[Kate's Boys 02] - The Bride With No Name

by Marie Ferrarella

  Kelsey’s blue eyes widened in confusion. “Salad girl,” she repeated as if trying to find the hidden meaning beneath the phrase. “Is that some kind of new slang term for…?” A mischievous look entered her eyes.

  What went on in his sister’s brain never ceased to mystify Trevor. “No, Kelsey, that’s a position in a restaurant.”

  Rather than clear things up, his answer seemed to confuse his sister even more. “You’re putting her to work?” Kelsey said it as if he’d just chained Venus to an oar and made her a galley slave.

  Before he could set her straight, tell her that he was only going along with Venus’s wishes, Venus spoke up. “It was my idea,” she told Kelsey. “I want to be able to pay my own way, to earn some money.” She didn’t add that for some reason, it didn’t feel right not to have any money. She was still working on unscrambling that feeling.

  Kate had come out to join them and caught the last part of Venus’s sentence. Taking the young woman’s hand in hers, Kate looked down at Venus’s perfectly manicured fingernails, then turned her hand over slowly, studying it. “My guess is that you don’t concern yourself with a paycheck.”

  Venus’s eyebrows drew together quizzically. “You read palms?”

  “I notice skin.” Kate released her hand. “Yours is as smooth as silk. That means you don’t wash dishes and you don’t do anything menial. Your nail polish is perfect, which tells me that you just had them done.”

  Bryan had joined them by now and was shaking his head, an amused expression on his face. “Looks to me like someone else has been watching way too many crime-investigation dramas.”

  “I study people, not TV shows, honey.” Kate patted his cheek affectionately. “You know that. What’s this I hear about a job?”

  Kelsey opened her mouth, eager to be the source of information, but Trevor beat both her and Venus to the punch.

  “I just hired Venus as my new salad girl.”

  She still wasn’t a hundred percent clear on what she was going to be doing. “If I can do the job,” Venus qualified.

  “A monkey could so do that job—” Kelsey retorted, then realized that her words could be taken as an insult. “No offense,” she added hurriedly.

  Placing himself in between the two women, Trevor turned to Venus, cutting Kelsey off. “Contrary to my sister’s limited knowledge, it takes having a larger brain than a primate to be an actual salad girl.”

  “Doesn’t sound right,” Kelsey piped up. “How about salad woman?”

  Trevor gave her a dismissive glance. “How about you do your homework?”

  “Ever the wit,” Kelsey sniffed. She considered herself way too old to be ordered around by one of her brothers. “But you’re in luck. As it happens, I do have some.”

  “Go.” He waved her off into the house. “Do it,” he encouraged.

  Reluctant to leave the small circle, Kelsey sighed and retreated into the house.

  Kate took the opportunity to move closer to Venus. She slipped her arm through the other woman’s. “You know, you really don’t have to find a job. You’re free to stay here as long as you need to.”

  Venus smiled at her. “That’s really very generous of you. Of both of you,” she added, her gaze taking in Bryan, as well. “But I’d feel better if I was paying you something.”

  Kate had always known when to back off. “Well, as long as it makes you feel better, I guess I can’t argue with that.”

  Hearing his wife’s declaration, Bryan could only laugh. “Sure you can, honey.” He wrapped one arm around his wife’s waist. “You could argue with anyone, anytime, anyplace—and most likely win hands down. I should have made you join the firm.”

  “I’d rather just join you,” Kate said, pausing to kiss her husband’s cheek. She nodded at the glass in his hand. It was half-full with something that looked half amber, half some sort of hazy mixture. “Make me one of those. Better yet, show me how.” Even as she said it, she was taking his hand in hers and pulling him back into the house.

  Within a few seconds, Trevor found himself alone again with Venus.

  “Still not too subtle, Mom,” Trevor called after Kate.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” she replied, raising her voice so that it carried as she continued walking into the house. “I just want your father to show me how to make one of those drinks he likes.”

  “Not much mystery to making a rum and Coke,” Trevor commented more to Venus than to Kate.

