Once Upon a Proposal Read online

  “The box kind is what I want,” Lisette said with certainty. “I had it once when I was at a sleepover with my friend Ellie Roman.” She leaned closer. “We made it ourselves.” She whispered it as if it might have been a crime.

  “Was it a long time ago?”

  She shook her head and tucked her hair behind her ear again. “Before Christmas. But then their cook found out and he got mad and told Ellie’s mom he was going to quit if she didn’t keep the nuisances out of the kitchen. That’s what he calls Ellie and her little sister. The nuisances.” She let out a breath. “I never cooked anything before. It was fun. Until we all got in trouble. Louisa—that’s our housekeeper—says the Romans’ cook is a—” more whispering “—lunatic.”

  Bobbie wasn’t certain that she didn’t agree. It was also inconceivable to her how the things she considered everyday were not part of Lisette’s and Todd’s world at all.

  She tucked her arm through the girl’s. Even at twelve, Gabe’s daughter was nearly as tall as she was. “My sister Tommi was cooking in the kitchen before she was Todd’s age. Now she owns her own restaurant.”

  Lisette’s eyes rounded. “Cool.”

  “I’ve always thought so. Maybe we’ll all go there sometime.”

  “Tonight?” Todd asked just as Gabe pulled his truck up to the curb and pushed open the passenger door from the inside.

  “Not tonight. She’s closed.” Bobbie nudged them forward and they darted across the sidewalk, scrambling up into the back seat of the big truck. She brought up the rear, and once inside, pointed out the location of her car to Gabe.

  “Why don’t we leave it for now,” he suggested. “I’ll bring you by later to get it after we go by the agency to do the checks for Fiona. No point in having us both driving when we’ll have to backtrack this way, anyway.”

  Bobbie was fully aware that it was feeling too much like a cozy family inside his truck, with his long-fingered hand casually resting on the console just a few inches from her arm and his kids squabbling over the video game that Todd had in his backpack. No matter what she’d agreed to help him with, she knew it would be smarter to find some distance. To go to her own car, even if it did mean a little extra driving in the rain.

  Which just proved how little she cared about smarts, when she blindly reached for the safety belt to fasten it around her. “Okay, but we’ll have to stop at the grocery store to pick up a few things on the way.”

  “You should have said so. We’ll just go out,” he said immediately.

  “No, Dad!” Lisette poked her head between the seats. “Bobbie’s gonna make us macaroni and cheese. Out of a box!”

  Gabe looked from his daughter’s unusually animated face to Bobbie and felt a dangerous warmth inside him. “Little did I know that cheap mac and cheese could get such a positive reaction.”

  “Does that mean we don’t gotta have carrots?” Todd asked from the rear.

  “We’ll have carrots, too,” Bobbie said, giving Gabe a smile that seemed a little shaky around the edges. “And maybe orange slices. We’ll just have a whole orange-colored theme going on in honor of Halloween tomorrow.”

  Lisette giggled and sat back in her seat. Gabe looked at Bobbie. “You don’t have to do all this, you know.” The more time they spent together, the more his children accepted her as part of his world, the easier it would be to tell them about the “engagement.” And the better it would be in court for him if any questions arose about his and Bobbie’s supposedly altar-bound relationship. He knew it. But it was getting damn hard to remember that was his only motivation.

  “I know I don’t have to.” She lifted her finger and he realized that the traffic light had turned green.

  He dragged his head out of the gray mist of her eyes and drove out of the parking lot. Rush-hour traffic had abated and it didn’t take long to get to Fiona’s neighborhood and the grocery store that Bobbie directed him to.

  When his kids scrambled out of the truck and raced to the row of shopping baskets lined up outside the entrance, arguing over who would get to push it, Gabe shook his head again. “You’d think they’d never been in a grocery store.”

  Bobbie looked up at him. “Have they?”

  He started to answer, only to realize he didn’t know.

  And wasn’t that a helluva note? Something so ordinary, yet something he’d never done with his own children. And he couldn’t be certain, but he doubted that it was something their mother had done with them, since Stephanie had grown up in a house full of servants, and even when she’d married him had expected to keep on a full-time housekeeper. The fact that such a luxury was not in his budget since nearly every dime he’d been making had gone back into expanding Gannon-Morris had been one of the more minor bones of contention between them.

  “Relax. It’s only a store.” Bobbie patted his hand before sliding out of the truck. She flipped the hood of her raincoat over her head and darted after the children.

  But Gabe knew it was more than that.

  It was one more reminder of the kind of life his children led with their mother and stepfather. He didn’t want his kids growing up insulated from such simple, normal things. He’d grown up that way. And if it hadn’t been for Fiona’s encouragement, he’d have never found his way out of the privileged life that had felt like it was strangling him even before he was out of his private high school.

  Bobbie had reached the wet row of shopping carts stacked up outside the store. She pulled one out, propped her foot on the bottom rack, and pushed off, sailing across the empty sidewalk toward the store. Her hood fell off her head and the tails of her jacket swung out behind her as she rode the careening cart.

  He heard his kids laugh. Both of them. And beneath that, he could hear the musical sound of Bobbie laughing with them.

