Once Upon a Matchmaker

by Marie Ferrarella

  “What’s a ’spression?” Gary asked, no more enlightened than he had been a minute ago. His brow was still furrowed.

  “It’s something that grown-ups say,” Tracy told him, crouching down to Gary’s level. “Like when they use metaphors.”

  Gary appeared to be completely willing to accept her first sentence. It was the second one that had the furrows in his brow deepening into wavy lines. “Huh?”

  Tracy glanced over her shoulder at Micah. “I went too far, didn’t I?”

  He laughed. “Don’t let it bother you. I do the same thing all the time. But I found if you don’t talk down to them, they get a better command of the language faster than if you use baby-sized words.” He spared his older son a warm glance. “Which is why they’re both smart as whips, right, Gary?”

  There was a tinge of uncertainty in the boy’s blue eyes, but he bobbed his head up and down with pronounced enthusiasm.

  “Hear that, Greg? Daddy says we’re whips.” He made a noise like a whip cracking down on its target.

  Greg echoed the sound and the two were off and running into the family room to play another new game they’d just made up.

  “Hard to believe he was so sick yesterday,” Micah marveled as he put the plate with her dinner on it into the microwave. He pressed the numbers for a minute and a half, confident that would be warm enough.

  “Too bad adults can’t bounce back so fast,” she agreed, thinking how nice it would be to have all that energy.

  “He didn’t always,” Micah remembered. “For a while there, I wasn’t sure how long I would even have him in my life.” He blew out a breath that sounded more like a deep-rooted sigh. And then, switching topics, he pushed the mood that threatened to engulf him aside. “That doctor you referred us to, Dr. Connor, Greg was crazy about her. People tend to think that kids don’t really have feelings or react the same way as adults do, but I noticed that Greg really reacted to Dr. Connor’s positive attitude. She treated him as if he were a little person. To be honest, I’ve been looking for someone like that ever since the boys’ old pediatrician retired.” His eyes held hers for a moment. “I really can’t thank you enough.”

  She ignored the shiver that materialized out of nowhere and slid down her spine. Or tried to.

  “Glad I could help,” she told him. “Like I said, Dr. Connor is a friend of a friend, and as far as I know, no one has ever had a bad thing to say about her. She loves kids and she’s extremely dedicated.”

  The microwave signaled that the minute and a half was up. Micah gingerly removed the plate from the turntable and placed it in front of his attorney.

  “Careful,” he warned as he handed her silverware. “The plate’s hot.”

  The corner of her mouth curved. “I had a hunch,” she deadpanned. “The steam kind of gave it away.” She was about to sink her fork into it, then stopped. She looked at him, slightly confused. He was standing behind the stool next to hers. There was nothing in front of him. “You’re not eating?”

  “I had dinner with the boys,” he explained.

  “Oh.” Tracy glanced down at her dinner. The aroma that wafted up from it was still tempting, but slightly less than a moment before. “That’s okay,” she told him. “I’m used to eating alone.”

  “Oh, God.” Micah laughed, shaking his head. Moving over to the casserole pan, he spooned out half a serving onto a plate and then brought it back to the counter. He slid onto the stool beside hers. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite so sad-sounding—at least not in a long while.”

  Was he mocking her, or just saying she sounded pathetic? The words had just slipped out. “I didn’t mean to make you feel guilty—”

  “You didn’t. Compassionate, maybe, but not guilty.” Micah slid a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth.

  “Aren’t you going to warm it up?” she asked. After all, he’d warmed up her plate, she just assumed that he’d want to eat his portion warm, too. Who ate their mashed potatoes cold?

  “I like to eat it cold,” he told her. “I developed a taste for cold food when I was in college—half the time the old stove in my studio apartment wouldn’t work. I didn’t have enough money to get it fixed and the super took weeks to show up—if at all. I got used to eating all my meals cold.” She seemed unconvinced. “It was okay—unless I was eating frozen pizza,” he laughed.

  The shepherd’s pie was comprised of beef, gravy, as well as lots of peas, all covered by a thick layer of mashed potatoes. Micah had sprinkled shredded sharp cheddar over it, then baked the casserole.

  Tracy looked from the casserole to the serving on Micah’s plate. “So you really don’t mind eating cold mashed potatoes?”

  He wondered if she realized that she was wrinkling her nose as she asked. It made her appear more like a teenager than an attorney.

  “Nope. Actually, I’ve learned to like it better than hot mashed potatoes.”

  “Well, you’re certainly easy to please,” she commented. Less than a beat later, she realized how that might have sounded to him. “Um, I mean when it comes to food.”

  The smile on his lips absolved her of any blunder, real or imagined, on her part. He nodded. “I know what you meant.”

  She tried to steer the conversation in a slightly different direction. “This is really good.”

  “Thanks. I try not to serve anything bad more than once.”

  Again, she couldn’t tell if he was being serious, or just pulling her leg. Not that she really minded the latter. After all the tension of dealing with high-powered clients all day long, this was almost like kicking back and relaxing.

