—preparing his proffer for the court.
“I ended up staying for dinner,” James said.
“It’s a nice old house.” Owned by a lovely, and possibly lonely, woman. James liked old houses. He liked women between the ages of five minutes and ninety-five years too. “I suppose you met the daughter?”
“Twyla. A neat kid, and she knows Grace and Merle. She’d be a good candidate for a playdate.”
“Three little girls in my house? If anything happens to me or Hannah, you and Mac are named co-guardians in our will, by the way. Be mindful of what you sow, little brother.”
Trent had meant the words in jest, but they reaped a small silence.
“You really mean that? We get the girls if anything happens to you?”
“Who else would we entrust them to? Hannah’s folks are not young, and she has no siblings.”
“I just… I mean… Thanks.”
A double load of responsibility and expense, and James said thanks.
“You’re welcome. I’ll tell Merle you did a wellness check.”
“Ah, Trent?”
“Hm?”
“Vera Waltham is having trouble with her ex.”
Wasn’t that what exes were for? “She told you this? In my experience, she’s jealous of her privacy.”
“She apparently let you into her kitchen.”
“But only into her kitchen,” Trent said. “Unlike you, the sight of me doesn’t make most women’s clothes fall off, with the happy exception of my wife. What sort of trouble is Vera having?”
“Her ex is leaving her threatening messages, but is clever enough to disguise his voice and make the threats vague. Somebody slashed the tire of her truck while it sat in a locked garage, and she suspects him.”
Why was Veracity Waltham confiding these things in James rather than telling them to the attorney who’d spent a long, hard year battling on her behalf?
“I can’t do anything about it until she tells me to, James.”
“She said she’d call you tomorrow, but if she doesn’t call you, I might nose around, see what I can find.”
Like most younger siblings, James was a first-class noser-arounder, second only to the private investigators the firm kept on retainer.
“You’re not her lawyer,” Trent said, not sure if he was being protective of Vera or of James. The guy had a soft spot for damsels in distress, and all the swashbuckling and mighty swordsmanship in the world didn’t disguise that from his own brother.
“I’m not her lawyer,” James retorted, “which means I can discreetly discuss her business with my brother, and I can drive past her place on my way to and from work, and I can get a damned battery for her 1964 Ford Falcon.”
“Her what?”
“Never mind. Tell Merle to get well soon, and give Hannah my love.”
James hung up before Trent could ask what he’d thought of that lovely old house—or if, in his raptures over an antique car, he’d even noticed the house.
Chapter 3
The third Saturday of every month was James’s one inviolable standing date. He ran riot the rest of the month, or had until recently, sometimes doing drinks with one woman, dinner with another, and—when he was particularly restless—the final round of the evening with yet another. The third Saturday of the month he was up early, in his jeans, and headed out by 8:00 a.m. without fail.
“Hi, Uncle James!” Merle clambered off the hay bale she’d been using for a grooming stool. “I told Grace you’re never late, didn’t I, Grace?”
“You did,” Grace said. “Hello, Merle’s uncle.”
They were two dark-haired little peas in a pod, stepsisters by virtue of Grace’s mom having married Merle’s dad, and friends by virtue of divine providence.
James swung Grace off her hay bale and perched her on his hip. “None of that. I’m your uncle James now too.” He did not glance at Merle, because he’d already had this talk with her, and she’d given her blessing.
“You’re not related to me.”
“Your mom married my brother,” James said, poking Grace gently in the tummy. “That means I get uncle privileges where you’re concerned. Mac does too.”
“Are you sure?”
“Ask your mom if you don’t believe me, but I’m right, aren’t I, Merle?”
“Yes, Uncle James. Grace is my sister now too.”
“Stepsister,” Grace said, gaze on the barn’s dirt floor.
“Details.” James set Grace on her feet and kept her hand in his. “Step, schmep. Are these your stephorses now?”
“Merle’s…Dad explained we’re a family, and the horses belong to the family. But Pasha is Merle’s personal horse.”
So careful, like her mother. Grace and Hannah both liked order and predictability, and given what they’d known prior to joining the Knightley family, James didn’t blame them.
