Kisses And Kids (Congratulations Series #1)

by Andrea Edwards

  Pat was better suited for the girl. He was able to keep a tight rein on her and, surprisingly, Angie accepted it. Except that Pat wasn’t too available for the kids with all his traveling. It had been almost two weeks since the kids had seen him. And they were missing him.

  Damn, Trisha thought. She was missing him. Was he really traveling all this time or was he just avoiding them? Her, as well as the kids? Suddenly the little chicken thief struck again.

  “Darn you, Lucy,” Trisha exclaimed. “You’re really bad. Look at what a gentleman Sniffles is. Why can’t you be nice like him?”

  The chunky Burmese had a much calmer disposition, but right now his huge soulful eyes were saying, If I’m so nice, why does she have the chicken and I have nothing?

  “Oh, all right. Here.” Sighing, Trisha pulled off a piece of meat and threw it in front of the well-mannered cat. He accepted the gift graciously and began to chew it. “That’s it for both of you.”

  The front doorbell sounded, precluding any further discussion.

  “Can I trust you guys to stay out of this?” Trisha asked. The innocent looks on their faces were answer enough. “Yeah, right.”

  She put the dish in the refrigerator before hurrying to the door, wiping her hands on a towel as she went. The party at the door leaned on the buzzer.

  “Hold your horses,” she shouted.

  Before opening the door, she looked through the peephole. It was Pat, looking rather rumpled and weary. Her heart smiled with relief as she pulled open the door; maybe he really had been away.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hello.” He looked almost uneasy, uncertain. “My flight just got in. I thought I’d drop by on my way home.”

  “Great.” Though the South Bend airport was on the northwest side of the city and Trisha lived on the southeast side. Pat would’ve had to have practically climbed over his house on the way here. Not that she was going to question him. “Come on in.”

  “Yeah, sure.” He shrugged. “Why not?”

  Opening the door, Trisha stood aside to let him in. She wasn’t absolutely sure, but she thought his eyes looked like Sniffles’s did when he wanted something. “Sit down,” she said. “Would you like something to drink? Have you eaten?”

  “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly.” It was so good to see him. He’d been gone ten days but it seemed like months. “I was about to have dinner.”

  “I’m sorry.” He made a face. “You’ve probably had a hard day and here I come, barging in on you.”

  She didn’t want him to leave. The time he’d been gone had dragged so and she must have a million things to tell him. “Have you eaten dinner yet?”

  “They served some sandwiches on the plane.” He started toward the door. “I’d better go.”

  “No, that’s okay.” She grabbed his arm. “I was just making a chef’s salad. I have more than enough for two.”

  “You sure I’m not a bother?”

  “Not yet,” she said with a laugh. “But you’re working at it.”

  He seemed to relax. A soft smile took hold of his lips. “I was just wondering how Angie and Rulli were.”

  “They’re fine. Ornery as ever, but Rulli’s studying his spelling. Worked on it with his new tutor today.” She moved farther into the living room. “Come on and sit down. We’ll have a bite and I’ll fill you in.”

  “You know, we could go out someplace.”

  She put her hands on her hips and gave him a look. “You think I can’t make a passable chef’s salad?”

  “No. No, ma’am.” He shook his head, pretending fear. “Not me.”

  “Good. Sit down.” She nodded toward the stools at the kitchen counter. “Get comfortable. Take off your coat and tie.”

  “Anything else?”

  She turned to see that he had already dropped his coat on the sofa and was undoing his tie. “Your shoes, if you want.”

  “Okay.”

  “And if that’s not comfortable enough, then tough,” she said with a teasing laugh and went back to dividing the salad. “We’re proceeding slowly.”

  “Is that a threat or a promise?”

  Trisha smiled at him. It was going to be a fun evening, and maybe even a little more than fun. It must mean something that he had come here rather than go home.

  He came over to sit at the counter. “Anything I can do?”

  Lucy came running over to jump onto his shoulder. In a split second, she was curled up around the back of his neck. Pat looked stunned, and a little uneasy as the kitten sniffed daintily at his ear.

