Love Is a Four-Legged Word

by Kandy Shepherd

  Tom jerked back as he felt a movement around his ankles. He looked down. He swore. Brutus the millionaire mongrel was enthusiastically humping his leg.

  Four

  Late the next morning, Tom walked slowly toward the small group of mourners gathered outside the grand old church. He felt uncomfortable at funerals—too much sentiment—but knew he had to pay his respects to Walter Stoddard.

  He spied his mother, tall and elegant in a dark hat. She broke away from the people she was talking to and hurried over.

  “Glad you could come, darling,” she murmured as he gave her a hug. “Everything’s on schedule. Walter’s other friends from the church are here, too. And Maddy, of course, sweet thing.”

  Tom followed his mother’s gaze across to where a slim figure clad in black stood near the arched entrance to the church. A slim, yet very shapely figure whose short skirt showed off amazingly long, slender legs. Yeah. He’d guessed that under her blue jeans she’d been hiding great legs. Now his conjecture was confirmed.

  “You know Maddy Cartwright?” he asked.

  “Of course I do. She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

  “Hmm,” he grunted.

  “She was so kind to Walter. She’s a professional chef, you know—and a magazine food editor. Spoiled him with her wonderful cooking.”

  “I’m sure she did.” Tom’s words were underlined with irony, but his mother didn’t seem to notice.

  Obviously she didn’t share any of his suspicions about Maddy Cartwright’s “kind” treatment of Walter Stoddard. But then Helen O’Brien always saw the best in people. Had even taken back his dying father to nurse him, years after he’d run off with a much-younger woman and squandered the family’s money on her. To this day Tom could not understand why she’d done that.

  “Don’t sound so grumpy about it, darling. I know doing Walter’s will wasn’t really your line of business, but when Walter found out my son was a lawyer—”

  “It’s okay, Mother, I didn’t mind. Really.”

  He hardly heard his mother as he stared over at Maddy. Her hair glinted and shone in the sunshine, like a flame dancing around her head.

  Tom had always had a thing for olive-skinned brunettes. But he had to admit that Maddy’s unusual coloring was eye-catching. Witch’s coloring. He’d read somewhere that the most dangerous witches of all had red hair and green eyes. She was looking up to her companion and chatting. But suddenly she dipped and swayed as if she were being pulled by some invisible force. Tom narrowed his eyes against the sun. Not an invisible force but a leash. And an animal straining against it.

  “I don’t believe it! She’s brought that disgusting dog to the funeral.”

  Helen O’Brien laughed. “Father Andrew isn’t too happy about it, I can tell you. Brutus has been lifting his leg on everything he can see. Including Father’s cassock. Hope he doesn’t try it on the casket . . . you know, to say farewell.”

  This time Tom heard his mother loud and clear. He frowned. “Mother, I can’t believe you said that.”

  Helen O’Brien laughed again. “Oh, loosen up, darling, you take everything so seriously these days.”

  Tom chose to ignore her. They’d had this conversation before. Didn’t his mother realize someone had to be the responsible one in the family? Next she’d be trying to match-make him with some “very nice girl” she’d come across.

  The race for a partnership at Jackson, Jones, and Gentry was all-important to him. It was vital both to prove something to himself and—deep down in a part of his psyche he didn’t care to visit too often—to his father.

  Before he’d gotten ill, his father had been a larger-than-life-sized character. Raymond O’Brien was forceful, always running toward risk, and Tom had hero-worshiped him. But when Tom reached adolescence, his dad grew scornful that his smart, serious, thoughtful son was not a chip off the rough-hewn, only-kind-of-man-to-be block. He became overly critical. Stop thinking, son, and start doing or you’ll never amount to anything. Over and over he’d said that.

  To be a partner at one of San Francisco’s most prestigious law farms was something. Now Tom had the ball at his foot and nothing was going to stop him from putting it into the net.Why couldn’t his mom realize that left little room for frivolities? Or for serious girlfriends.

  He narrowed his eyes again. “Who is that guy Maddy is talking to?”

