He pulled the wine from the refrigerator, and a bottle of beer for himself. “The wine’s a little cold,” he apologized, fetching a goblet from a cabinet. “Let it warm up before you drink it.” He poured a glass for her, then twisted off the cap on his beer. “Lindsey?” he hollered into the den. “Susannah and I will be out on the porch.”
“Susannah? Susannah’s here?” A scramble of footsteps, and Lindsey suddenly appeared in the kitchen doorway, slightly breathless. “Hi!” she said, greeting Susannah with much more enthusiasm than she’d greeted her father.
Susannah smiled. “Hi, Lindsey.”
“You were exercising?” Lindsey asked, appraising Susannah’s getup. “That’s so cool. What kind of exercise do you do?”
“Just walking,” Susannah said. “I used to jog when I didn’t have as much time to exercise, but walking’s actually better for you.”
“Yeah,” Lindsey said, making no move to return to the den. “So, what’s up? You just dropped by?”
“Your father and I ran into each other outside.”
Lindsey eyed her father, silently questioning. Then her gaze traveled to the beer and the glass of wine on the counter. “You came over for a drink?”
“Yes.”
“Can I join you?”
“I don’t think so,” Toby broke in. “It’s getting close to your bedtime, Hot Stuff. Maybe it’s time to turn off the TV and get your school things together for tomorrow.”
Lindsey rolled her eyes and curled her lip. “It’s early, Dad. None of my friends go to bed this early.”
“I didn’t say you had to go to bed,” he elaborated. “I said you should get your stuff together for school. Did you make your lunch yet? Did you take a shower?”
“Jeez.” Her eyes rolled again, aiming first at the ceiling and then at Susannah as if hoping to find an ally in her. “He treats me like a baby.”
“It’s something dads do,” Susannah assured her. “It’s perfectly normal.”
“It’s stupid.” With a huff, she spun around, her socks whispering on the tile floor, and stomped back into the den. After a moment, the television clicked off.
“Let’s go out on the porch,” Toby suggested, leading Susannah through a back door off the kitchen into a three-season porch, the jalousie windows shut tight against the cool night. He clicked on the lamp on the glass-topped table between two sling chairs, set Susannah’s glass on the table and gestured for her to sit.
She sank into the canvas pouch of the seat, finding it surprisingly comfortable. Through the slatted windows came the muffled chirps of crickets—a peaceful, rural sound. The sky had grown dark, but the glass held the night safely back.
Toby took the other sling chair. He leaned back and closed his eyes for a minute, then let out a slow breath in an uninhibited display of fatigue. It occurred to her that closing one’s eyes in front of another person was an act of pure trust. He must feel very comfortable with her.
Well, of course he did. Last night he’d told her things he wouldn’t have told her if he didn’t.
“So, how was the Daddy School?” she asked him.
He opened his eyes and grinned at her. Tiny creases formed at the outer corners of his eyes, and the curve of his lips etched lines around his mouth. “It was interesting,” he said, then added, “it was good.”
“Are you going to go back for more classes?”
“Definitely.” He took a swig of beer straight from the bottle. “The teacher is a preschool teacher named Molly Saunders-Russo. She’s a real dynamo. She works with younger children, mostly, but this class was for fathers of older children.”
“Were they all…single?” Susannah asked, deciding not to use the word widowers. It carried too much sadness.
He shook his head. “Some were single, but most were married. They’d come because they didn’t have the rapport they wanted with their children. Most of them are there for advice in how to communicate with their kids, how to get their kids to listen and how to keep their kids out of trouble. Most of them feel inept when it comes to fathering.”
“You don’t feel inept, do you?” Susannah asked.
Before Toby could offer more of an answer than a self-deprecating snort, Lindsey appeared in the doorway. Although she addressed her father, her gaze zeroed in on Susannah. “I made my lunch, Dr. Dad. It’s too early to go to bed. Can’t I watch a little more TV?”