  “What’s she doing?” he asked.

  “Getting to know you,” Trisha said, secretly smiling at the sight of the cat with Pat. She wouldn’t mind nibbling at his ear herself. Would he look that uneasy if she was doing it? She suspected he would. She was right when she said they were proceeding slowly. “Do you want French, Italian or Ranch dressing?”

  “Italian is fine.”

  Sniffles had come to have a snack of his dry food and Lucy jumped off Pat’s shoulder to join the other cat. Trisha got out some silverware.

  “Want a glass of wine?”

  “Sure.”

  She poured two glasses. “So, how was your trip?” she asked as they sat down to eat.

  “All right. Long.”

  It had seemed long to her, too. “Get much accomplished?”

  He shrugged as he poured dressing on his salad. “Probably not. Everything takes time.”

  Sniffles stopped eating, and jumped on the counter. He stopped just past the stovetop to watch them eat.

  “How’d he get his name?” Pat asked, nodding at the cat.

  “He has the sniffles a lot,” Trisha said and went back to her salad.

  Pat’s look said that didn’t quite explain it, so she went on. “I’d had a cat since grade school and, when he died two years ago, I went to a cat show to look for a kitten. I saw Sniffles there and it was love at first sight. I couldn’t resist him, but then he came down with a runny nose the next day. The vet thought he’d caught a little cold, but it wouldn’t go away and we eventually found out it was feline herpes.”

  He winced. “Is that serious?”

  She shook her head. “Not life threatening, and not contagious to humans,” she added quickly. “But he has a runny nose in the winter and a tendency to sneeze on you.”

  Pat stared at the cat, who stared defiantly back at him. “Don’t they come with some sort of guarantee?”

  “Sure.” She tried to figure out how to explain it without coming off sounding sappy, then wondered why she worried. If she and Pat were friends, he wouldn’t mock the soft, sentimental side of her. “I had the right to return him, but I couldn’t.”

  Pat’s eyebrow rose in question.

  She just smiled. “I love him. You don’t give back someone you love just ‘cause they aren’t perfect.”

  He shook his head in obvious confusion as he sipped his wine. “But he’s just a cat.”

  “Love is love,” she said. From the look on his face, she knew he still didn’t understand. “Love is roses blooming in the middle of the desert. It’s sunshine in the darkest part of the night. It’s courage to stare down all your worst fears. When you find it, you don’t let go of it. Not for any reason.”

  But his laugh said he didn’t believe in love’s power. “It’s getting your legs broken by a speeding train,” he said. “Hurts like hell, but cripples you so you can’t escape.”

  She didn’t know what to say. His pain hung there in the air, throbbing with agony, but his eyes forbade her to notice. He’d lost his mother to death, his father to alcohol and his brother to the streets. No wonder he was terrified of love.

  “So what’s the other cat’s story?” he asked as if they’d been discussing the weather.

  She tried to follow his lead. “Why does there have to be a story?”

  “There is, isn’t there?”

  She stared down at her
salad, spearing some lettuce with a bit more force than necessary. “Lucy was a gift from my father,” she said.

  “That doesn’t seem like much of a story,” he said. “Sniffles had a bit more drama.”

  “I never take gifts from my father,” Trisha said.

  Pat looked a bit taken aback, but she didn’t know if it was her tone or her words that did it.

  “I saw some Abyssinians at a cat show last spring,” she explained slowly. “And I happened to mention to my brother how beautiful they were. A week later, Lucy arrived on my doorstep, air express from California.”

  “And this was a problem?” he asked.

  Trisha bit back the annoyance that just thinking of her father awoke. “My father walked out on us when I was eleven,” she said. “He was a doctor. Moved in with a volunteer from his free clinic. She was young, wealthy and pretty. Not long afterward he was opening up an office in a wealthy neighborhood of Chicago and acting like he’d never heard of us or the clinic. It closed soon after, even though my mother tried her hardest to get other doctors involved.”

