His Baby. Muriel Jensen

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      Chapter Three

      Killian intended to sleep late Saturday morning, but his room was flooded with sunlight at 6:00 a.m. After tossing and turning for an hour, he finally got up, pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and went down to the kitchen and made himself an omelette.

      Kezia discovered him as he was buttering toast, her expression horrified. “You fend for yourself all the time,” she said, looking with surprise into the frying pan. “When you’re home, I’m supposed to cook for you.”

      He kissed her cheek, scooped his omelette onto the plate that held his toast and headed for the porch. “It’s okay,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s the weekend for you, too. I told Daniel I wouldn’t need him until Monday. Don’t fuss.”

      She grumbled further, but he stepped out onto the deck and closed the door behind him. A large lawn sloped to blueberry bushes, then a small apple orchard that sheltered a path to the beach.

      He was just beginning to mellow out from a hectic week when again Cordie came to mind. He envisioned her in the back room of her department, her red hair in two French braids looped around the back of her head, giving her a false air of dignity. Her brown eyes had been enormous against her natural redhead’s pallor, but they’d had little of the frivolity he remembered from their marriage. She was taller than average, but looked thinner now. Their separation had probably upset her, but he could make no concessions. They weren’t compatible. They never had been.

      Too bad he hadn’t seen that when they’d first met. But he’d been blinded by her glorious hair and her ivory shoulders in a little black dress.

      He shook his head against the thought and reminded himself that he was here to relax.

      He ate his omelette and made himself count the bank of trees in the distance to prevent himself from thinking of her.

      He went to the beach with an old paperback copy of a Robert Parker book and read until he reached a point in the dialogue where the hero and heroine argued about their relationship. Suddenly, his mind was replaying his conversation with Cordie rather than focusing on the dialogue he was reading.

      He got to his feet, wondering why a very busy man ever thought his body would allow him to relax for a weekend. It was accustomed to action—albeit corporate action—and his brain was used to making big, quick decisions.

      He went back to the house and called Lew Weston, Abbott Mills’s troubleshooter and one-man think tank.

      “I thought you were taking the weekend off,” Lew said.

      “I am,” Killian replied. “I just wondered if we got that report I asked for on the Florida Shops.”

      “We got it. It’ll wait for you until Monday.”

      “Your wife wasn’t upset that you volunteered to work the weekend?”

      “No. I promised her dinner and the theater.”

      “Smart man.”

      “Yes, I am. So let me do my job and you get back to the beach or whatever it is you’re doing.”

      Killian hung up and headed for the Vespa Campbell kept in the garage. He took a tour of the acreage. Nothing to find fault with here. Acres of apple trees blossomed in perfectly formed rows all the way up to the trees on the neighboring property. Campbell knew what he was doing.

      The roads were bumpy and dusty, but the air smelled of sea grass and salt and held the unmistakable sweetness of early summer. The fragrance filled his being, and for reasons he couldn’t explain, seemed to distill itself into the image of Cordie.

      With a growl, he rode the bike back to the garage and went into the house to find Kezia fixing dinner despite his insistence that he was self-sufficient. So he went upstairs to take a shower, dressed in fresh slacks and a white cotton sweater and asked the staff to join him for dinner.

      Winfield frowned at him. “We know you’re a democratic despot, Mr. Abbott,” he said politely. “You don’t have to prove it to us.”

      He denied that was his point. “You eat with Mom all the time. She told me.”

      “But that’s Miss Chloe,” Daniel said with the same frown Winfield wore. “You’re…you’re…”

      “The democratic despot?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “You used to eat with me when I was a child.”

      “No, you ate with us in the kitchen. That was before you became one of the Fortune 500.”

      “Then sit down with me or heads will roll.”

      They did, but it was dessert before they were comfortable.

      He slept in Sunday morning, then took a call from Chloe as he ate breakfast on the deck.

      “Tante Bijou isn’t at all well,” she told him, “and the housekeeper is worried. She wouldn’t let her call me. So I’ve taken over her care and I might be longer than I expected. Is that all right with you?”

      “Of course,” he answered her. “Stay as long as she needs you.”

      “Thank you, Killian. Give my love to Sawyer and Campbell.”

      “I will.”

      Campbell arrived home Sunday night—by helicopter. It landed in the middle of the front lawn with rotors beating so loudly that the sound brought everyone in the house to the side porch.

      As they watched, Campbell leaped to the grass, ran clear of the rotors, then waved as the ’copter pulled up again and sailed off into the sky, causing a wind storm in the fruit trees and the poplars.

      “He didn’t get arrested again, did he?” Winfield asked. He held a large free weight in one hand, obviously interrupted in the middle of his evening workout.

      “He didn’t call us for bail,” Killian replied. “And that wasn’t a police helicopter.”

      Kezia used the wooden spoon in her hand to point in the direction the helicopter had taken. “That’s his friend Billie Sandusky. She flew him to his interview.”

      Killian and Winfield both turned to her in interest.

      She shrugged. “No, I don’t know if they’re romantic,” she said, apparently eager to fend off their questions. “But I hope not. She drinks straight shots, and I don’t like to see that in a woman.”

      Daniel, standing at the bottom of the stairs with a greasy rag in his hands, warned her with a quiet, “Kezia.” He didn’t wear a uniform and his manner was easy and friendly, but he was always careful never СКАЧАТЬ