[Kate's Boys 04] - Travis's Appeal Read online

  Not on your life. “And just why would I want to do that?”

  He heard Mike blow out a breath. “Because I’m trying to get the family together, Trav. We’re all meeting at Dad and Kate’s house tonight at eight. Everyone else already said yes.”

  No pressure here, Travis thought. “Again, why?”

  Mike was being deliberately evasive. “If I wanted you to know now, I’d tell you now. The purpose behind meeting tonight is to tell you tonight. All of you at the same time.”

  Curious, Travis started theorizing out loud. “Okay, you’re not announcing you’re getting married because you and Miranda are already married—although what that beautiful woman sees in you is beyond my scope of comprehension—and you wouldn’t be getting us together to announce you’re getting divorced because you wouldn’t be sounding so damn cheerful about losing someone like Miranda—” And then it hit him like a ton of bricks. “—Oh my God.”

  “What?” Mike’s voice sounded alert, suspicious—and somewhat crestfallen.

  It could only be one thing. “Miranda’s pregnant, isn’t she?”

  He heard Mike take in a deep breath, as if bracing himself. “I’m neither going to confirm nor deny that. You want an answer, you show up at Dad’s house tonight at eight.”

  He was right. He’d bet a year’s salary on it. Especially since Mike wasn’t flatly denying it. That was as good as an admission any day.

  “You son of a gun. What about all this talk about waiting five years, putting together more of a nest egg before you even thought about having kids?” Travis threw Mike’s own words back at him.

  Mike relented. Partially. “All you really need is the nest,” he admitted with a laugh. “You tell anyone else and I’ll have your head on a platter,” Mike threatened.

  Travis laughed. “Oh, like nobody else is going to figure this out.”

  “Just show up tonight—and act surprised if you know what’s good for you,” Mike instructed. “Oh, and bring your ‘client’ along.”

  He wasn’t quite sure he liked the way Mike said that. “Why would you want me to do that?”

  “Because, Trav, I want to meet the woman who’s piqued your interest, that’s why.”

  Habit had him being defensive. He didn’t appreciate being read like a book, not by his brothers. He made allowances for Kate. “Who said anything about her piquing my interest?”

  “It’s there in your voice, Trav. Listen to yourself sometime. And, for God’s sake, just be happy and be content with that. The guys and I were beginning to think you’re studying to be a hermit in your off-hours. See you tonight.” Not waiting for a response, Mike hung up.

  Travis sat there for a moment, just holding the receiver in his hand, thinking.

  Several minutes went by. And then Bea came in. “I’m back,” she announced, a slight lisp due to her numb lower lip accompanying her words. Her small eyes narrowed as she appraised him. There was no attempt to veil her annoyance. “You going to sit there, making love to your receiver all afternoon or do you plan to work for a living?”

  He hung up the phone. “You can be replaced, you know.”

  “No, I can’t,” she retorted glibly and with confidence. “Your three o’clock is here.” With that, she turned back around. There was a defiant swing to her hips as she left the office.

  Travis grinned to himself. He was going to be an uncle. Who’d’ve thunk it?

  During his last appointment he had been engaged in a mental game of tennis, going back and forth as to his course of action.

  He knew he had to cancel. Not to seem rude and he didn’t want to offend O’Reilly. The man would be expecting him to show up at the restaurant. It had been almost a mandate.

  His attendance at Mike’s little impromptu gathering went without saying. Even though he was absolutely certain he’d guessed the reason behind the meeting, he wasn’t about to deprive his sister-in-law of the joy of making the announcement. That’s just the way things were.

  You trained us well, Kate, he thought.

  What gave him pause was that he wanted to ask Shana to come with him. He was fairly sure her father would find someone to cover for her at work. And since, technically, she wasn’t his client, which meant there really wasn’t a conflict of interest at play here, he was free to ask her.

  He wanted to ask her.

  The only thing stopping him was that he didn’t know what would come next. What he felt right now was stronger than anything he’d ever experienced, even with the woman he’d been engaged to. That in itself was pretty unnerving.

  He didn’t like being unnerved.

  He liked knowing what every step was all about before he ever ventured to take it.

  But this was different.

  This was the unknown. There were no security blankets at play here.

  He glanced at the five-by-six-inch photograph on his desk. It was taken when he and his brothers were six and seven. At his father’s wedding to Kate. But he looked beyond the photograph, to the reflection that hovered over it. His reflection.

  “Afraid?” he challenged the reflection.

  The next moment, he was reaching for the phone. He’d started to dial the area code before he realized he didn’t know the number to the restaurant. Stopping, he leafed through the packet of papers Shawn had left with him until he found it.

  The voice that answered the phone was hers. He’d know it anywhere.

  Travis did his best to sound businesslike. He didn’t succeed too well. “Shana? It’s Travis. Would your father mind if you took the evening off?”

  There was a pause. Good pause? Bad pause? He couldn’t tell.

  “No, he’s been after me to take some time off for a while now. Says I’m cutting into his space. What did you have in mind?”

  “My older brother is holding an impromptu family meeting. I can’t get out of it.”

  “I see.”

