Adopt-a-Dad

CHAPTER NINE

SWIMMING was a very good description of what came next. Michael carried Socks home. “He’s too weak to walk, and I’ll carry him if you won’t,” Jenny decreed, so he had no choice but to carry the misbegotten bag of bones. By the time they reached the front door they were both scratching. Socks, it seemed, came with friends. Jenny fed him four TV dinners, which appeared to hardly ease his hunger, and then they had no choice but to fill the tub and soak off the unwanted visitors.

Socks had agreed entirely with his dining arrangements. The bathroom plans, however, were not so much to his liking. Jenny had been right in deciding there wasn’t a vicious bone in his body, but Socks had his own way of objecting. By the time he was up to his neck in water and soaped to the eyebrows, his two new owners were soaked to the skin.

“There’s no need for you to stay,” Michael insisted, aware that Jenny must be exhausted after sitting for so long on the riverbank. “Go shower and change.”

“You can handle him?”

“Sure I can handle him.” Michael fixed Socks with a look. “Can’t I, Socks?”

In answer, Socks shook himself again, and water sprayed from one end of the laundry room to the other.

“I’ll leave you boys together then-to bond.” Jenny chuckled, and retired to her own room.

BOND. HA! The only thing bonding was dirt. Socks was filthy, with ingrained grime that looked as if it hadn’t been touched for decades. Michael used laundry soap and elbow grease, and more laundry soap and more elbow grease, and after fifteen minutes of scrubbing, he finally figured he had nice clean fleas. Too bad about the dog. Still he scrubbed on, knowing it was expected of him.

Which was truly strange. He didn’t do things because women expected him to. Did he?

Finally Jenny reappeared, flushed from a hot shower. To Michael’s amazement she was enveloped in his bathrobe and was holding a bottle of dog shampoo and a container of flea powder like trophies of war.

“How about this?” she asked gleefully, bouncing into the room. It was hard to believe she was eight months pregnant. “It’s courtesy of Mavis. I figured we needed proper stuff to kill the little suckers.”

Michael stared. He was feeling itchy and scratchy. He was soaked to the skin-he’d decided to hold Socks under until every flea was drowned-and his eyes were suddenly riveted to this bright-eyed, triumphant, pregnant waif of a woman. Wearing his bathrobe.

She took his breath away.

“You didn’t visit Mavis like that?” His voice came out sounding like a croak.

“I sure did, and I even woke her up.” Jenny’s eyes twinkled with guilty mischief. “But she doesn’t mind. Mavis hasn’t had so much excitement in years. What with your callers earlier this evening-I gather they were sniffing around asking questions-and me wearing your bathrobe and announcing we were married, I doubt she’ll get back to sleep all night.”

He groaned. “Great! It’ll be all over the neighborhood by dawn.”

“Mmm.” She cast a doubtful look at him. “Does that bother you?”

“No, but…”

“I’m not saying sorry anymore, Michael,” she said resolutely. “We’re in this together. Can I shampoo him now while you have a shower?”

“No.” He took the shampoo from her and emptied half of it into the tub. Socks almost visibly flinched. “I’m soaked to the skin already, and there are fleas doing the backstroke in here. Hunting and killing is man’s work. Clear out, lady, while I do the dreadful deed. I’ll bring him out to you after I’ve toweled him dry.”

“Are you sure?” Jenny gazed doubtfully at her bedraggled mutt, who looked even more doubtfully at her. “Poor Socks. He looks so sad.”

“He’s sad!” It was all Michael could do not to utter an expletive. “I’m itchy, I’m half drowned and I’ve been told I’m adopting a dog who’s half Shetland pony and half goat-and he looks sad!”

“I guess I can leave you to your fun,” Jenny said, chuckling. “I’ll plug in the hair dryer in your doggy salon-I mean, in your living room-and wait for you there.”

She ducked and bolted for cover as a sodden towel whizzed straight at her head.

DOG SALON or living room? Ha! It was neither. Michael’s living room looked as if it had never been used in its life. White shag carpet, white sofa, glass coffee table with designer fruit bowl and designer fruit.

