Assignment: Twins

He probably slipped out before I could think of any other favors to ask, she told herself dryly. Or perhaps someone was waiting for him. He hadn’t mentioned another date, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have one.

She opened her briefcase and swore when the blinking blue light on her cell phone caught her eye. The light meant she had voice mail waiting for her—probably from the courier service trying once more to deliver the paperwork on the MacIntyres’ counteroffer. That was yet another thing she’d have to deal with—or hand off to someone else—tomorrow morning.

She was truly off balance, she told herself, to have gone away and left her phone behind—and not even noticed that it wasn’t in her pocket. It figures, she thought. The damned thing had rung only once all weekend, until she’d walked off without it—but now she probably had messages stacked to the ceiling.

She punched in the code to retrieve her voice mail. There was only one message after all. That was a small blessing.

Behind her, Seth said, “Give me your keys so I can move the safety seats into your car.”

That was sweet of him, thinking ahead to make the morning easier for her. Nikki dug in the side pocket of the briefcase for her key chain, and froze as the message started to play. “It’s Laura,” she said and held the phone at an angle so Seth could listen too.

The connection wasn’t the best, and there was so much background noise that it sounded as if Laura was calling from a New Years’ Eve party. “Nikki, where are you? You always answer your phone—oh, no, I hope that doesn’t mean something’s wrong with one of the babies. I only have a minute—there are people waiting, so I can’t talk long. We’re fine, we don’t have this—stuff, this virus, whatever it is. But they’re holding us prisoner even though we’re perfectly healthy—oh, all right, Stephen, I know my minute’s up. Nikki, I’ll try again when I can get back to a phone, but I don’t know when that will be—you wouldn’t believe the lines. I’m so sorry to do this to you. Kiss the babies for me and tell them Mommy wants to come home.”

The message clicked off and there was silence.

Nikki tried to blink back tears. “Oh, damn, I wish I’d been here. I could have told her I’ll take care of the babies—”

“She knows.” Seth’s voice was little more than a whisper.

Only when she felt the warmth of his breath against her cheek did Nikki realize how close his face was to hers. It had seemed so natural to share the phone, to tip it so he could listen, too. So he could share right away in any news, rather than her having to relay it. To be close enough to lean on him, in case the news was bad.

But now that they were practically cheek to cheek…She was almost breathless.

Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. It isn’t like there’s anything romantic going on here.

Oh, there were plenty of sparks between her and Seth Baxter, all right—there had been ever since that day at the church two years ago when she’d told Thorpe precisely why she wasn’t going to marry him, and then she’d turned around to see Seth half hidden behind a pillar and drinking in every word as if it were hundred-year-old scotch.

But the sparks weren’t the starry-eyed kind. Far from it, in fact. What the two of them created was the kind of grinding, gnashing spark which flared when metal scraped against rock—and heaven help anything that got between.

No, the reason she was feeling off-balance right now had nothing to do with Seth practically having an arm around her. She was just suffering from a sudden attack of sentimentality. Even if she’d expected that message to be from Laura, Nikki would never have anticipated how strongly affected she would be by simply hearing her friend’s voice. It was no wonder if her first thought was to look for a supportive shoulder—it had absolutely nothing to do with who the closest shoulder happened to belong to.

She snapped the phone closed and took a step away from him. “Well, at least we know that Laura and Stephen are all right.” She kept her voice cheerful. “That’s good news. If they haven’t gotten sick yet, they probably won’t, and maybe they can leave the ship tomorrow.” She dropped the phone back into her bag. “Oh, you wanted to shift the car seats.”

Seth took her keys without a word.

Nikki pushed the high chairs aside and sat down at the dining room table with her papers. Though she didn’t try to memorize the details of every transaction, she’d learned a long time ago that being able to explain each number, what it meant, and how it was calculated was almost certain to make the closing proceed more smoothly. When clients were signing documents that obligated them to thirty years of mortgage payments, it was no time for the real-estate person to appear uncertain or uninformed.

She flipped through the document and tried to page back to make a comparison, only to find the first sheet stuck to the table. How on earth, she wondered, had Zack and Anna managed to spread their lunchtime applesauce so far and so liberally without her noticing?

Seth came back inside as she was prying the page loose. “Thanks for moving the seats,” Nikki said. “I’m always afraid I won’t get them in right.”

“I didn’t move them. I’ll take your car tonight, and we’ll swap back in the morning in Rockhurst. Got a scrap of paper?”

“What? You’re taking my car?”

