The Family Plan (17 page)

Remembering the adamancy in Lenore’s voice when she’d insisted she could never accept Isabelle, Caitlin wasn’t sure there was any solution to the impasse.

They finished their lunches quickly. Isabelle seemed to be unaware that the mood had changed, but Caitlin was all too conscious of the difference in Nathan. He had been rather quiet before his mother’s appearance, but he was positively subdued now. She hated seeing him this way, but she could think of nothing that would cheer him up.

Fortunately, Isabelle was very good at that sort of thing. By the time they returned to the office, Nathan was smiling again, if only for his little sister’s sake.

Settling Isabelle with her dollhouse again, Nathan followed Caitlin into her office. “Do you have much more to do today?”

“Not much. Another couple of hours, maybe. You?”

“Maybe a half hour to finish that file I was working on before lunch. Just as well. I’m not sure Isabelle’s dollhouse is going to hold her attention much longer.”

“She really is a very well-behaved little girl. No pouting or tears, no tantrums, no whining.”

“Except for the tantrums, I’ve seen a little of all of the above from her, but not much.” His smile looked a bit weary around the edges. “She’s a normal three-year-old, Caitlin, but she is a good kid, on the whole.”

“No question about that.” She hesitated, then tentatively laid a hand on his arm. The muscles beneath his long-sleeved rugby shirt were rock hard with the tension she had sensed in him since they’d left the deli. “Are you okay?”

“Who, me?” He flashed a semblance of his usual cocky grin. “I’m always okay.”

Giving him a repressive frown, she said, “You know what I mean. I know the scene with your mother bothered you.”

His mouth quirked wryly at her choice of words. “My mother would
never
cause a scene. She was as calm, collected and polite as she would have been with any distant acquaintance—or even with a bitter enemy—in such a public venue.”

“I know that must have hurt you.”

“It breaks my heart,” he answered simply. “But I don’t know what else to do about it.”

“Would you like me to try to talk to her again?”

He covered her hand with his own. “Thanks, but I don’t think it would help. My mother is the most stubborn woman I’ve ever met. Strike that. The
second
most stubborn woman. My sister still holds top prize.”

“I just wish there was something I could do to help.” Caitlin had discovered that she really hated seeing the empty look of pain in Nathan’s beautiful eyes.

Even as that thought occurred to her, she saw his eyes light with a soft gleam. His fingers tightened around hers. “I can think of a few things you could do to help me feel better.”

She sighed and started to move away. She should have known he wouldn’t be serious for long. Nathan’s typical response when things got too intense was to start wise-cracking and flirting.

As always, his flirting made her self-conscious. “I suppose we had better get back to—”

The rest of her words were smothered beneath his mouth.

She couldn’t believe he was kissing her right there in the office. With no warning, no provocation, no chance for her to resist. And she
would
have resisted, she assured herself even as she tilted her head slightly to accommodate his kiss, if only he had given her some forewarning of his intentions.

His arms went around her, pulling her closer. She rested her hands on his chest so she could push him away—in just a minute.

Hi tilted his head and deepened the kiss. Her fingers curled into his shirt, and she wasn’t pushing him away. Didn’t want to.

She parted her lips and kissed him back—and it had nothing to do with sympathy or wanting to soothe his pain or anything else but pure desire. She’d been wanting to kiss him again ever since the last time, damn it. And it was even better than she remembered.

Nathan was the one who finally raised his head.

For just a moment she would have sworn he was at a loss for words. Characteristically, he recovered almost immediately. “Have dinner with me tonight.”

Trying to pull her resolve together, she shook her head. “Isabelle—”

“Can stay with a sitter for a few hours. Mrs. T. has volunteered several times.”

Still shaking her head, she moved a couple of steps away from him, laying a hand on her desk as if to draw strength from its solid surface. “No. We have to stop this. Now.”

Nathan made a sound that closely resembled a growl. “I really should add you to that list of stubborn women. I’d say you run neck-and-neck with my mother and my sister.”

“I haven’t changed my mind about us,” she said, knowing she sounded as obstinate as he accused her of being. “I still think it would be a mistake for us to confuse friendship and natural attraction for something more.”

