Only a fairy godmother who would wave her magic wand and turn his nieces into mice would solve his problem. Or one who would whisk them back to San Francisco and provide them with a stable, devoted mother who loved them.
He rubbed his hands down his face and slumped on the sofa. No, their mother loved them. He didn't doubt that. She had just finally come to terms with her limitations and, because she loved them, gave them to him.
He supposed there was a skewed sort of logic to her behavior.
I know you think they need stability, she had written in her letter to him. I agree. And you must see that I'm not the one to give it to them. I've tried, God knows. But so far I don't even seem to have managed it for myself. I think I might be able to do it with Roger, but I don't want to give the girls hopes that I might destroy again. That's why I'm giving them to you. I know how you feel about being responsible. You never let me down. I know you won't let them down either. Thanks, big brother. I love you all. Meg.
Quite a testimony.
How the hell was he ever going to live up to it?
He'd been too afraid of their unstable background to ever consider marriage himself. He hadn't wanted kids for precisely the same reason. And now Meg had dumped into his lap responsibilities he never would have chosen in a million years.
But she was right about one thing—she knew him— and she knew he'd bust himself trying to take care of them. If only he knew where to start.
The doorbell sounded, startling him. He glanced at his watch. It was after eleven. He frowned and hauled himself to his feet, then turned on the intercom.
"Who is it?"
"Izzy," the voice said. It was faint and slightly tremulous, and for a moment the name didn't register.
Then it did, and he pushed the button to unlock the door downstairs and jerked open his own door at the same time. Then he went out into the hallway to peer down as Isobel Rule made her way slowly up the stairs.
"What happened?" he demanded, looking her over, half certain she'd been mugged.
Then sanity reasserted itself. No one would mug someone who dressed like a thrift-shop reject.
She gave him a faint smile. "He wasn't home."
He dumped you? That and several equally uncomplimentary questions leapt into his head. He suppressed them, stepping back to usher her into the apartment. She stopped just inside the door and stood, still holding her duffel bag. He took it out of her hand. Earlier she probably would have fought him for possession of it. Now she let him take it. She looked as if she was about to cry.
Finn, used to the vicissitudes of emotions in the models he photographed daily, was no stranger to tears, although he was more than a little surprised to see the previously unflappable Isobel Rule coming close to them. "Tell me what happened," he said gruffly. He steered her into the kitchen and put the kettle on.
She sniffled and perched herself on one of the kitchen chairs, propping her elbows on the table. "He's gone— and I don't even know for how long. I should have let him know I was coming."
"You didn't?" He'd been reaching into the cupboard for mugs. Now he simply stared at her.
"He never told me!" Isobel protested. She sighed and ran her hands through her hair distractedly. "It's hard to explain," she mumbled.
"Try me." He was intrigued. Besides, it took his mind off his own problem.
"Sam Fletcher is the grandson of my grandfather's best friend. They fought together in the Second World War and my grandfather saved his grandfather's life. I used to hear stories about it when I was growing up. My grandfather raised me," she explained. "My parents died when I was seven and I went to live with him."
Finn set out the mugs and leaned against the counter, watching her, waiting for the water to boil.
"I met Sam when I was nineteen. He was twenty-four. His grandfather had just died and Sam was taking over a lot of the nitty-gritty work in their family import-export business."
"They own Fletchers'!" Finn's eyes widened. Fletchers' was one of the best-known import-export businesses in the country. While it might not have the household name recognition of a Tiffany's or Neiman-Marcus, in its own sphere it was legendary. People with incomes like Tawnee Davis bought their household furnishings and knickknacks from Fletchers'.
"You've heard of it?"
"I've heard of it."
"They must make a lot of money," Izzy said glumly.
"You could say that."
"I didn't know it," she said in a small voice. "I thought Sam wasn't any different than me."
"And he is," Finn guessed, beginning to get an inkling of what she must have unexpectedly walked into.