  “And, like I said, this is one of Greg’s favorites. The good thing about it is that the boys don’t realize that they’re eating their vegetables, as well. Like most kids, they think if it’s good for you, it has to taste awful.”

  “So this is just a sneaky way to get them to eat their peas?” she asked, amused.

  He grinned. “You do what you have to do.”

  “Very clever,” she said, applauding his technique. “Fatherhood looks good on you,” she couldn’t help commenting. He laughed softly in response. She hadn’t expected that sort of reaction. “What? Did I say something funny?”

  “No, it’s just that your comment about fatherhood started me thinking. Before Gary and Greg came along, I thought I’d be perfectly happy with things just the way they were—just Ella and me. I didn’t need anything else. To be honest,” he confided, “I didn’t think I had it in me to be a good father. I figured I’d make a lousy one.”

  Well, that certainly wasn’t the case. “Why would you think that?”

  He shrugged. “I really didn’t have much of a blueprint to go on.”

  He had no male role model, no real father figure to emulate. She’d forgotten about that. “Because your father was killed when you were so young?” she asked sympathetically.

  “Well, there’s that,” he agreed, but that wasn’t what he’d actually meant. “But even before then, my father wasn’t exactly father-of-the-year material.”

  All this was so long ago, he rationalized that he wasn’t really telling tales out of school. There were times that he barely remembered his father. And when he did remember, he felt that he was better off if he didn’t.

  “My father was kind of short-tempered,” Micah explained. “He thought that I should be a small carbon copy of him and anticipate whatever he wanted me to do. Instead, I was more boy than man and that didn’t exactly please him.”

  She thought back to what she’d read in the information she’d gathered about him. “You were twelve, right?”

  “Right. I’d turned twelve the week before the car accident,” he recalled. Whenever he did think about the accident, he never thought about how close he himself had come to dying, just that he had lost his parents. For the most part, though, he did his best to block the memory altogether.

  Suddenly, she caught herself feeling sorry for the twelve-year-old who been expected to “
man up.” “Well, at twelve, you should have just been able to be allowed to be all boy.”

  Micah laughed shortly, remembering. “Not exactly the way he saw it.”

  What about his mother? Did she intervene? Mothers were supposed to protect their children—not that all did. “What did your mother say?” she asked.

  “My mother agreed with everything my father ever said about anything,” he told her. She detected a note of sorrow in his voice. Someone else would have felt slighted, or blamed their mother for not taking their side. That he didn’t, that he seemed just to miss her, spoke volumes about him. “It was easier on her that way,” he explained.

  “Well, even though you didn’t have an example to go on, you turned out to be a wonderful father,” she observed. “Anyone can see that the boys utterly adore you.”

  Finished with her meal, Tracy pushed the plate over to the side. That was when she noticed the mug on the corner of the counter. The slogan World’s Greatest Mom was embossed on it in multicolored flowers.

  For a moment, all she could see was the mug. An unsettling feeling slipped over her. Was there a woman in the picture she hadn’t met yet? And why would that matter to her?

  But it did.

  A lot.

  “Who’s that for?” she asked, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible, even though she caught herself feeling more than a little distressed about the mug’s existence and its mysterious recipient.

  At bottom, none of this made any difference to the case or how she was going to represent Micah, she argued silently. So why did she feel so disappointed?

  Micah picked up the mug, a lopsided grin gracing his lips. “The boys gave that to me on Mother’s Day,” he was saying.

  She did her best to suppress the laugh of relief that suddenly bubbled up within her. “They gave that to you, huh? Aren’t your boys a wee bit confused?”

  “That’s what I thought at first,” he said, appearing to agree with her. But then he continued. “But I have been both mother and father to them for the last two years, so I guess they thought I deserved it.”

  He turned the mug around in his hands. The smile on his lips was pure love. For just a second, pending charges notwithstanding, she envied him more than she thought possible.

  “I just didn’t have the heart to argue with them,” he concluded.

  “I understand.”

  And, oddly enough, she did. He was making perfect sense to her. Little feelings were at stake. Besides, his sons had unconsciously given him a wonderful compliment. That he had filled both roles for them and they were not just aware of it, but grateful. How often did that kind of thing happen?

  “The boys love you very much,” she told him. She took the mug from him and looked it over herself. “You’re very lucky to have them.”

  “I know.” If not for them, he wasn’t sure if he could have made it through these past two years. And then he looked up at her, finding himself curious about her. Had she remained evasive so as to separate her private life from her professional one? “And you really don’t have any kids?”

  There was that knife again, twisting in her stomach. Allowing the emptiness to all but consume her.

  “No,” she finally said. It was more of a whisper than a normal response. “I don’t.” I would have, had she lived. Lila would have been three by now. She could have made friends with your sons, played with them. Instead…instead Lila’s playing with angels.

  She felt her throat tightening up until she had to concentrate on breathing to get through the feelings her stillborn daughter generated.

  He’d struck a nerve, Micah thought. The topic was obviously a sore one for her. Was that because she’d had a child and then lost it? Or because she couldn’t have any? Or was it just that she felt her time would never come?

