Heart Stealers

by Patricia McLinn

  She was nervous. He made her nervous. Big deal. He was nervous, too. He’d just done something he’d sworn his whole life he would never do: pursue a relationship with a woman who had a child. When he’d asked her to join him at the Leukemia Foundation dinner last week, he hadn’t known she was a mother, but he knew now, and he was arranging a date with her anyway.

  If roaming around town with her and her kid while she took photos qualified as a date.

  He lowered his gaze to the box. The order form looked correct. The top two photos scored about a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one was appealing and ten was the stuff of nightmares. The third photo was one in which he was laughing. He squinted but saw no trace of her belly-dancer doll, or even the doll’s shadow, in the photo. He didn’t look quite so ghastly when he was laughing.

  He flipped hastily through the other photos and proofs. The ones of his staff members all scored ones and twos on his scale. In one picture, Janet looked deceptively benign, like the kind of grandmother who’d bake chocolate-chip cookies on her day off.

  “Great,” he said, closing the box. “Do you have an invoice?”

  “Your secretary said she’d prefer to have me mail the invoice.”

  “Then you’d better do that. Her word is law.”

  Sharon smiled. Just a glimmer of a smile, but it vanquished his nervousness. That was all he’d needed to see. Her smile was almost enough to convince him that spending a few hours with her kid on Saturday would be worth the torture. If he survived it, if he tolerated the little monster, maybe she’d smile again, a bigger, warmer smile.

  He truly was insane. He’d trudged through air that felt as thick and searing as lava and agreed to an outing with a woman he should steer clear of. Even worse, he’d agreed to it knowing her kid was going to be part of the deal. Maybe the heat had melted his brain. Or maybe Sharon had melted it.

  It wasn’t until he’d returned to his office, cooled off and flipped through the photos again that he realized one was missing: that last picture she’d taken of him, the one he hadn’t been prepared for.

  Chapter Five

  The should have taken his car. He should have insisted on it. The air conditioning in her car was apparently non-functional, the engine emitted an angry snarl whenever she accelerated, and worst of all, the back seat of her car contained one of those bulky padded infant seats—which was currently occupied by a screechy, whiny toddler.

  His name was Max, and he was loud. Brett had no objection to loudness in the proper context: when listening to Metallica, for instance, or watching the Thunderbirds perform high-speed jet maneuvers at an air show. But noise created by a child was different. It abraded his nerves and made him remember why he hated kids—as if he needed a reminder.

  “It’s very nice of you to offer the use of your car,” Sharon had said when he’d suggested it, “but I’ve got Max’s child seat all set up in my car. And if he spills something, or drops something—well, if he’s going to make a mess, I’d prefer that he make it in my car than in yours.”

  Brett would prefer that, too. He’d prefer not even to think about the kinds of messes little Max could make.

  Right now, as they pulled away from Sharon’s townhouse, Max was seated at the center of the back seat, Sharon’s camera bag to his left and another tote to his right. As Sharon had loaded up the car, she’d informed Brett that this other tote was filled almost exclusively with items for Max: diapers, apple juice, crackers shaped like fish, cubes of cheddar cheese, a zip-lock bag containing grapes, a teddy bear, a book about choo-choo trains, a change of clothing, a tot-sized baseball cap, and no doubt several other essentials that she hadn’t mentioned and that weren’t in sight at the top of the bag.

  The kid was babbling, a running narration. “We go in the car. We got to go now. We go on a drive. I wave at the trees! Lots of trees! There’s a birdie in the tree. Look at the birdie!” Brett risked a quick glance backward and observed that the kid was explaining these salient facts to the teddy bear, which he’d hauled out of the tote bag and was clutching in his pudgy hands.

  “Does your son talk all the time?” he asked Sharon.

  She was dressed for the heat, in a pair of khaki shorts and a sleeveless blouse of pleasantly faded plaid cotton. Her legs were long and golden, and he decided she looked better in shorts than she had in the cocktail dress she’d worn to the dinner last week, because the shorts exposed more of her. Her legs would have to be pretty damned terrific to compensate for the incessantly yakking tyke in the back seat. Fortunately, they were pretty damned terrific.

