The Daddy Project

“What’s his name? What does he do?”

“Oh. Nate. His name’s Nate and he’s a… He works in landscaping.” And in a blink the fib turned into a terrible lie that she would, without question, live to regret.

“Well, this is certainly a surprise. Where did you meet him?”

“Through work.” That part was true. “And I’m at work right now, Mom, so I really can’t talk.”

“I’ll call you tonight so we can make plans. You’ll have to invite him to Wanda’s barbecue so we can all meet him. So Jenna can meet him. Or you can give me his number and I’ll invite him.”

And there came the part where she would live to regret this…right on schedule. “No! No. Thanks, Mom. I’ll talk to him about it. I’m not sure if he’s free, though. I think maybe he mentioned something about having plans with his family.” Stop. Talking. The hole she was digging would soon be so deep, she’d never climb out of it. “I have to go, Mom. I’m working with a new client this afternoon. I’ll talk to you later.”

“I’ll call you tonight,” Gwen said again.

Kristi couldn’t tell if there was a subtle threat in her mother’s parting words, or if the guilt she was feeling had skewed her perception. Most likely a little of both.

Over the years her mother and Aunt Wanda had tried to set her up with more eligible men than she could count. She’d managed to avoid going out with most of them, but occasionally they’d caught her off guard, like the times they had invited someone like Bernie Halverson to a family event. Not one of those men had come close to looking like Nate McTavish. Not that looks were everything, but there hadn’t been any chemistry with any of them, either. Shaking hands with Nate had left her insides bubbling like a beaker over a Bunsen burner.

Even his T-shirt has chemistry written all over it.

She rolled her eyes at that thought. She had no business getting all dreamy-eyed schoolgirl over her new client. She had a job to do.

From somewhere in the house, a phone rang. She counted six rings before it stopped, unanswered.

She quickly scrolled through her photographs of the living room. Satisfied she had everything she needed for now, she crossed the room, opened a second set of frosted glass doors and walked into the dining room. Another unused space, judging by the cool temperature and drifts of gift wrap and empty toy packaging littering the floor. There were more yellow-and-mauve streamers and dejected-looking balloons, but everything else about the dining room was neat as a pin. It was spacious, with plenty of room to maneuver around a table that would comfortably seat ten. The furniture was a little too flea-market-finds-meet-grandma’s-attic to really suit the house, but some of it was solid and in good condition. She always liked to keep her budget as low as possible, so she would make it work.

From the moment she’d driven up, she’d loved this house, but now she felt a little sad for it, having its beautiful rooms closed up and uninhabited. This house deserved to be lived in by someone who would love it at least as much as she did.

At the back of the dining room was a third pair of opaque glass doors, closed like the others. She pulled them open, stepped into a spacious and very messy kitchen, tripped over the dog’s water bowl and sent a small tidal wave gushing across the tile floor.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Who puts a bowl of water in front of a closed door?” Apparently a frazzled single dad did. She had no idea where to look for a mop and she couldn’t leave this huge puddle on the kitchen floor. So much for working through the house on her own. Now she had to find that distractingly sexy and very single dad and ask him for help.

Chapter Two

Nate herded the girls and the dog through the family room.

“Why can’t we stay with the lady?” Molly asked.

“Because I have work to do.”

“We can stay with her.”

“She has work to do, too,” he said, sliding the patio door open.

“Taking pictures?”

“Yes.” And he was happy to leave her on her own. It was one thing to stand with her in the living room, or almost any other room, while she made notes and took photographs. But eventually they would get to his bedroom, and the idea of going in there with her had brought on a mild state of panic.

“She has a pretty purse,” Molly said.

“Does she?” He shut the patio door behind them. He had only noticed her bag was huge. And stuffed full.

“It has cupcakes on it.”

“Does it?”

Martha pulled her thumb out of her mouth. “I yike cupcakes.”

“I know you like cupcakes. Why don’t you two go in the playhouse and have a look at the new dress-up clothes Aunt Britt dropped off this morning.” He’d asked Britt to bring them out here because the girls’ bedroom already looked like Toys “R” Us had tangled with a tornado. “Maybe she brought you some purses.”

His sister, a self-proclaimed clotheshorse, frequently cleared out her closet to make room for new things and bestowed the items she no longer wanted on her nieces. The girls loved it, but their bedroom, the family room and now the playhouse overflowed with toys and Britt’s cast-offs.

“Come on, Martha. Let’s see what she brung us.” Molly snagged the dog by the collar and tugged. “You, too, Gemmy.”

At the entrance to the playhouse, she let go of the Saint’s collar and skipped inside. Martha straggled in behind her, and Gemmy sprawled across the doorway, head resting on her paws.

After they were settled, Nate turned his attention to the rows of potted asters in his makeshift greenhouse and tried not to think about the beautiful woman with the ginormous cupcake purse who was discovering that he was not the world’s greatest housekeeper. How had he not remembered to put a reminder about this meeting in his calendar? If he had, he would have spent last evening tidying up instead of going over the final draft of his current research paper.

He measured the height of a plant and recorded the data in the spreadsheet on his laptop.