Her wheedling didn’t soften him. “No. It’s late. Go upstairs and shower, and if you’re still not tired you can read in bed for a while.”
“I don’t want to read in bed,” she said, sending Susannah a pleading look. Susannah gave her nothing more than a sympathetic smile. Frustrated, Lindsey stormed away from the doorway.
“That didn’t seem inept at all,” Susannah murmured.
Toby snorted again. “It would be nice if I could get her to do the right thing without having her hate me.”
“She doesn’t hate you,” Susannah assured him. “She’s just angry.”
“She lied to me today,” Toby blurted out, then glanced away, as if shaken by his own statement.
“Lied to you?”
“It scared me,” he admitted. “It’s not that what she lied about was so significant, but if she can lie to me about nonsense now, what will she be doing when she’s fifteen and has a boyfriend and all her friends are drinking or using drugs? What am I going to do if I can’t trust her?”
Susannah had no answer for him. “Did you ask the teacher at the Daddy School?”
He took another slug of beer and turned back to her. She could see the worry in his eyes, the fearful, desperate love he felt for Lindsey. “We did talk about lying. Molly—the teacher—said it was important to understand why a particular child was lying, so you could deal with the underlying issue. For example, is she lying because she’s afraid of how you’d react to the truth? Or is she lying because all her friends are lying about the same thing? Or is she lying to protect a private part of herself from you?”
“Why do you think Lindsey lied to you?” Susannah asked.
He leaned back in his chair and gave a bemused chuckle. “You can’t possibly find this interesting. The tedious travails of a frazzled father and his clever daughter. I mean, really.”
She laughed, too. She was surprised at how interesting she found Toby’s problems. They were so domestic, so wonderfully ordinary. So unlike what she’d had in her own life up to now. “Of course I’m interested,” she told him. “Someday, I hope I’ll be a mother. Maybe I need to learn what the job entails before I take the plunge.”
“No one can ever know exactly what to expect before the fact,” he warned her. “Each child is different.” He regarded her thoughtfully. “You want to be a mother?”
She felt a twinge low in her belly, in her womb, as she thought about the baby she should have had. “Yes,” she said more forcefully than she meant to.
He continued to study her, his eyes dark and assessing, his smile curious but not probing. She wasn’t going to tell him about the baby. She felt close to him, but not that close.
Or maybe her idea of closeness was for him to open up to her while she refused to open up to him. That didn’t seem fair. But she couldn’t talk about the baby. Not even to him. It was too painful. “What did Lindsey lie about?” she asked, as much to distract herself as because she honestly wanted to know.
He accepted her redirecting the conversation. “She was in one of her moods this afternoon,” he said. “She had friends come over to the house without asking me first, and she said they were doing homework together when they weren’t. I know, it’s really trivial. Her friends are good girls. I can’t imagine that they were doing anything bad—except that Lindsey lied about what they were doing. That makes me suspicious.”
“They were probably doing girl stuff,” Susannah said. “Lindsey probably thought you’d laugh at her if you knew what they were doing.”
“Girl stuff?” He looked intrigued, and relieved that Lindsey
’s reason for lying to him might be innocuous. “Tell me, what do three fifth-grade girls do when they get together after school?”
Sipping her wine, Susannah tried to remember what she’d done at that age. In fifth grade, her life hadn’t yet veered from the normal. She’d made an occasional commercial, but she’d still been in public school then. She hadn’t started with tutors until high school, when she’d gotten a job on a cable-TV series and had to be on the set every day.
At Lindsey’s age, she’d been in school and had girlfriends. “We used to fix each other’s hair,” she recalled.
“Lindsey would never do that. She’s not into hair.”
Susannah laughed. “That’s what you think. All fifth-grade girls are into hair. And boys.”
“Boys? She’s not even eleven yet!”
“But she’s noticing boys. She and her friends probably sat in a circle and rated all the boys in the school. They argued over who was the cutest and who was the creepiest. Then they complained about their parents.”