  Venus was smiling. Whether at him, or because of Kate’s actions, he didn’t know. All he knew was that it was like watching a magnificent sunset.

  Chapter Eight

  Kate glanced up from the coffeemaker when Venus walked into the kitchen the next morning. The smile on the young woman’s face as she uttered a greeting was more a veiled grimace. Motherly instincts immediately rose to the surface.

  Abandoning the coffee she was preparing, Kate crossed over to Venus. “Are you all right?”

  Venus splayed her hand over her unsettled abdomen. “I’m having…” More frustration assaulted her as she searched for the description in vain. “Oh, what’s the word?”

  Kate noted the way Venus pressed her hand to her stomach. “Butterflies?” she guessed.

  She wasn’t sure that was the word. But beggars couldn’t be choosers. “As good a word as any, I guess,” Venus said. “Except that they feel a lot bigger.”

  Kate smiled as if she were familiar with the feeling. “No need to be nervous.”

  “I’m not sure if I’ve ever had a job before,” she confessed. She watched as Kate returned to the coffeemaker and poured out a cup of the dark liquid. “Nothing’s coming to me.” Kate handed her the cup and Venus wrapped her hands around it. The warmth worked its way through her fingers and soothed her. “What if I mess up?” She took a sip and let the black liquid wind its way through her slowly. “What if I disappoint Trevor?”

  Kate poured a cup for herself, adding in a generous allotment of milk and sugar, then sat down across from Venus. “The last thing you need to worry about is disappointing Trevor.”

  Venus frowned into her cup. “What makes you say that?” She would have given anything to be sure about at least one thing. Right now, everything felt like a huge question mark, including her.

  “I know my boys,” Kate answered. “Trevor’s the patient one.” She didn’t add that she’d seen the way Trevor had looked at her when he thought no one else noticed. Didn’t say how she hoped Trevor could become involved in something other than mixing several ingredients together in a bowl or pot. “He doesn’t expect you to be the world’s greatest salad girl right off the bat. You’ve got until at least the end of the day.” And then she laughed when she saw the unnerved expression that entered Venus’s eyes. Rising from her stool, Kate gave her a quick hug with her free hand. “I’m kidding.”

  And then, the crystal sugar bowl at Venus’s elbow told her that, “She does that kidding around stuff to make you feel better, you know.”

  Venus’s eyes widened as she stared at the bowl on the table. “The sugar bowl, it just—”

  “Talked?” Trevor asked, walking into the kitchen through the back door.

  Because of the time, he’d assumed that the family was still at breakfast. Parking his car at the curb, he’d circled the house and made use of the back entrance. Venus looked pretty, he thought. Pretty and scared. He had a feeling that the talking sugar bowl had nothing to do with that.

  Seeing Trevor, Venus slid off the stool and was quick to join him.

  “Yes,” she breathed in relief.

  “I take it that my mother forgot to mention the little fact that she’s a ventriloquist.” He glanced at Kate, shaking his head.

  “Actually, the subject never came up,” Kate responded innocently. And then her eyes sparkled as, for a moment, she entertained a fond memory. She patted Venus’s hand before turning back to the stove and the French toast she was preparing. “That’s how I caught his
father’s attention.”

  “Your ability to make words come out of inanimate objects was the second thing that caught my attention, Kate,” Bryan interjected, striding into the kitchen like a man who had no time to sit down and eat breakfast like a normal person. If anything, he appeared to debate grabbing something on the run.

  “What was the first?” Kelsey asked. She was a couple of steps behind him.

  Once in the kitchen, she made a beeline for the counter, eyeing the French toast like someone who hadn’t eaten for at least a month.

  “Please,” Kate said, rolling her eyes and then glancing in Bryan’s direction. She deposited a traveling mug filled with coffee into his hands. “Not in front of the children.”

  “I don’t see any children here,” Kelsey quipped, making a show of looking from her brother to Venus and then down at herself. “Spill it, Dad.”

  Bryan grinned fondly. “Your mother looked delicious in jeans. Back in those days, my life was so hectic, I’d forgotten that I could be anything but a lawyer and a father.”

