Mrs. Evans just wheeled around, headed into the house and let the screen door slam shut in Charlotte’s face.
“Talk to the hand, Charlotte,” she said as she went. “Talk to the hand.”
Charlotte stood there, glaring.
Chuckling, Jake edged past her and went inside.
The house surprised him. He’d expected doilies and crocheted afghans on every surface, but the style was sleek and airy, with taupe walls, white trim and black leather furniture arranged around a wall-mounted flat-screen TV that had as much square footage as the drive-in theater he went to as a kid.
The channel was turned to a congressional debate on C-SPAN.
“Can you believe those clowns in Washington, Jake?” Mrs. Evans demanded, heading for the up-to-date kitchen and plopping Harry down on the black granite countertop near the sink, where she proceeded to pull his thumb out of his mouth and help him wash his hands. “The economy is swirling right down the toilet, and those idiots—”
“Yeah, okay, Mama,” Charlotte interjected. “Jake doesn’t have the rest of the day to listen to one of your political diatribes. He’s very busy, and we have to go, anyway, so thank you for taking Harry, and I’ll see you— Oh, for crying out loud.”
Jake had wandered into the kitchen and was also washing his hands while keeping one eye on the baked bounty cooling on one end of the counter.
“What’s cooking?” he asked, never too proud to beg for a sweet treat.
“Cookies!” Harry clapped his tiny hands with unabashed glee. “Cookies, Mommy!”
“Little boys like you get cookies after they eat lunch,” Charlotte told him.
“Nooo!”
Harry stiffened in Mrs. Evans’s arms, bending over backward and kicking his feet in what looked like the beginning of one of those legendary toddler tantrums. Uh-oh, Jake thought, ready to run for cover if the situation deteriorated, but Charlotte, who was now in the kitchen, didn’t look concerned.
“Nooo! No, no—”
“And little boys who throw temper tantrums,” Charlotte continued calmly, “don’t get any cookies at all.”
Harry, apparently experiencing a change of heart, straightened midshriek and, sniffling, wiped the crocodile tears from his eyes.
Mrs. Evans answered Jake’s question as though there’d been no interruption. “Charlotte and I are baking for the pastor’s birthday luncheon on Wednesday—”
See? Church. He’d called that one, hadn’t he?
“—and I’m in charge of the cookies. I put these together before I went to PT this morning and left them here to cool. So, these are shortbread, those are double chocolate chip, those down there are white chocolate macadamia and these here are peanut butter.”
“The pastor’s a lucky man,” Jake told her, his mouth watering. “That’s all I can say.”
“Well, I need a taster. And I figured Charlotte wouldn’t let anybody have any fun until after lunch, so I boiled up some hot dogs.” She reached for a package of buns on the counter. “Does anyone here like hot dogs?”
“Me!” Jake and Harry cried together.
“I’ll have two, if you have any extra,” Jake added, turning to the fridge. “I’ll get the ketchup and mustard—”
Harry scrunched his face and shook his head violently enough to cause a mild concussion. “No mustard. No mustard!”
“I’ll just get some for me, little man.” Jake grabbed the condiments from the shelf on the door. “I’m assuming you don’t want any sweet relish, either.”
“No way!”
“Alrighty, then,” Jake said.
Jake accepted his loaded plate from Mrs. Evans and had just begun to doctor his dogs when Charlotte hit her limit. In an ominous sign, she crossed her arms over her chest and all but growled.
“Excuse me, Mr. Hamilton,” she began.
“I like that,” Jake told her around a mouthful. “You can call me Mr. Hamilton or Boss. Whichever you prefer.”
“In case you’ve forgotten, your mother is waiting for you at the photo shoot, so there’s no time for your little meal. We need to go. I don’t want her sending bounty hunters after us.”
Jake waved a hand. “Relax. My mother is a drama queen.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I’ll deal with her when the time comes. Have you got any chips, Mrs. Evans?”