“As if Lindsey had anything to complain about on that front,” Toby said with feigned indignation before succumbing to a wry laugh.
“Maybe they compared figures.”
“Figures? What figures? Their grades? Or their bank accounts?”
The man really did seem to need a Daddy School class. “Their bodies,” she said delicately. “They might have compared their bosoms.”
“They don’t have bosoms,” he argued, then caught her eye and subsided. “All right. They compared bosoms.” He traced a line through the frost dampening the surface of his beer bottle. “She’s been so moody lately I’ve been wondering whether she’s started her period yet.”
“You’d better have a talk with her.”
“I already had a talk with her. I explained everything and told her that she should let me know when it actually started.”
Susannah stifled another laugh. “She’s not going to tell you. You’re her father.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do? Buy her supplies and just leave them in her bathroom?”
“That’s a good idea.”
“I wish she had a woman who could take her shopping. Her friend Cathy’s mother helped her buy her first bra. I was willing to do that, but she refused to go with me.”
“Much to your relief, I’m sure.” Susannah reached across the table to give his hand a comforting pat. “Do you want me to talk to her about her period?”
“I’d love it,” he admitted, then grinned sheepishly. “But I can’t ask that of you.”
“Why not? I don’t mind.”
“Are you sure?”
She’d offered her help impulsively and realized she ought to give it a little more thought. Could she talk to a ten-year-old girl about menstruation? She might want to be a mother, but she wasn’t one yet. Her own mother had been a nonentity, withdrawn and ineffective. As Susannah recalled it, she’d bought her first tampons by herself, because she’d always known she was essentially on her own.
“I’m sure,” she said, meaning it. She would have loved having a friendly neighbor to help her buy tampons. Surely she could do that much for Lindsey. Besides, it would draw her closer to the Cole family, which might be a bad idea but which seemed almost inevitable. She felt safe in this house, with Toby and his daughter. No one expected big things of her here. They might ask, but they didn’t make demands. They didn’t look to her to support them or fulfill their dreams or work her tail off for them.
She’d spent too much of her childhood living for her parents, earning the money that had kept the family housed and fed, accepting the jobs her father had insisted that she take because he’d needed her income. Years later, she’d spent too much of her adulthood accepting what directors wanted, what her agent wanted—anything that could support both her and her parents. She’d spent too much of herself doing what Stephen had wanted, thinking that he would do as much for her. But he hadn’t. No one had. Eventually she’d realized that the only way she would ever have anything done for her was if she did it herself.
So she’d left them all and come to Arlington.
“I really don’t mind,” she said, convinced that she didn’t.
“Thank you.”
That was another difference. She couldn’t remember anyone ever thanking her back in Hollywood. But she wasn’t there anymore. This world was different. Toby was different.
She drank a little wine, then decided to see if he might be willing to do something for her. It was scary to have to ask—she was used to not making requests, because the few times she had, her requests had always been denied. But this was different. This was Toby. “I’m wondering if I can ask a favor of you, too,” she began tentatively.
“Anything.” He actually looked pleased.
His smile gave her courage. She took another drink, then lowered her glass. “I’ve been writing a script for Mercy Hospital. When I left the show, the producer gave me a shot at writing a few scripts. But all I know of hospitals is what I learned by being in the show. Which was fine when I was just an actress, but as a writer I feel kind of ignorant. I was wondering…” She studied him. He was smiling in encouragement. “Could I watch you work? I’ve introduced a character in my script who’s a pediatrician—” as handsome and gentle and multilayered as you are, she thought but didn’t dare say “—and it would be really helpful if I could observe a pediatrician on the job for a day.”
“Is that all?” He laughed. “No problem. Of course, if a patient objects, you’d have to leave the room, but I don’t mind at all.”
“I promise, I wouldn’t say a word. I’ll just sit quietly and take notes. And I’ll wear my eyeglasses and pull my hair back, so maybe people won’t realize who I am.”
