Four Reasons For Fatherhood

“I’m a carpenter,” she replied.

He was sure he’d misheard her. “A carpenter. Like on a construction site?”

“Not anymore.” Ringo stirred and she patted his back until he resettled himself, his lips open in an oval like a little fish’s mouth. “Now I have a weekly-TV cable show for women on how to use tools, do small repairs, simplify difficult or heavy jobs. I’m sponsored by Legacy Tools on the Crafters’ Channel.”

He found that fascinating. He wasn’t much of a handyman himself. “Well, good for you. But that must take a lot of time. What’ll you do about the boys? Can you afford to hire help?”

She raised an eyebrow, her expression at once indignant and imperious. She opened her mouth to reply but he cut her off before she could.

“I wasn’t questioning your household management or your ability to care for them. I was just wondering if there was something I could do to help.”

“Thank you,” she said, “but I understand you’re pretty busy with your business and your…your…”

He might have helped her had he known what she was trying to say. Since he didn’t, he simply waited.

“Your…life-style,” she finally finished with a slightly aggressive tilt to her chin.

“My life-style,” he repeated trying to remember when he’d last had time to have one.

“You know,” she said looking a little uncomfortable, though she seemed determined to ignore such a feeling as she went on intrepidly, “Your parties. Your women. Your nude sunbathing with Mariah Havilland.”

He laughed. “Now, I wouldn’t have taken you for a subscriber to the Reporter. And if you were, I still wouldn’t have taken you for the kind of woman who’d stare at a grainy photo of a man’s backside to determine who it belonged to.”

“It was identified,” she said coolly, “in the caption.”

“So you saw the naked backside,” he said, “and then stopped to read the caption? I wonder if Dave and Becky knew you could be titillated by such things. And then I suppose you read the whole story.”

“No, I didn’t read—”

“That’s too bad,” he interrupted, beginning to enjoy this exchange, “because you’d have discovered that in the nature of their deceptive headlines and captions, it wasn’t my backside at all, but that of her personal trainer.” He grinned. “I was flattered, though, to have been mistaken for an athlete.”

She heaved a long-suffering sigh. “I was simply trying to turn down your offer of help because I know that your life isn’t…conducive to…”

He loved watching her struggle for the right words. It took the edge off her duchesslike demeanor and added a fluster that she hated and he found amusing.

“Yes?”

“To a wife,” she said a little loudly.

“But I wasn’t asking you to marry me,” he said seriously. “I was offering to—”

“I know that!” she said in a harsh whisper. She swallowed and said icily, “I mean that you’re too busy to father children.” Her eyes closed and color crept up her throat as she obviously realized how that comment could be taken.

He didn’t even have to say anything to win that one.

But she seemed determined to get it right. “I mean,” she said with great patience, “that your offer to help—however kindly meant—would only complicate your life.”

“I meant,” he corrected “that I’d like to help you financially, though, of course, I’d be available for whatever else the boys needed.”

“Don’t you live in Seattle?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s 3300 miles away.”

“I have a jet.”

“Of course you do.”

Okay. Now he was getting annoyed with her. “You seem to resent the fact that I’m successful.”

“No, I don’t,” she retorted. “I resent the fact that you think you can solve all my problems with your genius touch or your money!”

SUSAN COULDN’T BELIEVE she’d said that aloud. He was staring at her in confusion.

She looked for the boys in the play area to avoid his eyes. She saw the kids crest the slide, then disappear down it in a laughing rush.

Aaron reached across the table to turn her face toward him when she continued to ignore him.

“Do you not want to take the boys?” he asked with a gentleness that surprised and unsettled her.

Guilt rose out of her chest to strangle her. She had to clear her throat to be able to reply. “I do want them! I do!”

“Because you promised Becky.”

“Because they need me, and because it’s the right thing to do! I’m just…a little…”

“Scared.”

“Yeah.” There was a certain relief in admitting it, even to him. Then she felt the weight of the trusting child in her arms and knew the three wild boys on the slide needed her, too, even though they didn’t understand that. So she pulled herself together. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t do just fine once I get the hang of it and the boys are enrolled in school and settled into a routine.”

She didn’t like the way he was looking at her, as though he’d found a chink in her armor. As though she wasn’t quite what he’d thought her to be and he was now concerned about his nephews.

She was about to assure him that the boys would be fine with her when the door from the play area flung open and John and Paul tumbled in. They rolled along the tile floor, punching and kicking at each other all the while.

“Paul gots a bleedy mouth!” George announced. He was dancing around his brothers like a referee at a wrestling match. “’Cause John kicked him in the face!”

Susan tried to sidle out of the booth with Ringo still asleep against her, but Aaron was already pulling the boys apart, holding them away from each other with a hand to each jacket front.

Aaron pointed John to the booth and held the wriggling screaming Paul to examine his mouth. He dabbed at it with a clean handkerchief.

“Looks like he knocked out a baby tooth,” Aaron said, lifting the boy into his arms. “I’ll take him into the men’s room to wash his mouth.”

Paul clung to his neck, crying pathetically.

“I didn’t do it on purpose!” John shouted after him. “I was coming down the slide after him and he stopped at the bottom and turned around. He got my foot in his face, but I didn’t kick him!” When Aaron and Paul disappeared into the men’s room, John turned to Susan and said imploringly, “I didn’t! It was an accident.”

“Yup,” George confirmed. “An assident.”