“In the pantry, honey,” Mrs. Evans said, pointing. Then she handed Harry his hot dog. “Don’t forget to say thank you, Harry.”
“Thank you, Grammy,” Harry said happily.
“Charlotte, honey, you should eat, too. I’ve got plenty.”
Splitting her glare between Jake and her mother, Charlotte stalked to the fridge and rummaged around for something. Jake worked hard on not noticing the delicious curve of her ass as she did so.
“So, Mrs. Evans,” Jake said, “I need to know so I don’t get my hopes up. Are we limited to just one cookie?”
Mrs. Evans, now fixing her own hot dog, dismissed this idea with a laugh. “Of course not. You couldn’t eat just one of my cookies. Have as many as you want. You, too, Harry.”
“Yay!” Overwhelmed with his delight, Harry opened his mouth too wide, and a half-chewed hunk of hot dog fell out onto his lap. Without missing a beat, Harry picked it up, examined it in minute detail, then shoved it back into his mouth. “I want four cookies!”
Charlotte emerged from the fridge with a slice of pizza. “You get one cookie. Two at the most,” she said before taking a bite.
Harry looked like he might protest, but Mrs. Evans saved him the trouble and patted him on his little leg. “You can have as many cookies as you want, Harry. Two cookies is the rule at Mommy’s house. But what’s the rule at Grammy’s house?”
“No rules!”
“Hey!” Looking outraged, Charlotte turned on her mother. “Will you kindly not undermine—”
Jake’s phone rang from his pocket. Everyone paused to look at him. Still chewing, he pulled it out, glanced at the display and handed it to Charlotte.
“Can you take care of this for me, Charlotte? Thanks.”
“Is that part of my duties now?” Charlotte asked. “Answering your phone?”
“As needed, yeah.”
“Oh. Okay.” Charlotte took the phone and clicked it on. “Hello? Jake Hamilton’s phone. Charlotte Evans speaking. May I help you?”
Jake’s mother’s voice came over the line, filling the kitchen as though she was right there with them.
“Excuse me, young lady, but did I or did I not ask for you to make sure my son showed up at the photo shoot? That was forty-five minutes ago. Forty-five—”
Flinching, Charlotte held the phone away from her ear and tried to get a word in. “Mrs. Hamilton, I did pass along the message—”
“—minutes, and I think it was a fairly simple request. So where is he? Did you tell him that he’s holding up the whole—”
“Jake is on his way,” Charlotte said sweetly but firmly, shooting him a furious look that made frost collect on his eyebrows. “Oops. I have another call coming in from court. I’m so sorry, but I have to take it.”
“—photo shoot, and I can only stall the photographer for so long, so you need to tell Jake to get his butt—”
“Thanks, Mrs. Hamilton. Goodbye,” Charlotte concluded, clicking off the phone.
It rang again immediately. Charlotte thrust it at Jake.
He checked the display—yep, Mama again—pocketed it, and chose a large peanut butter cookie. “These look great, Mrs. Evans.”
“Thank you, dear.”
“Why did you make me speak to your mother?” Charlotte shouted.
Jake shrugged, now selecting a white chocolate macadamia that seemed to have more chips in it than the others. “You answer my ph
one as needed. I needed you to answer the phone because it was my mother. It’s not that hard, Char.”
“Don’t call me Char. You just told me two minutes ago that you’d handle your mother when the time came.”
He stared at her outraged face—all flushed cheeks and flashing eyes—and tried not to laugh. “That wasn’t the time, was it?”
Charlotte seemed to choke on her anger.
Jake, knowing his life was probably at stake, kept his expression bland.
“Mommy’s mad,” Harry informed them all, glancing up from where he was using his fingers to swirl a drop of ketchup around on his plate. “Uh-oh.”
Charlotte finally recovered. “We are leaving,” she told Jake in a calm voice that nonetheless threatened dismemberment if he so much as thought about disobeying her. “You have one minute to say goodbye and get your cookies.”