  His mother peered across. “The rather gorgeous dark-haired fellow? Don’t have a clue. He’s not from church. Maybe he’s one of the undertakers. But he’s not wearing a suit.”

  Tom didn’t like the way Maddy was smiling at the stranger. Or the way he was standing so close to her.

  Duh. Again Tom mentally slapped his forehead. Somehow he’d just assumed Madeleine Cartwright was single. But maybe she’d had a boyfriend in on the scam on the old man. And he’d come with her to the funeral to gloat.

  “Hmm,” said his mother, following his gaze. “Doubt he’s an undertaker. I wonder who he is? Maddy doesn’t have a boyfriend as far as I know.”

  Perhaps conscious of their combined scrutiny, Maddy turned in their direction, saw them, smiled, and waved with the hand that was not trying to rein in Brutus.

  Tom scowled and gave an awkward kind of salute in return. He didn’t like being caught gawking at her. Didn’t want her to get the wrong idea. Like that he was attracted to her.

  He was just checking her out because he was so suspicious of her. If she insisted on wearing such short skirts, he couldn’t help staring at her legs.

  The man next to her also turned and looked across. But he didn’t wave. Or smile. It seemed all his smiles were directed to Maddy.

  “Why don’t you go over and find out who he is, Tom? I’ve got to look after a few of the old dears from Walter’s bridge club. It’s getting a bit hot for them to be standing around.”

  Tom walked as nonchalantly as he could across the churchyard. Damn! Why should he feel so self-conscious? What was it about this bewitching redhead that made him so concerned about how he appeared to her?

  Yes, she was cute and funny and very different from the women he usually met. Maddy was the girl next door who stood out in a world of ambitious businesswomen jostling to bust through the glass ceiling. But that was no reason for him to let her turn his thoughts upside down the way she was doing.

  As he neared her he caught his breath in surprised admiration. Makeup and a body-hugging black suit added a surprising sophistication to her homey image. Double damn. She looked more appealing than ever.

  And, he realized, more seductive. More, perhaps, the type of woman who would go after what she wanted from an old man? His mouth was suddenly dry and he knew he was going to find it hard to rustle up casual words of greeting.

  As it turned out, he didn’t need them. Brutus caught sight of him. The ugly mutt jerked so vigorously away from Maddy that she let go of the leash. His stumpy legs moved with amazing speed toward Tom. Within seconds Brutus was yapping hysterically as he jumped up on Tom’s legs, claws scrabbling painfully.

  “Get down!” snapped Tom, pushing him off.

  Great. What a sight. The deceased’s lawyer, a soon-to-be (he hoped) new partner at Jackson, Jones, and Gentry, having his leg humped by a horny little mongrel in front of all the mourners.

  Where was Maddy with the bucket of water? That’s what it had taken yesterday to rid him of Brutus’s attentions.

  Maddy quickly covered the distance between them and grabbed the dangling leash.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t hold him.” Her voice shook with repressed laughter, and her cheeks were flushed pink.

  “Get him off me,” Tom snapped, struggling with the tenacious animal. “And shut him up.”

  Maddy reached down and grabbed the little dog’s collar.

  “C’mon, Brutus,” she said, hauling him away. The little dog danced around on his back paws, still yapping. “At least he didn’t lift his leg on you like he did the priest.”

  Tom stepped back. “Didn’t this damn
dog ever go to puppy school?”

  “He was, uh, expelled.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  Her green eyes were dancing. “Don’t be so mean. The little guy’s just excited to see his alpha male.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t say that when anyone else can hear,” hissed Tom.

  “Okay. His leader of the pack, then.”

  Tom groaned. “Don’t say that, either. Keep the damn animal under control.”

  “But . . .”

  “No buts. Just do it.”

  Maddy’s eyes flashed. “Order the dog around, but don’t think I leap to your command,” she snapped, surprising him.

  Nonetheless, she took the leash and tugged Brutus closer. “Can he sit by your feet? I think he just wants to be with you. You know, because you are his—”

  “I said, don’t say it,” Tom warned through clenched teeth. “And keep him away from my legs.”