Kristi Callahan was stunning in a wholesome girl-next-door sort of way, with a lively swing to her blond ponytail and an engaging flash in her gray-green eyes. More green than gray. She smelled good, too.

His cell phone rang. After three rings, he tracked it to the end of the workbench, where it was hiding beneath a spare pair of gloves. His in-laws’ phone number was displayed on the screen. What now?

“Hello, Alice. How are you?”

“Nate, I was getting worried. I called the house but no one answered.”

Nate sighed. He and the kids could have been out for the afternoon or even just at the supermarket, and he refused to check in with her every time they left the house.

“Sorry, Alice. I didn’t hear it ringing. I’m out in the greenhouse.”

“Where are the girls?”

He resented the accusatory tone. Where did she think they were? “They’re in the playhouse. Gemmy and I are keeping an eye on them.”

“That’s good. You know if you’re busy, you can drop them off here anytime. Fred and I are always happy to see them.”

There were lots of things he’d like to say, but only one of them was polite. “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

“Did that person from the real estate company show up?”

Now they were getting to the real reason for her call. At least she’d called and not shown up unannounced as she often did. He never should have told her he was going to sell the house, especially since her constant interference was one of his reasons for wanting to move. He didn’t like the idea of being too far from the university, but his next house would be a lot farther than fourteen blocks from Alice and Fred’s.

“She’s taking a look at the house right now.”

“And you’re out in the greenhouse?”

“I wanted to keep Gemmy and the girls out of her way, so I brought them outside. Besides, she’s just deciding what needs to be done.” He didn’t have to be around for that.

“You should have asked us to help instead of spending good money to have someone else do this.”

Nate closed his eyes and, for several seconds, indulged in the idea of applying for a faculty position at another university. One on the other side of the country. Or maybe in a different country.

“There’s a house for sale down the street from us,” Alice said. “It would be perfect for you and the girls, and they’re having an open house on the weekend. You should come by and have a look.”

“That sounds…interesting.” Nate picked up a garden trowel and imagined stabbing himself in the head with it. Alice had lost her only child, he reminded himself, but that didn’t make it easy for him to rationalize her interference. After Heather died, Alice had transferred all of her attention to her granddaughters. Understandable, and he appreciated everything she did for them. Mostly. But she had always made it clear that she considered him to be partly responsible for Heather’s death. He’d managed to heap a fair amount of blame on himself and he didn’t need her adding to it. She was Molly and Martha’s grandmother and he had to be civil, but no way was he buying a house within walking distance of the world’s most meddlesome mother-in-law. He set the trowel on his workbench.

“While I have you on the phone,” Alice continued. “Remember that children’s beauty pageant we discussed?”

His insides coiled into a knot. There had been no discussion. Only her saying he should enter the girls, and him saying no. “Yes, I remember.”

“You might not like the idea, but you should look at their website before you make up your mind. It will be so good for them.”

Good for them? They were four years old.

“Especially Martha,” she said. “These sorts of things build confidence and that will help her to stop sucking her thumb.”

“I’ve been busy, Alice.”

“The application deadline is only a couple of weeks away.”

He contemplated the trowel again. “Right. I’ll take a look.” Or not. There was no way his daughters would be paraded around like a pair of miniature beauty queens, not to mention having to compete with one another. No way in hell.

“Speaking of the girls,” he said, not wanting to leave her with another opening. “I need to check on them. Thanks for calling, Alice. I’ll talk to you later.”

He set his phone on the table and stared at it, picturing it impaled by the garden trowel. Instead he measured the next plant and updated the spreadsheet while he shoved the conversation with Alice to the back of his mind. He had more important, and appealing, things to think about. Like the woman currently inside his home.

He could kick himself for forgetting she was coming here this afternoon. A colleague at the university had recommended Ready Set Sold, so he had called them from his office and scrawled the appointment on a notepad, which by now was buried on his desk beneath everything else he’d been working on—the syllabus for the summer school course he was teaching next month, a draft of a research paper he was coauthoring with a colleague and the latest edition of the American Journal of Botany. He really needed to be better organized, but he could scarcely remember a time when his life wasn’t out of control.

In the months after his wife died, he had welcomed the help and support he’d received. Even relied on it. Over time, his family had backed off, but not Heather’s. They meant well, at least that’s what he wanted to believe, but their good intentions frequently overstepped the boundaries. Without coming right out and saying it, Alice often implied that he should be doing a better job of raising her granddaughters, of keeping the house tidier, of being two parents instead of just one.

She insisted Molly and Martha were old enough to look after their own things, and part of him acknowledged that might be true, but he couldn’t bring himself to make them do it. They had already lost their mother, so it didn’t seem right that they be stuck with an overbearing father who made them earn their keep. Alice was also of the opinion that Martha was too old to be sucking her thumb, and she was now pressuring him to put an end to that by entering her in a beauty pageant of all things.

Heather would have known exactly how to handle her mother and their daughters. Why didn’t he? He was a bright guy with a PhD and a career as a scientist. When it came to family, he felt hopelessly in over his head, and he was also smart enough to know that reflected his own upbringing. His mother had kept house and raised him and his sister. His father had been the family’s sole breadwinner and his fallback approach to child rearing had always been “go ask your mother.” Over the years Nate had learned a lot of things from his dad, but parenting skills weren’t among them.

