Heart Stealers

by Patricia McLinn

  Brett nodded. “Is she going to be done soon?” he asked. The sooner she was done, the sooner she might rescue him from this awkward conversation.

  “She’s taking pictures,” Max answered.

  They seemed to have reached a dead end. Brett straightened up, releasing the kids but positioning himself in front of the door so they couldn’t escape the building. They peered up at him, craning their necks, and he peered down. When he stood at his full height, they looked awfully small.

  “She’ll be done soon,” the woman behind the counter promised. “If you can keep an eye on those two, I’ll go back and see how she’s doing.”

  Before he could object to that arrangement, she disappeared through the doorway.

  He felt abandoned. Trapped. He preferred not to attempt another exchange with Max; the kid would probably just say that his mother was taking pictures. So he simply stood blocking the door, arms crossed and legs slightly apart, feeling like the Jolly Green Giant towering over a field of unripe peas.

  After a minute, the girl removed her thumb from her mouth and glanced at Max. “Let’s run,” she said.

  Max hooted and ran toward the wall. She trotted along beside him, and they both barreled into the wall and squealed with laughter. Brett eyed the framed photos on display. None seemed to have been knocked askew. Evidently, two toddlers hurling themselves full-force at a wall couldn’t do too much damage.

  They about-faced and charged toward the opposite wall. As long as they didn’t attempt to break past him and out the door, everything would be all right. Boring, annoying but not disastrous. He hoped Sharon’s assistant was right about how much longer Sharon would be busy in the back.

  The twerps hit the opposite wall, breathless with laughter, and then U-turned and zoomed back to the first wall. Brett entertained himself with thoughts of what he would have been doing that day if not for Sharon. Certainly he wouldn’t have spent two hours pretzeled into position on a puny table in a nursery school and followed that by stationing himself in front of a door, observing two pint-sized maniacs as they literally bounced off the walls. He would have spent an extra hour enjoying his coffee that morning, browsing through each section of the newspaper at a leisurely pace. Then he probably would have met up with a friend at the tennis club—they had indoor courts, so the rain wouldn’t have been a problem—and played a couple of sets. In the afternoon, he would have reviewed the week on Wall Street while simultaneously watching the Red Sox game on the TV in his den; he could set up his laptop on the coffee table and check the on-line stock and bond indicators during the commercial breaks. In the evening, he would have gone out to dinner with one of his women friends. He had a few who could be available on short notice, who didn’t need time to rustle up a baby-sitter first. Women like him, unattached and glad of it.

  Ever since he’d met Sharon, though, he hadn’t been quite so glad.

  He wasn’t looking to get attached, of course. When women started thinking about attachments, what they were really thinking was children. Especially in his age range, women in the market for commitment were thinking about marriage and babies.

  Brett had nothing against commitment and marriage. It was the notion of babies that always screwed things up. That was why most of the women he dated these days were older, no longer operating under the influence of their wombs. And since they were older, single by choice or divorced and unwilling to make the same mistake twice, Brett rarely gave marriage much thought, himself.

  So why was he contemplating it now? Marriage was about moments like this—tedious stretches of time watching two rowdy munchkins go giddy over stupid wall-to-wall races.

  “Let’s go in circles!” Max suggested, sticking his arms out as if they were airplane wings and spinning around.

  “I’m dizzy!” the little girl screeched even before she started spinning. In short time they were both weaving and staggering and collapsing onto the floor, convulsed in laughter.

  Brett’s head throbbed. He had a bottle of aspirin in his car, but if he went outside to get it, they might tear the place apart in his absence, or climb up onto the counter, make themselves dizzy and then tumble off and crack their skulls open when they hit the floor. If the assistant came back, he could escape, but she was gone and he was stuck overseeing two diminutive dingbats who seemed to take inordinate pleasure in reeling and staggering into each other like drunks on a bender.

