What the Single Dad Wants... Read online

“You’re a very persuasive woman.” Brandon wasn’t trying to flatter her. There weren’t many people who could hold their own with his mother. The fact that she could said a great deal about her strength of character, and that impressed him.

  She moved her shoulders in a vague shrug, dismissing his assessment. “No, not really, but for some reason, I can tap into their innermost feelings. I can find that hidden spark that’ll make them try again and again until they conquer that particular hurdle and move on to the next one.”

  Brandon nodded, understanding. “You mean like with my mother.”

  Anastasia Del Vecchio was opinionated and stubborn, but the woman, despite her complaints, really wanted to get back to her former self. That gave her something to work with, Isabelle thought.

  “Your mother’s one of the easier cases,” she told him. When he responded to that with a laugh, she explained. “No, really. She wants to be pushed. I think if I played it strictly the way she makes it ‘appear’ that she wants it—stopping for a break every few minutes and taking the easy way out—your mother would complain even louder—and really mean it. She’d probably demand to know why I was giving up on her. For her, it’s all part of the process. She wants me to ride roughshod over her so she can grumble and complain—and get back to her old self. You know, for a woman her age, your mother’s in fantastic shape.”

  Amused, Brandon laughed softly under his breath. “You know, if you value your life, I wouldn’t mention that part about ‘a woman her age’ anywhere that she can overhear you. My mother’s age is a secret guarded only a little less zealously than security at the White House. How do you know how old she is, anyway?” he asked. Even he wasn’t a hundred percent certain that he had the right year.

  “I’ve been a fan of your mother’s ever since I can remember,” she told him. “Back then, she didn’t care if people knew what year she was born.”

  Shaking his head, he laughed. “Now there you’re wrong. Anastasia Del Vecchio always cared about keeping her age off the record. My mother wanted to be thought of as ‘timeless’ and ‘eternally young.’ To be honest,” Brandon went on to admit, “I’m not even sure if I know how old she is.”

  She studied his profile for a moment. “Doesn’t that bother you?” She knew that it would drive her absolutely crazy not to know.

  “Not really.” Brandon shrugged away the question. “It’s just part of what makes her Anastasia Del Vecchio. She’s quicksilver. Mercurial. Someone who can’t be pinned down.” He glanced over to his right. They traveled along another stretch of beach, passing an RV camping area. In direct contrast to the RVs, some of Laguna’s most expensive homes were nested on his left. “What matters more to me than any chronological number is that when I really needed her, she was there—without my having to actually say a word to her.”

  “When you found yourself suddenly being a single father.”

  The road ahead was empty. Brandon allowed himself a moment to glance at her. “So you know about that, too.” It was obviously not a question, but neither was it an accusation.

  Still, she blushed just a little at having verbally intruded into a private matter. “You were always an extension of your mother’s life, so bits and pieces of yours made it into stories that were written about her. And then you wrote your first thriller and became famous in your own right. Interviews followed…”

  Her voice trailed off as she realized that might have sounded a tad obsessive to him. She hadn’t been keeping tabs on him, she was just mildly interested in her favorite author’s life. And she had always been interested in Anastasia Del Vecchio. It was still difficult for her to grasp that she was giving the legendary star physical therapy and living within shouting distance of the woman.

  Isabelle pressed her lips together. There were so many questions popping into her mind, things she wanted to know about the man, the writer, firsthand. “Mind if I ask you something?”

  They were coming to a sharp turn. He kept his eyes on the road. “Go ahead.”

  Since he’d asked her about her work, she thought that allowed her to ask him a question about his. “Did you always want to be a writer?”

  There’d been a few other choices: cowboy, astronaut, but those had faded by the time he was nine. The only serious career he’d ever considered was the one he had now.

  “Well, seeing the world I was part of, creating fantasy just came naturally to me. I was always making up stories in my head, exciting stories—or so I thought,” he qualified with a self-deprecating grin. “Stories where I was the hero, saving the girl, and coincidentally, saving the world as well. Modest little stories,” he added with a soft laugh. “When it came time to earn a living, there was nothing else I wanted to be except a writer. The idea excited me. Fortunately for me, I had gotten better at making up stories.”

  Part of his skill had been honed to near perfection in the process of making up alibis for why his assignments weren’t in on time, or why he’d missed attending one class or another.

  There’d been a teacher, a dour looking professor with thick gray hair and an even thicker Scottish brogue, who’d told him that he might be better off putting his fertile mind to some sort of productive use that didn’t involve fabricating elaborate excuses. After a bit, he’d decided to take the professor’s words to heart and, as people liked to say, the rest was history.

  They’d entered Laguna Beach proper, with its tiny, artsy shops, a couple of minutes ago. Brandon hadn’t even noticed. He took a second to orient himself. A pinch in his gut told him what time it was.

  “Are you hungry?” Brandon asked.

  The question had come out of left field. She glanced at her watch and realized that they had been driving around for almost an hour. If anything, she would have assumed he’d turn around to go back, not suggest staying out longer.