  “A father and a lawyer,” Kate corrected. Dusting the first two pieces of French toast with powdered sugar, she wrapped them up in wax paper and deposited them into a paper bag, along with two napkins. “The kids always came first,” she explained tactfully.

  Time to go before they got bogged down in nostalgia, Trevor thought. He glanced at Venus. “So, you ready to blow this three-ring circus?”

  “It’s not a three-ring circus until you meet Trent, Travis and Mike,” Bryan told his houseguest as he accepted the paper bag from his wife.

  “Don’t forget Miranda,” Kelsey added. She stood waiting for the next serving of French toast to make its way off the griddle.

  “Miranda?” Venus asked. This was a new name for her—or had she missed it before? “Who’s Miranda?”

  “Mrs. Mike,” Kelsey informed her. “Or she will be as soon as they get married. You like weddings, Venus?” Kelsey asked, moving in closer to her parents’ houseguest. “Because I’m trying to convince them to have one big blowout of a wedding, but Mike likes things to be on the quiet side and—”

  Trevor saw Venus grow extremely pale and her eyes appeared to glaze over. “Kelsey, stop talking,” Trevor ordered.

  Bristling at being ordered around in front of company, Kelsey immediately went on the defensive. “Why? I can talk in my own house if I wa—”

  Trevor waved her into silence without looking in her direction. His attention was riveted on Venus. Instead of snapping out of it, she seemed even further away than she had a moment ago. “Venus?” He took hold of her hand, hoping that the contact would bring her around. “Are you all right?”

  She couldn’t make out the words. It was all she could do to hear his voice. Everything around her had retreated until it felt miles away, taking the light with it.

  And then suddenly, disembodied bits flashed through her mind. The word wedding resounded in her brain as if it were in a large echo chamber.

  In one of the flashes, she thought she saw a wedding dress. Her wedding dress. Or was that a picture in a magazine?

  She felt hot and cold at the same time.

  And sick to her stomach.

  There were hands, gentle hands, catching her. Was she falling? Through the air? Into the water?

  Suddenly, she felt something wet against her mouth. The ocean? Venus gasped, afraid that her next breath might be her last.

  And then things began to slip back into focus.

  She was on a chair, sitting at the table in a bright, sunny kitchen. People were gathered around her. Strangers, talking at her.

  No, wait, not people, not strangers. Trevor. The man who’d saved her. Who’d dived into the water and risked everything so that she didn’t sink to the bottom of the sea, forever disappearing without a trace.

  Trevor.

  “Oh God,” she gasped again, throwing her arms around his neck. Her heart hammered wildly in her ears as anxiety crackled and raced through her. But why? She hadn’t a clue.

  “What?” Trevor cried, holding her to him as he crouched beside her chair. “What is it? You’re shaking like a leaf.” She’d started shaking when Kelsey tried to give her some water. He ordered his sister back. “Put the glass of water down, Kelsey. For some reason, it triggered something for her.”

  “Maybe you should lie down,” Kate suggested gently to a still very pale Venus.

  Venus drew in a deep breath, trying to steady herself. She felt like a fool, drawing this much attention. Especially since she couldn’t explain what had just happened.

  “No, I’m fine.” She looked up at Kate. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. It’s just that, suddenly, I wasn’t here anymore.”

  “Where were you?” Bryan prodded.

  She raised her eyes to the older man’s face. “I don’t know,” she confessed honestly. She hated this helpless feeling. “It all just kind of swirled together.” She turned her head to look at Trevor. “I thought I remembered something and then it just sucked me away.”

  “But to where?” Kelsey wanted to know.

  “Leave her alone, Kelse,” Trevor told his sister. He was still kneeling beside Venus’s chair, where he had lowered her when she looked about to faint. “It doesn’t matter where.”

  “Maybe you’re trying too hard to remember, dear,” Kate said softly. “Don’t force it. These things take time.” Especially if it involved a repressed memory, Kate thought. Which this obviously did. “It’ll come back to you if it’s meant to.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Trevor asked.

