Tom was rather more concerned about the puddle. But he addressed the puppy chewing on the spoons. “No! Drop them.” The puppy instantly let go of the spoons and looked up at Tom, wagging its tiny tail so vigorously it nearly fell over. “Good puppy,” said Tom.
Gingerly Tom picked up the spoons, bent now and liberally embellished with puppy drool, and handed them to Maddy.
She looked up at him, head tilted to one side. “How did you do that?”
“You just have to be firm with dogs. Let them know who is boss.”
Maddy quickly cleaned up the puppy puddle with paper towels. “No, it’s not that. I tried firm and they ignored me. It’s the alpha-male thing.You’re obviously the alpha male to Brutus’s entire little pack.”
Tom closed his eyes. Please. This couldn’t be happening to him. But when he opened his eyes, the puppies were still there. So was Maddy. And although there was a smile dancing around her mouth, her eyes were wary.
He cleared his throat. “So, if I’m the alpha male to them, what does that make me to you?” His voice was gruff with the emotion he was finding it almost impossible to mask.
She chewed on her lip before answering in a voice that wasn’t quite steady. “You’re my alpha male, too, and . . . and I missed you terribly last night.”
“I missed you, too,” he said, relieved beyond measure at her words and the yearning expression that accompanied them.
He kissed her, deeply, possessively—breathing in her warm, familiar scent, tasting the tang of lime and the richness of coconut, exulting in her feminine curves pressed close to him. The misery of the last hours was eclipsed—eclipsed but not entirely forgotten.
“Maddy,” he said, breaking the kiss. “Last night, I’m so sorry. It was unforgivable . . . I want—”
She touched a finger to his mouth. “No, I’m the one who should be apologizing. I overreacted and—”
“I should have told you about the bonus.”
“Maybe. But I shouldn’t have made such a big deal of it. I didn’t even congratulate you on your partnership.”
“You did, you waved across the table.”
“That wasn’t a proper congratulation. I wanted to give you a big hug.”
“It’s not too late to give me a hug right now.”
She wrapped him in as big a bear hug that a five-six woman could give a six-two man. She nestled her head against his shoulder. It felt so good to have her there. So right.
“Congratulations, Tom,” she said. “Jackson, Jones, and Gentry are very lucky to have you as their newest partner.”
Tom kissed the top of her head. “Thank you. Your best wishes are worth more than the rest of them put together.”
She moved away to face him again. “I believe you really mean that.”
“I’m not in the habit of saying things I don’t mean. I think you know that by now.”
“I guess so,” she said, still sounding a tad uncertain. She glanced at the clock on the wall. “But talking of the partners, shouldn’t you be at work right now?”
“It was more important to come here. Anyway, I’m meeting with my important client, one Brutus Stoddard.”
“Who is currently getting reacquainted with his lady love.”
“He was miserable last night without you. So was I.”
“I didn’t sleep a wink.”
“Same. Of course it didn’t help to have Brutus snoring away on the bed.”
“You’re kidding me.” Her eyebrows rose. “You let Brutus on the bed with you?”
“Yeah. I told him I shouldn’t but that, as I missed you, too, I understood how he was feeling. So I let him stay on the condition he slept right down at the end.”
Only when the last word was out of his mouth did Tom realize what a disastrous admission he had made.
Maddy stared at Tom for a long, incredulous moment. “Say that again, will you please?”
“Sure, I—”
“Tom, you talked to Brutus. Talked to him like a person. Did you seriously expect him to answer you?” she said, mimicking his own somewhat pompous tones when he’d asked her a similar question.
She expected him to be defensive, argumentative even. Instead he grinned, a big, dimple-revealing grin, and threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, I admit it. Guilty as charged. I’ve caught it from the Cartwrights. I talked to a dog. Yes, like I expected him to answer me. And do you know what? He did.”
“Answer you? Brutus has got the gift of speech now?” This was too big a turnaround for her to easily cope with.
“I’m serious. I think Brutus knows exactly what is going on most of the time. He’s not as dopey as he seems. It’s animal instinct and if you’re on the right wavelength you can tune in to it.”
“Like my mother used to say, it’s the tone of the voice rather than what you say.”
“I don’t think your mother’s theory is entirely correct,” said Tom. “Too many variables.”
Maddy shook her head. “Huh? Tom, I’m clueless as to what you’re talking about.”
“That’s obvious. And it proves my point.The—”
“Wait,” she said. She’d been watching the dogs from the corner of her eye. “The puppies have gone into the living room. I think we’d better follow them.”
“Good idea. Though you do realize that wiping up puppy puddles is not part of the alpha male’s responsibilities?”