She looked morose. "He has a doorman. And a crystal chandelier. I wouldn't be surprised if it was Waterford."
"It is," Finn said.
Izzy looked at him, eyes wide. "How do you know?"
The kettle whistled and he poured water into the mugs for tea. "Because I shot a layout in his apartment building last year."
"You know where he lives?" Izzy considered that. "It's pretty fancy. It's very fancy," she corrected herself. "Sam never seemed fancy."
"Maybe he's not."
"You don't know him?"
"No." Finn hobnobbed with the recently rich and famous. The Fletchers had had money since they'd got off the Mayflower.
"I think I'm out of my league," Izzy said after a moment.
"But if he intends to marry you—"
"That's what he said. He gave me a ring." She flashed it briefly. It was a rock almost the size of a pea. "I thought it was a zircon," she said. "It must not be." She sounded even more miserable at that.
"Probably not." Finn thought she was the strangest girl he'd met in his life. Most of the women he knew would have killed for a diamond of that size. He shoved a cup of tea in front of her, hoping to forestall the tears he saw threatening.
Izzy wrapped her hands around the mug and stared into the steaming tea. "Thank you." She sipped it. "His mother looked at me like I had a social disease."
"What?"
She shrugged. "I didn't even know it was his mother at first. This lady came out while the doorman was rejecting me, and she gave me this look… it wasn't really snotty exactly, just aware, you know, like she was registering that I didn't belong."
"Maybe you're imagining things."
Izzy shook her head. "I don't think so." She sighed. "I don't think she has the faintest idea Sam and I are engaged."
"Not every guy tells his mother about the woman he's going to marry. Anyway," he said briskly, "he's a grown man. He doesn't need her permission."
"I just don't want to… embarrass him."
"You won't embar—" he started to say, then his voice faltered because there was just so far assurances could go, and assuring Isobel Rule that in her present state of slightly hippy shambles she wouldn't embarrass Sam Fletcher was too far.
Finn's eyes narrowed and he studied her closely, assessing point by point the woman he saw.
She wasn't tall and willowy like the models he shot every day. She didn't know the first thing about how to move with their sinuous grace. But she did have assets. Her shiny brown hair, if someone cut it and styled it and tamed all that riotous curl, might actually be lovely. Her skin was freckled, but not unattractive. In fact it had a sort of peachy-rosy glow that, if she wore the right colors, would be stunning. Slate blue, drab gray and burnt umber were not the right ones. A change of clothes would help, too. Something that didn't shriek Haight-Ashbury with an underlying hum of thrift-shop grab-bag for a start.
Her features were actually quite nice, not that she'd done the slightest thing to enhance them. She had wide brown eyes flecked with green and amber, a nice straight nose. And her mouth… he looked more closely. There was something almost akin to Angelina Fiorelli's about her mouth.
He could turn Isobel Rule into a woman who would knock all the Fletchers' socks off.
A slow smile spread across his face. "Izzy," he said, "have I got a deal for you."
CHAPTER THREE
"YOU want to make me over?" She echoed Finn MacCauley's words, trying to sound offended or at least indifferent. She didn't do a very good job.
He shrugged. "You're the one who just finished saying you didn't think you were playing in his league. I only offered to fix that."
"For a price," she reminded him.
"You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Besides, where are you going to go if you don't stay here?"
She didn't know. She knew actually that his offer was close to life-saving. At least it was face-saving. She couldn't imagine going home now and reporting to Pops and Digger and Hewey, the old sailors who shared the house Grandad had left her at his death two months before, that she couldn't get past Sam Fletcher's front door. They'd come storming out en masse and throw him overboard. They'd fuss and fume and get all over-protective and cosset and coddle her to within an inch of her life.
It had been all she could do to convince them she was capable of coming clear across the country alone to see him. If they'd known for a minute that she hadn't told him she was coming, well, it didn't bear thinking about!