  “The mind protects us,” Kate told her stepson. “It draws a curtain around what it feels we can’t handle. She’ll remember things when she’s better equipped to deal with them.”

  Did that mean that someone had tried to kill her? Trevor wondered. He couldn’t think of any other reason for her to be in the water that night. She’d either leaped from a vessel, trying to escape, or someone had thrown her overboard.

  “Do you really think so?” Venus asked. She desperately wanted to remember something, any little clue to who she really was.

  “I’d believe her if I were you,” Bryan confided. “In my experience, she’s hardly ever wrong.” He ended his statement with a wink.

  It made her feel better. Venus nodded, then, taking another deep breath, she rose to her feet. “I’m sorry.” Her apology took in everyone in the room. “I didn’t mean to make a scene.”

  Kate waved away the apology. “You didn’t. We’re just glad you’re all right.”

  Venus turned toward Trevor. “We’d better get going.”

  He wasn’t altogether certain that was still a good idea. “Maybe you should stay home today,” he suggested. “You can get started tomorrow.”

  “By tomorrow, my butterflies will be condors. And you’ll be short who knows how many salads. No, I’m okay, really.” She could see he wasn’t convinced. “Please, Trevor, I want to work. I want to be busy, be helpful.”

  Trevor had more than his share of doubts about the wisdom of letting her start working. He looked over her head toward Kate, silently asking her opinion. As a psychologist who dealt with children, she was the closest thing to a doctor they had.

  “If she thinks she’s up to it, let her try,” Kate counseled.

  He still wasn’t completely convinced, but he found he had trouble saying no when Venus looked at him like that—with liquid green eyes that pleaded so eloquently. So he sighed and nodded.

  “You heard the lady,” he said, nodding toward his mother. “Let’s get going.”

  He was rewarded with a wide, relieved smile and a whispered, “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank him until you find out what he’s paying you,” Kelsey called after them.

  Trevor purposely brought Venus into the restaurant more than an hour before the rest of the staff was due. He wanted to use the time to go over things with her, to orient her to her surroundings and make her as comfortable as possibl
e. In his opinion, there was nothing worse than feeling uncertain about what you were doing, knowing that at least a dozen pairs of eyes were covertly, and not-so-covertly, watching you.

  “There’s really not much to it,” he assured her after reviewing the ingredients of the five basic side salads Kate’s Kitchen served: chef, Caesar, Greek, cob and the house salad, which was a mixture of the best of the other four, doused with four kinds of cheeses. “I guarantee that you’ll be doing these in your sleep by the end of the day.”

  She nodded, her mouth curving in a smile that wasn’t a hundred percent confident. But she did appreciate the fact that Trevor had confidence in her—and that he had hired her on in the first place. “I want to thank you for letting me do this.”

  “I’m not ‘letting’ you do anything,” he corrected. “You’re bailing me out. I need a salad girl—or woman if you prefer,” he amended, remembering Kelsey’s terse correction.

  “What I prefer is not to let you down,” she told him, looking at the array of ingredients spread out before her on the table.

  “Not a chance,” he told her with a wink that went straight to her stomach and created havoc amid the butterflies.

  If she was about to say something, she never got the chance, because at that minute Trevor heard the back door being opened. The next moment, Emilio came walking in. The all but perpetual smile on the young Latino’s face widened when he saw someone else in the kitchen.

  “Hey, who’s the new girl?” Emilio called out as he made straight for them.

  Protectively, Trevor glanced at Venus’s face to make sure that his assistant didn’t overwhelm her. Emilio had a tendency to come on pretty strong right from the first moment.

  Trevor refrained from putting his arm around her. “This is Venus.”

  “Venus,” Emilio repeated, rolling the name over on his tongue. His dark eyes took instant measure of her and it was obvious that he didn’t find her lacking in any department. “Beautiful name,” he told her, then asked, “Venus what?”

  Venus looked toward Trevor for help. They’d never come up with a last name, even for simplicity purposes. “Just Venus,” Trevor told his assistant.