Jenny picked up an apple and took a bite, amazed to find it was real. His housekeeper must go to heaps of trouble with this fruit bowl, she thought, selecting and arranging each piece like an artwork. She grinned as she looked down, suppressing an almost irresistible urge to take a bite from every piece and leave it like that.

“Cut it out, Jenny Morrow,” she said. “You let Michael’s beautiful artwork be.”

But the fire was a different thing. It, too, looked designer perfect, with pine cones and logs set in artful symmetry. The firebricks in the back were still white. It really hadn’t been used. Austin’s climate was mild in fall and winter, but Jenny was still feeling the dampness of the riverbank, and the thought of crackling logs was definitely appealing. After all, she was going to live here, too.

No more apologies.

She took a match from the beautiful white ceramic container on the white mantel and watched guiltily as the flames flickered into life. Then she stuck her bare toes out to the warmth and sighed with sheer sensual pleasure. Yes!

That was how Michael found her when he hauled the towel-dried Socks in from the laundry room. She was sitting staring into the flames, and for once, his living room looked lovely.

No. Jenny looked lovely.

She glanced at him, her eyes dancing in the firelight. When she held out her hands to greet her wet dog, Michael felt his gut wrench in a way it never had before.

“I… He’s all yours.” Heck, his voice sounded strangled. “I’ll just go take a shower myself.”

He practically bolted out the door, with Jenny looking strangely after him.

IT TOOK MICHAEL twenty minutes to shower, anoint his various bites and regain his composure. When he returned, he found a transformation of gigantic proportions.

Dirty, flea-ridden and starved, Socks had looked appalling. When he was wet, every rib had stood out and he looked bedraggled and sodden, all big eyes and droopy ears.

But now, blow dried and brushed with love… Michael stopped at the living room door and stared.

Socks would never win any pedigree dog prizes, but his coat was a gorgeous honey color. His ears were a mass of rippling silken fur, and the rest of his coat would soon match. Jenny was lying full length on her side on the carpet before the fire, still in his red bathrobe, gently stroking the dog’s matted fur over and over. The two of them made an amazing splash of color in the golden firelight.

Jenny had a brush in one hand and a hair dryer in the other, and there was a pair of businesslike scissors on the floor beside her. She picked them up as he walked in and waved them in his direction.

“Great. We need one person on brush and one person on scissors. He has king-size mats under his tummy. They stink like crazy when you put them on the fire.”

Michael blinked. The tableau before him was almost surrealistic.

Socks, however, was enjoying himself to the hilt, sitting up in front of the fire as if he was on show. When Jenny mentioned his matted fur, he tucked his head under his chest and looked down, as if inspecting his belly for himself. And then he returned his gaze to Jenny.

Good grief. The dog was practically purring.

I would be, too, Michael thought, dazed, staring at them in stunned amazement, if Jenny was brushing me!

It was a ridiculous thought. Somehow he shoved it aside and knelt to take the scissors from Jenny’s hand. Their fingers brushed briefly as she passed them to him, and the feeling was like an electric shock striking right through his body. It was as much as he could do not to pull away as if burned.

“Oh, Michael, you’re flea-bitten.” She looked sympathetically at the red splotches on his chest. He’d hauled on a pair of jeans but left his chest bare, all the better to apply calamine lotion. She reached out a finger to touch, but he pulled back. No way.

“You…you must be, too.” He sounded like an embarrassed schoolkid. Why the heck wasn’t she feeling this strange charge between them?

“Nope.” She grinned. “Or not very much. You must be fatter. They always chew the fat ones first.”

“Right.”

“It’s true,” she said seriously. “My dad always said that.”

“And he was a flea expert? I though you said he was a miner.”

“His hobby was entomology.” She gave him a cheeky look. “An entomologist is someone who studies insects.”

“I know what an entomologist is,” he said, goaded.

“Sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry at all. “I just thought, you being American and all…”

“You’re saying my knowledge of the Queen’s English isn’t all it ought to be?”

