“How many do you have?” Travis asked, desperately struggling to focus on the conversation and not the woman whose fingertips still moved seductively along his temples.
“There’s just Susan and Shana,” Shawn said, “now that Grace’s gone.”
“Grace?”
“My wife,” Shawn clarified. He nodded toward Shana behind him. “How’s that feel?”
“Good,” Travis admitted.
But he knew nothing could be done for the pain he was experiencing. The headache had to run its course. He still fed it aspirins because a part of him was ever hopeful that, this one time, he could beat it back with pills. It was mostly a useless endeavor.
“But I don’t want to waste your time,” he added, intending the remark for Shana. He tried to turn his head, but paid dearly for that. The resulting pain shot through the top of his head, his nose and his jaw.
To his surprise, Shana didn’t withdraw her hands but continued massaging, making her small circles against his temples, sliding her fingertips in progressively larger and larger areas.
“Shh,” she soothed. “You have to give it a little time,” she advised. “The pain will go away soon, I promise.”
Not soon enough for him, he thought sarcastically. Hopefully before he liquefied right in front of her. It became increasingly more difficult to concentrate on what the woman’s father was saying when she stood behind him like that, wrecking havoc on his temples as well as his system. Her perfume, something light, heady and seductive as hell, seemed to seep into all his senses.
Ordinarily, in his present condition, the scent—any scent—would just contribute to his headache. But for some reason, hers didn’t. Instead, it soothed him even as it aroused him.
How was that possible?
“Dad, you and Mr. Marlowe go on talking,” Shana was saying. She’d bent forward ever so slightly as she spoke, just enough for him to feel her leaning lightly against his back.
Every nerve ending in his body felt as if it as hot-wired.
“You familiar with my restaurant?” Shawn was asking him.
With effort, Travis focused. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “What’s it called?”
Right now, if the man called the restaurant after himself, Travis wouldn’t have been able to make the connection. His brain was taking a definite time-out. He was struggling not just with an all-invasive headache, but with a sudden, startling desire to pull Shana onto his lap. Not just to pull her onto his lap, but to kiss her, as well.
Definitely not his style.
Not that he aspired to the role of hermit or someone who lived and breathed work to the point that he did nothing else, but he had become the controlled one in his family. The one who always thought things out, looked at the consequences of any action. He was no longer given to the rash behavior of his childhood.
So what were these urges doing, suddenly dancing through him with reckless abandon?
“Shawn’s Li’l Bit of Heaven.” Travis realized that he had been staring at the man, because Shawn added, “That’s the name of the restaurant. I named it for my daughter,” he confided.
“Shana?” Because if that was the case, Travis couldn’t help thinking, the man was given to serious understatement.
Shawn flushed and his complexion instantly turned a ruddy shade. “No,” he corrected, “Susan. That’s…my older girl,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. And then, because the woman’s presence was conspicuously absent, he added, “She couldn’t come. She’s been too busy to take time out for her old man these days,” Shawn grumbled. The frown on his face seemed to go deep, down to the very bone.
And then, the next moment, the man’s frown vanished and he was jovial again, caught up in a memory.
“But you should’ve seen her as a little bit of a thing. Sunshine in a bottle, that was her. Or maybe I should’ve said sunshine with a bottle,” he chuckled at his own joke. “She was a baby back then. Once she started walking and talking, she made it clear right from the beginning that she marched to her own tune.” He cleared his throat, pushing away whatever thought was troubling him. He raised his eyes to Travis’s face. “Anyway, you hear of it?”
Saying yes might leave him open to questions that he couldn’t answer. At the risk of bruising the man’s ego, Travis said, “I’m afraid not.”
To his surprise, rather than look put out, Shawn smiled and nodded. “The truth. You could’ve lied, trying to get on my good side, but you didn’t. You told the truth. I like that.” He nodded his head several more times, as if carrying on a debate that only he could hear. And then his eyes lit up. “Okay, boy, I’m gonna go with you.” He eyed him closely. “I’m putting my trust in you. Don’t let me down.”
“Thank you,” Travis said with feeling. “I won’t let you down.” Still seated, he slid forward and extended his hand to the man. At the same time, he felt Shana withdraw her fingertips from his temples.
For a moment, he thought it was because he was leaning forward.
And then it hit him.
Raising his eyes to her face as she came around to rejoin her father on the sofa, Travis stared at her incredulously.
“It’s gone,” he said like a mesmerized child watching a magician who had just made a full-grown tiger disappear from the stage. “My headache’s gone.” He was stunned. Migraine headaches, when they came, which fortunately for him was not often, moved in for the duration of the day. Sometimes longer. “That’s not possible,” he murmured.
Shana smiled at him. “Is your head throbbing?” she asked innocently.
“No.”
The look of pure satisfaction that came to her face was spellbinding to watch. “Then it’s possible,” she concluded.
Shawn chuckled, clearly pleased with the outcome. “Didn’t I tell you she was something?”
She certainly was. And the fact that her fingertips seemed to work miracles had nothing to do with it.
Chapter 3
The first meeting ended with Travis giving Shawn O’Reilly a list of documents he needed to review in order to ultimately place them beneath the protective umbrella of a living trust. In exchange, Shawn tendered an invitation to Travis to drop by the restaurant for a “meal that you’ll never forget.”
Whether by instinct or because being in such close proximity to Shana had temporarily rendered his ordinarily sharp thought process null and void, Travis refrained from mentioning that one of his brothers was a chef and owner of the popular Kate’s Kitchen, a fivestar restaurant overlooking the ocean in Laguna Beach. Trevor had named the restaurant as a tribute to their stepmother because of all the encouragement she’d given him over the years.
Travis accepted the light-green business card that Shawn held out to him, tucking it into his wallet.
“What about our next appointment?” Shawn asked.
Travis flipped through several pages on his desk calendar, searching for an empty block of time. “How’s two weeks from tomorrow at ten sound?” he asked. Fully expecting the man to agree to the date, Travis picked up his pen and was about to write in Shawn’s name when the man stopped him.
“Don’t you have anything sooner?” Shawn prodded. “I’d like it sooner than later,” he added, then explained, “I’m really not a very patient man and when I make up my mind,