Seth shrugged. “I looked at the back seat and decided it’s easier to move my tools than the safety seats. See you at Mrs. Cooper’s in the morning.” He scrawled an address across her copy of the offer-to-buy, dropped his key on the table, and was gone before she could say anything more.

“Nice guy,” Nikki muttered. “He just drives off in my car without even asking whether I mind.”

But the longer she thought about it, the more relieved she was. Seth might be tempted to leave her stranded with two babies, but she was absolutely certain that he would never abandon her while she had possession of his SUV.

Seth caught himself checking his watch again. If Nikki was going to make it downtown on time, she’d better get her cute little tush—and his SUV—into gear. What was holding her up, anyway? Heavy traffic, perhaps. The Monday morning rush hour had been worse than usual. He just hoped she hadn’t stalled out on the freeway, or gotten into a fender-bender. Maybe he should have turned himself into a contortionist to get those seats into the back of her car after all, instead of expecting her to drive his. She wasn’t used to a big vehicle—he knew that for a fact, because he’d had to fold himself up to fit behind the wheel of her little car.

He heard wood slam against concrete and wheeled around to see one of the workers looking sheepishly down at a scattered pile of lumber lying on the driveway. The delivery crew foreman came around the back corner of the truck and started to yell. “That’s high-grade oak, you idiot! Take it a few pieces at a time so you don’t bang it up.” He called to Seth, “We’ll get it all around back and then we can inspect for damages, sir.”

Seth nodded. He looked down the driveway again and saw his SUV pulling cautiously off the street. About time she showed up. Relieved, he walked down to meet her.

Nikki rolled the window down and leaned out. She was already wearing her standard-issue dark-blue jacket, with her engraved name badge clipped to the lapel. Her hair was caught up at the back of her head in a knot that was held together with what looked to Seth like chopsticks. The sunlight made it look more red than its usual medium brown, and the breeze caught a strand and whipped it around her face. She tucked it impatiently behind her ear.

“You’re running late,” Seth said. “I thought you might have had trouble finding the place.”

She looked indignant. “Not likely. For your information, I know every address in Rockhurst. I’ve sold a good number of these houses. In fact, see the one across the street? I’ve sold that one twice.”

Seth couldn’t resist. “Why? Weren’t the first buyers happy with it after all?” He enjoyed watching her sputter for a few moments. “You can park over there, out of the way of the delivery truck.” He pointed at a narrow strip of concrete between the garage and a row of ornamental evergreens.

She didn’t put the SUV into gear. Instead, she opened the door and slid out. “If you want it out of the way, you park it. It was all I could do to drive this bulldozer. Putting it into a confined space is something I don’t even want to think about. Where’s my car?”

“On the street, just around the corner and out of the path of the truck.”

One of the babies wailed, and Nikki looked over her shoulder, biting her lip.

“The other one will start up pretty quick,” Seth said. “They probably think since they can’t see you at the moment that you’ve disappeared forever. I’ll get them out in a minute and they’ll be fine.”

“They’re a little cranky.” She sounded a bit crochety herself, he thought, but the expression in her big hazel eyes was almost pleading. “I finally had to wake them up or I’d never have made it. But there wasn’t time to give them a bath, and they didn’t want breakfast, so they’ll no doubt be hungry in an hour or two.”

“Oh, that’s just great.”

“Hey, I’m not the one who kept them up late last night,” Nikki pointed out. “But I’ve already had to face the music. It’s your turn.” She leaned into the SUV.

The tailored khaki trousers she was wearing molded themselves to a trim but nicely rounded bottom. Seth watched with appreciation until she turned around again.

She was holding not a baby, as he’d expected, but only her briefcase. “See you in a couple of hours,” she said. “Have a good time.”

Both babies had started to cry in earnest. Seth smothered a sigh and opened the back door of the SUV. “Don’t worry,” he called after Nikki. “I’ll make sure they have a nap so when you get back they’ll be wide-awake and ready to entertain you!”

Nikki made a rude gesture over her shoulder and kept walking.

He grinned and unlatched Zack’s safety harness.

“Sir.” The foreman was standing right behind him, clipboard in hand. “If you can come around to the site now, we’re ready for you to inspect the materials and sign the invoice.”

Seth sighed and reached across Zack to lift Anna out. With a tearstained baby in each arm he followed the foreman around the corner of the house and past a trailer full of tools to the construction site.

At the back of the Mediterranean-style house a new wing, half as big as the original main floor, was taking shape. The poured concrete walls were ready for an eventual coat of stucco to match the rest of the house, half of the windows were in place, and the crates full of red tiles which had been part of this morning’s load of supplies were now stacked neatly nearby, ready to go up on the roof.