  She made to protest again but then obviously remembered what had happened when the dog last got an intimate distance from Tom’s leg. “Yeah. Okay. Sit, Brutus,” said Maddy.

  Brutus ignored her.

  “Sit,” said Tom. Immediately, Brutus shut up and sat down, his button eyes gazing up at Tom in devotion.

  Maddy twisted the leash around her wrist to keep Brutus on a tight rein.

  “Brutus, be good,” she hissed at the dog. And stop treating Tom O’Brien’s leg as if it were a girl dog. She couldn’t blame Tom for scoffing at her alpha-male theories when Brutus persisted in that kind of gender-confused behavior.

  “So, who is your date?” asked Tom.

  “Date?” she said, surprised by the tight set of his mouth. “Who brings a date to a funeral?”

  “The guy you were talking to.”

  She frowned. “He’s not my date. I only just met him today. He’s Walter’s great-great-whatever-nephew. Jerome Stoddard. He’s very nice.”

  Nice was an understatement. Jerome was gorgeous, with a sexy British accent that made her knees weak. The drought had definitely broken in San Francisco. From the sky had fallen, in as many days, two of the best-looking men she’d ever met.

  “Hmm,” said Tom in an undertone. “Walter warned me about him.”

  “What d’you mean, ‘warned you’?”

  “Confidential client information.”

  There spoke pompous Tom O’Brien, all right. She bristled.

  “You can’t just say that.”

  “Sure I can. I’m a lawyer, remember.” Surely that wasn’t a gleam of humor in his eyes?

  “But you’re also a human being, right? And it isn’t fair to say things like that without following up on them. I want to know why Walter warned you against him.”

  “Just called him a leech.”

  “A leech?”

  “After his money,” said Tom. “He’s heading over.You’d better introduce me.”

  Maddy did so, comparing the two men as they shook hands. Tom was so much bigger—taller and more broad-shouldered, his face strong jawed, his hair a little unruly.

  Jerome—shorter, leaner—was way more sophisticated; sleek black hair, so good-looking he was almost beautiful with eyes so blue she wondered if he wore colored contacts.

  In food terms, Tom was a hearty porterhouse steak, Jerome an escalope of salmon—each very different but equally delicious. Hmm. She’d find it difficult to choose if they were offered to her on a menu.

  But, immediately, she sensed the men didn’t like each other although it wasn’t apparent in their polite exchange of introduction.

  No, it was more in the way they sized each other up in a completely nonverbal way. The set of Tom’s shoulders; the narrowing of Jerome’s eyes.The two men reminded her of a wildlife film she’d seen of two stags circling each other in confrontation. Only the stags had been fighting over a doe.

  “So you didn’t know your uncle well?” asked Tom.

  “No,” said Jerome, “the English side of the family lost touch some years ago. I haven’t been in the United States long but managed to track Uncle Walter down. How fortunate I managed to meet with him before he passed away.” He sounded very sincere to Maddy.

  “Indeed,” said Tom, and Maddy was surprised at how noncommittal he was.

  “Jerome’s great-grandfather and Walter’s father were brothers, isn’t that right, Jerome?” she said.

  “So that’s the connection,” said Tom in an icy tone.

  Maddy looked from one man to the other, puzzled. She found Jerome charming not least because he resembled Walter. He didn’t seem at all leechlike. In fact, he looked very like photographs Walter had shown her of himself as a young man.

  But Tom obviously wasn’t impressed and she wondered why. She’d have to quiz him further on what Walter had said about his great-great-whatever-nephew.

  She noticed people starting to move inside the church. “I think we’d better be going in,” she said.

  “What about Brutus?” asked Tom.

  “Ah, the millionaire mutt,” said Jerome.

  Maddy looked up sharply. Was it appropriate to call Brutus that?

  Jerome leaned down to pet Brutus, but Brutus backed away from him and cowered behind Tom’s ankles. His movement tugged on the leash and pulled her closer to Tom, right up against his rock-hard biceps. Her heart started racing at the contact. She felt light-headed as she breathed in his already-familiar male scent.