  He even could feel the corners of his own lips start to turn upward. Addictive, that laugh was.

  He let out a low breath, shoved his balled hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. In the right one, his fingertips felt the sharp edges of a flower-shaped hair clip.

  He took it out and looked at it. The little jewels on it sparkled beneath the parking lot lights.

  He didn’t know why he still hadn’t given it back to her. Or why he kept carrying it around with him.

  He pushed the tiny thing back in his pocket, pushing aside, too, the speculation that wasn’t leading him anywhere he ought to be going, and followed them into the store.

  In the end, what should have taken only a few minutes to gather up what they needed for dinner took considerably longer. And when they left the store, they were all carrying bags. But when they arrived at Bobbie’s place, both Lisette and Todd quickly lost their avid interest in the groceries they’d chosen in favor of Bobbie’s dogs. Once Zeus and Archie were out of their kennel and free to play, all four of the youngsters—human and canine—were rolling around on the floor in the living room.

  Gabe pulled the last box of macaroni and cheese out of the reusable fabric bags that Lisette had insisted they purchase instead of using plastic and handed the box to Bobbie where she was loading things into what had been a nearly empty cupboard. “I can’t remember the last time I heard Lissi giggle like that.”

  Bobbie glanced up at him. “Kids and puppies. They’re a pretty surefire combination.”

  “You’re the surefire combination,” he countered.

  Her eyes widened a little and then she blinked, briskly shut ting the cupboard door and bending over to the lower one to noisily pull out a large pot that she handed him. “Mind filling that with water? I’ve gotta find the lid.”

  He took the pot, and figured there was a hot spot in hell waiting for him, considering the way he couldn’t pull his gaze away from the view she made bending over to root through her cupboard. And when she reached an arm in even farther, the back of her short orange sweater rode up a few inches, baring the creamy skin at the small of her back. A sheer stretch of narrow purple with a tiny bow at the center peeked above her blue
jeans and even though his kids were giggling from the other room and his grandmother was in the freaking hospital, the only thing he wanted to do right then was to let his fingers do the walking over that bow and beyond.

  “Hey, Dad?”

  He swallowed an oath, jerking around like he was thirteen and had been caught looking at pictures of naked ladies. “What is it, Lissi?”

  His daughter gave him a shy smile. “I’m glad we came here.”

  Bobbie made a faint sound and straightened, too.

  “I’m glad, too, honey,” he agreed quietly.

  Then Lisette smiled again, a little less shyly, and she pirouetted out of the kitchen. A second later, they could hear her and Todd whispering, followed by peals of laughter.

  He swallowed and shoved the pot under the ancient faucet. A moment later, Bobbie set the pot lid on the counter.

  “Thanks.” Her hands slid over his as she took the filled pot from him to set on the stove. She didn’t look at him. “You don’t have to stay in here and help, you know.” She turned on the burner and plopped the lid on the pot. “It’s not like there’s much room left in here, anyway.” She waved at the dog kennels taking up half the floor area.

  In answer, he reached for the bag of carrots. “Got a peeler?”

  She looked like she wanted to say something more, but just pressed her soft lips together and pulled open the drawer next to the stove. She rooted through the contents for a moment, then pulled out a vegetable peeler and handed it to him.

  But he caught her hand, along with the peeler. “Thanks.”

  “It’s just a vegetable peeler.”

  His thumb rubbed over her knuckles. “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  Her lashes swept down. “I know.” Her voice was low. “But you—we—don’t need things to get any more complicated than they already are. Right?” She looked up at him then, giving him a blast of her soft gray eyes.

  Eyes that were practically pleading for him not to bring any more hurt into her life.

  Yeah, he’d wanted her the day they’d met. When she’d latched her lips onto his and blown every thought of every single thing in his life right out of his mind. And with every day since, that want was becoming even more sharply hewn.

  But after that, what did he have to offer a young woman like her? A woman who deserved the whole deal. White roses and rings and picket fences and babies.

  Things he’d tried once and had failed at so miserably that he—and those he’d hurt along the way—were still paying the price.

  So he made himself nod. Made himself agree. “Right,” he said gruffly, and slipped the peeler out of her hand. Then he pulled out a carrot and began peeling the damn thing.

  But the only thing he was seeing was the expression on Bobbie’s face.

  The one that told him she was no more convinced of her words than he was.

  Chapter Nine

  “I feel like I’m committing some sort of crime,” Bobbie murmured later that evening.

  Gabe had dropped off the children at their mother’s house after their orange-themed dinner, then driven Bobbie to Golden Ability. Now she was sitting behind Fiona’s desk, an oversized checkbook flipped open on top of it. Beside her was the salary spreadsheet that she’d somehow managed to find in Fiona’s crowded filing cabinets. She consulted it as she carefully wrote out the staff’s paychecks.

  “You’re doing everyone a favor,” Gabe reminded her. He was leaning against the doorjamb between Fiona’s office and the rest of the administrative space at Golden Ability. “Just sign and stop thinking so much.”

  She’d be better off if she could stop thinking so much about a lot of things. She clicked the ballpoint pen again and quickly penned Fiona’s name.