Half a dozen men were already at work, but the instant Seth came around the corner of the house with a baby in each arm, everything stopped while the men gawked at him.

His crew chief grinned. “What’s that, boss, a couple of new trainees? Couldn’t get any with experience?”

Seth ignored him and made the rounds of the site, checking the counts and looking over the oak which the delivery men had piled inside the new rooms, safely away from rain. A couple of boards had splintered when they’d hit the driveway, and the foreman noted the damage. “Do you need the replacements right away, or can we just put them on next week’s load?” he asked.

“Next week will be fine.”

“I’ll make sure they get on the truck then. All right, if you’ll sign here….” The foreman looked uncertainly at him and the babies. “I mean…”

The twins probably didn’t top twenty pounds each, but their combined weight, plus the fact that with both arms full he couldn’t shift the burden to let one arm take a break, had left Seth’s muscles aching. Moving stacks of two by fours—even tossing concrete blocks—was dead easy compared to walking around with a twenty-pound weight attached to each arm.

He thought about handing one of them to the foreman, but as if she’d read his mind, Anna grumbled and nestled closer. Well, the babies would just have to lump it for a minute, Seth decided. As long as he kept a close eye on them, they’d be as safe on the ground as anywhere.

He squatted down and set them on the lawn. Zack instantly grabbed a handful of the trampled grass and put it in his mouth. Anna yelped, clutched at Seth’s jeans, and tried to pull herself to a standing position. He hoped his belt buckle wouldn’t suddenly give way.

Seth signed the ticket, folded his copy, and stuck it in his shirt pocket, then bent to pick up Zack, who had green saliva trickling down his chin. “Come on, champ, spit it out,” he ordered.

“And then we need you to move the SUV out of the driveway so we can get the truck out,” the foreman added.

You can park over there, out of the way of the delivery truck, he’d told Nikki. But she had refused to move the SUV, and he’d forgotten to. He smothered a groan, picked up the babies, and hauled them back around to the front of the house.

The hell with it, he thought. It was only ten in the morning, but he might as well call it a day. He wasn’t going to accomplish anything with a twin grafted to each arm, anyway. And since he’d have to buckle them back in again so he could move the SUV fifty feet, he might as well take them home where they could play in the grass without risking splinters and stray roofing nails.

Only after he got them both settled in the back seat and slid behind the wheel did he realize that his key wasn’t in the ignition switch. In fact, it wasn’t anywhere to be found.

Nikki’s luck held. The traffic had lightened up in the few minutes while she was stopped in Rockhurst. And instead of having to drive five blocks past the bank and then get dizzy swooping around a parking ramp to find a spot to leave her car, she managed to filch the last parking place on the street directly in front of the building. It was a one-hour spot, however, and that helped to make her more brisk than usual at the closing, hurrying things along as much as she dared.

As soon as the last papers were signed, she stood up and started to briskly shake hands all around. “What’s your hurry, Nikki?” the banker asked. “I thought you and I would have lunch at that new little bistro on Country Club Plaza.”

“It’s much too early for lunch.”

“Of course it is,” he said gently. “I’ll pick you up at the office later.”

“Oh—I’m sorry, Richard, but I can’t. I have a long list for today.” The excuse sounded—and felt—a bit feeble, but she didn’t feel like explaining the twins, the cruise ship, and the virus in front of clients and bank staff. “I’ll call you later in the week,” she added, and gathered up her briefcase.

Richard Houston didn’t look pleased, but he didn’t argue.

The new homeowners had stopped on the sidewalk to wait for her, to thank her and invite her for dinner as soon as they got moved in. Nikki smiled vaguely and said she’d be in touch, and she practically ran to her car.

It had been locked while she was in the bank, of course, and the sunshine pouring through the glass had heated the leather of her seat till it was buttery soft and soothingly warm against her back, helping to relax the tension in her muscles.

The heat also seemed to have activated the scent of the leather—and something else, she noticed. Something clean-scented and musky and vaguely familiar. Seth’s aftershave, she concluded. She wondered how long that aroma would linger.

At the office, she gave the finished paperwork on the closing to Jen to be filed, picked up her messages, and looked wearily at the courier package which had finally come full circle back to the office. She’d probably better deliver it in person rather than take a chance on another delay.

“Also, Bryan wants to see you,” Jen added. “He’s in his office.”