“Well, I’m special,” James said, “I get more than one personal niece. We’re going out for breakfast as soon as I tell your parents you’ve been kidnapped.”
Merle caught his other hand, and he let them drag him into the house.
“Anybody home?” he bellowed.
“James, welcome.” Hannah, James’s newly acquired sister-in-law, came out of the kitchen, wearing sweats, a dish towel over her shoulder, and a T-shirt that said “Lawyers do it in their briefs.”
Also a smile.
“Greetings, Hannah.” He kissed her cheek, enjoying the flowery, female scent of her. “Prepare to repel boarders. I’ve come to kidnap these beautiful damsels, but first you have to assure Grace I’m a properly certified uncle with all the privileges and immunities attendant thereto.”
“He’s talking like a lawyer,” Merle said to Grace. “He does it to be silly.”
“My secret is revealed. We must ask Merle why it is her uncle Mac talks like a lawyer, because he’s never silly.”
“Is too,” Trent said, emerging from the hallway to his study. “Mac’s silliness is subtle and coincides with full moons. You have to watch for it. Good morning, Brother. Have you come to steal our treasures?”
“At least until this afternoon. Come along, treasures.”
James bundled the girls into the backseat of his SUV and headed out to the county’s only mall. The weather was too brisk to spend much time outside, particularly with Merle getting over a cold, and James needed to make a stop at a certain car parts store.
After the girls finished a course of Belgian waffles, they ran James from one store to another. Grace found a stuffed unicorn, a silly, fluffy little thing with a pink horn, and insisted James buy it for himself.
“Everybody needs one,” Grace explained. “She can be your personal unicorn too, Uncle James.”
“You have to give her a name,” Merle said.
What came out of James’s mouth would matter to his nieces, and they mattered very much to him. What should he call the first stuffed animal he’d acquired in nearly thirty years?
“Justice?” he suggested. “No. She’d have to be blind then, and these big blue eyes don’t look blind to me. I don’t know. I’ll have to think on it.”
“Take your time,” Grace said. “My first bear was named Aloysius, but I couldn’t say that when I was little. I called him All The Wishes, and then he said he wanted his name to be Wishes, and that’s what it is.”
“Pasha is really AM Appomattox,” Merle chimed in. “We call him Pasha for short.”
“I’m really Lucy Grace,” Grace added…and the girls were off into a conversation regarding names of classmates, stuffed animals, Disney characters, and entire universes that uncles—even doting uncles—were excluded from.
James suffered a pang, to know he’d been nudged down a hair in Merle’s pantheon of grown-ups. With Grace as a friend and sister—nothing “step” about her—Merle didn’t need James’s avuncular companionship quite so much.
The word for that realization was lowering. Maybe Mac would admit to the same observation, that Merle was growing up, but Mac would never in a million years admit to feeling nonplussed about it.
“We having ice cream cones for lunch?” James asked.
“Mom says you have to take us to the park for ten minutes if we get ice cream for lunch,” Merle said.
Mom would be her stepmother, Hannah, but Merle had been without a maternal figure for so long, she didn’t dither over what to call the woman her father had recently married.
“Then it’s ice cream cones and a walk to the park, but only for ten minutes, Merle Knightley. It’s cold out, and I’m a tired, skinny old uncle who might blow away on the first stiff breeze.”
“You’re not skinny,” Grace said. “You’re just right.”
Ten minutes at the park turned into twenty, of course, but James called a halt to the festivities before anybody was truly cold. The girls kept moving the whole time, and James was dragooned into underdoggies at the swings, and twirling the merry-go-round, so even he stayed comfortable.
“I’ll make a place in the backseat for Uncle James’s unicorn,” Merle said, tearing off for the car. By rights, Grace should have followed, making suggestions at the top of her lungs, but James was learning that little girls often did not act the same as little boys.
“Uncle…James?” Grace kicked the dirt, then stared off in the direction of the SUV. “You’re a lawyer, right?”
“I am.”
“Can you do things at court like Merle’s…like my dad?”
