The Matchmaker's Sister

by Karen Toller Whittenburg

  He was still pondering the how of it when his mother eventually pushed away her cake plate, dotted her mouth with a napkin and lifted her eyebrows expectantly.

  “More cake?” he asked hopefully.

  Her smile told him the grace period was over even as her attention moved past him and up. “Why, Miranda,” she said graciously, “how lovely to see you.”

  A long, slow tingle slid the length of his spine as he pushed back from the table and stood, turning to see the woman, who’d occupied most of his thoughts since she’d hit him in the chest with her salmon, standing at his elbow, a bottle of club soda clutched in her hand.

  “You remember my son Nathaniel?” Charleigh said.

  “Oh…yes, of course,” Miranda answered, clearly not remembering until that very second. “Nate.”

  “I’m Nicky’s older brother.” He couldn’t believe he’d said the O word first thing. Way to go, Nate. “But I hope you won’t hold that against me.”

  She smiled a little uncertainly. “I, uh…no. No, I always rather liked Nick. Although I haven’t seen him in some time. A long time, actually.” Her smile hesitated, turned from him to his mother. “How is Nick?” she asked as if she thought, perhaps, she ought to ask.

  “Still wildly attractive and unattractively wild. From a mother’s standpoint, anyway.”

  “Oh.” Miranda’s lovely eyes—blue with an intriguing touch of gold—flickered to Nate’s, returned to Charleigh. “I see his picture on the newsstands occasionally.”

  Charleigh smiled, proud of her youngest child despite his shortcomings. “He’s very popular at Soap Opera Digest.”

  Mainly because his private life was as full of bizarre intrigues as his alter ego’s, Daxson Darck, on Sunset Beach. But Nate didn’t feel the need to point that out. Nor did his mother.

  Miranda hesitated, then turned to Nate. “I got some club soda,” she said, offering him the bottle. “For your shirt.”

  Nate took the bottle from her hand with no intent of touching her except in the most casual way. But she had a grip on the club soda, almost as if she was reluctant to let it go, and his fingers lingered for a moment on hers. The spark of recognition flared, instantaneous and erotic. And he pulled back from the exchange almost as quickly as she.

  “It’s so interesting that you should walk up just now, Miranda,” Charleigh was saying with a conversational smile. “Because Nate was just talking about you.”

  “He was?”

  A soft touch of color bloomed on her cheeks and despite every effort to stay unaffected, Nate was charmed to the core. She had felt it, too, that moment of awareness. It might have been a long time since he’d shared that first recognition of electric attraction, but it wasn’t the sort of thing a man forgot.

  “Was he explaining how I ruined his shirt? I still can’t believe that happened.”

  “Our tongs collided,” Nate informed his mother, pointing to the stain, which until that minute he’d forgotten was there. “It was fate.”

  Charleigh glanced at his shirtfront. “Fate?”

  “I was hungry. She was tossing salmon.”

  “How serendipitous.” Charleigh’s smile turned to Miranda. “No, actually he was wondering aloud if I thought you might dance with him. If he asked. I was just telling him I was sure you would when, suddenly, here you are.”

  Miranda looked surprised, but she didn’t seem appalled by the thought of dancing with him. Nate considered that a positive sign. Below the drape of the tablecloth, his mother’s foot nudged his. “Miranda,” he asked obediently, “would you like to dance?”

  “Um, sure,” she replied doubtfully, her gaze flickering to his chest, then back to his face. “Unless you’d rather get some club soda on that stain.”

  “Probably best to let the dry cleaners treat it,” Charleigh said, apparently believing he’d take any excuse to get out of dancing.

  But even mothers were wrong on occasion. And although he might be on the shady side of forty, he was a long way from passing up the opportunity to hold a beautiful woman in his arms. “The club soda will wait for me,” he said. “The music won’t.”

  He took her hand, seeking, and finding, that shiver of electric response, and led her to the dance floor, where he drew her into his arms. The song was as soft as the night air around them. And Nate felt like a young man at his first formal dance. Expectant. Excited. Uncertain.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “It’s been quite a while since I was in this position.”

