Natural Born Trouble

by Sherryl Woods

  “And you think I’d be a sucker for three kittens?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, sounding genuinely horrified. “I mean the boys did say you were lonely, but…” She winced. “Well, never mind. I just thought maybe you’d be willing to help me out for a bit.”

  Duke eyed his sons. Obviously they’d had a big day. They’d turned downright chatty with Dr. Dani. He would have to warn his latest housekeeper not to take them into town again until they turned twenty. Maybe then they would stay out of mischief and keep the details of his personal life to themselves.

  “Look, it was really nice of you to come out here, but I’m afraid I’ll have to take some time to think about this.”

  “But you have to at least look at the kittens,” Zachary pleaded. “They’re really cute.”

  “And they need homes,” Joshua added. “Just like we did.”

  Duke scowled at Dani, annoyed that she’d put him in this position. The boys knew the rules. Apparently, they also knew he would never be able to resist Dani Adams. “Don’t you want to chime in with your two cents?” he asked her.

  She grinned. “No, they’re doing pretty well on their own. I hate to oversell.”

  He surveyed her thoroughly just to watch the color climb in her cheeks. “Darlin’, something tells me you could sell a man just about anything you put your mind to.”

  To his amusement, she blushed furiously at that, but held her ground.

  “About the kittens,” she persisted.

  Duke recognized that he had been outmaneuvered and outmanned. Heck, he’d been sold when Dani Adams first opened her pretty little mouth. Besides, how much trouble could a kitten get into? “Okay, okay, I’ll look at them. But we’re just taking one. No more. Is that clear?”

  The boys exchanged a look, but nodded dutifully.

  Five minutes later, Dr. Dani Adams was tearing down the driveway kicking up dust again, and he and the boys were each holding one squirming kitten. For the life of him he couldn’t remember exactly how that had happened. Something told him that a man would have to watch his step every single second around that woman or taking in stray kittens would be the least of his problems.

  Back inside, he left the boys playing with the kittens, and headed straight for the kitchen where he could hear Paolina banging around pots and pans in time to the salsa music she was playing loudly enough to wake the dead. He hadn’t decided if the woman was hard of hearing or just used the music to drown out his orders and the boys’ complaints.

  “Paolina?” he shouted over the din. When she didn’t respond, he reached out and turned off the huge boom box on the counter. “Paolina?”

  She glanced up at him in surprise. “¿Sí?”

  “Did you drive the boys into town today?”

  She tilted her head and regarded him warily as if trying to determine the politically correct response. “Sí,” she said eventually. “They ask to go.”

  “Because of the dead goldfish,” Duke said.

  She bobbed her head. “Sí, sí, muy muerto.”

  “Paolina, the next time the boys want you to take them into town, call and check with me first, okay?”

  “Call, sí, sí. I will call.”

  He doubted she really understood a word he was saying, but he figured it was worth a shot. Paolina had been recommended by Jordan. She was related somehow to the line of housekeepers that had been working for their family for generations. A distant cousin, Jordan thought. Just here from Mexico. Very legal. All of her papers were in order. She just needed a job and a few basic language lessons, Jordan had promised.

  Duke was quickly discovering, however, that if he hoped to have any kind of intelligent conversation with her, he was going to have to brush up on his Spanish. What puzzled him, though, was that she seemed to have no difficulty whatsoever comprehending the boys.

  “Gracias, Paolina,” he finally said with a sigh, hoping that at least some of his message had gotten through.

  She smiled brightly. “De nada, Señor Duke.”

  He retreated to his study, only to find two boys and three rambunctious kittens there before him. The kittens had apparently been on his desk. Papers were scattered in every direction and one kitten, the one they’d informed him was his, was kneading whatever papers remained in his briefcase. Hopefully, it was the contract for those blasted mineral rights Jordan wanted to acquire. He could use the destruction of the paperwork as an excuse to delay the acquisition until he could get more facts to back up his belief that it would be a bad deal.