  How did he approach this without making it sound as if he was getting serious about her? How could he be getting serious about her when they hadn’t even gone out? What the hell had come over him?

  “I’d like to bring you with me.”

  There was a long pause on the other end. Just as he was about to ask if she was still there, he heard her say, “All right.” His heart jumped. Idiot. “What time?”

  “Same time I was going to come to your restaurant. Eight. I can swing by and pick you up at seven-thirty,” he told her.

  “Sounds like a plan to me. Come to the restaurant. I’ll be waiting.”

  “Great.”

  He vaguely heard himself say “Goodbye.” The receiver slid from his fingers as he broke the connection, landing in the cradle with a clatter. A single refrain drummed through his brain.

  I’ll be waiting.

  Chapter 8

  O rdinarily, Travis wasn’t the type to do things on a whim. Of all the Marlowe men, he had become the most steadfast one, even more so than his father. He was the one who always thought things through carefully before acting. The role of a family lawyer suited him to a tee.

  Friendly, warm and outgoing, he still could not be called flamboyant.

  Like all of them, Travis had been affected by his mother’s death, by her abrupt and permanent absence from his life coming after five years of a daily relationship. Even now, more than twenty-two years later, his mother’s death affected the way he approached all relationships—warily. Not at first, but if anything semi-serious seemed to be in the offing, he always rethought his feelings.

  Which was why everyone in the family was surprised when they discovered that he was bringing someone to a family gathering. Other than Adrianne, who’d lasted only a short while, he’d never done that before. For the most part, when he dated, which was not frequently, he’d always kept his dating life separate from his family life. That he’d only known Shana O’Reilly for a time equal to the longevity of a fruit fly, just added to the overall mystery.

  His family weren’t the only people who were surpr
ised by his sudden change in behavior.

  So was he.

  Yet here he was, standing before the door of Shawn’s Li’l Bit of Heaven, about to go in and shake things up in what had, heretofore, been his well-ordered life.

  He had his hand over the door handle, but he couldn’t make himself open the door.

  “In or out, buddy,” a deep, gravelly voice behind him prodded impatiently.

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Travis confessed, more to himself than the irritated, would-be patron.

  Making up his mind, Travis pulled the door open and stepped inside the restaurant. The man behind him elbowed him out of the way and strode toward the hostess table, muttering something unflattering regarding people who couldn’t make up their minds.

  Shana was waiting for him.

  She had been for the last half hour, her gaze drawn to the door every time it opened and someone entered. And each time she would look, something tightened inside of her in anticipation.

  The same way it did whenever the phone on her desk rang tonight.

  One was in anticipation of seeing him walk through the doorway, the other in anticipation of Travis calling to cancel his plans after all.

  She wasn’t altogether sure which one she was rooting for.

  Until she saw him walk in.

  The way her heart raced before she took a deep, calming breath, told her which side had won. Try as she might to be indifferent, she wanted him here more than she didn’t.

  But even that bothered her.

  She hadn’t expected to find herself attracted to anyone, not for a good, long while. She thought she had more control over herself than that. It wasn’t all that many months ago that she’d given Kevin his walking papers. Kevin, of the wide smile and wider charm. Kevin, who excelled in effortlessly turning a girl’s head. Kevin, who thought that he rightly deserved to be the center of any woman’s universe. Certainly the center of the woman’s who he’d chosen to be his wife.

  His glaring flaw had come as a complete surprise to her, arriving without preamble after she’d given him her heart and had seriously begun to envision her life as his wife.

  It exploded like a land mine the afternoon he tried to talk her into getting her own apartment again and moving out of her father’s house. When she protested that her father still needed to have someone around to help him out, Kevin had frowned and shook his head, like a parent whose child had given the wrong answer to a simple homework question.

  “You shouldn’t put your life on hold like that,” he told her. “Don’t get me wrong. Your dad’s a nice guy and all that. He’s damn lucky, he’s got enough money to hire himself a good caretaker—”

  “Giver,” she’d heard herself correcting Kevin even as a numbness began to creep through her. Squeezing her stomach. Making her ill. “Caregiver.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Kevin’d dismissed impatiently. “The bottom line is that you don’t have to be his prisoner, running every time he needs something.”

  “I don’t run,” she protested defensively.

  “Looks like running to me,” he observed. “It was okay when I was just going out with you. But now I’ve given you a ring. We’re going to get married. Things have to change.” She remembered the look in Kevin’s eyes as he tendered his ultimatum. He was completely confident of the outcome. “The bottom line is that it’s going to be him—or me.”

  Everything was bottom line to Kevin. It had grown to be his favorite catch phrase, something he repeated at least several times a day, most likely without realizing it, the way some people found themselves trapped within the confines of a mindless phrase like, “you know?”

  She fed it back to him.

  “The bottom line is that you’re a cold, self-centered bastard,” she’d told him, angry that he’d placed her in this kind of a position. She knew her father would never do that to her, never make her choose like that. She pulled off the diamond engagement ring Kevin had given her. The one he’d let drop cost over fifteen thousand dollars. It took everything she had not to throw the ring at him the way she wanted to. “I don’t know how I missed it all these months.”