“I’m not at all confused,” he assured her easily. “I simply want a chance to spend some time with you. Alone.”

“Definitely not a good idea. It seems like every time we’re alone together lately, well…” She felt her cheeks warm before she finished lamely, “Things get out of hand.”

Nathan laughed. While she couldn’t help being relieved that he was smiling again, she didn’t like feeling that it was at her expense. “I rather like it when things get out of hand,” he said.

The old Nathan was definitely back—at least for now. Maybe she should be pleased with herself for finding a way to cheer him up, even if unintentionally. Instead, she tried to speak firmly and with unmistakable finality. “I am not getting involved with you, Nathan.”

He reached out to touch a fingertip to her lower lip, which was still warm and moist from kissing him. “Caitlin. You already are.”

Turning away from him so quickly she almost stumbled, she spoke more gruffly this time. “Go check on your sister. She really shouldn’t be left alone this long.”

“This issue between us is far from settled.”

She only sighed in response to his warning. “Just go away, Nathan. I have work to do.”

She was relieved when he turned and left the office, leaving her to settled into her desk chair and bury her face in her hands. She was not unaware that he had left her in the same despairing position he’d found her in earlier.

Sunday would have been Stuart McCloud’s sixtieth birthday. Nathan was painfully aware of the significance of the date from the time he woke that morning.

He couldn’t help feeling a bit nostalgic as he dragged himself into the laundry room to wash a load of Isabelle’s play clothes, then moved into the kitchen to start breakfast. Birthdays had always been a big deal in the McCloud household, with special breakfasts, parties and elaborate gifts. Stuart was the one who had insisted each birthday be celebrated. Simply surviving another year was an accomplishment in itself, he had said many times.

Stuart had fallen six months short of surviving his own sixtieth year.

Nathan gazed pensively out the window over the sink. It was a dark, gray morning. Looked as though it might start raining any minute. Isabelle was still sleeping. He had let her stay up a bit later than usual watching videos last night since he’d known she could sleep in today.

Though he hadn’t been a faithful churchgoer for the past several years, he supposed he should start taking Isabelle to Sunday school. Problem was, the only church he had ever attended was the one in which his mother was an extremely active member. Maybe he’d better look into a few others. He wouldn’t want to ruin his mother’s longtime pleasure in her church.

The smell of scorching batter brought his attention back to what he was supposed to be doing. He flipped the pancakes quickly, frowning at the charred edges. Okay, so he would eat these.

He remembered lazy weekend mornings when
he
had been the one to sleep in. He would then read the paper while sipping coffee and munching cold pizza or whatever else he might find in the fridge. Maybe head out midafternoon with his golf clubs or a fishing rod, a cooler of beer and whatever buddy had been available at a moment’s notice. On other Sundays he’d had lunch with his mother, sometimes joined by his brother and sister.

If he had wanted to stay out until midnight on weekends—or all night—he’d been free to do so. If he’d been in the mood for a woman’s company, all he’d had to do was pick up the phone.

How his life had changed.

Because he was still in that strangely melancholy mood, and feeling just a little lonely, he covered the plate of pancakes to keep them warm and reached for the telephone.

His brother answered on the fourth ring, just when Nathan was beginning to think Gideon wasn’t in the mood to answer the phone today. He didn’t worry about waking him—Gideon was always up at sunrise. He said his brain was sharper in the mornings.

Which didn’t mean he was a cheerful riser. “What?” he barked into the phone.

“Sorry,” Nathan said. “Bad timing?”

“Rough scene,” his brother replied. “Been at it since five and I’ve only managed two paragraphs.”

Nathan knew better than to ask how close Gideon was to deadline. Saying the word
deadline
to Gideon McCloud was like saying
kill
in front of a trained attack dog. Always elicited a snarl, at the very least.

He settled for asking carefully, “Anything bothering you?”

“Other than intrusive early-morning phone calls, you mean?”

“Other than that,” Nathan agreed equably.

“No, nothing’s bothering me in particular. What’s up with you? Why did you call?”