She looked at him, deadpan. “So why doesn’t that surprise me? But is eating peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies on the alpha-male menu?”
“Right at the very top.”
Maddy followed Tom into the living room and sat down next to him on the sofa. There wasn’t much room so she was forced to snuggle up next to him as they nibbled on the cookies.
“So, what’s this about my mother’s theory?” she finally asked.
Tom looked very serious and lawyerlike. “The whole misunderstanding about the bonus debunks her theory.”
“Explain.”
“The truth is, I didn’t tell you about the bonus because I was so caught up in protecting you and Brutus from that evil Stoddard that I simply didn’t think about it.”
“Yes. I can see that. Now.”
“But you thought I was just doing it for the money. If ‘cashing in on the millionaire mutt’ means what I think it means.”
Maddy pulled a remorseful face. “Sorry about that.”
“You’re forgiven,” he said with a swift kiss. “But here’s the interesting bit. If your mother’s theory was correct, you would have known from the tone of my voice—and from what I was doing rather than saying—how I felt about you. But you didn’t, and that made you go off on entirely the wrong tangent.”
A glorious sense of anticipation made her feel like half-set Jell-O—contained on the outside but all mushy and wobbly on the inside. She remembered his concern for her after the Jerome-and-the-lucky-pony incident. The way he exposed himself to ridicule by defending Brutus in court. How he had risked his important meeting with Clive Gentry so she could make her audition.
And suddenly she was receiving him loud and clear.
“So it was like, actions speak louder than words. Only I wasn’t picking up on the meaning behind the actions.”
“That is correct.” His choice of words was so wonderfully lawyerlike.
She snuggled even closer to him on the sofa. Her voice suddenly didn’t work very well and she had to force it out of a dry throat. “So . . . what are the words,Tom?”
They both sat very still for a very long moment. Then Tom twisted her around to face him. He cupped her face in both his hands. “That I was looking after you and Brutus because I . . . I cared for you . . .” His brown eyes had never seemed more sincere and his tone wasn’t lawyerlike at all.
“Yes?”
“Because I love you, Maddy.”
She swallowed hard. “I . . . I love you, too, Tom.” The words, once out, weren’t nearly as difficult as she’d imagined. In fact, she fe
lt like singing them over and over.
The kiss that followed was the sweetest she had ever experienced. And not entirely due to the cookie crumbs on both their tongues.
On Wednesday she’d asked Tom if he was a dream. Last night the dream had turned into a horrible nightmare. Now the wide-awake reality was so much more wonderful than any dream could ever be.
“There’s something else,” said Tom. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a square of white paper. He unfolded it and Maddy could see it comprised two tightly printed pages.
She caught her breath. “Is that what I think it is?”
Tom nodded. “My five-year plan.” Then, with great exaggeration, he tore it in half.
“Tom!”
He tore it through again. Then he crumpled up the pieces into a ball and threw it toward her pretty, hand-painted waste-basket. He missed, and the paper ball was immediately pounced on by the nearest puppy.
Maddy knew Tom had lived his life according to that plan and the ones before it for half his life. “Are you sure destroying your plan is what you want to do?”
“Absolutely sure. And I’ve trashed the computer file. Deleted the BlackBerry.”
“Wow. That’s serious stuff.”
Tom got up from the sofa and paced the tiny area of her living room. “Maddy, I was an idiot to let something like that plan dictate my life. When I think how inflexible I let myself be come . . .”
The printout of the plan was now being squabbled over by two puppies emitting fierce baby growls as they shredded it all over her floor.
“I wouldn’t say inflexible, Tom. More . . . focused. Don’t beat yourself up over it.You needed that plan. Now you don’t. End of story.”
He frowned. “What if I’d adhered so strictly to subsection 2c that I’d missed out on loving you?”
“The point is you didn’t. And, remember, I threw the two-date rule out the window.”
“And the kissing-occasion rule, don’t forget.”
“That’s right. It’s all about compromise, I guess.”
“That’s what my mother said this morning.”
“Your mother?”
“I called to tell her the good news about the partnership. She picked up on how miserable I was and dragged it out of me that we’d had a disagreement.”
Maddy liked Helen O’Brien. And she wouldn’t mind a closer look at those baby photos. “What did she say?”
“She went ballistic.Turned out she and Walter cooked up the twenty-one-day clause and the bonus with the express purpose of forcing us into each other’s company.”
Maddy started to laugh. “You’re kidding me? You heard Walter on the video. He was always telling me it wasn’t right for me to be on my own.That I needed a good man in my life.”