  “Not all the time, no,” Sharon said, shooting Brett a smile that was right up there with her legs on his list of spectacular sights. “Sometimes he refuses to say a word. Usually that’s when I need him to say something. And he talks non-stop when I need him to be quiet. He loves being contrary.”

  “And they call children blessings,” he muttered.

  Sharon must have thought he was joking, because she laughed. “I want to take some shots of the park down near the Oak Hill School,” she told him. “That’s where we’ll start.”

  “You’re just taking these photos for yourself?” he asked. If they talked about her work, maybe he could ignore the din of toddler commentary arising from the back seat.

  She glanced at him, a faint frown denting her forehead. “No. What makes you think that?”

  “You said something...” He tried to recall exactly what. He’d been befuddled when he’d gone to the studio to pick up his pictures, distracted by her presence and by the undertow of attraction that dragged him off course like a dangerous tide. She’d been talking to him, and he’d been thinking he ought to get the hell out of there and head back to safe, solid ground. Instead, he’d said he wanted to spend Saturday with her. She’d said she was planning to spend the day taking pictures... “On spec,” he recollected. “You’re doing this on spec.”

  She hooked her pinkie over the directional switch to turn on the signal. While Brett didn’t like her car, he did like watching her drive. She drove more cautiously than he did, but he supposed that was what mothers did when their children were in the back seat. Her movements flowed, her hands climbing the circumference of the steering wheel as she turned it, then relaxing as the wheel straightened out on its own. Her sunglasses hid her eyes from him, but he could see the smooth contour of her cheek in profile.

  Just as she took her time making the turn, she took her time answering. “Yes,” she finally said, her curt answer a letdown after he’d waited so long for it.

  “You’re doing this just for fun? Working on a Saturday for no pay?”

  She shrugged. He wished he could see past the dark lenses of her glasses; her eyes might provide more information than her words. “I see birdies,” Max announced from the back seat. “I wave to the birdies. Hello, birdies!”

  Brett tried not to grit his teeth. He wondered why Sharon would want to kill a Saturday morning photographing a park near an elementary school just for her own gratification. There had to be more to it, but she seemed reluctant to explain, as if she didn’t trust him.

  And why should she trust him? She hardly knew him. They’d spent all of a few hours together one week ago.

  Still, her reticence irked him. “If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine,” he said. “But I’m a little confused as to why you’d ask me to join you if you don’t want me to know what you were doing.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want you to know.” She steered into the parking lot beside the park and yanked the parking brake. Then she sighed. “I’m putting together a proposal to submit for the commemorative book for Arlington’s birthday.”

  “You want to do the photos?”

  She nodded. “I’d like to win the commission. The money would be nice, and the exposure would be phenomenal.”

  “You should have told me sooner.” He grinned, relieved that she wasn’t hiding some dire secret from him. “I know a lot of people on the city’s celebration c
ommittee. I could—”

  “I don’t want you to.”

  Behind them, Max launched into a monologue about the grass, the big rock, his ravenous hunger and his teddy bear’s nose. Brett studied Sharon’s face, wishing he had x-ray vision so he could see past those damned sunglasses. “You don’t want me to what?” he asked.

  She did him the favor of lifting her sunglasses onto the crown of her head. Her eyes were intense, earnest, almost pleading. “I don’t want you to convince them to choose me for the commission.”

  “Convince whom?”

  “The people you know on the birthday celebration committee. That nice woman, the lawyer, who sat at our table—”

  “Gail Murphy?”

  “Yes. And whoever else you know. I’m aware you’re well connected, Brett, but I’d like to win the commission fairly.”

  He nearly guffawed. Cripes, how old was she? How could a woman who ran her own business, who’d been married and widowed and was currently raising a son single-handedly, be so naïve? “People rarely win these things fairly,” he pointed out. “Life isn’t fair. If you want the commission, I can make it happen.”