No, she had to dig in and stay in New York. And Finn MacCauley's offer was clearly the best way to do it. All he wanted in exchange was that she take care of the girls. What sort of hardship was that? She enjoyed the girls.
So what was the problem?
The problem, Izzy finally got around to admitting to herself, was Finn MacCauley himself. She'd never met anyone like him in her life. Sam, who was apparently wealthy beyond all her wildest dreams, seemed somehow more ordinary, more commonplace, than Finn.
Sam was easygoing, casual, lighthearted. There was nothing intense about Sam—unless it was the romantic spark he had fired in Izzy five years before. Finn, on the other hand, positively radiated passionate energy. She'd seen it in him the moment he'd burst out of the door to his studio. She could see it now as he prowled the confines of his kitchen.
It was a sort of intense singularly masculine energy that made her more than a little nervous. She found that surprising when she thought about it, because heaven knew she'd been raised around men. Since the age of seven, she'd been raised by men—Grandad and his sailor pals. But not one of them had she been as aware of as she was Finn MacCauley.
Did she want such a man to, as he put it so very bluntly, "shape her up"?
Did she have a choice?
Well, yes. She could say no thank you to his deal. But then where would she stay? And who would he get to take care of Tansy and Pansy?
"For how long?" she asked warily.
"How long is Fletcher going to be gone?"
"I don't know." She didn't relay any more of the ignominious details of her encounter with the doorman.
"I'll find out tomorrow," Finn said.
He acted as if it would be no big deal. Probably for him it wouldn't be. No doubt she could learn a lot from him.
If she dared.
Visions of Pops and Digger and Hewey looking after her for the rest of her life—or theirs—rose again in her mind. She lifted her gaze and met his piratical one. "All right," she said. "I'll do it."
She was awake at first light, surprised, in fact, that she'd slept at all. But the previous day's events had been tiring enough so that it wasn't long after her head hit the pillow that Izzy was out like a light. The sounds of the city woke her again when it was scarcely dawn. She didn't know why sirens and rattling trash cans should sound different in New York than they did in San Francisco. She only knew that she was awakened very early.
She stayed in bed until almost seven, then went to check on the girls. They were asleep, curled in tiny balls in Finn's huge bed. Finn himself was bunking downstairs on the daybed.
"Unless you want to share yours with me," he'd said when she'd protested.
Her face had flamed. "I meant that I would sleep there," she told him.
"You need to be where you can hear the girls. God knows I wouldn't know what to do with them."
And so he'd left her upstairs in the small utilitarian bedroom that seemed to double as a home office. "Make yourself at home," he'd said dryly.
She had—more or less. Though she'd got a bit of a jolt when she opened the closet and discovered two large black-and-white female nude photographs leaning against the back wall.
"One guess where they were hanging," she'd said to herself, remembering the girls' gaping stares and Finn hustling them back out of his bedroom last night. She wondered now if he could make her look as sexy as those women.
What would Sam think if he did?
She was beginning to wonder if she really knew Sam at all. He'd always seemed like a regular guy to her. Her grandfather's best friend's grandson. No more, no less.
Now she felt nervous about calling his office and asking when he would be back. She felt nervous about seeing him again—which was crazy because she'd never been more comfortable with anyone than she'd been with Sam.
She brushed her teeth, took a quick shower, then dressed in a pair of baggy orange shorts and a faded red T-shirt, then went downstairs.
Finn was as sound asleep as his nieces had been, but not curled up. On the contrary. He was sprawled the length of the daybed, a thin sheet dragged across his waist, the only thing, Izzy suspected, covering a full display of blatant masculinity. Quickly she looked away.
Just as quickly, her eyes found their way back to him again.
It was, perhaps, an invasion of privacy. Certainly she should have gone back upstairs or at least into the kitchen area, ignoring him. She didn't. She couldn't. She looked her fill.