  He nabbed the kitten as he sat down and allowed it to settle in his lap, where it purred contentedly. He found the sound soothing, even though his thoughts were in turmoil. Images of Dani Adams kept flashing through his mind. Those tantalizing flashes pretty much spoiled the head of steam he was trying to work up all over again at her father. He settled back and let the images linger.

  She wasn’t his type, not really. A little stiff, a little uptight and way, way too brisk and professional. He preferred women who were soft and cuddly and accommodating, the opposite of all those social workers and foster mothers who’d made his childhood a living hell. At least that had been his preference before he’d settled down with Caroline. Since the separation, he’d steered as far away from romantic entanglements as he possibly could. Maybe his type had changed.

  Before he could spend too much time contemplating the likelihood of that, his phone rang. He didn’t waste his breath trying to shush the twins, just grabbed the portable and walked through the French doors onto his patio.

  “Duke? It’s Jordan.”

  His shoulders tensed. “Yes,” he said curtly.

  “Look, I’m sorry our discussion got out-of-hand earlier. I put you into that position so I could take advantage of your expertise. I should be listening to you.”

  “With all due respect, yes, sir, you should.”

  “Still won’t cut me any slack, will you?” Jordan said with a laugh. “Even when I’m trying to apologize.”

  “Sorry. I guess I missed that part.”

  “Maybe that’s because I’m out of practice,” his boss conceded. “Look, jot down some of your thoughts and let’s go over this again in the morning, okay? Maybe clearer heads will prevail by then.”

  “Mine or yours?”

  “Hopefully, both. My wife says I behaved like an arrogant, pigheaded idiot.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me, sir.”

  “Kelly said the same thing about you.”

  Duke chuckled. “No argument there, either. I’ll have my reasoning on paper in the morning.”

  “Good. Now, tell me. How are you and the boys settling in? I should have asked you that earlier today. Do you like it here? Is there anything you need?”

  “The boys love it,” Duke said.

  “But you’re still fighting the desire to get back into the field,” Jordan guessed.

  “Yes,” he admitted, knowing that the older man would understand. At one time Jordan had been a wildcatter himself, trying to make a place for himself in a business vastly different from his family’s cattle empire.

  “You’ll find this challenging enough in time,” Jordan promised. “I’ll see to it.”

  If Jordan didn’t, Duke had a feeling his daughter could. “By the way, I met your daughter today,” he said.

  “Dani?” Jordan asked, clearly surprised. “How’d that happen?”

  He related a condensed version of the dead goldfish saga that had his boss laughing.

  “So how many kittens did she stick you with?” Jordan asked before Duke had even gotten to that part.

  “Are you psychic or something? How did you know about the kittens?”

  “Son, from the day I married her mother the house has been crawling with kittens, and I’m allergic to the blasted beasts. Dani has a way with her.”

  “I’ll say,” Duke muttered.

  “Did she pull out the sob story about drowning them in the river if no one took them?”

&nbs
p; “Good God, no.”

  “That’s the one she used on me. Those big eyes of hers filled up with tears. She told me that’s what Kelly intended to do to them unless I agreed to let them stay.”

  “And you believed her?” Duke asked skeptically.

  “Of course not. Kelly’s got the softest heart in the universe. But I had to admire Dani’s ingenuity. My father bought it, though. She had cats all over White Pines by the time she was six or seven. Somehow over the course of twenty odd years she’s managed to convince my father that it’s a win-win situation. He saves the cats. The cats keep the mice away.”

  “Amazing,” Duke said, thinking that Harlan Adams’s legendary reputation did not include any reference to the notion that he was a soft touch.

  “You could have told her no,” Jordan pointed out. “You had no problem delivering news I didn’t want to hear.”

  “This was different.”

  “Yes,” Jordan said thoughtfully. “I imagine it was. Good night, son. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  “Good night, sir.”