  Maybe he really didn’t want to go back and stare at his blank computer screen, she thought. If that was the case, she was happy to play along and give him an excuse. Besides, she really was hungry. “Why, is my stomach growling?”

  “No, but I just realized we’re coming up on The Enchanted Cottage, and I don’t know about you, but I left without having any lunch.”

  She hadn’t eaten lunch, either, and breakfast was a blur. But she was more interested right now in the name he’d just casually dropped. “The Enchanted Cottage?” she repeated. “Isn’t that an old movie with Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire?”

  They were at a light, and he took the opportunity to stare at her in wonder. “I’ve never met anyone else who’d ever heard of the movie. Did you even have a childhood?” he asked.

  “Yes, and that was it, watching old movies.” Getting lost in stories that were larger than life had helped her deal with a cold upbringing.

  “Well, I’m impressed,” he freely admitted. “So, are you hungry?”

  She could literally feel her stomach tightening in both protest and anticipation. She nodded. “I could eat, yes.”

  That was all he wanted to hear. Brandon grinned. “Great.”

  As it turned out, the restaurant, which looked like a quaint cottage, was just up ahead, nestled on the corner to his left at the next traffic light. It was timed to turn red as he approached and then took its own sweet time turning green again, despite the fact that there was no through traffic to merit the long wait.

  The moment it turned green, Brandon drove down the side street and searched for a place to park. Half a block later, he found it. He carefully slipped his vehicle between a truck and a sports car with an ease she couldn’t help admiring.

  “You parallel park.” There was no missing the note of awe in her voice. She was lucky to manage head-in parking. Wedging a vehicle between two tight places was definitely not one of her favorite activities. She was fairly certain that she couldn’t do it.

  “I also know all the stanzas to ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’” Brandon quipped as he pulled up the emergency brake and turned off the ignition.

  “A man wit
h endless talents,” Isabelle remarked with only partially feigned admiration.

  Getting out of the vehicle, he laughed. “I guess that accurately sums me up.”

  The next moment, the laugh faded as he quickly jumped into action. Grabbing Isabelle by the shoulder, he yanked her back, away from the street.

  Caught off guard, she stumbled, and her body slammed into his. All their parts fitted together splendidly, leaving no space for even a glimmer of daylight.

  The reason for the sudden action was to prevent Isabelle from being hit by a careening, all-but-out-of-control sports car whose driver had obviously taken to celebrating heavily a little early in the day. The sound of tires screeching and wailing as the driver narrowly avoided smashing into several parked cars on the next block vaguely registered along the outer perimeter of her mind.

  What registered in the foreground was heat.

  Lots and lots of heat.

  None of which was emanating from the beach a mere block away as the crow flew. It was being created from the very firm, very enticing contact of their two bodies momentarily sealed against one another in the most natural, albeit the most sensually provocative, of ways.

  Was that his heart beating like a wild drum, or hers? At this point, she couldn’t tell. She only knew that she was in very real danger of melting as the feeling of excitement all but roared through her veins like a charging rhino.

  “Sorry,” Brandon murmured, looking down into her eyes, making no effort to pull away.

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” she replied, the words leaving her mouth in what felt like slow motion, in direct contrast to the wild throbbing of her pulse. It beat so hard, she thought it would shatter her wrists. “You just saved me from being flattened,” she managed to conclude. She congratulated herself on not sounding too breathless.

  Shaking himself free of the spell that she’d woven around him, he pretended to look up and down the rurallike street.

  “Never a cop around when you need one,” he complained under his breath.

  She was just now coming to grips with what could have happened. “Good thing you were here.”

  His eyes skimmed over her body, none the worse for wear, he decided. “Yeah. Good thing,” he parroted.

  God, but the conversation was inane. It had to be brought up two notches before it could even qualify as “lame.”

  He could do so much better on paper, Brandon told himself. Had done so much better in real life. But that was when his brain was functioning, capable of forming complete sentences. Right now, all he could think of was that he wanted to kiss this woman. Wanted to kiss her in the very worst possible way. Kiss her for a very long time.

  But she was his mother’s physical therapist, and some how, kissing her just didn’t seem right.

  The next moment, he rebelled at the restriction. The hell with right.

  The last phrase echoed in his head as he cupped the sides of Isabelle’s face with his hands. By turns he saw the surprise, the wonder and then the surrender in her eyes. She tilted her head back ever so slightly.

  The silent invitation was clear.

  Brandon brought his mouth down on hers.

  Her pulse was already fast because she’d just barely escaped being struck by the careening sports car. But it might as well have stopped beating altogether in comparison to its speed the moment Brandon began kissing her.

  Fireworks went off in her veins as his kiss registered and then deepened. Her head spun.

  She’d read that exact sort of description once, had even mulled over it wistfully, despite telling herself that feelings like that didn’t happen in real life. Kisses were just that. Kisses. Lips touching lips. Skin on skin. Nothing more. Kisses had no secret powers, no ability to set rockets ricocheting through the heavens and through her as they simultaneously wiped out all ability to think. That was just literary license run amok.

  But here she was, having it happen. To her. One moment, she was almost roadkill, the next, soaring through the afternoon sky, no longer bound by something so mundane as a mortal body.

