''I Do''...Take Two!

by Merline Lovelace

  In quick sequence, Tommy let them know that he was not happy about having to stand in line for gelato, the men’s room, or to retrieve their tickets to St. Mark’s Cathedral. Travis responded with dwindling patience to each of those sullen complaints. The terrifying minutes on the balcony of St. Mark’s, however, took at least a year off his life.

  It started when they claimed their tickets and a brochure that contained a brief history of the four iconic bronze horses mounted on the balcony directly above the cathedral’s main entrance. Tommy seemed interested when Travis related the historical background. That the sculptures were probably Greek in origin. That they’d once adorned the hippodrome in Constantinople and were looted by Venetian forces when they sacked the city during the Fourth Crusade.

  His mistake, Travis realized too late, was relating the interesting fact that the Venetians had severed the horses’ heads to transport the massive war trophies from Constantinople. Once in Venice, they’d soldered the heads back on and fashioned jeweled collars to hide the seam. Naturally, any kid as lively and inquisitive as Tommy Ellis would want to see the decapitation site for himself. And to do that he would have to hoist himself up on the balcony ledge.

  Kate had spotted him first. Screeching, she’d grabbed his dinosaur T-shirt and hauled him off the ledge. When he had both feet planted back on the balcony, Travis did a mental ten count. Then another ten. He was about to go for thirty when Brian called. After relating the welcome news that the surgery had gone well and Tommy’s nanny was in recovery, Ellis had asked to speak to his son.

  The change in the kid was instant. His face lit up like one of the megawatt flares the Combat King dispensed to deflect oncoming missiles. But despite Tommy’s dramatic upsurge in spirits, Travis felt as though he’d been put through a meat grinder by the time they returned to the Gritti.

  The message waiting at the desk didn’t do much to lighten his mood. Kate gave an excited hoot when she learned that Callie and Dawn had arrived a little over an hour ago. She couldn’t wait to schmooze with her pals and bring them up to date on all the happenings since they’d parted company in Rome. Travis couldn’t wait to down an early but well-deserved scotch.

  * * *

  Kate’s friends rang the bell of the Ellis suite less than fifteen minutes later. Eager to see them, Kate set aside the wine Travis had just poured for her and hurried to the door.

  “Look at you,” Dawn murmured, searching her face with the keen eyes of long friendship. “You’re glowing, dammit.” She gave an exaggerated sigh. “If that’s what taking a belated honeymoon does for you, maybe I shouldn’t have left two grooms standing at the altar.”

  “Well...”

  “Never mind. I’ll get it right one of these days.”

  She breezed in on that rueful admission. Callie gave Kate a fierce hug and followed.

  Scotch in hand, Travis rose to greet them. His smile carried that faint tinge of wariness he’d adopted since the two women had declared open season on him. “How was Tuscany?”

  “Incredible.” Dawn’s glance swept the opulent suite. “These new pals of yours certainly live well.”

  “They do. Can I get you a drink?”

  “A red wine would be great.”

  “You got it. Callie?”

  “I’m good for now, thanks.”

  While he attended to things at the antique cabinet that housed the bar, Callie greeted the fifth person in the room. He was slumped in a corner of the sofa, regarding the newcomers with a mix of curiosity and shyness.

  “Hi. I’m Callie.”

  “I’m Tommy Ellis.”

  “Nice to meet you, Tommy. Is that a diplodocus on your shirt?”

  His eyes went wide. “You know ’bout dinosaurs?”

  “I do. I studied them in school.”

  “I didn’t know girls studied stuff like that.”

  Callie hid a smile. “Some of us do.”

  “I’ve got a book with pictures of tyrannosauruses and pterodactyls ’n’ stuff. Wanna see it?”

  “Sure.”

  Perked up by the attention, he bounced off the sofa and showed the way to his room.

  “Cute kid,” Dawn commented as Travis delivered her a crystal goblet of deep, shimmering brunello. “How’s his nanny doing?”