  She shook her head so emphatically he suspected she was trying to refute herself more than him. “I’ve been putting together a portfolio of photos taken in Arlington and the vicinity. They’re good. If I win the commission, it will be because I’m talented and I deserve it, not because someone I knew twisted arms for me.”

  “I wouldn’t twist arms. All I’d do is tell the people I know on the committee that you’re talented and you deserve it.”

  “And they’d say, ‘Oh, you’re right, Brett—thanks for that insight! If you think she deserves it, we’ll hire her right away.’”

  “I doubt I’ve got that much juice.”

  From the back seat came a strident voice: “Let’s go! Out of the car! I wanna get out!”

  It figured that the kid would interrupt with shrill demands while Brett and Sharon were discussing something important. She twisted to look at her son, but Brett caught her chin with his thumb and steered her gaze to him. “Other people are going to use their connections. Why won’t you?”

  “Because...” She sighed. Her eyes shifted from him. Her chin moved slightly, and he took that to mean she wanted him to remove his hand from her. He did, reluctantly. “Brett, I—I know this is going to sound silly, but I’m not like you. I don’t have influence. I don’t know people who have influence. I trust in hard work and talent to get me where I need to go, because that’s what I’ve got going for me.”

  “Get out now!” the kid shrieked. “Now, Mommy! I wanna go now!”

  “You do know people who have influence. You know me,” Brett pointed out.

  “And I—” She sighed. “I’d feel funny taking advantage of you.”

  He laughed. “You can take advantage of me any time you want. I won’t mind.”

  “Maybe not, but I would.”

  “Now, Mommy!” The kid sounded outraged at her failure to obey. “I go out now!”

  “All right, Max. We’ll get out of the car now.”

  “Out of the car now,” he repeated, his voice bristling with indignation.

  Sharon turned from Brett and swung open her door. The warm air smelled of grass and dust and sunshine. She opened the back door and her son greeted her with a bleat of pleasure, his misery magically gone. “I get out now,” he said cheerfully, scrambling out of his seat as soon as she released the clips that held him in place. “I have to play.”

  Brett remained in his seat a moment longer, wondering at what age a person could no longer assert that he had to play. Had he ever believed he had to play? He couldn’t remember. Even as a child, he’d rarely believed play was an entitlement or a necessity. His sister and brothers had played—he knew, because he’d witnessed them hard at it—but he’d been older, and his responsibility had been to watch them, not to join in. He’d been Brett, in charge of everyone else. Playing had never been an option for him.

  He got out of the car in time to see Sharon swing Max from the back seat and set him down on the park’s scruffy lawn. As soon as she let go, the kid charged forward, his stubby legs carrying him with surprising speed toward a huge, rounded outcropping of granite, which he proceeded to scale. Sharon managed to collect her camera bag and lock the car without shifting her gaze from her child.

  Brett shook off the pensiveness that had embraced him. He had the freedom to play now. Outside of work, he was responsible for no one, in charge of no one. He could do whatever he wanted, within reason and the law.

  For one brief, strange minute, the only thing he wanted to do was climb that magnificent bulge of granite, just like Max.

  * * *

  She might have been startled by how handsome Brett was if she hadn’t kept the photo.

  She knew he was handsome, of course. She’d spent last Saturday night with him, far too aware of how attractive he was. But her soul wasn’t a strip of film or a digital screen; it didn’t preserve every image it captured. All that had remained vivid in her mind was his mysterious behavior as their time together drew to an end. He’d wanted her; he hadn’t wanted her; she’d wanted him and he’d cut and run.

  But then the photos had come back from the lab, picture after picture of him at his desk, smiling hesitantly, smiling warmly, looking grim, smiling again, looking pained and then smiling once more. All right, she’d thought: he was a great-looking guy, but still not worth wasting mental energy over.

  Until she’d seen the last shot and known she would never be able to stop thinking about him.

