Keeping Company

by Tami Hoag

  “We’re closed for the day. It’s kind of hard to have an employee picnic if half the employees are working. That’s the beauty of being unmaterialistic,” he said smugly, spreading his arms in an expansive shrug. “It doesn’t matter to me if I miss a day’s profits.”

  Alaina rolled her eyes. The boat tied up alongside the dock caught her attention. The Tardis. She was no expert, but it looked pretty sharp to her. It looked as if Dylan could afford to miss a day’s profits. She would have commented on this if she hadn’t been so dismayed at the prospect of spending the day on the deck of the gleaming craft.

  Dylan studied Alaina’s pallor with interest. She was looking at the Tardis as if it were a sea monster that might just swallow her whole. It seemed the invincible woman had a chink in her armor. Rather than finding it disappointing, he found it oddly endearing. Gently he asked, “Alaina, you’re not worried about going out in the boat, are you?”

  “Of course not,” she said, tipping her chin up and fighting the urge to gag as the smell of fish wafted down from the area where the commercial boats were moored. “It’s just that—that—the life jacket will clash with my outfit. You should have warned me.”

  “I don’t think you’ll offend too many people,” Dylan said dryly. He eyed what she was wearing—a silky pink tank top and a trendy pair of tan jodhpurs. A slow, sexy smile spread across his mouth. “Alai-na, you’re wearing fuch-sia,” he singsonged, reaching out to run his forefinger just under the strap of the blouse. His voice dropped a velvety octave as his gaze locked on hers. “It’s very pretty. Did you wear this just for me?”

  Alaina’s normally nimble tongue stumbled on her answer, giving her away almost as surely as her blush did. She managed a lame “No,” but Dylan obviously didn’t buy it. That she came up with an answer at all was a minor miracle considering the alarming rush of feelings the languid caress of his fingertip had brought on. He dragged it lazily up and down along the strap of her blouse, coming alarmingly close to the upper swell of her left breast.

  It irked her that she hadn’t been able to smoothly deny his assumption—almost as badly as it irked that she had indeed chosen the silky tank top with Dylan’s unusual color preference in mind. It wasn’t like her to dress to please a man. She couldn’t for the life of her figure out why she had done so today.

  Dylan realized he was grinning like an idiot. He didn’t care. Alaina had dressed to please him. Never mind that her outfit would have been more appropriate for a Ralph Lauren fashion shoot. Never mind that she was there ostensibly as part of their deal. The more he saw of Alaina, the less he thought about the mundane practicality of their arrangement. That may not have been wise, but it was the truth.

  He wondered now what she would do if he repeated his performance of yesterday and kissed her. Heaven knew he’d thought of little else since the encounter on her porch. There hadn’t been anything mundane in her response. A pleasant kind of heat flushed his skin at the thought.

  The side screen door slammed and Cori and Sam wandered out onto the pier, escorted by their big shaggy dog and a middle-aged woman with a dyed-red beehive hairdo.

  Dylan jerked his hand away from Alaina’s shoulder as if her skin had burned him. Clearing his throat and pasting on a nervous smile, he hurried to introduce her to his family.

  “Alaina, this is our housekeeper, Mrs. Phoebe Pepoon. My son, Sam, and my daughter, Cori.” The dog whined and barked at him. “Oh—ah—and our dog, Scottie. Everybody, this is my friend, Alaina Montgomery.”

  Alaina smiled politely and nodded from one to the next of the troop.

  Phoebe Pepoon had a rather disconcertingly vacuous expression, a crooked, tight-lipped smile, and eyeglasses with lens so thick they made her green eyes look huge and watery. An enormous woven straw tote slung over her shoulder was overflowing with tubes of sunscreen.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Montgomery,” Sam said soberly, stepping forward to shake Alaina’s hand. “Dad was right, you do bear a pronounced parallelism of visual perspective to Princess Andora.”

  Alaina blinked. “Umm—thank you … I think.”

  “Pas de quoi,” he said with a flawless accent.

  Dylan shrugged almost apologetically. “He just bought a ‘Teach Yourself French’ cassette.”

  Alaina nodded, managing a stunned smile. “I see.”