  She held herself rather stiffly, not exactly melting against him, but she looked up at that and smiled. And his heart skipped a beat. Maybe he was too old for this. “What position?” she asked. “Dancing?”

  “Having my mother kick me in the instep until I asked you to dance. She thinks I’m backward with women.”

  Miranda’s eyebrow arched prettily. “And are you?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought so before.”

  “Before she kicked you?”

  He grinned. “Sometime around then, yes.” Relaxing into the rhythm of the music, he tried to draw Miranda closer, but she resisted, one palm pressed rather solidly against his chest. He didn’t insist, of course, but wondered if maybe she hadn’t wanted to dance with him. Maybe Mark had been right and women like Miranda viewed men over forty with suspicion. Or distaste.

  But he knew he hadn’t imagined the attraction. Or the subtle blush still lingering in her cheeks. He felt the attraction now, was reasonably sure she was feeling it, too. And she didn’t seem the type to be nervous about dancing with a man, even if he wasn’t exactly the Prince Charming she might have had in mind.

  On the other hand…there was her palm maintaining a curious, if not completely unreasonable, distance between them.

  And then it hit him.

  The stain on his shirt bothered her. She either didn’t want to come into contact with it or she felt afraid of making it worse if she did. He had to restrain a ridiculous grin from eating up his entire face. Either reason was perfectly acceptable to him as utterly, unexpectedly charming. She was worried about the stupid stain and it was all she could do to be out here dancing, instead of inside, at one sink or another, scrubbing salmon juice out of his shirt.

  He stopped in midstep. “I’m sorry,” he said, taking her hand and turning toward the house. “But I can’t concentrate on anything except getting that club soda on this shirt.”

  Her relief was instant and companionable. “I was thinking the same thing. The longer it sets, the harder it will be to get out.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” he replied, intrigued by the warmth in her hand and completely captivated by the smile in her eyes.

  Chapter Two

  Nate snapped the front pages of the Providence Journal to a comfortable reading position and settled in to enjoy his morning coffee with the news. He got through the headlines and one paragraph of the lead article before getting up to top off the coffee and check the fridge for orange juice. Back to the table, he reread the paragraph, then decided a little toast would go well with the juice and tide him over until breakfast. Once the bread was in the toaster, he stood, somewhat impatiently, and waited for it to brown. He wondered what Miranda Danville was having for breakfast or if she ate breakfast at all. Lots of girls didn’t.

  Not that Miranda was a girl.

  Oh, no. She was a woman. Definitely. He could still feel the soft, very womanly curve of her in his arms.

  Not that she’d really been in his arms.

  The dance hadn’t lasted a minute. But the memory of her serious, somber expression as she’d watched him dab club soda onto his shirt stayed with him. She’d been so intent on the stain, so concerned about her part in ruining his shirt, that he wasn’t even startled when she’d grabbed the towel from his inept hands and worked diligently on blotting the stain herself.

  Not that he hadn’t been startled.

  The sheer force of the attraction that had cut through him at her touch was enough to sc
are any man. Any man with good sense, that is.

  Not that standing here thinking about her like this showed particularly good sense.

  She was too young for him. Or more aptly, he was too old for her. He was the father of two thirteen-year-olds and two seven-year-olds. He’d been several years into his career before she was out of braces. He’d been married since she was in grade school. If he were going to date—and he wasn’t sure as yet that he was ready—it ought to be with someone closer to his age and experience. A widow, maybe. A single mother. Someone who understood the intricacies of family life, the challenges of parenting. That couldn’t happen with someone like Miranda.

  Not that it couldn’t happen. But it didn’t seem very likely.

  Why was he even thinking about her? The truth was, she couldn’t be the least bit interested in dating someone with his experience. His years and years of experience.

  Not that experience meant he had nothing to offer. He was, after all, a hell of a nice guy. Angie had told him that repeatedly and he had no reason to believe she’d lied about it. He had means, too—a decent retirement income on top of the substantial wealth he’d inherited by virtue of being born his father’s son. He had a Juris Doctorate, too, so he could practice law again, if he wanted. That wasn’t too shabby a list of qualifications, he thought, and then wondered why he was listing all he had to offer a woman when he’d already pretty much decided he wasn’t even ready to date.