  He made her feel positively giddy, and she absolutely loved the sensation.

  The attraction Brandon had initially felt for her flared. Momentarily vulnerable by the very real possibility of losing her had his reaction been a nanosecond slower, he’d kissed her.

  And discovered himself in a whole different place than he thought he would be.

  Control was extremely important to Brandon, because there’d been so little of it available to him when he was younger. When he attained it, he held on to control as if it was his very reason for existing. His very lifeline.

  But just for a moment now, it slipped out of his grasp as this woman took him to heights he hadn’t expected and to sensations he hadn’t thought possible.

  It was a major revelation to him.

  Coming up for air, Brandon drew back and looked in wonder at the woman he’d brought along on this little field trip. Concerned that she might have been offended, he didn’t know whether or not an apology was in order. There was no way on earth he was sorry he’d kissed her. But he honestly didn’t know how she might react to what had just happened.

  Unable to put up with the stillness any longer, he broke it by making an apology. “Sorry,” he murmured.

  About? Was he sorry that he’d thrown his doors open to anyone and everyone? Or was it more personal than that? Was he sorry he kissed her?

  “I already told you that you have nothing to be sorry about.”

  “That was before—”

  He was talking about before he’d kissed her, she realized. Straightening, her eyes never leaving his, she allowed her voice to interrupt his. “But it still applies.”

  He relaxed a little, relieved that she wasn’t annoyed, that she didn’t think he had just taken advantage of her because the opportunity had presented itself. Nothing would have been further from the truth. If anything, he’d been the one to be taken advantage of. Not by her, but by his own momentary lapse into vulnerability.

  He didn’t like leaving himself open like that. People who were open got hurt. That was why, ordinarily, he was locked up tighter than Fort Knox. Nothing and no one got through.

  Because the last time he’d allowed himself to be open, to be vulnerable, he’d lost his heart to Jean, Victoria’s mother. At the time, he’d thought it was a good thing because it was for forever. Learning that “forever” was incredibly finite had been a cruel, hard lesson that had almost broken him. But he had learned it. It was a lesson that he meant never to forget.

  But Isabelle had made him do just that, made him forget, if only for a moment.

  He had to be careful that it didn’t happen again. Because he knew that the consequences would be too hard for him to endure.

  “About that lunch you promised me,” Isabelle prodded cheerfully, sensing he needed to have his thoughts diverted. She nodded toward the old-fashioned building they’d passed at the corner.

  “Right.”

  This time, he looked both ways before placing a hand to her back and guiding her across the street. There’d been enough risks taken for one day.

  Chapter Eight

  “Oh, my God, the view from here is absolutely incredible!” Isabelle cried breathlessly. “It’s like looking into forever.”

  “Looking into forever,” Brandon repeated, rolling the words around in his mind. “Might not make a bad title,” he murmured, more to himself than to her.

  They had had their late lunch at the restaurant, which, she’d discovered, turned out to be even more quaint on the inside than on the outside. Afterward, they’d gone across the street to take in the view. There was a charming gazebo built strictly for that purpose. It had been there, Brandon told her, for as long as anyone could remember.

  The freshly repainted gray, circular structure was perched on the edge of an embankment that overlooked the beach. The ocean stretched out from there for as far as the eye could see.

  It was the ocean t
hat had captured Isabelle’s attention. The waters were almost painfully blue and just slightly restless, its waves reaching out to the shore only to withdraw like a flirtatious southern belle, teasing her suitor and testing her feminine powers for the first time.

  She could have stood here watching for hours. If she’d had the time.

  “Do you come here often?” The moment she asked and heard her own question out loud, Isabelle had to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Brandon asked, more than a little amused. Isabelle’s laugh was captivating. Captivating and innocent, like having someone take his hand and draw him into a party.

  “What I just asked you, that sounded like a line a guy usually says to a girl in a bar or a club.” Mocking the scenario, she made her eyebrows rise and fall wickedly before repeating the question using a far deeper voice than she had initially. “Come here often, honey?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” he purposely took on the feminine role and made his voice go up two octaves, approximating a falsetto. And then he went on more seriously in his own voice, “Driving up and down Pacific Coast Highway and looking at the ocean from here are a couple of ways I use to clear my head and get my creative juices flowing.”

  From out of nowhere, there was the smell of rain in the air. It rarely rained in southern California in July, so Isabelle attributed the sudden damp smell to the wind shifting, ushering in the scent of the sea.

  “In your quest for creativity, do you ever walk along the beach itself?” she asked.

  “That’s my third way,” he confirmed.

  Brandon glanced down at the shoes she was wearing. Her footwear was the one very impractical thing about her. Rather than running shoes or low, barely-there heels, Isabelle apparently favored high-heeled sandals. Granted, the heels were rather solid as opposed to stilettos, but they were still high heels. He’d never seen her wearing anything else. He’d asked her about them once, saying that he would have thought that sneakers would have worked better for her. She’d replied that she felt more stable and in control of the situation in heels. Thanks to life with his mother and Victoria, he knew better than to argue with a woman when her mind was set.