  His face was so open in that photograph, the last one she’d taken. His eyes were naked, his starchy tension gone. He was neither smiling nor frowning, but instead wore an enigmatic look, one part curiosity, one part fatigue, one part longing. Whenever she gazed at the photo, she found herself trying to imagine what he longed for.

  Things seemed to be going smoothly enough between them. They’d been together only a half hour, but they hadn’t hit any snags so far. He’d sent no mixed signals, no signals at all. His offer to promote her for the town book commission was generous and not entirely unexpected, but it didn’t represent anything personal. It was just the sort of thing people who knew people who knew people did.

  For some reason, though, she didn’t want to accept intervention from Brett. If anything was going to develop between them, it wasn’t going to be based on favors and debts.

  Max was scaling his favorite boulder with all the fervor of a trained rock climber, although with considerably less finesse. Once he was done climbing on it, she intended to photograph it. At this time of year, bleached from months of sunlight, it broke stark and pale out of the earth. She wanted her portfolio to include a nice mix of Arlington’s man-made and natural wonders: the YMCA building, the City Hall, the hilariously sleek art-deco liquor store on the south end of Hauser, the geometry of her own condominium complex with its staggered rows of angular roofs—but also the apple orchards, the swells of the hills north of town, the dense forests of fir trees rich and green against a gray sky, and this rock. Once Max was done conquering it, of course.

  Brett strode over to the rock, looking as if he wanted to join Max on it. What undoubtedly appeared mountainous to Max would be quite manageable to Brett. Maybe he’d climb to the top and help Max up. They could be a team.

  The thought made her smile, even though she knew she should avoid such notions. She shouldn’t be hoping for a friendship between Brett and Max when the friendship between Brett and herself was so tenuous.

  “That’s quite a rock,” he said as she approached.

  “A souvenir left by the glaciers.” She popped the lens cap off her camera and took a picture of Max, his little face screwed in concentration as his sneakered feet skidded on the rock’s curved surface.

  “Is he safe doing that?”

  “The worst that could happen is maybe a scraped knee or a bruise. The worst that could happen if I didn’t let him cl
imb is that he’d grow up afraid and super-cautious.” She sighed. “The hardest thing about motherhood is swallowing your fear and letting your kid take risks.”

  “I always thought it was trying to line up a baby-sitter.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “It’s the sleepless nights. When they’re young, you’re up all night because they’re crying and need to be nursed. When they’re older, you’re up all night because you’re thinking of the perils lying in wait for them.”

  “But then they grow up and leave?” He sounded oddly hopeful.

  “I don’t know for sure, but I bet I’ll still be lying awake, worrying about Max, until the day I die. The trick is to keep him from finding out how worried I am.”

  Brett propped a foot on the edge of the rock. His sneaker looked enormous, almost as long as Max’s entire leg. Brett wore shorts, and for a moment she was transfixed by the hair along his shin and calf. There wasn’t much, just enough to enhance the hard contours of his muscles and remind her of how long it had been since she’d seen a man’s naked leg, since she’d seen a man naked.

  She felt her cheeks bloom with a heat that had nothing to do with the August morning. Fortunately, her camera hid half her face. While Max labored his way to the top of the boulder, she took some shots of a cloud formation above the dense foliage of an oak tree, and the grid of concrete paths that cut through the park. Finally, Max reached the crest of the rock and stood, as proud as any climber who’d reached the summit of Everest. “Look at me, Mommy!” he crowed. “Look! I’m all the way up!”

  She gave him a cheer and took a picture of him. “Do you need help getting down?” she asked.

  “I can get down,” he said, squatting and gazing anxiously at the grass below, as if it were miles away. He eyed Brett, who took a giant step backward. Tottering slightly, he bit his lip. “I can get down,” he said a little less certainly.

  Sharon’s heart clutched in sympathy for him. He really wanted to climb down by himself, but he didn’t know how and he was too proud to ask for help. She groped for a way to assist him without threatening his fragile ego. “Look, Max, your sneaker is untied. You can’t climb down with an untied shoelace.”