The Daddy Makeover

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “All right. Thank you.”

  He was quite certain he was the one with trepidation in his eyes now as he stepped into her apartment. Only after he crossed the threshold did Conan hurry to him for attention and Eben could swear the dog looked pleased.

  Chapter Six

  Sage had always considered her apartment to be a perfect size, roomy without being huge. The rooms were all comfortably laid out and she loved having an extra bedroom in case any friends from college came to stay. It had always seemed just right for her.

  How was it that Eben Spencer seemed to fill up every available inch?

  His presence was overwhelming. He wore the same pale blue dress shirt he’d had on that morning, though his tie was off and his sleeves were rolled up. Afternoon stubble shadowed his jawline, giving him a slightly disreputable look she guessed he would probably find appalling if he were aware of it.

  He looked so damn gorgeous, it was infuriating.

  She shouldn’t even be noticing how he looked, not after she had spent all day sternly reminding herself they had nothing in common, no possible reason for this unwanted attraction that simmered between them.

  He represented wealth and privilege and all the things she had turned her back on after a lifetime of struggling—and failing—to find her place there. He was no doubt just like her father, obsessed with making and keeping his money.

  Good grief, the cost of his tailored shirt alone could probably feed a family of four for a month.

  She didn’t like him, she told herself. While her brain might be certain of that, the rest of her was having a tougher time listening to reason when she just wanted to curl against his strength and heat like Conan finding a sunbeam shooting through the window.

  She sighed and pulled her lasagna out, attributing her flushed and tight skin to the heat pouring from the oven.

  “Can I help with anything?” he asked, standing in the doorway.

  Yeah. Go away.

  She forced herself to stuff the thought back into the recesses of her mind. She was a strong, independent woman. Surely she was tough enough to endure an hour or so with the man.

  “Everything’s just about ready. Chloe and I were finishing things up in here when you arrived. Would the two of you mind setting the table?”

  She regretted the question as soon as she asked it. Eben Spencer probably had a legion of servants to do that sort of grunt work at his house. To her surprise, he didn’t hesitate.

  “No problem. Come on, Chloe.”

  Through the doorway beyond him, Sage saw Chloe get up from the floor where she had been playing with Conan. She and the dog both tromped into the kitchen, making Sage even more claustrophobic.

  “You’ll have to point me in the right direction for plates and silverware,” Eben said.

  “I’ll grab them for you.”

  She pulled out her favorite square chargers—she’d bought them from a ceramics studio in Manzanita, attracted by their wild, abstract designs—and the contrasting plates she always used with them, then held them out for Eben to take.

  Their hands connected when he reached for them and a spark jumped between them.

  Sage flushed. “Sorry. It’s the, uh, hardwood floors. Makes electricity jump in the air, especially when there are a lot of negative ions flying around from the storm.”

  She was babbling, she realized, and forced herself to clamp her lips shut. She didn’t miss the long, considering look Eben gave her.

  “Oh, is that what it’s from?” he murmured.

  Before she could formulate what would no doubt be a sharp retort, he grabbed the plates and carried them out of the kitchen. Only after he left did she release the breath she suddenly realized she was holding.

  “Silverware is in the top drawer to the left of the dishwasher,” she told Chloe. “Glasses are in the overhead cupboard.”

  She didn’t have the luxury of a dining room in her apartment, but she had commandeered a corner of the good-sized living room for the table Will Garrett had made her.

  The chairs were a mismatched jumble picked up here and there at thrift stores and yard sales, but she coordinated them with cushions in vivid colors to match the placemats and chargers.

  She always thought the effect was charming but she imagined to someone of Eben Spencer’s sophisticated tastes, her house probably reeked of a lousy attempt at garage-sale chic.

  She didn’t care, she told herself.

  It was a waste of time even worrying about what he might think of her and her apartment. In a week, Eben and Chloe Spencer would just be a memory, simply two more in a long line of transitory visitors to her corner of the world.

  The thought left her vaguely depressed so she pushed it away and pulled the salad she and Chloe had tossed earlier out of the refrigerator. After a few more moments of them working together, the meal was laid out on the table.

  “Everything looks delicious,” Eben said, taking the seat across from her.

  “Sage is a vegetarian, Daddy,” Chloe announced with fascinated eagerness.

  “Is that right?”

  “Not militant, I promise,” she answered. “Steak lovers are usually still welcome at my table.”

  A corner of his mouth lifted. “Good thing. I do enjoy a good porterhouse, I’m sorry to say.”

  “You can enjoy it all you want somewhere else, but I’m afraid you won’t find any steaks here tonight.”

  “I can be surprisingly adaptable.” Again that half smile lifted his features, made him seem much less formidable. Her insides trembled but she stubbornly ignored them, serving the lasagna instead.

  They were all quiet for a few moments as they dished breadsticks and salad.

  Sage braced herself for a negative reaction to her favorite lasagna dish. She wasn’t the greatest of cooks but after choosing a vegetarian lifestyle in college, she had worked hard to find dishes she found good, nutritious and filling.

  But her tastes were likely far different than Eben’s. He probably had at least one Cordon Bleu-trained personal chef to go along with the legion of servants she’d imagined for him.