“I expect you’ll get it right sometime,” she said kindly. “Just as soon as you learn to spell.”

“Yeah, right.” It had been a major source of conflict between them in the months she’d been his secretary. She’d type center as centre. He’d change it, and she’d patiently change it back again. He’d given up in the end, letting her spell as she darn well pleased, and he gave in now. Anything for a quiet life!

“Okay. Okay. So what’s a coal miner doing with a hobby like entomology?”

“Contrary to what Gloria believes, being a miner didn’t make my father ignorant,” she said. She glared, defying him to argue. “There was no money to educate him, so my dad left school after grade eight, but he kept right on learning.”

“He studied insects in his spare time?”

“So did my mother,” she said proudly. “They wrote a great research paper that’s still widely acclaimed all about the habits of bumblebees. I remember hours and hours with my parents, tracking individual bumblebees-only we kept getting them confused. It’s very hard to tell one bee from another, you know. Unless…” Her voice grew thoughtful. “Unless you’re another bumblebee, I guess.”

“You’re probably right.”

She didn’t seem to notice his amusement, or the way he was watching her. He couldn’t keep his eyes from her.

“In the end my father roped them with a piece of fine thread, and we’d run around the garden with our chosen bumblebee tied on our line like a kite,” she told him. She chuckled. “It was a good piece of research. There aren’t many kids whose dad gets home from work, grabs his string and heads out to the garden to rope bumblebees.”

“I can see that,” Michael said faintly. He hesitated, still watching the firelight flickering over her face. “It’s a good memory to have.”

“It’s part of me,” she said softly, lifting a tuft of Socks’s hair for inspection. “Cut here, Michael. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I mean, my parents-they’re part of who I am, and if this little one inside me starts following bumblebees, then I’ll be really proud. I’ll know where it comes from.”

She paused, as if unsure whether to continue. But she did. “Don’t you feel that about your own birth parents? That you need to know them-that there’s a part of you missing?”

“No,” he said flatly. “I don’t need them.”

“I’ve learned not to need my parents, too,” she told him sadly. “I had no choice. But every morsel of information I could ever find out about them was important to me. I can’t understand why it’s not important to you.”

“It’s not.”

“It’s all to do with not letting people close, isn’t it,” she probed, still gently stroking Socks. “Not needing anyone. Pretending you can stand alone-that you’re you and you’re not part of anyone else.”

“Jenny, get off my case.” He sighed. “I do let people close. My brother and sisters.”

“You love them?”

“Yeah, but…”

“But you tell yourself that you don’t need them.”

“Look, this is getting a bit personal,” he said tightly. The emotion in the room was supercharged, and his reaction to emotion was to bolt. “Do you mind if we just concentrate on Socks?”

She looked at him for a long moment, her green eyes shrewd and assessing, and Michael thought suddenly-even more uncomfortably-that she saw more than he wanted her to. Finally she nodded.

“Well, at least we know he needs us,” she said cheerfully, looking at the dog. She cast another sideways glance at Michael. “Tell me,” she said. “If you were down on the riverbank just now-alone and not with me-would you have brought Socks home?”

“No!”

“Really?” Her eyebrows shot up.

“Definitely not.”

He looked at Socks, and Socks looked at him. Michael felt a pang. Reproach was something this dog had honed to a fine art.

Maybe he wouldn’t have abandoned him entirely, he thought. He would have at least taken him to the pound.

Jenny was shaking her head in disgust. “Then it’s just as well I’m here,” she told him with asperity. “Michael Lord, you need humanizing.”

“By humanizing, you mean turning me into chief cook and bottle washer for a misbegotten mutt?”

The mutt rolled over on his back, exposing his newly dematted tummy. Socks closed his eyes in bliss and waved one back leg, begging to be scratched. Michael glared at the dog, glared at Jenny, then scratched.

And Jenny grinned.

“That’s exactly what I do mean,” she said smugly. “It’s very therapeutic. She lifted another tuft for Michael to clip, but she winced as she did it.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

“You winced.”

“I did not wince. I never wince.”

