Father Formula

He was tall and broad, dark hair ruffling a little in the afternoon breeze, eyes inky black and taunting. If he was anyone else, she’d admit that he was gorgeous. But he wasn’t. He was the man who’d dropped her effortlessly to the kitchen floor and knelt astride her.

“I know the schedule, thank you,” she replied politely, then turned her attention to Brandon and Brady. “Do you want me to walk you to the bus stop?”

The boys looked at each other in horror.

She realized immediately that had been a faux pas.

Brandon looked hopefully at Trevyn. “Can you take us in the truck?”

“Sure.” Trevyn dug his keys out of his pocket as the boys raced into the open garage. Alexis caught Ferdie’s collar to prevent him from following.

Trevyn smiled at Alexis. “Don’t take it to heart. Being delivered in a truck looks better to your buddies than walking with a woman in tow. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Alexis sighed as she watched them all climb into the truck. Ruled by testosterone at ten and twelve. What a world.

They waved to her as the truck disappeared down the drive. Ferdie whined mournfully.

She walked toward the bushes that surrounded the headland rather than going back to the house, slapping her thigh in an invitation for the dog to follow. She felt edgy and strange here without her sisters. She’d lived much of her adult life without them, but when they were here at Cliffside, they were usually together.

From behind the width of the hedge, she took in the breathtaking view of bright blue sky meeting even bluer water. She closed her eyes and drew in a deep whiff of the salty fresh air. She felt it fill her body and bring back memories of her, Athena and Augusta as children playing like wild things on this lawn.

She’d had dark and selfish thoughts then, she recalled. She used to think that her mother would love her if she could just get rid of the competition. Athena was so competent and Gusty was so charming and agreeable. Alexis, unfortunately, had a gift for candor and a talent for art, neither of which was appreciated by their mother.

In her hopeful, positive moments, the young Alexis was very grateful for her sisters, realizing how bleak her life would be without them. With their mother ignoring them and wanting to claim the limelight herself, and their father taking every opportunity he could to stay away, all they had was one another and the trips to Aunt Sadie’s in Dancer’s Beach.

But when she felt hurt and resentful, she imagined life without Athena and Gusty. She pretended they had never been, and that it was just her, hand in hand with her mother.

There would be no delighted stares of passersby fascinated by three red-haired little girls dressed alike, or in three shades of the same color. No one would stop and tell her mother how beautiful her children were, how much they looked like her.

It would just be the two of them. No one would notice. They would just go shopping together and with no one else to claim her mother’s attention, Alexis would have it all. Her mother would look at her and smile.

She’d seen other mothers do that to their children. They didn’t even have to say anything. Love filled their eyes, made their smiles glow, brought about a ruffle of the child’s hair or a sudden hug.

Alexis had always waited for such a moment, but it never came.

By the time she was a teenager, she’d resigned herself to her fate and allied herself with her sisters in their struggle to find personal value and self-esteem.

Athena found it in an ability to argue clearly with anyone about anything. It was soon obvious she was headed for law school.

Augusta loved knowledge and children, and glowed when she talked about becoming a teacher.

Alexis decided to parlay her art into a life. Art, she’d learned early on, could never be simply a career.

Her talent won her a year’s study abroad in college, and she decided to remain there afterward, loving the daily contact with paintings, sculptures and buildings that had been created by Michelangelo, da Vinci, and all the other names associated with the Renaissance.

And, truth be told, it allowed her to run away. She didn’t have to watch her sisters, so sure what they wanted to do, so secure in their abilities to do it, while she floundered with a skill that was unpredictable at best.

She appreciated being able to launch her efforts thousands of miles from anyone who knew her.

She’d achieved a fair measure of success, was well accepted by the art community in Rome, and sold very well at the small but prestigious gallery that represented her in New York City.

That was far more than most artists enjoyed, Alexis reminded herself as she started back toward the house, determined to find something productive to do. She would have to prepare dinner tonight. With her limited culinary skills, that should take her most of the day to plan and prepare.

She’d just reached the driveway when Trevyn’s truck came rumbling and gasping up the hill. He drew up beside her, stopped and leaped out of the truck.

“Did you beat the bus?” she asked.

“Got there in the nick of time. Did Athena or Dave tell you how to call me from the house if you need anything?”

Alexis now enjoyed a fragile but determined sense of self that was sometimes manifested in the need to be more clever and more right than whomever she dealt with. Trevyn McGinty, however, didn’t seem to understand her need to be superior.

“Thank you,” she said politely with a quick glance at him. She wasn’t sure why, but it made her uncomfortable to look at him too long. His eyes said he knew she was a phoney. He couldn’t know, of course. She attributed that feeling to her worry about Gusty, and the weirdness of their situation. Everything seemed foreign and threatening. “But I’m not worried, and I doubt that I’ll need to call you.”

The cool reply was intended to put him off.

It failed. He grinned, hands in the pockets of a dark blue fleece jacket. “What if you get up in the early morning to make tea,” he asked with feigned innocence, “and surprise another intruder?”

She’d come out without a jacket and rubbed her arms in the thin green knit of a light sweater. Annoyance bubbled out of her politeness. “You find it impossible to be a gentleman about that, don’t you?”

He shrugged a shoulder. “Only because you refuse to admit that I had every right to be there.”

“You were using a lock pick!” Her voice was rising. “Why didn’t you knock on the door like a normal person?”

“It was four-fifteen in the morning,” he replied. “Why weren’t you asleep like a normal person?”

“I was…” She’d begun to answer instinctively, then thought better of it. She’d been worried about her sister, worried about her art, worried about being twenty-nine and feeling no closer to an answer to what her life was all about. Art, certainly, but that left her pretty one-dimensional.

“I was thinking,” she finally said. “I know you’d just returned from Canada, but couldn’t you have sat in your car for a couple of hours and waited for a sign that someone was awake?”

The amusement left his eyes. “I’d just seen the news about Gusty. I needed information. I knew Dave wouldn’t mind if I let myself in.”

She could allow him that, she decided grudgingly, even if he had been foolish enough to make love to her sister on a few hours’ acquaintance. But she still wasn’t feeling friendly.

“What kind of person travels with a lock pick, anyway?”

“A former spook. I was always better at it than Dave or Bram, so I carried the pick.”

“Well, in the world of non-spooks, it’s a questionable talent.”

“Sorry. Force of habit. And I didn’t expect the house to be occupied by anyone but Dave, except maybe Dotty. How was I to know he’d picked up four other people?”

“I’d have thought the spy business would teach you to never assume anything.”

Something shifted in his eyes for an instant and she caught a glimpse of old pain.

“Yeah, well, I’m trying to unlearn a lot of old habits from those days.” He looked away for a moment, as though he realized he’d betrayed something personal. When his eyes settled on her again, they were self-deprecating. “The work teaches you to trust nothing and no one, to believe only what you see, and only if you’ve seen it from the beginning. Like lock picking, those qualities don’t help the transition to normal life.”

He leaned down to ruffle the dog’s ears, then pointed in the direction of the guest house he occupied. It looked very much like the two-story brick Colonial Revival that was Cliffside. It also had two stories, but only two windows across instead of four, and no attic gables.