  Nine going on forty-two was how Dylan had described his son. That seemed painfully accurate to Alaina. Sam had a thatch of sandy hair and a smattering of freckles. He was dressed in colorful baggy shorts and a neon-bright T-shirt, like any California kid his age. But the speculative look he gave her was nothing short of adult. She had a feeling nothing much got by Sam.

  Turning slightly, Alaina looked down at Dylan’s daughter, and a wall gave way deep inside her. The eyes she gazed into may have been darker than her own, but they were an absolute reflection of her own at seven years of age—wary, hurt, vulnerable. Alaina saw in Cori Harrison not only an adorable little moppet with curly dark hair, but a soul mate, a child who had had the foundation of her life cracked by divorce.

  She gave the girl a small, empathetic smile. Cori didn’t smile back, but turned and looked up at her brother, who held her hand. She was looking to Sam for a sign, and it was clear that Sam was reserving judgment.

  Alaina felt a pang of rejection, but it was tempered by understanding. She could well remember the parade of men her mother had introduced to her over the years of her childhood. She had learned very quickly that a friendly smile for her was often meant to garner brownie points with Helene. She hadn’t trusted any easier than Cori or Sam did.

  Dylan watched the exchange with interest, his attention focusing mainly on Alaina. He had been very nervous wondering what her reaction to his kids would be. Alaina did not strike him as being overly maternal. That had worried him for a variety of reasons. But what he saw in her expression now was something other than polite interest. In fact, she appeared to be lost in thought as she looked down at Cori and Sam.

  Heaven help him, she looked vulnerable again, he thought with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. That look always came as such a surprise to him. Alaina’s image was one of the tough, confident professional. To see her vulnerable, to know that under that slick, polished exterior she was capable of being vulnerable, had a profound impact on his heart.

  There was so much more to Alaina than what so pleasingly met the eye. She had given him a glimpse of the woman behind the shield of cool self-sufficiency when she’d made the telling remark about her mother the other night. Now she was giving him a glimpse of the lonely girl she must have been. Dylan wanted to know more. He wanted to know everything about her. He wanted to uncover all her secrets. He had decided the ruse of their phony relationship was going to give him the opportunity to do just that.

  * * *

  The Tardis was a good-sized boat—or was it a ship? Who cares? Alaina thought as her stomach rose and fell with the sea. It wasn’t big enough. The Queen Elizabeth II might have been big enough. At least the Queen Elizabeth had cabins where a miserably seasick person could hide until death blissfully descended upon her.

  She looked around the deck, careful not to move her head, just her eyeballs. No one else appeared to be suffering any ill effects. Cori and Sam, swallowed up in their puffy orange life jackets, trotted around on the deck as if it were motionless. Scottie the dog, also sporting a life preserver, trailed happily after them with a big doggie grin on his face.

  Mrs. Pepoon, wearing clip-on sunglasses, her nose and lips coated white with zinc oxide, sat at the very front of the boat, staring out at the sea, an abstract, updated version of the carvings that adorned the bows of wooden ships of old. She must be one hell of a housekeeper, Alaina thought, because she certainly couldn’t see any other reason for employing such an odd woman.

  Rita, the bar’s head waitress, and her no-neck, commercial-fisherman husband, Cleve, were dancing to the music that poured out of a boom box, and—Alaina gulped ha
rd—drinking beer. Under the best of circumstances her stomach rejected beer. The mere thought of it now had her shuddering.

  Chloe, Cleve’s identical twin sister, sat in a deck chair next to the cooler, enthusiastically bent over a plate of food. Alaina winced a little at the thought of Dylan’s having to fend off a bruiser like Chloe. Poor guy. Bulging with muscles, Chloe looked like the poster girl for steroid abuse. She glanced up from her lunch and smiled at Alaina, swiping a spot of mayonnaise out of her mustache. “Good potato salad, Alaina.”

  Forcing an anemic smile, Alaina said, “Thanks.” I bought it myself.

  “Is it a family recipe?”

  “Yes.” Of the Liebowitz family, proprietors of the Fourth Street Deli.

  “How’s it going, Counselor?” Dylan emerged from belowdecks with several fishing poles. He set them down carefully and leaned back against the railing where Alaina stood looking ready to turn and heave her breakfast overboard. He slid an arm around her waist and snuggled her against his side, giving her a wink and a short nod in Chloe’s direction.