  Finally, he heard promising noises from the back room—not shrill, juvenile voices warbling “This Old Man” but adult voices, another woman’s and then Sharon’s. “... In a week to ten days,” she was saying. “As far as your Christmas cards, you’re way ahead of schedule. I’m sure there’ll be some really nice shots to choose from...”

  She emerged through the open door, leading a woman and two girls in frilly matching dresses and glittery hair ribbons from the back room. Both girls were sucking on lollipops. Sharon immediately spotted Brett—he was hard to miss, being the tallest person on his side of the counter—and froze.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She pressed her lips together as if to prevent any words from slipping out. Then she deliberately turned from him and smiled at the mother of the two party-dressed children. “We’ll call as soon as the pictures come in,” she said evenly.

  “Okay. Girls, did you thank Ms. Bartell for the lollipops?”

  “Thank you,” they sing-songed, then resumed sucking on their treats. Brett wondered whether Sharon had had to resort to belly-dancing dolls to get them to relax in front of her camera.

  She watched as they walked around the counter and headed for the door. Since he was standing right in front of the door, she couldn’t avoid looking at him. Christ, he thought, studying the hard glint in her eyes, the grim set of her lips. He might not be able to interpret the facial expressions of children, but he could sure interpret Sharon’s. It said, I hate you.

  What had he done to provoke such animosity? He’d been honest with her. He’d kissed her—but he hadn’t forced her to kiss him back. He’d blown two hours that morning sitting in an uncomfortable room designed for midgets so he could learn how to tolerate her kid. And she hated him.

  The bell above the door tinkled as the woman and her two chic little darlings left the studio. He was scarcely aware of their departure, and of the continuing silliness of Max and his friend as they spun around and flung themselves to the floor. The photos decorating the walls blurred into meaninglessness; the counter that separated him from Sharon was irrelevant compared to the invisible wall of ice that stood between them.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Why are you here?” she asked simultaneously.

  Before either of them could answer, Sharon’s assistant bounded through the doorway, carrying a clipboard with a form attached to it. “Is it okay if I leave after I process this order? I wanted to get down to the mall this afternoon, and—”

  “Sure, Angie. Go,” Sharon said, her voice leaden, her chilly gaze never leaving Brett. The assistant busied herself for a moment at a desk behind the counter. The rumble of a metal drawer being open and shut offered a counterpoint to the high-pitched giggles of the kids. She filed her papers, then eyed Sharon, then eyed Brett, then eyed Sharon again. After plucking her purse from a shelf below the counter, she scurried around the counter and out the door, obviously eager to leave before the tension between Sharon and Brett erupted in some sort of catastrophic manner.

  All the tension was coming from Sharon, he thought. Well, almost all. The only thing making him tense was her inexplicable fury.

  “Max, Olivia,” she said briskly, “no more dizzy games. One of you is going to get hurt.”

  “It’s fun,” Max asserted, spreading his arms and launching into another spin.

  “It won’t be fun when you crash into the counter—or into each other. Come on. Livie? Both of you. I’ve got crayons in the back room.”

  “I wanna get dizzy,” the little girl said.

  “Not anymore. I
t’s coloring time now.”

  Reluctantly, the children pulled themselves to their feet, regained their bearings, and staggered around the counter and out of Brett’s view. He was impressed by Sharon’s ability to get them to obey her. She hadn’t had to threaten or punish them. She’d simply said it was coloring time, and after token resistance, they’d yielded.

  What about him? Was he supposed to follow them around the counter, too? If he did, would he be rewarded with a crayon or a slap in the face?

  This was America; he was supposed to be advised of the charges against him. If he walked around the counter, though, he couldn’t help wondering whether his punishment would be meted out without his ever learning what he was guilty of.