“I just felt like checking in. I haven’t talked to you in a couple of weeks.”

“Still got the kid?”

“You know I do.”

“Pretty weird, bro. You raising a kid, I mean.”

“I know. But she’s a pretty cool kid. Why don’t you have dinner with us one night this week and find out for yourself?”

“We’ve had this discussion. I don’t need any more siblings. The two I’ve got are trouble enough—you calling me during prime working hours, Deb nagging me every few days to try to talk sense into you.”

“Deborah’s been calling you about me?”

“Yeah. Even though I keep telling her I don’t have any influence over your actions. Never have. Never wanted to.”

Though their personalities were very different, they had been closer than this once, Nathan mused, remembering summer days of swimming and skateboarding, autumn afternoons of basketball and football, spring weekends of baseball and tennis. Gideon had always been rather quiet and introspective, content to spend hours in his room with piles of novels and notebooks for his own scribblings, but he’d withdrawn even more into himself as he’d left his teen years.

Nathan had tried countless times to identify the turning points in his brother’s life, any specific causes for the changes in him. But whatever traumas there had been, if any, Gideon kept them to himself. To their parents’ dismay, he dropped out of college his junior year. A year later he’d sold his first short story. Almost four years after that his first novel had seen print.

His early readership had been small but loyal; his earnings, modest, but sufficient for his simple tastes. And now he seemed to be poised on the brink of breaking out into a larger market. His tightly plotted and eccentrically cast novels were becoming more popular through enthusiastic word-of-mouth from his core of longtime readers. If Gideon was excited about the new direction his writing career was taking, he kept that to himself, as well.

“You remember what today would have been, don’t you?” Nathan asked quietly, wondering if the date had had anything to do with Gideon’s difficulty writing that morning.

Gideon’s reply was curt. “I remember.”

“You want to talk about it?”

Gideon had been estranged from their father even before Stuart had left the family, but Nathan couldn’t believe his brother hadn’t suffered in some way from Stuart’s death, even though he had steadily refused to discuss his feelings. Nathan didn’t think it was healthy to keep feelings so deeply bottled up. He’d been trying for years to maintain open lines of communication between himself and his younger brother, even though he usually felt as though he was the only one making any effort at all to reach out.

He couldn’t remember the last time Gideon had called him. He couldn’t help wondering if he would ever hear from his brother again if he didn’t initiate the call. The thought that they could actually drift that far apart made him even sadder than he had been before he’d placed this call. Maybe dialing his brother’s number hadn’t been such a good idea, after all.

“No, I don’t want to talk about it.” Gideon’s reply was adamant. A heavy silence followed it.

Nathan tried to think of something more to say. “Maybe when you get a little extra time we can get together for a game of racquetball. It’s been a long time since I’ve stomped you.”

“A
very
long time,” Gideon retorted. “As I recall it, I whupped your butt the last five or six times we played.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve practiced a bit in the past year or so since you last defeated me. I might just surprise you.”

“Could be. I’m out of practice. Haven’t been to the gym in a while.”

“So you want to get together for a game sometime?”

Gideon’s hesitation was long enough to make Nathan believe his brother was looking for a reasonably civil way to reject the offer. Instead he said, “Yeah, okay. We’ll do that sometime.”

It certainly wasn’t an enthusiastic response, nor had he made any specific plans, but he hadn’t closed the door Nathan had so tentatively opened. Nathan took some encouragement from that. “Great. Give me a call sometime.”

“Sure. Is there anything else, or can I get back to work now?”

“Go back to work. I just wanted to say hi.”

“Okay. See you around.” Just as Nathan was preparing to hang up, Gideon added gruffly, “Thanks for calling.”

A dial tone sounded in Nathan’s ear almost before Gideon finished speaking. Nathan stared for a moment at the receiver, disproportionately pleased by his brother’s parting words, yet wondering if they had really meant anything.

Was Gideon really glad that Nathan stubbornly kept in touch or was it just something he’d said automatically, trying to be polite? And yet, when had Gideon ever done anything just to be polite?