  “And you’re still angry.”

  She didn’t like how Pat said that, as if he was judging her and finding her wanting. “And shouldn’t I be?”

  He held his hands up in surrender. “Hey, I’m not criticizing. I was just asking. I’m the last one in the world who would believe the ‘love is roses in the desert’ theory.”

  She felt slighted somehow though. If he wasn’t criticizing her anger at her father, he was criticizing her belief in love. How silly she’d been to think she could—or should—open up to him.

  “Never mind,” she said, digging back into her salad even though her appetite had fled. She knew her voice was curt, but she couldn’t help that. “The gist of it all was that I would have refused to accept Lucy from him, but it would have meant another cross-country trip for her. She had looked pretty miserable after the first one, and I couldn’t do that to her.” Trisha fixed Pat with a definite glare. “Even if that meant I wasn’t following my own philosophy.”

  Pat sighed and put down his fork. “I screwed up, didn’t I?” he said. “I really wasn’t criticizing. If anything, I was thinking about you. I learned the hard way that anger like that only backfires.”

  “It hasn’t yet,” she said. But the look in his eyes made her feel better, made her annoyance slip away.

  “Are you sure it hasn’t?” he asked. “Why are you still single?”

  His question seemed to catch her defense unawares, but all she did was laugh slightly. “Gee, why don’t we get personal? I’m not married because I only trust males who have skinned knees and play on swing sets. Why aren’t you?”

  He relaxed and finished the last of his salad. “Are you kidding? I’m waiting for the woman that I’d walk barefoot in the snow for.”

  “Hope she owns stock in an aspirin company.”

  “No, seriously.” He picked up his glass of wine and held it up to the light, staring at it. “I don’t want anybody leaning on me. It sounds selfish, but it’s not. I don’t want to fail anybody the way I failed Angel.”

  “You can’t keep blaming yourself,” she said.

  He grinned. “Sure, I can. If you can stay mad at your father forever, I can blame myself for Angel not doing more with his life.”

  She laughed, unable not to. “We are certainly a pair,” she said. “Both avoiding relationships because of ghosts from the past. I guess we have nothing to fear from each other.”

  His eyes took on a new light, almost like hope or anticipation or maybe just relaxation. “You’re right,” he said. “It sounds like the perfect relationship.

  And it did.

  * * *

  “Douglas, you just cannot do things like that,” Trisha snapped.

  “They’re only Ping-Pong balls.”

  “That’s not the point,” she said. “If you smash them, they can’t be used anymore. And that means that no one can play.”

  “It’s a stupid game anyway.”

  “Then you won’t mind not playing until you replace the balls you smashed.”

  “Jeez,” the kid muttered. “You don’t gotta get all hyper about it.”

  Trisha just held her hand out for the paddle. After a moment, he gave it to her and walked away. His pride demanded that he make some crack to his friends, at which they all snickered, but Trisha knew better than to pursue the argument. She closed her hand around the paddle and turned back toward the office.

  It was this damned heat. Even though September was fading fast, it had to be close to ninety today. And that meant they had twice as many kids inside as usual for a Friday afternoon. Everybody was looking for someplace cool and nobody seemed to be leaving even though it was dinnertime.

  “Miss Stewart,” a little voice called. “The drinking fountain don’t work right.”

  “I know, Wendy. We’re getting it fixed.”

  “When?”

  “When we can. You’ll have to be satisfied with water that’s wet, instead of wet and cold.”

  Trisha went into the office. Clarissa looked up from her desk, with a stack of message notes. Trisha felt something collapse inside her. She’d only been gone about ten minutes to take care of Douglas.

  “Three tutors can’t make it, as if we wouldn’t have noticed by now.” Clarissa flipped to the next message. “Michael Shaughnessy’s had some business problems and isn’t going to replace his computers after all, so we won’t be getting his old ones.” Then to another. “And your car won’t be ready today. They don’t have a part in stock. Hopefully, tomorrow.”