  One thing he was surely guilty of was lust. Despite Sharon’s obvious displeasure, she looked wonderful to him. He loved being able to read her mood—even though it was a bad one—in her eyes, her lips, the tilt of her head. He loved the slender width of her shoulders and the sleek length of her arms extending from her simple white shirt. Her skin glowed with a golden undertone from months of summer exposure, and her hair shimmered with sun-lightened streaks. He recalled the kiss they’d shared at the Dairy Queen last week, a kiss haunting in its unfulfilled promise.

  He wanted her.

  Was that a crime?

  “Are you going to talk to me?” he asked.

  She shot him a quelling look, then turned and followed the children into the back room. “Over here,” he heard her tell them. “Right here at this table—that’s where we’re going to set up.”

  “I’m hungry,” one of the tykes whined.

  “We’ll have lunch very soon. Mommy has a few things to take care of first.”

  Was Brett one of the things Mommy had to take care of? He’d be damned if he was going to stand around in the front room, waiting for her to deign to tell him what she was so pissed about. He strode around the counter and through the doorway.

  To his left was an area surrounded by gray velvet curtains, with stuffed animals and cushions on the floor and photographic lamps on stands, all aimed at an upholstered bench positioned in front of a blank screen. A large camera on a wheeled tripod stood in one corner of the area. “This is where you do your studio shots?” he asked.

  “Children’s photos,” she replied tersely. That she even bothered to answer was a positive sign.

  “She takes pictures in the other room,” Max offered. Brett interpreted that to mean the studio had a second area for taking photographs. Clearly, it was not the area where the children were kneeling on chairs and hunching over sheets of paper, a plastic tub of crayons open between them.

  Brett glanced at Sharon, hoping for her to elaborate. Instead, she busied herself gathering the stuffed animals and storing them in a colorful toy chest.

  His patience was like a rubber band, stretched to the point of snapping. He took a deep breath and followed her into the curtained area. “Okay, give me a hint,” he murmured, keeping his voice down so the children wouldn’t hear. “What’s going on?”

  She methodically gathered a Nerf ball and what appeared to be a stuffed raccoon from under the bench and tossed them into the toy chest. “You’re a liar,” she said.

  He was many things, but a liar wasn’t one of them. He’d been completely candid with Sharon, despite knowing his honesty would likely cost him his chance at a relationship with her. If he were a liar, he could have told her he adored children. If he had, she would have kissed him back. They would have been well beyond kissing by now.

  “What did I lie about?” he asked, aware of the challenge in his tone.

  “Being a father.”

  “What?”

  She straightened up and met his gaze. “I saw you in that class this morning. You know I saw you, because you looked straight at me. That was a class for fathers.”

  “I was there as a guest.”

  Her eyebrows fluttered slightly upward. She appeared skeptical.

  “I told you I don’t like kids,” he whispered, then peeked at the children to make sure they weren’t listening. Engrossed in their drawings, they paid no attention to Sharon and Brett. “I’d make a hell of a lousy father, given that fact.”

  “Then what were you doing in a class designed specifically for fathers?”

  “Trying to learn how to like kids. I heard about the class from some guys I know. Some of my best friends are fathers,” he added, hoping to tease a smile out of her.

  He failed. But she seemed to thaw a little, anger replaced by bemusement. “So your friends told you about this class, and you decided to go as a guest because...?”

  Wasn’t it obvious? “Because you’ve got a kid.”

  “You were taking the class because of me?” Her eyebrows fluttered more, widening her eyes, giving her a startled look.

  “Because of Max.” He peeked at the table again. Max was handing a fat yellow crayon to the girl. “Now I’m worrying that there’s more than one kid in the picture. It’s going to take me a truckload of classes to get me to the point where I can stand one kid. But two?”

  “She’s Max’s best friend,” Sharon explained. “Maybe his future wife. The details haven’t been worked out yet.”

  “His future wife.”

  “She lives next door. Her mother needed the morning free, so I took both kids.”

  “Even though you had to work?”

  “I’m a good juggler—and I happen to like kids.” She surveyed the area and nodded, satisfied at its tidiness. “So you were taking that father class for my sake.”