  “Sorry,” he apologized with feeling, remembering that he’d already asked her about having children last night and she hadn’t answered him. “I didn’t mean to pry. I’ve got no business asking you questions like that.”

  She was being way too sensitive. It had happened and she’d moved on. Time to act like it. “You’re entitled to know about your attorney,” she replied, pulling herself together and away from the whirlpool that threatened to suck her into its depths. “Anything else you want to know?” she asked. “Go ahead, ask me anything that’s on your mind. I’ll do my best to give you as honest an answer as I can.”

  In his world, that was doublespeak for sharing only partial intelligence while keeping the rest a secret, usually for security reasons.

  But she wasn’t part of that world, he reminded himself.

  Or was she?

  She wasn’t quite prepared for the bluntness of his first question. “Are you married?”

  It took her a moment before she replied. “No.”

  “Good.” She looked at him sharply. What had he meant by that? The next beat, he explained, “I wouldn’t want to be dragging you away from your husband and dinner.”

  That made her laugh. “If I had a husband, I’d be bringing him here—on second thought, no, I wouldn’t. He’d want to know why I couldn’t cook as well as you. You know, I was only half kidding last night about you opening up your own restaurant. But tonight convinced me that last night wasn’t just a fluke. I really think you could do very well opening up your own place.”

  The smile she saw on his face in response to her heartfelt compliment had the middle of her stomach tightening again while the rest of her grew very, very warm.

  She wasn’t sure just how much of that she could attribute to the hot meal, but she did her very best to pin the blame there—and not on the man who had prepared it.

  Chapter Nine

  It was almost a week later. Although there had been several phone calls between them, Tracy had deliberately not allowed herself to come over to his house on some pretext as she made her way home. She knew better than to think “out of sight, out of mind” actually worked, but something was going on with her. Something she didn’t quite understand and it made her very nervous. Especially whenever she was around Micah.

  In short, she was reacting to Micah. To his home life, to his family.

  To him.

  And that was decidedly bad, not just because of the conflict of interest it could possibly represent but it was bad for her, personally.

  In the courtroom, there was no question about it, she was a dynamo. But when it came to her own home court, well, that was an entirely different story. Her emotions had a habit of tripping her up, so she had learned, long ago, to just block them out. She’d gotten rather good at that, or so she’d believed up until now. She was not a person who made the same mistake twice and she’d discovered that leading with your heart, or any part other than your head, was asking for trouble with a capital T.

  Been there, done that. And once was more than enough for her.

  But Jewel had stopped by her office today with an update on what her I.T. guy, Neal, had uncovered on Micah’s supposedly “scrubbed” laptop. The news was very hopeful—but only up to a point. Jewel had carefully explained all that to her and now she was standing before Micah, trying to find a way to couch her words so that he was apprised of the situation, but didn’t instantly take it to mean he was now in the clear.

  Because he wasn’t. Not yet.

  She began again, following him to the kitchen, which apparently seemed to be his favorite room in the house when he was trying to destress.

  “My investigator’s I.T. guy managed to dig up what was going on with your laptop that made your bosses so suspicious.”

  Taking a couple of beers out of the refrigerator, he turned to look at her just before he set the bottles on the counter. “Donovan gave him access?” he asked, more than a little surprised.

  Right now, even he couldn’t get access. Placed on restricted duty, he was given a regular laptop that had none of the high-security-clearance software on it. And even then, he’d been subjected to a couple of unannounced spot checks where
someone from the human resources department would come up to his desk and put their hands on his laptop, halting all activity. He would have to step aside and wait while the other person ran a check on it to make sure it hadn’t been accessed again.

  Each time, he’d cooperated, but it set his teeth on edge. Until this was resolved, he was a pariah.

  “No.” Sitting down on the stool, she picked up the bottle he offered her. “Donovan still has your original laptop locked away.”

  Frowning, Micah removed both bottle caps. What was she telling him? “Then how…?”

  “Don’t look at me, I haven’t a clue. But he did resurrect all the erased files as well as pin down just when they were breached. Jewel says what he does is damn close to black magic, but apparently, if this Neal person can’t access your computer, then it’s somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.” She paused to take a small sip. Beer was something she nursed rather than drank in regular, long sips. “Fortunately for you, yours isn’t. Neal pieced things together and says as far as he can tell, your laptop was picked at random by this crew of cyber hackers to be part of a botnet.”

  Micah had command of a wide spectrum of information and knew his way around a great deal of physics, different disciplines of math and a wide variety of software needed to implement this knowledge. But what his attorney was talking about was a whole different, unknown world to him.

  “A what?”

  She found it rather comforting that someone of his caliber was as mystified as she was when Jewel had first tried to explain the existing situation to her. Tracy had absolutely no doubt that Micah was rather brilliant when it came to doing what he did for the company he worked for, which was why it was so nice to know he could be stumped, just like her.

  She explained it to him the way Jewel had explained it to her. “The hackers formed a network of infected computers, which they control remotely—”

  The frown on his handsome face deepened. “Doesn’t anyone need to be in the same room as their equipment anymore?”

  To him, the first requirement was always close proximity. Had this—as well as he—gone the way of the dinosaur?