It took a moment for Jeff to realize they were safe, all of them, on the warm, dry sand. Still clutching her notebook, Flannery let go of Jeff’s neck and dropped lightly to her feet. Ellen clung, trembling, to his back. He unpeeled her arms and eased her downward.
Kate sprawled on the sand. Her wig was askew, her makeup smeared. The padding under her clown suit drooped with seawater. She looked so pathetic, and so ludicrous, that Jeff might have laughed—except there was nothing funny about the situation.
“Flannery Valera, you come here this minute!” She pushed herself to a sitting position, eyes sparking like flints. Her orange-haired daughter shuffled forward, eyes downcast, notebook clutched to her chest.
“What do you think you were doing, young lady?” Kate demanded. “You were told to stay in the kitchen! When we get home, you and I are going to have a long—”
“Oh, please don’t punish Flannery!” Ellen darted between them like a fragile, yellow butterfly. “It was my fault! I asked her to take me out on the rocks! She said no at first, but I begged her—”
“Why?” Jeff placed a hand on his child’s shoulder and turned her around to face him. “Why on earth would you want to go out on those dangerous rocks, Ellen?”
Ellen’s velvet eyes held an expression Jeff had never seen before—a look of pure, radiant wonder.
“Flannery told me about the mermaids. She said that if you sit on the rocks and listen with all your heart, sometimes you can hear them singing—”
“Ellen!” Jeff groaned in dismay. “That’s nonsense, and you know it! There’s no such thing as—”
“But you’re wrong, Daddy!” Ellen’s small frame quivered with certainty. “They’re real! I heard them out there! I listened with all my heart, and I heard the mermaids singing!”
Kate trudged miserably up the side of the dune. Her sand-caked costume hung like a sack of potatoes on her sweltering body. The saltwater residue on her skin was beginning to itch, and her damp wig had been discovered by a colony of friendly sand flies. All she wanted to do, at this point, was find the Jeep, go home, take a long, cool shower—and nail her daughter’s little freckled hide to the living room wall.
The afternoon had been a string of disasters, but this was the capper. For the most part, she enjoyed Flannery’s creative nature and allowed her youthful imagination free rein. But when Flannery’s imagination overruled good judgment and put her and another child in danger—
“Are you going to make it all right?” Jeff Parrish glanced over his shoulder with a superior scowl—his usual expression, Kate surmised. To avoid his gaze, she had deliberately dropped behind him in their trek up the dune. Her position, however, gave her a mouth-watering view of his rugged shoulders, tapering back and taut, muscular buttocks. Jefferson Parrish III might be a pain in the fanny, but he was also, Kate conceded, a world-class hunk.
“Kate?” He was waiting for an answer to his question.
“I’ll be—fine,” Kate muttered, blowing a sand fly out of her face. “Just get me back to my Jeep so I can drive home and forget this whole wretched afternoon!”
“You didn’t have to go into the water,” he said. “With the heavy surf, and you in all that padding, you should have known what would happen.”
“I wasn’t thinking about myself,” Kate snapped. “I was concerned about my daughter—and yours. And speaking of our daughters, how far ahead of us are they? Can you see them?”
“They’re just over the top of the dune. They’ll be fine.”
“Except that Flannery is probably filling your Ellen’s head with more of that fantasy nonsense—oh, I saw your face when Ellen said she’d heard the mermaids. Your expression was definitely not a pretty sight.”
“Here.” He reached back, caught her hand, and yanked her up to his own level on the dune. “I want to be able to talk to you without getting a kink in my neck,” he explained.
“So talk.” Kate feigned an indifferent shrug, her saltsoaked bra straps chafing her tender flesh. “See if you can tell me anything I haven’t already figured out.”
“I was hoping that chip on your shoulder had washed off in the ocean.”
“No such luck. But at least I’m willing to listen.”
“I’ll take that into account.” He climbed in silence for the next few steps, his fingers still gripping hers. His palm was as smooth as fine Italian leather—but then, Jefferson Parrish III had probably never lifted anything heavier than a cricket bat. Maybe that was how he’d broken that quirkily gorgeous nose of his.
“This probably sounds stuffy, but I don’t know how else to explain it,” he said, his free hand swinging her clown shoes, which he’d gallantly fished out of the surf. “We Parrishes are raised with certain values—ethics, if you will. We take pride in passing those values down from one generation to the next.”
Like congenital arrogance, Kate almost said, but she managed to bite back the words.
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking. But family tradition is a serious matter. I was raised the way my father was raised, and his father and grandfather before him—to value honesty and hard work, to do one’s best in every effort and to shun anything that smacks of falsehood or frivolity—”
“Such as fairy tales. And mermaids.”
“Exactly.”’He sounded so smug that Kate could have punched him.
“But Ellen’s just a little girl—”
“We raise our girls the same way. My older sister is a neurosurgeon. One of my aunts was a civil engineer. Another taught physics at Radcliffe—”
“And what if Ellen doesn’t want to become a surgeon or an engineer or a physicist?”
His penetrating scowl knotted the thick, dark brows above his steely eyes. “You’re missing the point, Kate. Ellen will be free to become whatever she chooses. But as her. father, it’s my duty to see that her choices are based on sound, realistic principles.”
“I see.” Kate wiped a sweat bead off her nose. Overhead a pair of gulls wheeled and cried in a giddy mating dance. “And what if Ellen makes mistakes?” she asked. “What then?”
“If I do my job as a parent, that’s unlikely to happen. Most mistakes, after all, are based on unrealistic expectations.”
“But hasn’t anyone in your family ever made a mistake? For heaven’s sake, haven’t you ever made a mistake?”
She felt his hand go rigid, then withdraw from hers as they rounded the top of the dune. “You ask too many questions, Kate Valera,” he said coldly. “Come on, let’s catch up with our daughters and get you back to your Jeep.”
Kate clung to her silence, keeping a tight rein on her emotions as they trooped down the leeward slope toward the house. Jeff Parrish was the last person who deserved her sympathy, she told herself. The man was too cocksure, too boastful of a family tradition that turned children into little automatons with no freedom to dream and imagine. Worse, he was raising his sensitive daughter to be a copy of his cold, success-driven self. The whole situation was deplorable!
So why, as her gaze outlined the back of his elegantly rugged head, was her mind flitting through visions of cradling that head in the warm furrow between her breasts while her fingers tunneled the rich, dark silver of his hair?…
Merciful heaven, maybe she was the one who needed a healthy dose of reality!
She could see the girls now. They were skipping