No doubt her fellow salesperson was going to rib her about the MacIntyres’ counteroffer, Nikki thought. Well, there was nothing she could do about it now except smile. Telling Bryan what had really happened to sidetrack the courier package would only amuse him more.

Bryan was on the phone, so she started to walk on past his cubicle. But he beckoned her in and waved her to a chair while he ended his call. “It’s an important day for you, Nikki. I thought perhaps you’d like a hand to figure out your strategy for Neil Harrison.”

The auto-plant tycoon. At least it wasn’t about the MacIntyres. Not that Nikki was any happier to be talking to Bryan about Neil Harrison, especially since she was going to have to admit that she couldn’t stick around the office long enough today even to meet the man, much less show him houses.

“It’s nice of you to offer to help,” she said. “As a matter of fact—”

“Oh, I’m happy to give you my advice,” Bryan went on. “It’s all in finding the right strategy, Nikki. You know, of course, that men look at houses differently than women do. Women will look at anything and everything which vaguely resembles their needs. They’ll make a full-time job of house-hunting, while men want to look at just one place and be done with it.”

Ordinarily Nikki would have objected to the generalization, but today she didn’t have any room to maneuver. Bryan might be a sexist jerk at times, but he was a good salesman—and he was in a position to bail her out of a jam. If she asked him for help directly, however, he’d never let her hear the end of it.

It’s all in finding the right strategy, Nikki, she told herself. “You know, it’s funny,” she mused, “but I was just thinking about that very thing. The original call came to me because of the ordinary rotation, but I was wondering if Mr. Harrison wouldn’t rather have a man show him around.”

Bryan didn’t react at all for a moment. Then he said, sounding wary, “That isn’t like you, Nikki. Not grabbing a challenge—and the chance at a big commission.”

Nikki tried to look innocent. “I just want to do what’s best for the firm. You’re right that this is a very important client, and I’d much rather have you make the sale—and get the commission—than for me to fall short and get nothing.”

Bryan propped his elbows on the arms of his chair and clasped his hands together. “What’s wrong with him, Nikki?” Suspicion dripped from his voice.

“Wrong? Nothing, as far as I know. I’ve never met the man. I just thought you could probably read his reactions better than I could. You know, man to man.”

Bryan hesitated, then smiled slowly. “Well, that’s certainly true. All right, I don’t have anything better to do this afternoon. Which property were you going to show him first?”

“I hadn’t decided yet,” Nikki said truthfully. She wasn’t about to volunteer that she hadn’t even started to make a list, much less prioritize it. “And I wouldn’t want to cloud your judgment, anyway. Let me know how it goes, all right?”

She dug into her briefcase for her car key, and pulled out two. Her own, and Seth’s.

He was going to kill her. Worse, she didn’t blame him.

It was just past noon when Nikki got back to the house. The SUV was in the driveway, and she breathed a sigh of relief—though she still almost tiptoed into the kitchen, wary of fallout.

Seth was washing dishes while the twins played on the floor at his feet, creating a mad symphony with pan lids for cymbals and wooden spoons for drumsticks. He looked up when she came in, but he didn’t comment.

Relieved, she set her briefcase on the counter and picked up a towel. “I guess the fact that you’re here means you must have a spare key.”

“Now I do,” Seth said dryly.

Nikki bit her lip. “I’m really sorry. It’s force of habit to never leave a key in the ignition. Living in the city, driving in all kinds of neighborhoods…”

“Oh, think nothing of it. You could have automatically locked the doors with the twins still inside.” He rinsed the last plastic bowl.

Nikki looked at the pile. Laura had been right—it didn’t take long to create a mountain of china, glass and plastic. “Something tells me this is bad news for the dishwasher.”

Seth nodded. “It’s completely shot. I hoped I could substitute a new style of motor, but it’s just too ancient to find one that will fit.”

“Laura’s not going to like that.”

“It can’t be helped. I’m going back to work, Nikki. The babies are all yours.”

All yours. That sounded ominous. Was he planning to come back at all? He hadn’t promised anything beyond this morning… “Look, Seth, I said I’m sorry about the key.”

“I heard you. They’ve had lunch, by the way.”

“I see that. I’m just surprised they’ll eat spinach, if they won’t touch squash.”

Seth paused in mid-step. “Spinach?” He sounded as if he’d never heard of it before.

“Yeah.” She gestured. “The green stains down the front of Zack’s shirt. I’m not complaining, mind you, but you might try a bib next time.” She wanted to ask, Is there going to be a next time?

“Sure. I’ll keep that in mind.”

She followed him to the door. “Is there anything you’d like for dinner?”

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