  “Super,” Alaina said without much enthusiasm. “Wonderful.”

  Chloe didn’t look all that interested to her. The waitress seemed more enamored of the contents of the ice chest than she was enamored of Dylan. She was reaching for her third sandwich.

  “She’s an interesting lady,” Alaina murmured.

  “Chloe? Yeah.” Dylan kept his voice low and conspiratorial, one eye trained on his waitress as if he were afraid she might suddenly bolt and charge. “She was a Marine, you know. Took two years before anyone found out she was a woman. It made all the papers.”

  Alaina gave him a look. “Harrison, you are so full of it.”

  A sharp swell lifted the boat. By the look on her face Dylan figured Alaina’s stomach had lodged itself somewhere in the vicinity of her tonsils. He watched her grit her teeth, and he had to smile to himself. She was a trooper, poor sweetheart. She wasn’t the least bit comfortable on the sea, but killer whales wouldn’t have been able to drag that admission out of her.

  “You’re sure you’re all right?” he asked gently, lifting a hand to tenderly comb her dark hair back from her pale cheek. “You’re looking a little green.”

  Alaina willed her mutinous breakfast to settle. For some reason it seemed extremely important that she pass this test. She didn’t want Dylan thinking she couldn’t handle the seagoing life. The reason she didn’t want him thinking it made her stomach roll all the more, because she had a sinking feeling it wasn’t just a matter of her being highly competitive. It was a matter of wanting to please him.

  She took a slow, deep breath. “It’s … my makeup. The woman at Elizabeth Arden specifically told me it would take on a greenish cast if I went out on the ocean.”

  “Oh, well, maybe it would tone down a bit if you ate a little something.” The horrified look she gave Dylan tugged at his heartstrings. He bent down and pressed a kiss to the tip of her nose. “Have a piece of bread,” he murmured, briefly savoring the feel of her sagging against him. “Trust me.”

  Trust him? Alaina nearly laughed out loud. She had trusted him to take her on an innocuous little picnic, and there she was, ready to toss her cookies into the heaving Pacific. The man was a menace, she thought, looking up at him. He was also right at home on a boat—ship—whatever.

  The sea breeze ruffled his wavy chestnut hair and kissed his high cheekbones with healthy color. His hair was far too long to be fashionable among her crowd, Alaina thought, but she wouldn’t have had him change it. The unruly locks were part of who he was—just as this floating nausea machine was. She groaned inwardly as he led her to a chair.

  The bread actually helped, enough that Alaina managed to try several of the dishes Dylan’s friends had brought along. She ate her lunch without paying much attention to it, all the while keeping an appreciative eye on Dylan. He had stripped off his T-shirt and tied his hair at the nape of his neck with a shoelace, making him look like an eighteenth-century pirate captain. Sun-bronzed muscles rippled as he worked around the boat seeing to the needs of his compatriots.

  In addition to Rita, Cleve, and Chloe, there were two old-timers who worked in the bait shop and a Russian defector named Uri who helped tend bar. They were an unusual group, to be sure. Unfortunately, being able to eat and keep food down seemed to be the only thing Alaina had in common with Dylan’s crew.

  It was plain she didn’t fit in with his friends. They were from blue-collar backgrounds, and try as she might, Alaina could find no comfortable way into their conversations. Her comments were met with polite but cool responses or blank looks. She got the distinct impression they would rather Dylan had left her behind.

  His children didn’t seem to think much of her either. Cori and Sam avoided her like the plague, though several times she caught them watching her from a distance. Scottie the dog ran off with her Gucci handbag and chewed a hole in it before Dylan could wrest it away from him.

  All in all, Alaina thought as she sat beside the reticent Mrs. Pepoon later that afternoon, her first effort at “keeping company” with Dylan was an unqualified failure. After tangling herself in fishing line and snagging her silk blouse with a hook, she had been banned from the angling activities. She wasn’t keeping company with Dylan at all, she thought morosely, her gaze straying to Phoebe Pepoon. She was keeping company with a woman with a beehive hairdo and orange polyester pedal pushers.