“We’ve been manipulated from day one.”
“Are you complaining?”
Tom sat down beside her again. He put his arm around her to pull her close. “No, I’m not. I’m grateful to Walter. Maddy, I couldn’t imagine ever loving anyone the way I do you.”
Tenderly, he wiped the streak of flour off her face with his finger.
“Me, too. Loving you, I mean,” said Maddy. “I—ouch! There’s a puppy chewing on my foot.” She shook it off and he scampered back to join his brothers and sisters, who were now flopped on top of each other in a heap next to Coco.
“Maddy, you don’t intend to keep all of the puppies, do you?” Tom didn’t quite mask the undertone of dismay in his voice.
“No. Even when I move upstairs into the big house, it wouldn’t be practical. I’d like to keep one, the little girl I fell in love with at Mrs. Poodle’s house. I’m going to call her Tinker-belle. We’ll have to find homes for the others.”
“As long as the new owners sign an agreement to relinquish any claims on Brutus’s fortune.”
“Yes, Mr. Lawyer. But I’d like to hang on to all the puppies for a bit longer until they’re ready to leave their mother. And father, too, of course.”
Brutus had joined the heap and within seconds all the dogs were asleep. From the ones that looked most like Brutus emanated puppylike snores.
“We’d never, ever part Brutus and Coco.” Maddy sighed. “Hmm. Mr. and Mrs. Brutus . . . Hey, I’ve just had an idea.”
Tom felt himself break out in a cold sweat at the faraway look in Maddy’s eyes. “No, Maddy. No.You’re not thinking of holding a wedding ceremony for two dogs, are you?”
Maddy’s eyes danced with mischief. “It would look cute, don’t you think? Brutus in a new bandanna. Blue perhaps? And Coco in her best diamanté collar with ribbons tied in her fur. Hot pink, I think. We could even paint her claws pink to match with nail polish.”
Tom groaned. “I think you’re getting a bit carried away here,” he cautioned.
Maddy narrowed her eyes, deep in creative thought. “I could sell the pictures. Can’t you just see the headlines? ‘Millionaire Mutt Weds. Makes Honest Dog of Mother of His Puppies.’ ”
Tom rapidly raked his fingers through his hair. “Don’t even joke about it, Maddy. Please. And don’t for one minute even think about making our wedding a double service.”
Maddy stared at him. She did the nose thing. “What did you say,Tom?”
Where had that come from? Tom had a sudden vision of Maddy gliding up the aisle toward him in a beautiful white dress, her face all misty behind a white veil. Suddenly it seemed the only way to go.The logical conclusion.
“I said . . . I said the word ‘wedding.’ ” He felt dazed, his feelings in free fall.
Maddy looked equally stunned. “What brought that on?” she asked, with the tiniest of tremors in her voice.
He took both her hands in his. “You know how traditional I am, Maddy. First comes love. We’re there. Right?” He kissed her gently on her adorable nose. “Then . . . then comes marriage.”
“You mean become Mrs. Tom O’Brien?” Maddy’s eyes were huge in her heart-shaped face.
“Yes, Maddy. I mean, will you marry me?” He held his breath for her answer.
Maddy was trying to smile but Tom could see her lips were trembling too much for the smile to work. But finally she choked out the words he was aching to hear. “Yes, yes, and yes again. Tom, I love you.”
He felt overwhelmed with pride, exultation, and pure alpha-male possessiveness. “I love you, too, Maddy. For always and for ever.”
Maddy felt as if her entire being was bubbling with joy. She hadn’t known Tom long but she’d known him long enough. Nothing could make her happier than to be not just a chocolate chip in his life but his lawfully wedded wife.
He kissed her again. The best kisser in the universe would be hers to have and to hold and to kiss for the rest of her years. She was destined to a life with no lipstick and she couldn’t be happier about it.
But there were a few details to sort out before they started talking china patterns. Or in his case, no doubt, china without patterns.
“Uh,Tom, there’s just one thing.”
“Mmm,” he said, nuzzling into her neck and sending delicious little tremors through her body.
“We’ve got the love, we’ll plan the marriage, and then—quite likely—we’ll get to the baby carriage stage.”
“I hope so,” he said, more intent on undoing the tie of her apron from around her waist than on listening to her.
“I’d like to have right of veto over the naming of our children. No Bruces, no Squiggles, no—”
“Maddy.” Tom slipped the knot of her apron, released the ties, slid his hands under her T-shirt to the small of her back, and pulled her close to him. “Just be quiet and kiss me, will you?”
And she did.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
&nbs
p; Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Love Is a Four-Legged Word Page 26