  After he’d hung up, Duke had the awful feeling that he’d revealed far more about his reaction to Dani Adams than he’d ever intended. And he didn’t like that speculative note he’d heard in Jordan’s voice one little bit. It appeared he was going to have to be on his guard about more than business when he went into work in the morning.

  And he was going to have to stay the hell away from Dani Adams and her cats. Even as he reached that conclusion, one of those blasted little kittens tried to crawl up the leg of his pants, its claws biting into his flesh even through the fabric. He heard the snag, even before he caught the plaintive meow. Looking down he saw that the kitten was caught partway up his calf.

  “You’re going to be nothing but trouble,” he muttered sourly as he leaned down to disentangle the animal.

  But even as he said it, he brought the soft, tiny creature up to curl against his chest.

  “Nothing but trouble,” he murmured again. This time, though, he was thinking of Dani Adams when he said it.

  Chapter Three

  Dani was pretty sure she held her breath all the way back into Los Pinos. Duke Jenkins was the kind of overwhelming, purely masculine man who made a woman’s toes curl without half trying.

  With the notable exception of her stepfather, she’d spent her whole life around men whose fashion sense gravitated toward denim. Somehow Duke Jenkins had managed to make a perfectly respectable business suit and starched white shirt look as if he were only seconds away from stripping down to nothing. Her imagination had run wild. If a man like that put his mind to it, he could probably seduce a tree stump.

  Of course, there was no chance of him trying anything with her. He worked for Jordan. More importantly, she was immune to his charms. He was a single dad, which placed him so far off-limits he might as well have been in Alaska with a barricade around him. With any luck she would never see him or his boys again. With better luck, she would never even hear his name mentioned.

  Luck, of course, was never on her side, not when it came to matters of the heart, apparently.

  No sooner had she walked into the house than her phone rang.

  “I hear you met your father’s new vice president today,” her mother said without so much as a minute of small talk to disguise her prying.

  “How could you possibly have heard a thing like that already? I barely left the man’s house an hour ago. Do you have spies over there? Or can I blame this on Grandpa Harlan. I know he has them everywhere. He always knows what we’re up to, half the time before we do. It’s unnerving.”

  “You can’t blame this one on your grandfather. Jordan spoke with Duke earlier on a business matter. He mentioned that you’d been there. He said you talked him into taking a few kittens off your hands,” she reported with obvious amusement. “Jordan said he sounded a little bewildered by how that had happened.”

  Dani chuckled. “I’m sure Dad could identify with that.”

  “Indeed. I overheard him sympathizing rather sincerely. He told Duke to watch his step around you or his house would be crawling with all sorts of critters.”

  “I’m not that bad,” Dani protested.

  “You’ll never convince Jordan of that. He wasn’t the least bit interested in owning one cat, much less the dozens you paraded through here over the years.”

  “That was better than my brother’s snakes and you know it.”

  Her mother laughed. “You bet. I’ll tell Jordan to remind Duke of that when he’s cussing about the cat hair all over the house.”

  She paused and all of Dani’s self-protective instincts went on full alert. Her mother turned hesitant only when she knew she was about to tread on dangerous ground.

  “So,” her mother began a little too casually, “what did you think of him?”

  “Who?” she asked just as innocently, determined not to be sucked into making an admission she could never live down. If she so much as hinted that she’d been attracted to Duke, even on a purely physical level, the meddlers in the family would turn that into an engagement before she could blink.

  “Duke, of course.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Sweetie, a woman would have to be dead not to notice a man like Duke Jenkins.”

  “Okay,” Dani conceded grudgingly, aware that nothing less than total honesty would satisfy her mother. She might as well get it over with. “If I were to have to give a totally objective description of the man, I’d say he’s quite a hunk.”

  “An understatement, if ever I’ve heard one,” her mother concurred. “He’s gorgeous with all that thick, sun-streaked hair and those shoulders…” She sighed. “My goodness, those shoulders…”

  “Mother!”

