Kate Welsh - Substitute Daddy

Someone pounded on Melissa’s front door the following Saturday, waking her from a perfectly wonderful dream that Brett starred in. She couldn’t help being annoyed at whoever had snatched her from his arms. Then she realized what she was thinking and aimed that stupid anger straight at herself. What was with her and all these ridiculous dreams she’d been having lately? She’d positively gone around the bend!

In her half-awake state, she tossed on her robe and made her way down the steps. When she pulled open the door, she found Brett, but he wasn’t pounding on her door. He was standing on the ground at the skirt of the porch pounding on the porch floor from below with a hand sledge, loosening the deteriorating floorboards.

To further befuddle her already disordered brain, he was dressed as she’d never seen him—in worn jeans and a faded T-shirt. And there was more. The muscles of his arms stood out in stark definition beneath his tanned skin. She had never thought of Brett as a particularly physical man but that’s the way he looked in the early-morning light.

“What are you doing?” she asked for some reason, even though the answer was obvious. Anything to keep from acknowledging the heat she felt when she looked at him dressed like a man instead of a GQ mannequin.

This isn’t good, Melissa had enough sense to tell herself. She tried in vain to find that nice liberal dose of anger she’d been feeling only minutes ago. But then Brett looked up and smiled.

“I…” he started to reply, then stopped and just stared. It was as if his powers of speech had abruptly deserted him.

Melissa’s heart flipped in her chest when his burning gaze traced her body from her toes to her face. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. What she saw in his eyes was more dangerous than all the strings to all the trust funds in the world. She clutched her robe closed with a tighter grip and felt her face heat.

But then his smile mutated into that lady-killer grin of his. Fury flooded her brain. And she was free. Gloriously free.

Melissa didn’t say a word but turned and slammed the door behind her. Oh, no. He was not going to charm her the way he did his legion of women. He probably thought that was a way into her life with the baby. How could she have forgotten for even one millisecond the kind of man he was?

Again she asked herself, what on earth was the matter with her? First she dreamed of the man, then for a few seconds there she’d actually believed he was looking at her with desire and she’d liked it. She knew all about the swinging door on his bedroom and all the kiss-off gifts he’d given to those women. She herself had already felt the pain of his fickle-hearted rejection.

Her doctor had warned her that her hormones would go haywire, but she hadn’t thought he meant she’d lose all reason! She’d dreamed of Brett this week and, instead of waking annoyed, she woke feeling needy. It had to stop! Where women were concerned, Brett Costain was poison.

Trying to be completely honest with herself, Melissa admitted that her attraction to Brett was part of her reluctance to accept the trust fund. And there was something else bothering her too. Did she have the right to deprive Gary’s daughter of a relationship with her father’s best friend and brother?

Melissa would have no problem doing just that if she were convinced Brett’s influence would be a poor one. The problem came from a very real sense that her opinion of him was colored by what had happened between them the night they’d met and his rejection the next day.

The truth was she didn’t really know him. The only things she’d heard about him concerned his relationships with women. Other than that subject, Leigh had rarely spoken of Brett at all. To judge him entirely on the merits of his family was unfair. Gary, who was raised by the same parents, had turned out to be a wonderful man. It was altogether possible there was a lot of good in Brett that her sister had assumed Melissa wouldn’t want to hear. Leigh certainly hadn’t intended to keep Brett from sharing her and Gary’s life with the baby.

So what was Melissa to do?

She decided to step back from the problem and avoid him, putting off any decisions until she could look at him with a clear head.

She got down to work after making her decision and managed to catalog and tag every piece of furniture she intended to put in Country and Classics. As she finished scheduling a consultation with the daughter of an old client for early the following week, she glanced at her watch. It was five o’clock and Brett was still hard at work. She had studiously ignored him all day, which wasn’t easy with the sound of power tools buzzing in the background.

She fanned herself idly and realized how very hot it had gotten. Guilt crept in. She hadn’t even offered Brett as much as a glass of water all day. Ashamed and with Aunt Dora’s admonishment always to treat others as you want to be treated echoing in her head, Melissa poured him a glass of sweet tea and carried it to the porch.

Brett stopped pounding the second her shadow fell over him. He looked up and this time he didn’t smile. He didn’t grin. He just wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand and nodded a greeting.

“Is that for me?” he asked.

“I was working and I hadn’t realized it was so hot out here. Where did you learn to fix a porch?”

Brett walked to a pile of tools and pulled a book from under them. He handed her the thick how-to volume. “There’s very little we can’t learn from books.”

Melissa glanced down at the hardback and thought of all the life lessons she and Leigh had learned from their parents and later Aunt Dora and Uncle Ed. Thinking of their conversation about life and happiness she thought Brett had a lot to learn and she didn’t see him learning those lessons from books. But it wasn’t her place to tell him so.

Casting about for something to fill the silence, she glanced toward a silver Range Rover he’d parked in the drive. “You traded in your sports car?”

He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind—a mixture of horror and disbelief. “Give up my Beemer? No way. I only rented that for the weekend because I needed to haul the wood.”

Melissa couldn’t help it. She laughed. Uncle Ed’s pickup was still rusting away in the barn over yonder and Izaak still used his father’s old wagon to haul wood. Only a Costain and people of their ilk would rent a Range Rover to haul lumber.

“You going to let me in on the joke?” he asked.

Melissa shook her head. It wasn’t her job to teach him about the real world even if the hair that fell across his forehead lent him an air of innocence rivaling even the most naive babe in the woods. “I doubt you’d understand,” she told him.

“Try me,” he dared her, his beard-shadowed chin raised in a challenge. At least this way he didn’t looked like a guileless ten-year-old.

What is wrong with your thinking, woman? This is a mover and shaker. A powerful international attorney. He works for heads of multinational, billion-dollar companies. He does not have a slingshot in his back pocket or posies hidden behind his back!

Melissa forced her thoughts to the subject at hand. “How many Beemers and Range Rovers have you seen on these back roads? And how many plain old pickup trucks have you seen?” she challenged.

“Rovers are sturdy,” he argued.

The man was completely dense! “At fifty or sixty thousand dollars a pop, they’d better be.”

He squinted in the glare of the late-afternoon sunlight and looked up at her, scrubbing back his dripping hair. She could almost see him struggling to understand her point. “Come on. Are you trying to say if I show up with a high-end car when the baby is old enough to understand the difference between a BMW and Chevy it could do some sort of damage to his psyche?”