“I can. I do different things from Trent because my clients are businesses usually, not individual people, but I use the same courthouse, the same judges.”
“I think I need a lawyer.”
Her expression was resolute, and she was one smart little girl. “Do you have any money in your fanny pack, Grace?”
“Sure.”
“Give me a dime. If I’m going to be your lawyer, you have to pay me, and then all your business with me stays private.”
James didn’t know what prompted him to insist on this ritual, but it seemed to make sense to Grace.
“My mom says there’s a word for it.”
“Attorney-client privilege,” James said, taking a dime from Grace’s small hand. “Now before your sister is here listening to our every confidential word, tell me what’s on your mind.”
James led her to a bench, and while Merle waited patiently in the backseat of James’s SUV, James listened to his client. When Grace had finished a few minutes later, he agreed that she did indeed need a lawyer, and he’d be only too happy to take her case.
* * *
“I need a riding instructor,” Trent said. “In your vast social network, can you point me to any?”
James looked up from the subcontract he was reviewing—one without a merger clause or a conflict of laws clause, which always signaled weak draftsmanship.
“You know how to ride,” James said. “Has marriage addled your wits?”
“The instructor isn’t for me.” Trent took a chair, as if subcontracts were never urgent matters. “It’s for Grace, and possibly Hannah.”
“Hannah doesn’t have a suitable mount,” James said, setting the document aside. “Pasha’s too old and too little to do lessons for Grace and Hannah both, as well as pack Merle around, Zeus is too damned big, and Bishop has a dirty spook.”
Though the gelding was a former steeplechaser, and nobody should hold the spook against him.
“He has an honest spook, not a dirty spook,” Trent said, picking up an old Rubik’s cube. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in doing some horse shopping?”
Instead of teaching some Washington, DC, shyster-meister how to write a fair subcontract?
“Sure I would, but why me?” James asked.
Trent start flipping the cube around, lining up the greens first. “I ride,” he said, “but when it comes to horses, you know what you’re doing. I’d ask Mac, but no horse on earth would be good enough in his eyes for Hannah, much less for Grace.”
True enough. “So we’re looking for two horses?”
More flipping, which suggested James ought to retire the damned toy to a desk drawer.
“M
aybe. Start with one for Grace.”
“You is doomed, Brother,” James said, taking the Rubik’s cube from Trent before he had it all organized. “That will bring you up to five, and five horses is a lot of horses when viewed from the business end of a muck fork. I’m telling you this for your own good. You have to feed them, worm them, look after their teeth, get the farrier after them regularly, buy the bedding, the tack, the fall inoculations, the spring inoculations, foot the vet bills when they do stupid horse things like run smack into trees… You’re smiling.”
“You sound like Mac.”
“Cripes, that’s low, Trent.” James tossed the Rubik’s cube into a drawer and tucked the lousy subcontract back into its file. “I’m only trying to give you some perspective.”
James also considered giving his brother a hand with the herd—keeping a couple of the mighty steeds in his own backyard, for example—and discarded the notion.
Horses were beautiful and first-rate company, but way too much work.
Trent fished a pile of colorful paper clips out of the glass bowl on James’s desk and started stringing them into a chain.
“Riding will be a family pastime,” Trent said. “I’ve already resigned myself to that. We all need recreation, and the girls won’t outgrow the horse crazies until they’re at least teenagers.”
When they’d graduate to boys, as James could attest.
“Adelia Schofield is a good instructor,” James said. “She’s fun but safety conscious, and she said hanging out with horses growing up added two years to her virginity.” She hadn’t been wearing a stitch when she’d shared this with James.
“The things women tell you.”
“Under the circumstances, it wasn’t that much of an admission,” James said, though God above, riding did great things for a woman’s thighs. “She has a point. Not too many young swains are afflicted with the horse crazies, at least compared to the number of girls who have them. I was the exception, but then, I realized early on that the odds at the horse barn favored a guy, provided he was straight.”
One of the paper clips broke, and James held out his hand for the resulting casualties.
The First Kiss Page 4