  The encounter with Miranda Danville had spooked him, that was it. He hadn’t expected to feel that sort of instantaneous, animal attraction, wouldn’t have thought he could feel it again. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to feel it. Attraction led to liking and liking led to intimacy and intimacy led to love and…well, loving someone again seemed like one hell of a commitment. It was one thing to think he might want to marry again someday but a whole other thing to realize love—and the inevitable possibility of losing that love—was part of the deal.

  But he was getting way ahead of himself. Worrying about something so far-fetched seemed ridiculous. Well, not that far-fetched. His eyesight was still as keen as ever and he hadn’t imagined the look of awareness in Miranda’s lovely blue eyes. Nor had he invented the intriguing blush of color he’d seen on her pearly cheeks. The attraction he’d felt had been mutual. He knew that as well as he knew his name. It was the what-came-next that had him buffaloed.

  The toast popped up, nutty brown and crisp, and he gingerly snatched it out and dropped it onto the counter as he searched through the cabinets for a plate. He wasn’t exactly at home in the kitchen, even though he’d grown up in this house and ought, at least, to remember where Maggie kept the dishes. But he wasn’t accustomed to fixing his own toast. Or being alone in the kitchen. His mother had left early, off on another of the day-long antique hunts she loved, dragging Maggie, the live-in housekeeper and cook, who was more friend than employee, more companion than help, along with her. The two women had waved a cheery goodbye to Nate, who had been intrigued by the novelty of a little Sunday-morning silence. With luck, Kali and Kori might sleep until he’d finished the paper. Will and Cate, being teenagers, invariably slept through the morning hours whenever possible.

  Returning to the table with the toast, he took a sip of coffee and picked up the newspaper again. The coffee had cooled and he should have buttered the toast before sitting down again, but he was determined to read the newspaper before the children invaded his solitude. Even if he did find it difficult to concentrate.

  It was too damn quiet, that was the problem…and his mind was more interested in going over and over the few insignificant minutes he’d spent with Miranda Danville than in focusing on the world’s myriad problems.

  He needed noise, the shrill, rattling chaos his kids normally provided free of charge to keep his mind off an encounter that hadn’t amounted to much of anything. Miranda was too young and too beautiful to find him of interest. Unless he could manage to get a particularly heinous stain on his clothing just before he met up with her again.

  “Hi, Dad!”

  His wish for distraction was granted, the silence scuttled as Kali did the bunny hop past his chair, her dark brown ponytails—doggy ears?—he never could keep those straight—bouncing. Or maybe this was Kori. Even after seven years of practice, he still sometimes had trouble telling them apart. If they stood perfectly still, shoulder to shoulder, right in front of him, he could do it in a snap. But when in motion, as they usually were, or when he saw one without the other—like now—well, it wasn’t so easy. Since Angie died, they seemed to find comfort in looking as much alike as possible and Nate couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen them dressed in anything except matching outfits. He probably ought to do something about that. Suggest they wear matching outfits in different colors, maybe. Or stand still more often.

  “What’s for breakfast?” She braced her feet on the black-and-white tile and tugged at the refrigerator door, opening it with a tremendous—mainly unnecessary—show of effort. “How ’bout we have your famous pancakes?”

  Dad’s famous pancakes was family code for going out to breakfast. Angie had made a joke about the fact that anytime she suggested he cook, he suggested they go out to eat. The kids loved to tease him, made up all kinds of fictitious stories about his ineptitude in all matters domestic. He’d always played along because it made them laugh and he’d never felt any particular need to apologize for not knowing how to do the things Angie did so well. But suddenly he felt inadequate, as if his children might have to suffer through years on a psychiatrist’s couch because he didn’t know how to make pancakes. “I can fix you some toast,” he offered, taking a bite out of his own. “Pretty tasty.”

  Kali—he was almost positive it was Kali and not Kori—looked at him with eyes like his own, but set into her mother’s heart-shaped face, with a handful of Angie’s freckles scattered across her pert little nose. “No, thank you,” she said, and turned back to studying the contents of the fridge. “Can I have a Popsicle, please?”