Deciding this was no time to push his luck, Jake turned to Mrs. Evans, who was eyeing him with speculative amusement, and gave her a smile and a quick peck on the cheek.
“It’s great to meet you,” he told her. Behind him, he could hear Charlotte grabbing Harry for a goodbye kiss and a tickle. The child’s laughter was pleasing to his ears, like the trill of wind chimes in a gentle breeze. It was no real jolt to realize that he was sorry to leave in such a hurry and wouldn’t mind coming back real soon. “Thanks for the delicious lunch.”
Mrs. Evans held him at arm’s length for a second, studying him with warmth and disarming perception. “You come back and see us, okay? Anytime.”
“I’d like that.”
“I mean it,” Mrs. Evans warned.
“So do I.”
Now for a goodbye to Harry, Jake thought, turning to the boy, who was perched on his mother’s hip, grinning. He had a chocolate chip cookie in one hand, chocolate smudged down one dimpled chipmunk cheek, and a ring of ketchup around his mouth.
Jake smiled at him, feeling the hard tug of something in his chest.
If he’d seen a cuter kid in the last five years or so, he couldn’t remember him or her right now.
“Bye, Harry,” he told the boy, squeezing his little arm. “It was nice to meet you.”
Harry giggled and lapsed into a shy routine that fooled no one. Ducking his head, he buried his face in Charlotte’s neck and peered up at Jake from beneath his long lashes.
“Say bye,” Charlotte prompted him.
Harry raised one hand and gave a tiny wave.
Jake, feeling that tightness in his chest again, waved back and headed for the door.
“I like your fish,” Harry called after him.
Jake paused, glancing over his shoulder at mother and son. They had their cheeks together now, and Harry had his hands around Charlotte’s neck. They looked like a small but loving family, self-contained and utterly devoted to each other.
They looked...right.
“I like you, too,” Jake said, low, and he’d meant to say it only to Harry, but his focus was inexorably drawn to Charlotte’s guarded expression. In trying to look directly at her, though, he discovered that he couldn’t. Too much unexpected stuff was churning up inside him, and the volume of it overwhelmed him. Maybe even scared him. What if she could see it? “I like you, too.”
* * *
Maybe she should make it official and change her name to Alice, Charlotte thought as she finished up her call and, gasping, lowered the phone from her ear.
She’d definitely slipped through the rabbit hole today.
Jake—who’d wanted her free to take notes about their cases and make a couple of quick phone calls for him—was behind the wheel of her car now. This left her free to stare out the driver’s-side window and gape at Integrity, the Hamilton family estate in the upscale suburb of West Mount Airy. Worse, the long approach up the circular drive gave her plenty of time to get nervous about meeting the legendary Hamiltons.
For one thing, her raggedy car, though paid for, was woefully unworthy of being in such elegant surroundings. In fact, the Hamiltons probably had a groundskeeper or some such person—someone whose duty it was to keep anything tacky, like, say, skunks, white pants after Labor Day, or cars older than two years, from marring the perfect splendor of the place. That person was probably already on the march, coming to expel the car from the premises. Immediately.
For another thing, she didn’t belong there, either, and she had no faith in her ability to fake it for a couple hours. True, the family would be busy with posing and smiling for the photographer, and no one would probably notice her much anyway, but what would she do if they did? What would they talk about other than the weather? Mutual friends at the club? A recent vacation to Fiji? Fashion trends for the fall? Yeah, right. She could see it now: she could tell them about the latest sale at Target, and they could tell her what they’d seen on the runway during their annual pilgrimage to New York for fashion week.
Yeah. That wouldn’t be awkward at all.
It wasn’t that she thought that they were better than she was because they were rich and she was...less than rich. Significantly less than rich. It was just that she didn’t feel as though she’d be spending the afternoon with her people.
This afternoon would be more like a turtle’s visit to a bird’s nest.
There was nothing wrong with a turtle, but it didn’t belong up a tree.
And Charlotte sure as hell didn’t belong here at Integrity.