  “Last report said she came through the surgery fine and should be able to fly home on Sunday, as planned,” he related.

  “Kate told us about the private jet.” She took a sip of the wine, her green eyes knifing into him over the rim of her goblet. “She also told us this guy Ellis offered you a job. Are you going to take it?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “About damned time you pulled your head out of your ass and got your priorities right, Westbrook.”

  “Thanks, McGill,” Travis drawled. “I was just waiting for your stamp of approval to seal the deal.”

  Hastily, Kate intervened. “Sheathe the swords, you two. How about we take our drinks out on the terrace? I want to hear more about Tuscany.”

  After the blistering heat of the day, the terrace was an oasis of shade and soft, sweet fragrance. Planters ringed the stone balustrade, filled with red geraniums that brightened so many Venetian window boxes. At the far end, a lion’s head fountain bubbled happily into a marble basin.

  None of these feasts for the senses could compete with the color and sheer vitality of the canal, however. Thoroughly delighted, Dawn leaned her elbows on the wide balustrade to admire the water ballet below. She leaned over farther, then had to jerk her hand upright to keep the wine from slopping out of her glass.

  “Oops, almost got me a gondolier.”

  “Better not!” The warning came from Tommy, who’d just come out with Callie. “We’re not s’posed to toss anything over the rail. Dad said so. After the hotel manager complained,” he added with reluctant honesty.

  “Why’d he complain?”

  “Water balloons,” Travis supplied solemnly.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “It’s those stupid hats.” The six-year-old’s nose scrunched in disgust. “If they’re gonna wear straw hats with ribbons ’n’ stuff, I think they should ’spect to get water bombed.”

  Dawn looked much struck by the observation. “You’re right. Those hats are stupid. And such easy targets,” she added with a glance at the boats gliding by below.

  “Christ, don’t encourage him.”

  Dawn responded to Travis’s muttered plea by making a face, then moved to the wrought iron beside the fountain. “Sit here with me, Tommy. I want to hear more of your adventures in Venice.”

  When he settled next to her, the gurgling fountain drowned out their conversation. The cheerful splash also covered Callie’s quiet comment to Kate and Travis.

  “He’s an extremely bright child. But very concerned about the woman who’s been looking after him. I gather she’s been with the family for some years.”

  “Pretty much most of Tommy’s life,” Kate replied. “Brian said his mother died when he was little more than a baby.”

  “The father seems to have done a good job with the boy. Tommy’s bright and engaging and interacts well with adults.”

  “He is and he does, although I have to admit he kept us on our toes today.”

  “I expect he keeps his father on his toes, too,” Callie guessed. “Even considering the fact that Ellis can afford to hire live-in help, it’s not easy being a single parent. Even tougher when that parent is male. Only 17 percent of single parents in the US are men. As a result, they don’t have as many support systems to help them deal with the emotional roller coaster of raising a child on their own.”

  “Kate and I took a brief ride on that roller coaster this afternoon,” Travis related drily. “I haven’t looked in the mirror, but I suspect it turned my hair white.”


  “Pure snow,” Callie said, laughing, and gently changed the subject. “Tell me about this new job. Kate says you’ll be based out of Washington. What does the job entail, or is that classified?”

  “Not completely.”

  While Travis sketched the bare-bones details of what he would be doing as VP for test operations, Kate thought about Callie’s assessment of Tommy. She wasn’t surprised her friend had picked up on the boy’s worries so quickly. Given her years with the Massachusetts child advocate office, Callie’s antennae were finely tuned.

  Too finely tuned. The pain and despair she’d had to deal with daily had left their mark on both her heart and her health. She’d lost weight in the past year, Kate thought, her gaze on her friend’s prominent cheekbones. So much weight that she and Dawn had begun to worry about the quieter one of their threesome. A primary, if unstated, goal of this trip had been to fatten Callie up on pasta and cannoli.