  “Yeah. For what it’s worth.” As her gaze softened, he struggled to look indignant. He wanted her to feel guilty for having misjudged him.

  Far from guilty, she looked amused. “I don’t see how taking a class is going to get you to love Max.”

  “I don’t have to love him,” Brett argued. “I just have to—” He faltered.

  “You just have to what?”

  “Tolerate him? Learn how to spend a few hours in his company without having my nerves rubbed raw? I don’t know, Sharon.” He raked a hand through his hair. He didn’t know how classes could teach him something that ought to be instinctive, how a Daddy School could replace what was missing from his heart. He didn’t know if attending lessons at a preschool could make it possible for something to develop between him and Sharon—and if it did, where he hoped that development would lead them. He could wind up graduating from the Daddy School and discovering Sharon was all wrong for him. Or he could take class after class and never learn how to coexist with her child.

  “I don’t know,” he repeated softly, regretfully.

  To his surprise, she smiled. “You are the strangest man I’ve ever met.”

  “I’m not strange,” he objected.

  “You’re certainly not typical.” Sizing him up, she shook her head. “I’m sure some men just don’t want the responsibility of kids, or they don’t want to grow up themselves. But you’re very responsible and mature. That’s not why you don’t like children.”

  He sighed. This was neither the time nor the place to present her with his life story. But he didn’t want her thinking he was strange. “I had three brothers and a sister, all younger than me,” he told her. “I basically raised them. I didn’t want to, and I resented it.”

  She frowned, lifted her hand as if to touch his cheek, then thought better of it and touched her own cheek instead, shoving back a lock of hair. “Why? I know your father was gone, but your mother—?”

  “She had problems,” he said simply. “She wasn’t up to the job. So it fell to me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  That was one reason he hadn’t wanted to go into this with Sharon—he didn’t want her pity. “Forget it. It’s old news.” He shrugged.

  Her sad, sympathetic expression told him she wasn’t about to forget it. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Think I’m wonderful,” he suggested. “Think I’m noble and sexy and—”

  Sh
e pressed her fingertips against his lips to silence him, then glanced toward the children. They were busy scribbling all over their sheets of paper. They hadn’t heard him, but even if they had, he doubted they knew what “sexy” meant.

  “I think you’re amazing, Brett,” she said, her voice hushed but warm.

  He could live with that. He’d rather she thought he was “sexy,” but “amazing” wasn’t half bad.

  Chapter Eight

  Sharon felt as dizzy as Max and Olivia must have felt when they’d done their whirling-dervish routine in the front room. In just one week, she’d gone from puzzlement over Brett’s confession that he didn’t like children to soul-deep disappointment that this man whom she found so alluring was utterly wrong for her, to rage that he’d apparently lied to her, to dazed affection that he had actually spent that very morning attending a class to learn how to get along with her son.

  Now, as she dialed Deborah’s number, she spied on him as he hovered near the kids, watching over them while they scrawled incomprehensible doodles on large sheets of scrap paper. He seemed to be exerting himself to pay attention as Max and Olivia took turns explaining their drawings to him. “This is a big frog,” Olivia informed him; “This is a tree that’s very, very big,” Max noted in counterpoint. From Brett’s expression, Sharon could tell that he saw neither a big frog nor a very, very big tree in the abstract slashes and squiggles of crayon, and that he was exercising enormous willpower to keep himself from telling the kids they were full of it.

  His earnestness made her want to laugh.

  His stance made her want to do other things. His head was cocked slightly and his hair was tousled, lending a hint of bad-boy resonance to his usually polished looks. His eyes were blue enough to shame the overcast sky outside. He’d hooked his hands on the back pockets of his jeans, and the pose stretched the dark cotton of his shirt tight across his torso. His shoulders appeared boulder-solid, his chest sleek and strong. If only the kids weren’t present, she’d—

  “Hello?” Deborah’s voice came through the phone after three rings.