  “Well, I can’t help it. He reminds me of Jordan.”

  “Is Dad aware that you’ve fallen for his new protégé?”

  “Very funny. The only man I’ve ever fallen for was Jordan and he knows it. Unfortunately, your father knew it, too. It took Jordan a while to figure out he felt the same way, but once he got the message things have worked out rather nicely.”

  As she spoke, Dani could imagine her mother’s soft, nostalgic smile, the one that always came with any mention of Jordan Adams.

  “Anyway, enough about that,” her mother said briskly. “We were talking about Duke.”

  “You were talking about Duke,” Dani corrected.

  “And you were trying to avoid the subject. I was just going to say if any man on earth needs a woman in his life, he does.”

  Dani had been waiting for this particular hint. It was about as subtle as a swat with a riding crop. “Forget it,” she said emphatically.

  “Forget what?” her mother inquired innocently.

  “I am not now nor will I ever be interested in Duke Jenkins.”

  “Because of his boys, I imagine.”

  “Of course, because of the boys. Mother, I really don’t want to get into this again. Just forget it, okay? If you feel some sort of matchmaking force coming over you, give Jenny a call. She’s older than I am. She’s practically an old maid. Besides, she has Grandpa Harlan’s tough hide. She could probably handle a man like Duke Jenkins, plus his sons without batting an eye. She needs a little romance in her life. I don’t.”

  “Danielle…”

  “Don’t start with the Danielle. That always precedes a lecture and I don’t need one. It’s been a long day and I’m exhausted.”

  “But—”

  “Bye, Mom. Good to hear from you. Love you.”

  “Danielle! Don’t you dare hang up on me.”

  With only the slightest twinge of regret, Dani ignored her mother’s command and slid the receiver firmly back into its cradle. Francie III crawled into her lap, circled twice, then settled down, purring loudly as Dani automatically stroked her under her chin.

  Jenny and Duke Jenkins. Now there was a combination to contemplate. Grandpa Harlan’s adopted daughter was as potentially volatile
as a high school chemistry lab. Unlike Dani, she would be a more than even match for a man like Duke.

  Ironically, though, the thought of seeing the two of them together made acid churn in Dani’s stomach. If she hadn’t known better, she would have labeled the reaction as pure, gut-deep jealousy, which was ridiculous, of course. No single father would ever stir anything more dangerous than the quiet warmth of friendship in her ever again. She wouldn’t allow it.

  * * *

  Famous last words, she thought a few days later when she went to White Pines for the annual Fourth of July celebration. There were Duke, Joshua and Zachary right in the thick of things. There was Jenny, beautiful, dark-haired Jenny Runningbear Adams, holding Duke’s attention with her animated telling of some Native American lore. Dani wanted to strangle them both, which was hardly the reaction of a disinterested third party.

  Everyone—with the exception of her mother and Jordan—claimed to be absolutely stunned that she and Duke had already met. Her grandfather’s claim struck her as a little too hearty, a little too determinedly innocent. She didn’t trust the man one iota, not when it came to meddling. How Harlan Adams could have heard about the whole kitten incident she had no idea, but she didn’t doubt for a second that he knew every detail. Nothing in Los Pinos and especially with his own family escaped his notice.

  Nor did she doubt that Duke and the boys were here at his personal invitation. She doubted he’d needed any coaching from her mother on this one. Grandpa Harlan was a romantic, and he wasn’t about to rest until everyone he loved was settled down and as content as he was.

  “Nice-looking family,” her grandfather observed as if he’d gotten a look inside her head. Old as he was, he still moved with an agility and sneakiness that amazed her.

  Dani stared straight into his eyes, hoping her unblinking gaze would persuade him that Duke Jenkins was absolutely the last person on her mind.

  “Who?” she inquired.

  He returned her gaze with a sharp look. “Don’t play that game with me, gal. You know perfectly well who I mean. Saw you looking at them just a minute ago.”