“You winced.” He frowned. “Cramp?”

“No.”

“It’s not a labor pain?” he demanded, startled.

“Yeah, right. One labor pain and I intend to start yelling my lungs out. That was a ‘my leg’s been stuck in one position for too long’ wince-if there was a wince. And if there was, then it was a very little wince, and I’m denying it, anyway.”

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” He was sure she was hurting. “Jenny?” What was he thinking of? She’d had one heck of a day, and it was late. “Go to bed, Jen,” he said sternly.

“No. I want to finish this-and we haven’t decided where he’ll sleep.”

“I’ll organize it. I’ll finish his brushing. Go to bed.”

“I am tired,” she admitted. She paused. “I’ll go soon. But I want to watch.”

“Then lie on the couch and watch. Now!” He turned his voice into a roar, and her eyes twinkled-just the way he liked them most.

“Yes, sir.” She started to rise, but staggered, and he moved like lightning to help her, holding her hands, pulling her up then supporting her as she lowered herself onto the couch.

“Ten minutes of watching,” he said sternly, reluctantly releasing her hands. She felt nice. “And then bed.”

“You sound like my father.”

“That’s exactly what I feel like.”

ONLY IT WASN’T at all what he felt like, he thought as he brushed Socks. Jenny’s father? That would make the feelings he was having paternal. Ha!

The dog was asleep, abandoning himself to Michael’s ministrations with absolute trust. Michael had found the very spot on a dog’s belly that needed scratching most, and he’d thus been deemed a friend for life. He could do anything he wanted, and it was okay with Socks. Socks was fed and clean and flea-free, and he was with belly scratchers. Friends. He could afford to sleep because he was in doggy heaven.

And it suddenly seemed like that for Michael, too, though he couldn’t quite figure out why.

It was midnight on Sunday. He should be still over with the guys or else sleeping the sleep of the dead, he told himself. Instead, he was sitting by the fire, gently brushing a starving mongrel and watching a very pregnant and very lovely woman drift off to sleep beside him. She’d watched and watched for a whole four minutes, and every minute her eyes became heavier.

And now she slept with Socks.

It was strange. Surreal.

He should stop brushing, he told himself, his hand still rhythmically stroking. He should boot Socks into the laundry room and send Jenny to bed. But he wanted her to wake up the next morning to a perfectly groomed dog. He knew she’d expect it of him.

And he was content exactly where he was.

So he brushed on into the night, woman and dog sleeping beside him. And when he finished brushing, he sat and stared into the flames for a very long time.

SOMETIME about two in the morning he decided he should go to bed. He was three-quarters asleep himself, the dog settled on his knees with his long ears draped onto the floor, and he was resting against the couch with Jenny’s sleeping face just inches from his. The fire had died to a heap of glowing embers, and there were no more thoughts left to think. There were only feelings, and feelings were threatening to overwhelm him.

So…bed.

“Come on, boy,” he told Socks. “Let’s get you settled.” His body was lethargic, unwilling to stir, but he forced himself upright. The dog whimpered in protest. Michael stood firm, then stooped and lifted Socks into his arms.

“Let’s introduce you to the garden and then show you your sleeping arrangements.” He cast one long, lingering look at Jenny and left her to her slumbers.

The garden was entirely to Socks’s satisfaction. He did what he needed to do in the manner of a well-trained dog, then headed indoors and directed himself straight for the living room again.

“No way,” Michael told him. “The laundry room’s where dogs sleep.”

Socks looked reproachfully at him as if he’d just taken offense. He sighed-heck, the dog’s sigh was almost human-and then trod heavily to his designated sleeping place. He eyed a couple of dry towels Michael had laid out for him as if they were an affront to his dignity, sighed again, then watched with mournful eyes as the door was closed firmly behind Michael, locking him in.

WHICH LEFT JENNY.

He could leave her in the living room, Michael thought. It was warm enough. She could sleep on the couch for one night.

The couch wasn’t quite long enough, he decided. Her legs were bent. She’d be better off in bed.