  To her relief and gratification, he closed his eyes in appreciation after the first taste. “Delicious. My compliments to the chefs.”

  Chloe giggled. “There weren’t any chefs, Daddy. Just Sage and me.”

  “You two have outdone yourselves.”

  “It’s super good, Sage,” Chloe agreed. “I wasn’t sure I’d like it but I can’t even taste the carrots and stuff.”

  Sage smiled, charmed all over again by this little girl with the inquisitive mind and boundless energy.

  “Thank you both. I’m glad you’re enjoying it.”

  “Maybe you could give me the recipe and I could make it sometime at home, if the new nanny helps me,” Chloe suggested. “I like to cook stuff sometimes, when I have a chance.”

  “I’ll do that. Remind me before you leave and I’ll make a copy of the recipe for you.”

  “Thank you very much,” Chloe said, with a solemn formality that made Sage smile again. She shifted her gaze from the girl to her father and immediately wished she hadn’t.

  Eben watched her, an odd expression in those brilliant green eyes. It left her breathless and off balance. He quickly veiled it in that stiff, controlled way of his she was coming to despise.

  “This is a beautiful house,” he said into the sudden silence. “Have you lived here long?”

  “Five years or so—I moved in a few weeks after I came to Cannon Beach.”

  “You’re not from here? I wondered. You have a slight northeast accent every once in a while, barely noticeable.”

  Her mouth tightened as if she could clamp down all trace of the past she didn’t like remembering. “Boston,” she finally said.

  “That’s what I would have guessed. So what brought you to Oregon?”

  “When I graduated from Berkeley, I took an internship at the nature center. I spent the first few weeks in town renting a terrible studio apartm
ent a few blocks from here. It was all I could afford on an intern’s salary, which was nothing.”

  “You worked for free?” Chloe asked and Sage had to smile a little at the shock in her voice.

  “I was fresh out of college and ready to see the world, try anything. But I did hate living in that terrible apartment.”

  “How did you end up here?” Eben asked. He sounded genuinely interested, she realized, feeling ashamed of herself for being so surprised by it.

  “One day at the grocery store I helped a local woman with her bags and she invited me home for dinner.” Her heart spasmed a little and she suddenly missed Abigail desperately.

  She managed a smile, though she suspected it didn’t look very genuine. “I’ve been here every since.”

  Eben was silent for a long moment. By the time he spoke, Sage had regained her composure.

  “How many apartments are in this place?”

  “Three. One on each floor, but the middle floor is empty right now.”

  “Your neighbor on the first floor let me in.”

  “Right. Anna.”

  Conan barked a little from under the table when she said Anna’s name and Sage covered her annoyance by taking a sip of the wine she had set out for her and Eben.

  Eben and Anna Galvez would be perfect for each other. The hotel tycoon and the sharp, focused businesswoman. They were both type A personalities, both probably had lifetime subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal, both probably knew exactly the difference between the Dow Jones and the NASDAQ—and how much of their respective portfolios were tied up in each, down to the penny.

  Sage could barely manage to balance her checkbook most months and still carried a balance on her credit card from paying a down-on-his-luck friend’s rent a few months earlier.

  Yeah, Eben and Anna would make a good pair. So why did the idea of the two of them together leave her feeling vaguely unsettled?

  “You said the second floor is empty?”

  “Yes. We’re still trying to figure out what we want to do, whether we want to fix it up and rent it out or leave things as is. Too many decisions to make all at once.”

  “I didn’t understand that you owned the place. I thought you were renting.”

  She made a face. “I own it as of a month ago. Well, sort of.”

  “How do you sort of own something?”

  “Anna and I co-inherited the place and everything in it, including Conan.”

  He looked intrigued and she didn’t like feeling her life was one interesting puzzle for him to solve. “So the dog came with the house?” he asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “So are you and Anna related in some way?”

  “Nope.” She sipped at her wine. “It’s a long story.”

  She didn’t want to talk about Abigail so she deliberately changed the subject.

  “I understand from Chloe you’re in town to buy The Sea Urchin from Stanley and Jade Wu.”

  Frustration flickered in his green eyes. “That’s the plan, anyway.”

  “When do you expect to close the sale?”

  “Good question. There have been a few…complications.”

  “Oh?”

  “Everything was supposed to be done by now but I’m afraid the Wus are having second thoughts. I’m still working hard to convince them.”

  “My daddy has a lot of other hotels,” Chloe piped up, “but he really, really wants The Sea Urchin.”

  Of course. No doubt it was all about the game to him, the acquisition of more and more. Just like her own father, who had virtually abandoned his child to the care of others, simply to please his narcissistic, self-absorbed socialite of a second wife.

  “And I imagine whatever you want, you get, isn’t that right?”

  She meant to keep her voice cool and uninterested, but she was fairly sure some of her bitterness dripped into her words.

  He studied her for a long moment, long enough that she felt herself flush at her rudeness. He didn’t deserve to bear the brunt of an old, tired hurt that had nothing to do with him.

  “Not always,” he murmured.

  “Can I have another breadstick?” Chloe asked into the sudden awkward silence.