  They’d also wanted to help her forget whatever tragedy had caused her to walk away from her job last month. She never discussed her cases, even with them. Her work was governed by confidentiality laws every bit as strict as those Travis operated under.

  Privately, Kate thought part of the problem was that Callie had no one in her life to balance the heartache she’d encountered in her job. Unlike Dawn, who attracted and discarded men with cheerful regularity, Callie approached relationships the way she did everything else, carefully and cautiously. So far none of the men she’d dated—including the half dozen or so Travis had fixed her up with—had made it past her reserved exterior to tap into the passion Kate and Dawn knew she possessed.

  She needed someone older, they’d decided. Someone who shared her core values about work and family and friendship. Someone...

  Like Brian Ellis.

  Almost as soon as the thought hit, Kate dismissed it. The heartache she herself had gone through with Travis these past months had pretty much shattered her naive belief in a perfect match.

  They’d complemented each other in almost every way. Both hardworking, both career oriented, both reasonably intelligent. And so hungry for each other! In those joyously happy first years, neither of them could have even imagined they could cause each other such hurt.

  Still... Her glance drifted to Tommy and back again. Be interesting to see if Callie assessed the father as favorably as she had the son.

  Chapter Nine

  The five of them stayed out on the terrace for another hour. Basking in the attention of the newcomers, Tommy remained on his best behavior. His face lit up, though, when his dad called.

  Travis answered the house phone, then passed the instrument to the boy. “Your dad’s on his way back to the hotel. He wants to know if you’d like to go to the hospital with him after dinner to visit Mrs. Wells.”

  Abandoning his manners, Tommy snatched the phone. “Does she want me to come? Really? I miss her, too.” His happy glance landed on the geraniums. “I’m gonna pick her some flowers. She likes flowers.” He listened a moment, his lips pooching. “But these are pretty red ones. What? O-kaay. I promise.”

  Heaving a much put-upon sigh, he passed the phone back to Travis. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Travis took the phone and confirmed that Kate’s friends had arrived and were comfortably settled. “We’re all sitting out on your terrace, having drinks and admiring the view.”

  “I owe you for this,” Ellis told him. “But I feel guilty as hell about cutting into your time with Kate. I know you had to hink your flight schedule big-time to get this leave.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Kate and I are glad to help.”

  “Yeah, well, I may have to hink my schedule, too. I’d planned to stay in Italy through Billy Bob. But with Mrs. Wells out of action, I have to rethink those plans.”

  Billy Bob was their private code for the final and most critical flight test for the classified modification Ellis Aeronautical Systems had designed for Combat King II. The outcome could mean millions for EAS, possibly billions—Travis wasn’t privy to the company’s closely held contract negotiations. Not yet, anyway. But he knew EAS’s CEO wouldn’t have carved this big chunk of time out of his schedule if his company didn’t have major bucks riding on the outcome.

  “Let’s talk about the schedule when you get back to the hotel,” he suggested.

  He’d kept his reply light. Innocuous. Yet as soon as he disconnected, he found himself the object of three pairs of eyes. Kate’s questioning brown, Callie’s deep lavender and Dawn’s sharp, clear green. Even Tommy had picked up on the subtext.

  “Are Dad ’n’ me flying home with Mrs. Wells?”

  “Maybe.”

  Emotions washed across the boy’s expressive face. Relief, guilt, disappointment...all easily interpreted by the four adults.

  “You don’t want to go home?” Callie asked.

  “Uh-huh, I do. Mostly.”

  “But?” she probed gently.

  “We were s’posed to go to Rome after Venice. I was gonna have my picture taken with a gladiator at the Coliseum. Maybe get a sword ’n’ everything.”

  “Maybe you and your dad should talk about that when you go to see Mrs. Wells after dinner.”

  “Speaking of which,” Dawn put in, “what’s the plan? If we’re going to eat out, I need to spiffy up.”

  Kate and Callie shared a quick grin. Even unspiffed, Dawn could bring strong men to their knees. At this particular moment her hair spilled over her shoulders in a careless river of dark red, her I Love Rome T clung to her full breasts and her jeans might have been painted on.