But there was no way in the world he intended waking her, so he stooped and gathered her gently into his arms, lifting her to lie against him.

She didn’t stir. Her body was warm against his bare chest. His bathrobe seemed far softer against his skin now than when he wore it himself. She was totally relaxed in sleep. And she smelled of something. What?

He couldn’t place it. He didn’t know what she smelled of. He knew enough of Jenny now to know she wouldn’t be wearing some expensive perfume, but whatever it was, it was lovely. Lavender water, maybe? Or maybe the smell was just Jenny.

This was ridiculous. He was growing sentimental in his old age. He got a grip-metaphorically as well as literally-and carried his lovely burden to her bedroom.

She still didn’t stir. He lowered her onto the bed, pulled the bedclothes away, and then rolled her over so she was lying on the sheet. Then he unfastened her robe and stared for a second, his mouth twisting at the sight of her pregnant body in her shabby pajamas. She looked defenseless. Young. Poor.

His sisters wouldn’t be seen dead in clothes like these, he thought grimly. Maybe he could call Lana tomorrow and ask what women wore when they were pregnant, something soft and pretty and-

What was he thinking of? Jenny wouldn’t thank him for criticizing her clothes!

Enough. He stooped to pull the bedclothes over her, and as if he’d spoken her name, she stirred and opened her eyes. She looked at him as if she was dreaming. Her eyes crinkled into a smile of pleasure, but they had that look that told him she wasn’t seeing him. She was seeing some lovely thing in her dreams.

He touched her eyelids, closing them gently.

“Sleep,” he told her. “Sleep, Jen.”

“Love…” It was a husky whisper. Her eyes didn’t open. She wasn’t seeing him-heaven knew who she was seeing-but her arms came out and her hands reached for his face, urging him down to her. He was so surprised that he let himself be propelled toward her.

“Love.” The word was whispered in the dark, and her lips found his as he froze into stunned submission. He let himself be kissed.

Her lips were so soft, urgent, even in sleep. They tasted like nectar, and he couldn’t believe what she was doing. Her hands were holding his face against hers, and her mouth was searching, searching…

And finding. She had what she wanted in the touch of his mouth against hers. She had…what?

Whatever it was was indefinable. The touch was like fire between them, a fierce, burning pain that threatened to overwhelm him. He felt his gut tighten, and it was all he could do not to gather her body against his and sink beside her on the soft, welcoming bed.

No! For one long moment Michael froze, but she was too sweet. Like a siren’s song, she was impossible to resist. He let himself be drawn in, sinking to sit on the bed beside her and returning her kiss with a passion that stunned him. With a fire he didn’t know he possessed. With a need…

No!

This was crazy. Jenny was asleep! She was dreaming of her dead husband, not him!

Somehow he dragged himself back, and her hands fell loosely to her sides. Her eyes were still closed, but her mouth curved into a gentle smile of happiness. She was making no objection. She’d kissed her man, and now the dream could continue.

“My love,” she whispered, and she turned, snuggling into the pillows and drifting into dreams in which Michael had no part.

HOW COULD HE sleep after that?

He couldn’t. No man could. He lay and stared into the dark for a long, long time. At about three or four there was a whimper from the laundry room, then another. Not a howl. If it had been a howl, maybe he could have resisted, but the dog sounded as miserable as he was. And lonely.

He swore, then padded through the living room and opened the laundry room door. Socks lay on his towels and looked at him with eyes that expected nothing-he’d lost all hope.

“This is ridiculous,” Michael said. “You should be in the pound.”

The dog’s eyes said he agreed with him entirely. That was what he deserved.

“She wanted me to brush you. I’ve fed you and housed you. There’s nothing else you need.”

The eyes said he was entirely right. Socks needed nothing more. Except…

“Come on,” Michael said, goaded, holding the door wide. “I guess I’m lonesome, too.”

It was the first time he’d admitted such a thing in his entire life.

It was also the first time in his entire life that Michael Lord shared his bed with a dog. Yet still he stayed awake.

Because all he really wanted to do was to share a bed with Jenny.