“Sorry, Phil. I got held up.” He slipped into his seat, the rustle of his suit jacket against the polished mahogany table the only sound in the room.
Then somebody chuckled.
Dumping his briefcase on the floor, Jordan glanced around the table, and saw his colleagues were smiling. Jack LaRoque, the office Lothario, grinned and, focusing his gaze on the breast pocket of Jordan’s jacket, tapped his own.
Jordan looked down and saw Mandy’s pink hairbrush sticking out of his pocket. He must have stuffed it there after tidying her mop of blond curls. His gaze shot back to his boss, whose lips were compressed to a pencil-thin line.
“Sorry,” Jordan muttered. But as he thrust the brush into his briefcase, his cell phone rang. Cursing silently, he checked the caller ID.
“I’ll have to take this.” He threw Phil an apologetic glance. “It’s my daughter’s day care.”
The caller was Greta Gladstone, the owner.
“You’ll have to come and pick Mandy up,” she said. “She’s been having hysterics ever since you dropped her off. This isn’t going to work out, Mr. Maxwell. You’ll have to come up with some other arrangement.”
His day was going rapidly from bad to impossible.
“I’ll be there,” he said, “in five minutes.”
He surged to his feet. “Phil, I’m sorry, I have to—”
“You took three months off to be with your daughter after you lost your wife, Maxwell. Fine. Understandable. But enough is enough.” Morningstar pressed a hand to his chest and belched. “I’ll give you one more week. Get your personal problems sorted out before next Monday or—”
“Next Monday. Right. Thanks, Phil.” Jordan was already halfway out the door. “Thanks a bunch. I’ll have everything sorted out by then. I swear.”
Jordan called his sister the moment he got Mandy home.
“Lacey, thank the lord you’re there.” His daughter had fallen asleep in the car, and he held her limp figure in his arms as he spoke. “I need you to come up. Are you free?”
Lacey was twenty-five to his thirty-four and a world-famous model. She was forever flying off somewhere to a shoot; and she routinely smiled or pouted at him from the cover of top fashion magazines when he passed the local newsstands. With hair like sable, skin like cream, and legs that didn’t know when to stop, she was drop-dead gorgeous.
She was also super-smart, and he was hoping she would come up with some way out of his present dilemma.
She lived just a few minutes away, in a waterfront condo, and by the time he heard her car purr up his drive, he’d made a pot of coffee. As he was walking across the foyer to the sitting room with two steaming mugs, Lacey let herself in by the front door with her own set of keys.
“How come you’re at home?” she asked. Lending elegance to a simple white cotton T-shirt and blue jeans, she preceded him into the sitting room, walking with the trademark fluid glide that had graced hundreds of catwalks. “Shouldn’t you be out selling houses, now that Mandy’s at the Wedgwood Avenue Day Care?”
“Sit down, Lace.” He waited till she’d arranged her long willowy body in an armchair, before he handed her one of the mugs. Setting his own mug down on a side table, he paced the room. “Mandy’s not at day care. She’s upstairs, asleep.”
“Is she sick?”
He shook his head.
“Then wh—”
“She was expelled.” He scratched a despairing hand through his hair.
“Oh, honey.” Lacey rested her mug on her knee. “She wouldn’t stop crying?”
“Yeah, she’s been the same all week. When I made to drop her off today, she was sobbing and clinging to me like a terrified kitten. I felt like a monster, prying her little fingers free and then handing her over…as if I didn’t want her.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, to try to blot out the ugly image. When he opened them again, he saw worry clouding his sister’s face.
“Oh, Jordan, I’m so sorry.”
“What the hell am I going to do?” he asked. “If this goes on, she’s not the only one who’s going to be thrown out. Morningstar’s had it up to here with me. I may be one of the top salesmen in the Lower Mainland but he’s given me till a week Monday to get my personal affairs in order and if I haven’t, it’s—” He slashed his throat with his index finger. “Game over.”
He slumped down in a chair and somber silence fell on the room as they drank their coffee.
When they’d finished, Lacey said in a tentative tone, “Honey, won’t you even consider Fel—”
“No!” He shot up from his chair and scowled down at her. “Don’t even say that name in here, I don’t want—”
“We’re not talking about what you want now.” Lacey stood and confronted him, her green eyes pleading. “Jordan, I understand how you feel—after what happened, I don’t blame you for hating Denny Fairfax—”
“Lacey, I’m warning you—”
“But his sister had no part in what he did, she didn’t even know until after the car accident that he and Marla had been involved in an affair for several months before it happened. And although you lost your wife—”
“In more ways than one!”
“—Felicity Fairfax didn’t come out of the whole mess unscathed. She lost her brother—or as good as lost him. According to all reports, he’s never going to come out of that coma. And, honey, Felicity and Mandy adored each other. I saw them together, it was beautiful. Won’t you at least consider rehiring her? You wouldn’t even have to see her—at least, not too much, only when you dropped Mandy off as Marla used to, and then pick her up again at night—”
A heart-rending wail coiled its way down the stairs and into the sitting room.
Jordan blew out a sigh. “She’s awake,” he said. “Let’s see what you make of her.”
They went upstairs and into her bedroom, which opened off the landing. The child was still crying.
Jordan felt a sense of panic as he and Lacey crossed to the crib. The situation was escalating out of his control. If this continued, he’d lose his job and then how would he support himself and his daughter? He’d made a helluva lot of money over the years but Marla had spent it as fast as he could earn it—sometimes even faster.
“Poor little mite.” Lacey bent over the crib rail, but Mandy wasn’t aware of her because her eyes were tightly shut. She was lying on her back, her cheeks wet and flushed scarlet as she wailed at the pitch of her voice.
Lacey waited till her niece stopped to catch her breath, and then she said, “Hi, sweetie, what’s the matter?”
Mandy froze, and then gulping back a choking sob, opened her eyes. When she saw Lacey, she started crying again, harder than ever, and rolling over she pressed her face to the pillow, so that her cries were muffled.
Jordan leaned over and lifted her up into his arms. Holding her close, he murmured soft words, and in a while, she stopped crying and just clung to him, shaking and giving an occasional gulping sob, her arms clamped around his neck.
Lacey ran a hand down her niece’s back, lightly. “Sweetie—”
Mandy jerked away from her caress. And tightening her grip around her father’s neck, started to sob again.
“I thought,” Lacey whispered to Jordan, “that you’d have managed to get her to sleep in her bed again by this time. She won’t give up the crib?”
He shook his head. “No way. It’s