  “Why don’t we just hit a trattoria for dinner?” Kate suggested. “Travis took me to a fabulous one last night. Very casual.”

  * * *

  When Brian Ellis arrived a few moments later, he certainly appeared to agree with Kate’s assessment that Dawn didn’t need spiffing.

  He greeted Callie with a warm smile and countered her thanks for letting them use Mrs. Wells’s rooms with the comment that it was small payment for the favor Kate and Travis had done him. But his reaction to Dawn was more visceral and instantly apparent. The handshake was firm, the smile stayed in place, but he did that quick double take Dawn always sparked in the male of the species.

  Uh-oh, Kate thought. This could be trouble. As much as she loved her friend, she cringed at the distinct possibility Dawn might wreak her usual love-’em-and-leave-’em havoc on Brian Ellis. The man had lost his wife. He was raising a young son, managing a megacorporation. Anything other than a light flirtation could prove a recipe for disaster.

  Hard on the heels of that thought came a healthy side order of guilt. Fiercely, Kate reminded herself that her loyalty lay—and would always lie—with Dawn. Ellis was an adult. He could take care of himself.

  Still, Kate wasn’t surprised when he asked about their plans for dinner, then countered her suggested trattoria with a generous offer. “Why don’t you let Tommy and me treat you folks to dinner here at the Gritti? Their indoor restaurant is too formal for us,” he said with a conspiratorial wink in his son’s direction, “but we enjoy eating out on the terrace.”

  “You’d like it,” the boy assured them. “The chef bakes a special kind of mac ’n’ cheese just for me. It’s really good!”

  Dawn shot him a quick smile. “Sounds great. I’m in.”

  The others agreed and they were soon settled at a table almost within arm’s reach of the water traffic gliding by. Spray misters mounted on tall poles dispersed the last heat of the day and bathed diners in cool comfort. Based on Tommy’s enthusiastic recommendation, they all ordered his special dish. The mac and cheese turned out to be a truly glorious combination of penne pasta, crumbled Italian sausage, portobello mushrooms, creamy pomodoro sauce and four different Italian cheeses baked in individual ramekins.

  During the me
al Kate surreptitiously assessed Ellis’s interaction with her two friends. After that initial double take, the executive divided his attention between his guests. He was easy with both Dawn and Callie and gave only a hint of the issues he was dealing with when Tommy wanted to know if they were flying home on Sunday with Mrs. Wells.

  “I think so, bud. I’ll have to fly right back to Venice, though, so I called Monika Sorenson. You remember the au pair who stayed with us when Mrs. Wells went out to visit her sister in California last year?”

  “I remember.” The boy’s nose wrinkled. “She eats those stinky fish in gucky yellow stuff.”

  “Marinated smelts,” Ellis explained to the others, a smile in his blue eyes. “Monika tried to introduce Tommy to some of her native Scandinavian dishes. Without noticeable success, as you can guess by his reaction. Anyway,” he continued, addressing his son, “Monika’s fall classes at the University of Virginia don’t start for a week. She said she could come stay with you, so I’ll fly home with you and Mrs. Wells on Sunday, get you both settled, then—” his glance flicked briefly to Travis “—fly back to finish up at the base. Okay, bud?”

  “Okay.” Tommy accepted the change of plans with only a grudging poke at the remains of his pasta. “But I really wanted to go to Rome ’n’ see the gladiators.”

  “Next trip,” Ellis promised, pushing back his chair. “We’d better head to the hospital and see Mrs. Wells before it gets too late. The rest of you please stay and have dessert. And thanks again for today,” he said to Travis and Kate. “Tommy and I really appreciate it. Don’t we?”

  Recalled to his manners, the boy expressed his thanks with a smile for Kate and a manly handshake with Travis. He was so polite, so well behaved, that Kate might have imagined the sullen, unhappy child of the morning and early afternoon.