  Her father turned his attention to her. “How many have you had? Four, isn’t it?”

  “They’re so good, though!”

  Sage had enough experience with both eight-year-olds and dogs to know exactly where the extra breadsticks were going—under the table, where Conan lurked, waiting patiently for anything tossed his way.

  She handed Chloe another breadstick with a conspiratorial smile. “This is the last one, so you’d better make it last.”

  “I’m going to have to roll you down the stairs, I’m afraid.”

  Chloe snickered at her father. “Conan could help you carry me down. He’s way strong.”

  “Stronger than me, probably, especially with all those breadsticks in his system.”

  Chloe jerked her hand above the table surface with a guilty look, but her father didn’t reprimand her, he only smiled.

  Sage gazed at his light expression with frustration. Drat the man. Just when she thought she had him pegged, he had to act in a way that didn’t match her perception.

  It was becoming terribly difficult to hang on to her dislike of him. Though her first impression of him had been of a self-absorbed businessman with little time for his child, she was finding it more difficult to reconcile that with a man who could tease his daughter into the giggles.

  She had always made a practice of looking for the good in people. Even during the worst of her childhood she had tried to find her stepmother’s redeeming qualities. So why was she so determined to only see negatives when she looked at Eben Spencer?

  Maybe she was afraid to notice his good points. If she could still be so attracted to him when she was only focusing on the things she disliked, how much more vulnerable would she be if she allowed herself to see the good in him?

  The thought didn’t sit well at all.

  What was her story? Eben wondered as Sage dished out a simple but delicious dessert of vanilla ice cream and fresh strawberries. She was warm and approachable one moment, stiff and cool the next. She kissed like a dream then turned distant and polite.

  Her house was like her—eclectic, colorful, with a bit of an eccentric bent. One whole display case in the corner was filled with gnarled pieces of driftwood interspersed with various shells and canning jars filled with polished glass. Nothing in the house looked extravagant or costly, but it all seemed to work together to make a charming, cozy nest.

  He was intensely curious about how she came to own the house after five years of renting it, but she obviously hadn’t want to talk about it so he had let her turn the conversation in other directions. He wondered if that had something to do with the pain that sometimes flickered in her gaze.

  “I love strawberries,” Chloe announced. “They’re my very favorite thing to have on ice cream.”

  “You need to try some of the Oregon berries sometime,” Sage said with a smile.

  She maintained none of her stiff reserve with Chloe. She was genuinely warm all the time and he found it entrancing.

  “And before you leave, remind me to give you some of the wild raspberry jam I made last summer,” she went on.

  “You made jam all by yourself?”

  “It’s not hard. The toughest thing is not eating the berries the minute you pick them so you’ve got enough left to use for the jam.”

  Before Chloe could ask the million question Eben could see forming in her eyes, Sage’s dog slithered out from under the table and began to bark insistently.

  “Uh-oh. That’s his ignore-me-at-your-peril bark,” Sage said quickly, setting her unfinished dessert down on the table. “I had better let him out.”

  “I’ll do it!” Chloe exclaimed. Her features—so much like her mother’s—were animated and excited.

  She had been remarkably well-behaved through dinner—no
tantrums, no power struggles. It was a refreshing change, he thought. Sage Benedetto had a remarkably positive effect on her. He wasn’t sure what she did differently, but Chloe responded to her in a way his daughter hadn’t to anyone else in a long time.

  “Thanks, Chloe,” Sage said. “Just make sure the gate is closed around the yard so he can’t take off. He’s usually pretty good about staying on his own territory, but all bets are off if he catches sight of a cat.”

  Chloe paused at the door. “Can I ask Miss Galvez if I can look at the dolls while I’m downstairs?”

  Sage shifted her gaze to meet Eben’s. “You’ll have to ask your father that.”

  “Someone will have to clue me in. What dolls?”

  “The woman who left the house to me and to Anna Galvez had a huge doll collection. It takes up an entire room in Anna’s apartment now. I promised Chloe we could take a look at them before dinner, but time slipped away from us and then you arrived.”

  “Can I see it, Daddy?”

  “If Miss Galvez doesn’t mind showing you, I can’t see any reason why not.”

  “Yay!” Chloe raced out the door, though Conan shot ahead of her and Eben could hear his paws click furiously down the stairs.

  The moment they left, Eben realized he was alone with Sage—not a comfortable situation given the tension still simmering between them. She was obviously suddenly cognizant of that fact as well. She jerked to her feet and started clearing away their dinner dishes.

  He finished the last of his dessert and rose to help her. “Thank you again for dinner. I can’t remember a meal I’ve enjoyed more.”

  It was true, he realized with surprise. Chloe was usually in bed when he returned home from work, but on the rare occasions he dined with her, he typically found himself bracing for her frequent emotional outbursts.

  It had been wonderful to enjoy his daughter’s company under Sage’s moderating influence.

  Sage didn’t look convinced by his words. “It was only vegetarian lasagna. Probably nothing at all like you’re used to. You don’t have to patronize me.”

  Her words surprised a laugh from him. “I don’t think I could patronize you, even if I tried. I doubt anyone can. I mean it. I enjoyed the meal—and the company—immensely.”