The place was unbelievable. A stone mansion bred with a castle and set within a small-scale version of Central Park, it had leering gargoyles, a tennis court, a swimming pool, what looked like a greenhouse or conservatory and, yes, a turret.
Just in case anyone wanted to climb up there and drop boiling oil on the invading hordes during the next siege.
There was no telling how many bedrooms and bathrooms the thing had, and she was too demoralized to ask. All this well-landscaped architectural perfection put another dent in her battered self-esteem. Look at this place! Jake had grown up here. And where had she grown up? In a tiny house with a chain-link fence. Despite her family’s tough circumstances after her father got sick and ultimately died from multiple sclerosis when she was seventeen, they’d scraped together enough money for her to go to college, and what had she done? Gotten pregnant by a jerk. Now she had another mouth to feed—a precious little mouth, yeah, but still an expensive mouth—and she was on the twenty-year plan for getting her law degree.
In short, Charlotte barely had a dime to her name, and her list of professional accomplishments included exactly two things thus far: graduating from college and getting into law school.
Whoop-de-freaking-do.
Jake, meanwhile, had graduated from Penn and Northwestern Law. He had a thriving legal practice and, she was guessing, plenty of money in the bank.
Bottom line? He belonged in this kind of high-end world. She didn’t.
All of which reminded her that any sort of romantic relationship with him was doomed to failure on so many levels that she’d have better luck winning the gold medal for ski jumping in the next Winter Olympics than she would of becoming his lover and emerging unscathed.
And she needed that reminder. Because she was excruciatingly aware of his unyielding masculinity filling up her car, his easy charm with her mother, his unexpected kindness with Harry and, most of all, the prickling energy that crackled between them whenever they looked at each other.
Snap out of it, girl, she told herself as Jake slowed the car to a stop. This was no time to go all gooey inside over Jake. Nor was it time to lapse into any woe-is-me nonsense. Woe wasn’t her. She had a job in a terrible economy, a healthy son and a loving mother who was on the mend.
All of which made Charlotte a lucky girl, and she intended to remember it.
Even when confronted with the Hamiltons, a family with enough money to give God a
loan when He was running short on funds.
She gave a low whistle. “Nice house. Which room does the president stay in when he visits?”
Jake’s profile tightened as he parallel parked at the end of a long string of luxury cars: Range Rover...Benz...Jaguar...and, yes, a red Ferrari.
Jake didn’t seem to appreciate her humor. “It’s ostentatious, I know. You don’t need to remind me.”
What?
“It’s not ostentatious, Jake. It’s beautiful. You’re so fortunate to—”
Whoa. Apparently he didn’t like that, either. Scowling, he climbed out, stalked around the hood to her side and opened the door for her. Which was, by the way, the first time in living memory that a man had opened a car door for her.
“Yeah, no. It’s no accomplishment to be born into a family that can give you every advantage in life. It’s not exactly a reflection on me, you know?”
She slowly got out, picking her next words with the care of a jeweler searching through a pile of loose diamonds, hoping to find the flawless one.
“I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“You didn’t,” he snapped, heading for the front walk.
Putting a hand on his arm, she stopped him. “Don’t brush me off, please. I’m not stupid. What did I say?”
With a rueful smile, he rubbed the top of his head before shoving both hands deep into his pants pockets. “Do you ever take a good look at your life?”
That surprised her. She felt her brows doing a slow creep toward her hairline. “Every now and then, yeah.”
“Do you like what you see?”
Another surprise.
She took a second to remember all the issues she’d just been fretting about. And then she weighed them against her intentions, which were good, and her character, which was strong, and her heart, which was pure. Well, pure except for the part that occasionally wished she could snatch Roger’s phone, throw it to the ground and stomp it to smithereens so that he’d be more engaged with his son. Let’s call it ninety-percent pure.
“Yes,” she told him. “Most of the time, I do like what I see.”
Case for Seduction (Kimani Romance) Page 6