  He knew sugar was probably the worst thing for a seven-year-old at this time of day. Or later, for that matter. On the other hand, she had said please. “Sure,” he answered, not seeing the harm. “Why not?”

  Her smile, too, reminded him of Angie, in all its crinkly cuteness. But then, except for their eyes, his little daughters were their mother made over. Dark, brown hair, rusty freckles, sassy attitude, all born in them as if Mother Nature had wanted to ensure Angie wouldn’t be forgotten.

  As if that were ever a possibility.

  He watched Angie’s child assess the problem of retrieving the requested Popsicle. Chin up, she reached for the handle of the side-by-side freezer, approaching it as if she’d need eighty pounds of heft in order to pry it open. Nate was tempted to get up to help, but knew from experience she’d rather do it on her own. The door popped open easily, obviously a pleasant surprise, and she smiled while plunging her hand into the box of Popsicles and coming out with the treat successfully in her grasp. She closed the freezer door with her hip and bounced happily over to the table, where she pulled out a chair and sat down, apparently unconcerned about having left the refrigerator door wide-open.

  He got up and closed it, warming up his coffee—again—before returning to his place at the table. He smiled across at her as she licked the orange ice and she smiled back. There was something different about her this morning. Her hair was pulled into two neat ponytails—doggy ears, he decided, was what Angie had called that particular hairstyle—which were each tied with two overlapping ribbons, one blue, one yellow. She was dressed in yellow shorts and a blue-and-yellow-striped T-shirt. A matching outfit. Hmm. “You look nice this morning,” he commented, wondering how she’d gotten her hair so neat.

  “Thanks,” she said, her mouth full of Popsicle. “Cate did it for me. She’s doing Kori’s now.”

  Aha. This was Kali. He should have trusted his instincts. But then the oddity of what she’d said registered. “Cate fixed your hair
? This morning?”

  Kali nodded, apparently seeing nothing unusual in the idea that her sister was up before…he glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall…nine-thirty—a.m.

  “Did you wake her up?” he asked.

  “Nooooo.” Kali stretched out the word, turning it into an I’m-not-stupid, Dad statement. “She’s got a date.”

  “Oh,” Nate said, then frowned. “She isn’t old enough to date.”

  Kali shrugged and Kori came into the kitchen, identical to her twin in every detail, right down to the coordinating ribbons in her hair. Nate decided he would definitely give some thought to suggestions he could make about emphasizing their individuality. “Hey,” she said. “Where’d you get a Popsicle?”

  “From the freezer.”

  Kori looked expectantly at Nate. “She’s got a Popsicle.”

  “He said I could have it.” Kali gave the ice a smug swipe with her tongue.

  “Dad!” Kori’s tone was egregiously offended. “How come she gets a Popsicle?”

  “Because she asked?” Nate suggested, his mood perked by the level of distraction now percolating in the room.

  “Can I have one?”

  “Yes, you may have one.”

  Kori’s smile flashed like neon and he was suddenly aware of a strange mix of color on her teeth. “What’s wrong with your teeth?” he asked, leaning forward for a better look.

  “Don’t worry, Pops,” she said, sounding a lot like her older sister. “It’s just wax. Doesn’t it look like I have braces on?”

  Before he could comment that it looked like just what it was—thin strips of green and pink orthodontic wax stuck across her front teeth—Cate walked in. She’d gotten tall over the last few months, and looked older even than she had yesterday. That could, of course, be the punk-funk style she’d been perfecting over the past couple of years. Her hair—today—was cranberry red with banana and blueberry streaks. At least she was sticking with healthy-fruit colors, he thought. She had a ring—fake, thankfully, as Angie had established a firm rule about no permanent holes in places where nature hadn’t seen fit to put one in the first place—clipped on one eyebrow and a silver stud, magnetically attached—he knew because he’d insisted she show him—at her navel. He would have preferred that the navel jewelry wasn’t visible, but at least her fringed crop top covered all of her except a three-inch band of skin at her waist.