She'd seen plenty of semi-clothed men before. A girl didn't grow up in a house full of old sailors, even determinedly discreet ones, and not catch the occasional glimpse of masculine flesh. And she'd seen Sam in bathing trunks, shirtless. Not once had she ever been stopped in her tracks by the sight.
Finn MacCauley stopped her where she stood.
She remembered Tansy framing him yesterday, isolating what frightened her about him, looking at it closely so that it wouldn't be so scary. Izzy wished she could do the same. For in Finn MacCauley, even in repose, Izzy could see an elemental intensity. Even asleep he had energy. It was there, coiled within his lean hard body.
She'd imagined that a real wildlife photographer would have to be possessed of a wiry, sinewy strength simply to get out into the uncivilized regions of the world and take pictures. She'd never have guessed that a man who made his living photographing some of the most pampered people in the world would have the same strength. But it looked very much as if Finn did.
His shoulders were broad, his arms well-muscled. His stomach was flat and hard. His well-defined chest was lightly furred with black hair. It arrowed down past his navel, dipping below the sheet. Her eyes followed it. Her mind saw things her eyes could not. She blushed and dropped her sandal.
Finn muttered in his sleep, then shifted. The sheet slipped lower. He blinked, then opened his eyes.
Izzy averted hers at once and scrambled to retrieve her sandal. "S-sorry," she mumbled. "I didn't mean to wake you."
He frowned and reached up to push his tousled hair out of his eyes. "Wha' time is it?"
"Seven."
He groaned. "Do they always get up this early?"
"They aren't up yet. I… couldn't sleep."
He raised himself on one elbow. "What'd you have in mind?" His voice was low and seductive and Izzy found herself backing toward the stairs instinctively.
"Breakfast?" she said.
He rubbed a hand down his face. "Breakfast." The word was a low, despairing mutter. "Fine. You have breakfast. I'll sleep." And with that he rolled over and started to snore.
Izzy stared at him, amazed, wondering what he would do next. The answer came fairly promptly: nothing. He truly had fallen back asleep again. She stood watching him, tracing the line of his profile, thinking that he really did resemble that pirate in her grandfather's old book. And she was going t
o resemble the fool in another one of them if she didn't head toward the kitchen and concentrate on breakfast. If he had the fixings, she could make pancakes for the girls.
Surprisingly enough, he did. There was a box of pancake mix in one of the cupboards, and with the eggs and milk they'd brought home on the way back from the restaurant last night, she busied herself mixing up a bowl full of batter. She was just finishing it when a carrot-topped child appeared on the stairs.
"You're here!" The little girl's eyes widened and she broke in a grin.
Izzy put her finger to her lips, shushing her. The child looked guiltily and nervously in Finn's direction, then crept down the stairs and tiptoed toward the kitchen, obviously trying not to stir the sleeping beast.
"Are you hungry?" Izzy asked. It was Tansy, she could tell now that the little girl had come closer.
Tansy nodded. "How come you stayed? We thought you were leaving."
"I… had a change in plans."
"Good." The little girl smiled. "It's better that you marry him—" she shot a look over her shoulder at her uncle "—than Sam."
Izzy dropped an egg. "That's not what I mean. I didn't mean I was marrying your uncle instead! I meant that Sam isn't home just now so I'm going to stay here and help your uncle take care of you for a while. Until he finds someone else."
"Don't want no one else." Tansy's lower lip jutted out.
Izzy knew a losing argument when she saw one. "Go get dressed," she said. "And get Pansy up."
"She is up. She won't come down while he's here."
"She's going to get hungry then," Izzy said. "This is his home."
She had the first batch finished and was putting them on a plate for Tansy when the smell of breakfast cooking roused Finn. He sat up, letting the sheet fall away so that she saw, before she glanced away again, that he was wearing a pair of extremely brief underpants. He rubbed the back of his head with one hand and scratched his chest with the other.
"You really know how to torment a guy, don't you?" he mumbled, then hauled himself to his feet and staggered toward the stairs.
Finn's Twins! Page 4