  Depression settled over her like a pall as she watched Dylan helping his children fish. She’d never felt so rotten in all her adult life. What was the matter with her? She had never before considered it a problem that she didn’t fit in with commercial fishermen and bait-shop waitresses. It had never mattered that children didn’t flock around her for attention. Coordination with a fishing pole had never been high on her list of priorities.

  The reason hit her smack between the eyes when Dylan glanced back at her, winked, and waved. Cold reality intensified her depression to gigantic proportions.

  She wanted to be accepted by Dylan’s friends, she wanted to be accepted by Dylan’s children, because she wanted to be accepted by Dylan.

  She was falling for him.

  Panic crashed over her like a tsunami wave. It was her most secret wish sneaking up on her and viciously attacking her without warning. Way down deep inside her, beneath the resilient toughness, beyond the cool self-possession, she had always harbored the desire to be a part of a normal, loving family—like Dylan’s family.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered, appalled by the prickle of tears at the back of her eyes.

  This had to be the worst possible thing that could have happened! She couldn’t fall for Dylan Harrison! They had made a deal; this was to be a relationship in name only. He had told her she was perfect for the job because she wasn’t his type of woman at all. There was no chance of his really falling for her on a long-term basis. Dylan wanted a woman who could fish. He wanted a woman who could make potato salad. He had no desire to hook up with another career woman.

  In a daze, Alaina stared across the deck at him. Her heart gave a great, traitorous ker-thump as she watched him kneel down beside Cori’s chair and wrap his arms around his little girl—the little girl with the big, sad eyes. A lump the size of an Idaho russet lodged in Alaina’s throat.

  Oh, Lord, she thought, pressing a carefully manicured hand to her trembling lips, she was falling in love with him.

  No question. This was definitely breach of contract.

  Of all the bloody rotten luck! Alaina ground her teeth, anger intermingling with all the other raw emotions inside her. She didn’t want to be in love with Dylan Harrison. She didn’t want to be in love with anybody, she vowed, locking that secret dream back in its box in the farthest corner of her heart. For years she had prided herself on being practical, levelheaded, and patently unromantic. That was the image she had always wanted to project. Love was a tenuous, fickle, silly thing. She didn’t want anything to do with it.

  “You�
�re looking a little out of sorts, Princess,” Dylan said, taking Mrs. Pepoon’s chair as his housekeeper made her way belowdecks. He dropped his blue baseball cap on Alaina’s head and pushed the bill down low over her eyes. “Did you and Mrs. Pepoon have a fight?”

  Pushing the cap up, Alaina leaned away from him, only vertigo keeping her from getting up and moving to another chair. Being within touching distance of Dylan didn’t seem like a good idea at the moment. Falling overboard seemed marginally worse. “It’s rather difficult to fight with someone who hasn’t uttered a word to me all day.”

  “Difficult, but it can be done,” he said, thinking back to the cold war Veronica had waged during their marriage when she had wanted to move to L.A. and he had wanted to move to Anastasia. He eyed Alaina carefully. She had her pretty patrician nose out of joint about something.

  “This isn’t precisely my element, you know.” Inner tension clipped her words.

  “You’re not having a good time?” It was more a flat statement than a question.

  She gave him one of her stony looks in answer.

  Dylan felt a renewal of the anxiety he had experienced earlier. A blind person could have seen Alaina was having a lousy time. After a few halfhearted attempts to fit in with his friends and his children, she had withdrawn. That was not a good sign.

  He couldn’t find it in him to blame her, though. He’d dragged her on a boat and gotten her seasick. One of his fishhooks had ruined the blouse she’d worn for him—silk by Anne Klein, ninety-seven fifty. His dog had eaten her purse—leather by Gucci, one hundred sixty-five dollars. Those incidents didn’t add up to a fun day in anyone’s book. They probably added up to a huge black mark against him in Alaina’s. She already swore he wasn’t her type. He’d spent the day proving it and running up a bill as well.

  Dylan heaved a sigh.

  Another problem he hadn’t foreseen was the cold shoulder his friends had turned Alaina’s way. True, Alaina hadn’t made much of an effort to fit in, but his staff hadn’t exactly extended open arms either. He supposed they were bent out of shape over the fact that he had chosen Alaina himself rather than letting them foist someone off on him.