  Hopefully, tomorrow. Trisha took the messages and went into her office. Yes, she certainly hoped tomorrow would be better. She sank into her chair, her eyes closing. Yesterday had been so nice. At least, the evening had been. Pat hadn’t stayed long; he was visibly tired after his trip. But they’d had a nice dinner. And even more important, they seemed to have taken a step forward in their relationship. They actually had sort of agreed to have a relationship, maybe.

  “Knock, knock.”

  Trisha’s eyes flew open and she found Pat in her doorway. He was dressed informally, just in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, and his eyes were concerned.

  She smiled at him. “Hi. What are you doing here?”

  “Just dropped in to check with Angie and Rulli. He had only one wrong on his spelling test.”

  Trisha nodded. “I know. He was so excited.”

  But Pat’s eyes did not lighten with the news. “You look beat.”

  She shrugged. “It’s been a hell of a day.” She leaned her arms on the desk. “It always gets crazy here when it’s hot outside.”

  “Well, it is that.” He came farther into the room and sat down. “I thought the weather was supposed to get cooler the later in September it got, but we’ll probably be wishing we had this day all over again come December.”

  “Believe me, I won’t want this day again,” she said with a laugh, but it came out weary and weak.

  “That bad?”

  “Worse.”

  Clarissa came to the door. “Sorry to interrupt, but Mike Gentry just called.”

  “Not the grant!” Trisha cried. “We lost it?”

  Clarissa shook her head. “They want more information. He’s sending us some more forms that we need to fill out before we resubmit.”

  Trisha just felt beaten. “How many times can we resubmit before we’ve missed the deadline?”

  “Think there’s a plot in all this?” Clarissa asked.

  “I just wish there was,” Trisha said with a sigh. “That would mean that someone cared, even if negatively.” She rubbed her eyes but the weariness just wouldn’t rub away.

  Pat leaned forward. “When do you get off?”

  Clarissa looked at her watch. “She should have been gone an hour ago.” Her voice was scolding.

  Trisha just shook her head as if they didn’t understand. “I can’t leave with things so crazy,” she protested.

 
; “Why not?” Clarissa asked. “Jeff and I can handle it. We’ve handled worse in the summer.”

  “But I—”

  But Pat had gotten to his feet and had taken her hand, pulling her to her feet. “Come on. You need a break. Hanging around here isn’t going to do anyone any good.”

  “Wait a minute,” she cried. She didn’t like his high-handedness all of a sudden. Or was it that she didn’t like how good her hand felt in his? “I have responsibilities here.”

  “And the main one is to stay mentally healthy for the kids,” he said. “You can’t do that as beat as you are. You need a break.”

  “Maybe I need to make my own decisions.” Why was she putting up such a fuss? She’d spent time with Pat before. This would be no different.

  “Maybe you ought to listen to someone else for a change,” Clarissa snapped. “You aren’t the only one with sense around here.”

  Maybe she was the only one with sense. The only one who saw the path she and Pat were heading down. Yesterday it had seemed perfect—smooth and pleasant. This afternoon it seemed scary—steep and treacherous.

  “Look,” Pat said. “I’ll leave my home number. We’ll grab a bite to eat and go over there. If Clarissa needs you, she can call.”

  It would look foolish to keep protesting. “All right,” Trisha said finally, then turned to face Clarissa. “You have to promise to call if things get even a little more hectic.”

  “Honey, I’m no martyr.” She pushed Trisha out the door. “I’ll call if I need help, believe me.”

  “And I’ll be in, first thing in the morning,” Trisha said. “So—”

  “It’s going to be morning before we get out of here,” Pat said. “I’m sure Clarissa knows what to do.”

  Trisha said nothing, just let him lead her out into the hallway and into the chaos.

  “Miss Stewart,” someone whined.

  She started to turn, but Pat beat her to it. “Miss Stewart’s leaving. Go see Clarissa.”

  “That might have been important,” Trisha snapped at him.

  “I would guess it’s someone who wants to complain about something you can’t change,” he said. “Give it a rest, will you?”