“Maybe you could wear a pair of Groucho glasses and a wig,” he teased. “Seriously, I don’t think it will be a problem as long as you stay in the background.”
“I can,” Susannah assured him. Even when she’d been in front of the camera every day, she’d managed to stay in the background off the set. She did what people asked and hoped they’d appreciate her. She worked and waited for someone to say “thank you.” Directors loved working with her because, as they used to say, she had no ego.
She had an ego, but for the chance to observe Toby she’d gladly fade into the scenery.
“We can work out a time when I’ve got my schedule in front of me,” he suggested. “I’ll figure out a good day, one where I’ve got some hospital rounds and some office appointments.”
“Okay.”
He glanced at his watch and winced. “Can you excuse me for a minute? It’s Lindsey’s bedtime, and I want to see if she’s anywhere close to being ready.”
She twisted her wrist to read her sport watch. It was already after nine-thirty. “It’s late,” she said. “I really should be going home.” Her wineglass was nearly empty, and she drained it in a single sip. Then she stood.
Toby stood, too. He took her glass and his bottle, held the door open so she could enter the kitchen ahead of him, and set the glass and bottle on the counter where she’d left her weights. He carried them with him through the hall to the front door, opened it and let the porch light spill in through the screen door. “Thanks again for agreeing to talk to Lindsey,” he said.
“Thanks again for agreeing to let me shadow you at work.”
“It’ll be fun having you there,” he said. He lowered his gaze to his hands, still holding her weights, and she held out her hands to take them. When he placed them into her palms, he let his fingers graze her wrists, then circle around to spread beneath her hands, as if he were helping her hold the weights—or else simply holding her, filling his hands with hers.
His palms were warm and broad. Protective. It was amazing how safe she felt with him—as if he were someone who would help her carry all her burdens, someone willing to give as much as he took, someone who offered support instead of simply demanding it.
She lifted her eyes to his face as he ga
zed down at her, and suddenly she felt a little less safe. She saw something quite the opposite of protectiveness in his expression, something hot and yearning and insistent.
He bowed and brushed his lips to hers.
Her mind went blank. Her mouth tingled, her breath caught and rationality failed her. Everything they’d discussed earlier that evening—Lindsey? His job? The Daddy School? Trust? Whatever they’d talked about melted into an irrelevant blur. All that mattered was that she’d just been kissed for the first time since she’d left Stephen, left California, left her old life behind. She’d just been kissed by a man she barely knew, kissed by someone she admired and respected and—damn it—dreamed about. Kissed by the father of a moody young girl. Kissed by her next-door neighbor.
Her eyes slowly regained their focus. Toby looked nowhere near as stunned as she felt. His eyes were luminous, searching her face, attempting to read a yes in her expression.
She wanted to say yes. She wanted him to wrap his arms around her and cover her mouth with his, to fill it with his tongue. She wanted to feel his body pressed to hers, hard and hungry. She wasn’t used to wanting that kind of thing—and certainly not with this kind of man.
Her neighbor, she reminded herself. The father of a vulnerable young girl. A wholesome doctor. Basic and honest and undemanding—except for the blatant demand in his gaze, the subtle demand in his kiss, the promise in his hands cupped around hers.
She shouldn’t give in to those demands—but she wanted to. Just for one blissful minute longer, she wanted to be kissed by Toby Cole.
She tilted her mouth up and he took what she offered, releasing her hands not to hug her but instead to slide his own hands up her arms, along her shoulders to her cheeks, digging his fingers into the strands of hair that had unraveled from her braid and holding her head steady for his kiss. His mouth opened over hers, and she tasted beer on his lips, felt passion in his tongue pressing against her teeth and then thrusting deep. She heard a guttural sigh—his or hers, she couldn’t say—and moved her tongue against his. The sigh must have come from him, she realized, because she could scarcely breathe—and didn’t really care.
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