  Stunned, he’d looked at her as if she’d just regressed into a blithering idiot. Grabbing the ring she held out to him, he’d predicted, “You’ll be sorry,” and stormed out of her life.

  “I doubt it,” she said quietly to the door he’d slammed in his wake.

  And then she cried. Cried because he’d hurt her. Cried because she turned out to be so wrong about him. Cried because the life she’d envisioned had been proven to be a tissue of lies.

  She didn’t want to cry again. Not because she’d been hurt or disappointed to find out that someone she’d learned to care about wasn’t really worth the effort.

  As Travis approached her, she promised herself this time was going to different. This time would be strictly fun. With absolutely no strings. Her body might wind up involved in this little venture, but her heart would be tucked away in a safety deposit box, held in reserve for the right man—if such a man existed.

  With that resolved, she deliberately ignored the flutter inside her chest cavity, widened her smile and took her purse out from behind the desk.

  “Have yourself a good time.”

  Shana swallowed a gasp. How did a man who tipped the scales at over two hundred pounds, distributed over a relatively short frame, manage to sneak up behind her so quietly? Shana wondered as she swung around to face her father.

  He looked good tonight, she thought, pride mingling with a sense of relief. But she still hesitated leaving him. If she hadn’t found him when he’d had that second heart attack, he wouldn’t be standing here right now. That haunted her, especially in the wee hours of the morning.

  “You’re sure you’ll be all right tonight without me?”

  The restaurant owner laughed as he nodded a greeting to Travis. “Hard as it is to believe, baby girl, yeah, I think I can muddle through one night without you. This restaurant has been muddling through way before you were even a gleam in anyone’s eye. Now go, have some fun.” He leaned over so that only she could hear his words. “He seems like a nice guy. If he’s not, tell ’im about my new huntin’ knife. The one I use for skinnin’ critters.”

  Suppressing a laugh, Shana shook her head. Her father always twanged when he grew protective of her. When he’d heard the full story about the broken engagement from her, it was all Shana could do to keep him from going out after Kevin to “set him straight” for making her cry. He’d said something about vivisection being involved until she made him swear to forget about it. Kevin, she insisted, wasn’t worth the trouble.

  “I’ll tell him,” she promised, kissing the soft cheek. “Now, don’t push yourself too hard, you hear me? And if you start feeling tired or weak—”

  Shawn nodded and wearily recited, “I’ll call you.”

  She looked at him for a long moment. She knew better. She might be able to get him to say the words, but no way would she get her father to live up to them. “No, you won’t.”

  Shawn turned toward his attorney. “Take this girl off my hands, boy,” he implored. “She’s got more mothering in her than a hen with a hundred chicks running around her.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Travis told his client. Trying not to seem too eager, he turned his attention to Shana. “Ready?”

  Why her stomach would suddenly tighten in response to the look in his eyes, she had no idea. She didn’t feel equipped to explore it at the moment. Instead, she forced her smile to remain where it was and nodded as she casually slipped her arm through his.

  “Ready.”

  “Have a good time,” Shawn called after them, smiling to himself. From where he stood, things looked very encouraging.

  It was nice when life actually went according to plan, he thought.

  With any luck…

  Shawn didn’t finish the thought because it might be bad luck and he had no desire to jinx things.

  Rubbing his han
ds together like a man looking forward to what was to pass, he turned back to the restaurant and the rest of his evening.

  “So, you didn’t tell me,” Shana said as she pulled her seat belt out and slid the metal tongue into the groove. It clicked into place. “What’s this big family gathering all about?”

  His own seat belt fastened, Travis put his key into the ignition and turned it. The engine came to life. “It’s supposed to be a secret.” Looking over his shoulder, he pulled out of the parking space in one smooth motion. “But by process of elimination, I think Mike’s wife is pregnant.”

  She thought for a minute, but was unable to assign Mike a position in the family hierarchy. “Which one is Mike again?”

  Travis spared her a grin. He liked that she asked rather than let things float along without clarification. “Mike’s the one who isn’t a triplet.”

  She nodded, assimilating the information. It clicked with another piece she’d taken in the other day. “The older one.”

  “By a whole year,” Travis put in. He thought of his earlier conversation with Mike. “By the way, we’re supposed to act surprised when they make the announcement.”

  “Surprised,” she repeated, underscoring it with a quick nod of her head. “Got it. I can manage that, seeing as how I’m already surprised.”

  “By what?”

  Easing onto the brake at the red light, he spared her a quick glance. Was it his imagination, or did her perfume fill the inside of his vehicle?

  “Your invitation. Most guys don’t bring a girl to meet their entire family on a first date.”

  The light turned. The second it did, someone behind him leaned on his horn. A choice word rose to Travis’s lips, but he swallowed it. Instead, he stepped on the gas, sailing across the intersection.

  “Is that what this is?” he asked innocently. “A first date?”

  Okay, had she missed a signal? Assumed something that wasn’t intended? Embarrassment reared its hoary head, threatening to color everything in shades of red. “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” he allowed. “I actually kind of thought of it as being a transferred dinner invitation.”