  Only when the first check was completed did she realize she’d been holding her breath.

  She let it out and carefully tore out the check, making certain she’d recorded all of the information in the register. “Fiona needs to have all this computerized,” she said, moving on to the second paycheck. “It would be a lot easier.”

  “Tell her that.”

  “I have.” She added the signature, tore it out and enveloped it. Concentrating on this task for Fiona was the only thing keeping her from dwelling on Gabe. “She keeps every other thing around here on the computer. I don’t know why she doesn’t handle her accounts payable and payroll that way, too, but she just says that she’ll leave that task for the next person to run Golden Ability.” She shook her head. “As if anyone else could fill her shoes. This place would cease to exist if it weren’t for her.”

  “That would be a shame.”

  “No kidding.” She wrote out a few more checks. “Fiona serves more than a hundred people a year. No fees for them to participate, no charges to be partnered with a service dog. Golden bears the cost for all of it and for an agency this small, that’s amazing.”

  “She ever tell you why she started the agency in the first place?”

  Bobbie shook her head and quickly turned her attention back to the checkbook when Gabe suddenly straightened away from his slouch against the jamb and entered the small, crowded office. “I assume what everyone does—that she must have had a heart for it. It’s not like she’s earned the money that would buy that huge house of hers from the profits.”

  “She had my grandfather to thank for that.” He flipped a narrow, straight-backed chair away from the wall on the other side of the desk and sat down on it, crossing his arms over the top of the back.

  “You must have been pretty young when he died.”

  “About five.”

  “Do you remember him?”

  “Some things. Does Fiona talk about him?”

  “Not much.” She pressed the end of the pen against her chin for a moment. Her gaze settled on the sinewy lines of Gabe’s tanned forearms where he’d rolled up his shirtsleeves, and her fingers tightened around the pen. It was a miserable substitute for the feel of his warm skin.

  She looked back down at the checkbook. The cozy office already felt cramped with him there; now she realized it also felt too warm. “I, um, I know she changed everything in her house except his study after he was gone, and never married again. I figured that even after all those years, some losses still remain too deep to talk about.”

  “He had macular degeneration. He was going blind.”

  She looked up, and realized she wasn’t terribly surprised at the detail. “Which explains why Fiona gained an interest in all this, obviously.” She waved her hand around in a loose gesture, then clicked the pen and began tending to business once more. “How did he die?”

  “The official story is that he had a heart attack. I learned when I was a teenager, though, that he’d killed himself.”

  Aghast, she looked up at him. “What?”

  “He chose death over a life of blindness.”

  She pressed her hand to the sudden ache in her chest. “Fiona must have been devastated. And your father, too.”

  “She never wanted anyone to feel as desperate as my grandfather did about their loss of sight. But the rest of the family just wanted to pretend he’d died of natural causes. To this day, they still maintain that story. And none of the family, including my father, supported Fiona’s decision when she started up the agency.”

  Her lips twisted a little. “Except for you, none of her family seems to support her decision even now, some thirty-odd years later.”

  “She didn’t do what was expected of her. She was supposed to have ladies’ teas and sit on the boards of charities. Not run one. She couldn’t even count on financial support from the Gannon Law Group. A woman with less resolve would probably have caved to the pressure.”

  “Is that why you admire her so much? She didn’t cave to family demands?”

  “She didn’t cave, and she backed me when I refused to go to law school.”

  The more Bobbie knew about him, the more fascinated she be came.

  And there was danger in that. A danger s
he wanted to run headlong into.

  She realized she was staring at him again and forced herself to look away.

  She signed the last of the paychecks and set down the pen again. “You’re a successful businessman, though,” she man aged to say, with a credible degree of calm, considering the way her nerves were dancing around. “I’m sure Colin is proud of you now.”

  “He might have been if I’d at least become an architect. Instead, I’m a contractor.”

  “Which is nothing to be sneezed at,” she defended.

  “It’s blue-collar.”

  “So? Honest work is honest work.” Bobbie locked the check book back inside the desk drawer and gathered up the sealed envelopes, tapping them neatly into a pile. “And it must suit you. Why else would you spend your entire adulthood making your company a success?”

  “Success is relative.”

  She squared the pile of envelopes on the center of Fiona’s ink blotter. It was the only place in the office that was immaculately tidy. The rest of the place was cluttered with books and reports and the odd frippery that Fiona had collected over the last several decades. “I suppose it is.”

  She pushed back from the desk and scooted out between it and the filing cabinets that lined the wall. She dropped Fiona’s desk key back in the ceramic turtle, a handmade gift from the first client that Golden had served all those years ago, and went to the door. “I’ve never been particularly successful at anything, so I’m hardly qualified to say.”

  He looked over his shoulder at her, his eyebrow cocked. “You’re pretty damn successful, in my opinion.”

  She tried to squelch the bolt of pleasure his words caused and failed miserably. “All right, I can raise puppies pretty well,” she allowed. “But that’s certainly not going to get me into the Fairchild hall of fame.”

  He swung his legs around until he was sitting properly in the chair, facing her. “And what would that take?”