  “Sorry. Brutus . . . he’s shy with strangers,” she found herself explaining awkwardly to Jerome as she extricated herself from the too-close proximity to Tom and his too-appealing muscles.

  But Brutus hadn’t been at all shy with Tom. Quite the opposite. For the little dog it had been hero worship at first sight.

  “I’m sure he’ll get used to me,” said Jerome.

  Get used to him? Maddy felt a little shiver of excitement. Was the gorgeous Jerome planning to get to know her better?

  “Uh, sure,” she said, forcing herself to sound nonchalant. “But right now we have to be going into the church.”

  “I’ll join you in a moment,” said Jerome, pulling his cell phone from his pocket. Odd. Why would he be calling someone when the funeral service was about to start?

  His face inscrutable, Tom watched the other man walk around the corner.Then he looked pointedly down at Brutus.

  “Are you going to tie him up outside the church?”

  “No way,” said Maddy. “Walter would have wanted him to be here.”

  “But would Father Andrew?” asked Tom, glancing to where the priest stood guard at the door.

  Father Andrew glared at Brutus and then at her—even though she had offered to pay for the dry cleaning of his cassock.

  “I know how much the dog meant to Walter so I’ll let him inside. But keep him under control or he’s out,” warned the priest.

  “I will, Father,” she said meekly. “I should have brought a muzzle, I guess.”

  “It’s the other end I’m worried about,” said the priest, turning with a flourish of his robes.

  Maddy could have kicked Tom for his smothered laugh.

  Five

  Tom hadn’t been inside a church for some time. The last time he’d been to this particular one had been for his father’s funeral ten years ago.

  He looked across the aisle to where his mother knelt serenely in prayer, lit by a shaft of sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows. Was she remembering that long-ago service? His stepmother—if you could call someone barely older than himself a stepmother—hadn’t even bothered to come.

  And now here he was sitting beside another young woman whom he suspected of using her looks and youth to bamboozle a fortune out of an older man. He shifted uncomfortably, thinking he should excuse himself and go over to sit with his mother.

  But there was Brutus. Subdued now, the dog sat on the pew between Tom and Maddy, and Tom had to admit that the animal was behaving impeccably.

  Had Maddy been right that Brutus was in mourning for
his master? Did he instinctively know that Walter lay at rest in the imposing casket that sat beneath the altar? Or was this heart-break thing, as Tom suspected, just so much hogwash?

  As the priest commenced the service, Brutus maintained a reverential silence except for the odd clinking of his dog tags as he scratched behind his ears. Tom shifted uncomfortably at the thought of fleas.

  His father’s funeral service had been unbearably sad. Death had come prematurely from the same high cholesterol that Tom dreaded developing. The messy family situation had cast a pall over the proceedings. Tom had been racked with guilt over the anger he’d felt for his father and the pain at his loss.

  Before his dad had discovered the stock market and the prizes his gambling instincts could net him as a trader, the family had lived in Denver, Colorado. Tom’s happiest times had been when his dad took him horseback riding. Tom was a natural and basked in his dad’s approval. All that stopped when they moved to San Francisco.

  Tom took a deep breath, unaware that he had done so. Father and son had reached a shaky reconciliation before Raymond died. But that had not made the funeral any easier. His mother had sobbed nonstop through the service. His sister had refused to come, having disowned their father when he’d run off with wife number two.

  But today was a very different funeral. Walter Stoddard had lived a long and fulfilled life. The church was packed with his friends and there was even laughter during the eulogy. Though no one seemed to know about the old man’s millionaire status.

  But Tom scarcely heard the words of the service. He rose, kneeled, and sang hymns on automatic pilot.

  He was way too aware of Maddy, rising, kneeling, and singing hymns beside him. Of the swell of her breasts against her sleek-fitting black jacket. Of the elegant curve of her calves outlined by fine black hose. Of her lavender scent now blended not with chocolate but something else. Strawberries? What had she been cooking? Even if it was onions he was convinced it would smell good on her.

  As they sang “The Lord’s My Shepherd” he noticed her beautiful full mouth tremble and tears escape and roll down her cheeks. She sniffed and wiped them away with her fingers.