Maureen Child - Seductive Revenge

So Isabelle took a step forward, into that joint custody world. Bending down, she gave Caro a kiss and whispered, “Sleep tight. I love you.”

Then she stepped aside and let Wes be the one to smooth the sheet and blanket, to sweep soft, silky hair back off their girl’s forehead. He kissed her cheek and said, “Good night, Caroline.”

“G’night,” she said on a yawn. “Will I see you some more tomorrow?”

Wes straightened up and glanced at Isabelle meaningfully before looking back at his daughter. “You sure will.”

* * *

For the next week, Isabelle felt like a caged tiger in the zoo. Someone was always watching her—and that someone was Wes. Every time she turned around, there he was. At the grocery store. At Caro’s school—where he’d charmed the little girl’s teacher until the woman was practically a puddle of goo in front of him.

He showed up at her house nearly every evening, bringing dinner with him—which endeared him to Edna, who enjoyed the time off from cooking. He helped Marco pull a tree stump from the backyard, and now Isabelle had to listen to Marco’s glowing remarks about a “city man” who knew how to put in a real day’s work.

But the worst, she thought, as she pulled into the school parking lot, was Caro herself. The little girl was completely in love with her father.

Wes had plenty of charm when he wanted to use it, as Belle was in a position to know. But she’d never really stood back and watched as he made a conquest. The women in town, Edna, they were one thing, but seeing Caro respond to her father’s determination to win her over had been both touching and worrisome. The harder Caro fell for Wes, the easier it would be for him to eventually break the girl’s heart. Though to be honest, she hadn’t really seen any sign of Wes pulling away. Instead, he seemed focused on being an integral part of Caro’s life.

And all of it worried Isabelle. Sooner or later, he would return to Texas. What then? Would he want to take Caroline back with him? Would they end up in a bitter custody fight after all? Or would he have his fill of playing daddy and just leave—breaking Caroline’s heart? Even a best-case scenario was filled with possible misery. Say she and Wes worked it out together and he didn’t get tired of being a father? Wouldn’t he want Caro with him in Texas for at least part of the year?

Isabelle’s head hurt, and she didn’t see any relief in her near future. So she pushed all of those thoughts out of her mind and tried instead to focus on her work.

She went over the last of her digital drawings, adding a touch of color here, smoothing a sharp line there, until she was completely satisfied. Well, completely was a stretch. She was never truly satisfied with her work, and invariably, once she’d sent the drawings off, she would think of dozens of things she could have done differently.

But the most important thing here was getting her latest designs to the manufacturer who could get started on production. Isabelle sent off a quick email, attaching the designs, and then shifted her attention to the paperwork that had been mounting over the last few days.

“You work from home?”

Isabelle jolted in her chair, glanced at the open doorway to her home office and slapped one hand to her chest when she saw Wes standing there. “How did you get in?”

“Edna let me in. Told me you were up here.”

Traitor, Isabelle thought. Her housekeeper was clearly indulging her inner matchmaker. Too bad the woman didn’t know that Wes wasn’t interested in a match of any kind. Isabelle’s heart ached a little at that internal reminder. It would be so much easier for her if she could just get past the feelings for him that kept resurfacing.

He strolled into the room, hands in his pockets, and wandered the perimeter, invading her space, looking at everything. She bit her tongue, because telling him to get out of her office would only make him that much more determined to look around. He took long, slow strides, moving with a sort of stealthy grace that made her insides quiver completely against her will.

Taking a deep breath, Isabelle watched as he checked out the full-color digital printouts of her latest sketches she had taped to a wall and the easel where one of her charcoal sketches was on display. Then he moved onto the dry erase board, with her schedule laid out, and finally to the corkboard where she’d affixed dozens of pictures of children holding toys.

Her office was at the front of the house on the second floor. Caroline called it the tower room. The windows looked out over a landscape that included the woods full of snow-covered pines, a lake, and in the distance, mountains that looked tall enough to scrape the sky.

The room wasn’t very big, but she didn’t need a massive office since there was no one to impress. She had a desk with a computer, an easel and paints, and space enough to pace when she needed to think. But right now, Isabelle wished for a much bigger space, because her office seemed to have shrunk the moment Wes walked into it.

“What is all this?” he asked quietly, turning at last to look at her.

“My work. It’s what I do now,” she told him and stood up from behind her desk. She didn’t want to be seated while he loomed over her. “I set up a nonprofit that provides toys to hospitalized children. I call it Caro’s Toybox.”

She didn’t look at him, instead focusing on the pictures of the smiling kids she kept in her office as inspiration. “I do the design work and the manufacturer produces the toys, then we distribute them.”

He looked at those smiling faces in the photographs, too, and asked, “How’d you get into this?”

Isabelle walked up to stand beside him so that both of them were looking at those happy faces staring back at them. “When Caro was so sick, and then diagnosed, we spent a lot of time in the local hospital. We saw ill, scared children, and I realized that stuffed animals, or dolls, or even a toy plane could bring comfort to those kids when no one was around.”

She sighed as memories rushed into her mind—sharing waiting rooms with other worried mothers, hearing the muffled cries of children, punctuated by an occasional wail of pain.

“I held Caro on my lap as doctors poked and prodded her. She was scared, but she had me there to try to comfort her,” she said sadly. “But there were a lot of kids on the ward who spent too much time alone in their beds. Their moms and dads had other kids to take care of, and jobs, too. Nurses are amazingly great, but they’re frantically busy and can’t always take the time to try to ease a child’s fear.”

“I wish I’d been there. For Caro. For you.” His voice was low, soft and tinged with regret.

Isabelle looked at him and saw his features soften and felt closer to him than she ever had. Whether he’d been there or not, he was Caroline’s father, and only the two of them could really understand what it was like to have a sick child you couldn’t help.

“I wish you had been, too.” She looked up at him. “I know it’s my fault that you weren’t, and for that, I’m really sorry.”

He looked down at her, and his clear aqua eyes shone with emotion that he couldn’t hide. “Thanks. For saying that. For meaning it.”

Isabelle’s heart thumped hard in her chest. Her stomach swirled with anticipation, expectation and a jolt of nerves that only increased with every breath she drew. “I do, Wes,” she said. “If I could do it all over…”

He shook his head, reached out and laid one hand on her shoulder. “We can’t do any of it over. But we can do it differently from here on.”

The heat of his touch drifted down, sliding into her chest and filling her with a kind of warmth she hadn’t known in five years. Staring into his eyes, she was drawn in by that magnetic pull she’d always felt around him. It took everything she had to keep from moving into him, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him. But that would only make this moment even more confusing than it already was.