These days Nate rarely thought about the weeks and months after Heather died, leaving him with a pair of toddlers and a fledgling career as a professor of botany at the University of Washington. When he did reflect on those dark days, they were blurred by grief, and even a little guilt. His two-year-old daughters had needed his undivided attention, 24/7, and that had kept him going. The university had even granted him a semester’s leave. Many people, including his family and Heather’s, thought he should have taken more time off but he had wanted to get his life back to normal.

Now, two years later, he was probably as adept at juggling his family and his professional life as he would ever be, and it felt as though the ship had sailed on establishing boundaries for his in-laws. Selling the house and moving to another neighborhood might not be the best solution, but right now it felt like his only one. And it was better to do it now. The girls wouldn’t stay little forever. They’d be starting school next year, and this would get easier. It had to.

He knew the future would bring different demands, not fewer, but a smaller house would be more manageable, and a fresh start might make it easier to lay down some new ground rules. But first he had to sell this house, and he was definitely smart enough to know he needed professional help with that. Heather had planned to decorate right after they bought the place, but she was already pregnant, and then she got sick. The girls were born six weeks early, and then she got even sicker. Curtains and cushions had never been on his list of priorities, and they had dropped off Heather’s. Once he’d made the decision to sell the house, Ready Set Sold seemed like the perfect solution. Alice might think “home staging” was a waste of money and phony as hell, but Kristi Callahan seemed like the real deal. Even her blond hair looked natural. Nice curves, great legs—

“Nate?”

He dropped his calipers.

“I’m sorry,” Kristi said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Oh. No, you didn’t.” Like hell she didn’t. His imagination had been on the verge of conducting a closer examination of those legs. He hoped his red face didn’t give that away. “I’m just clumsy,” he lied.

Her laugh sounded completely genuine. “Clumsy is my middle name. I’m afraid I spilled your dog’s water bowl. It was in front of the door between the dining room and the kitchen, and I can’t find anything to clean it up.”

He bent down to pick up the calipers, came face-to-knee with the hem of her skirt and jolted himself back to the upright position. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll come in and mop it up.”

“So, this is your greenhouse,” she said, looking around. “It’s not what I expected.”

“It’s technically not a greenhouse. It was built as a pergola and the previous owners converted it into a pool house by adding the change room at the back. We don’t use the swimming pool.” He gestured at the bright blue cover. “So I closed this in with heavy-gauge plastic and use it as a greenhouse instead.”

“I see.”

He could tell she didn’t, but at least she hadn’t called it an eyesore like his mother-in-law had.

“You have a lot of plants,” she said. “Is this what you do for a living?”

He surveyed the rows of asters. “I teach botany at Washington U. I’m collecting data for a senior undergraduate course I’ll be teaching this fall.”

“So, you’re a university professor.” She was still looking at the plants as though she wasn’t quite sure what to make of them.

“Yes, and I also do research.” Oh, geez. As if she would care.

“What are you researching?” she asked, probably because she felt she had to say something.

“The poor reproductive barriers in species of angiosperms.”

“Really?” She looked puzzled. “I didn’t think plants had sperm.”

Nate laughed. “I said angiosperms. That’s the botanical term for flowering plants. You’re right that plants don’t have sperm. At least not in the strictest sense of the word.”

Her cheeks flared pink. Her comment had been innocent enough and he wished he had let it go.

“I thought you might be a gardener,” she said.

Now it was his turn to be puzzled.

“You were wearing garden gloves when you answered the door and your T-shirt—” She glanced at his chest and away again. “So…”

He liked that she was still blushing.

“It’s the equation for photosynthesis,” he said. “I got this at a conference I attended last year.”

“I thought so. I mean, that’s what it says on the back. So, about the mop…” She hiked her thumb toward the house. “I need to clean up the water I spilled and finish looking through the other rooms.”

He also liked that she was outwardly more flustered than he felt on the inside. “I’ll clean it up. It’s my fault for leaving Gemmy’s bowl in front of the door.”

He set the calipers beside the next plant he needed to measure, saved the spreadsheet and closed his laptop. “Molly? Martha? I’m going inside for a couple of minutes.”

“We’re playing school,” Molly yelled back. “An’ I’m the teacher.”

“Good for you. I’ll be right back. Gemmy, stay,” he said, giving the dog the palm-out signal for “stay.” She rolled onto her side with her back firmly pressed against the playhouse door and her eyelids slowly slid shut. She wasn’t going anywhere and neither were the girls.

“I take it Gemmy is a girl,” Kristi said as they circled the pool together and walked toward the house.

“She is. It’s short for Hegemone.”

“That’s an unusual name. I’ve never heard it before.”

“Hegemone is the Greek goddess of plants. The botany connection seemed like a good idea when I got her. Then the girls came along and they couldn’t pronounce it so they shortened it to Gemmy. She also responds to Gem. And Milk-Bone treats.”

“My dog’s name is Hercules. That’s a Greek god, too. I think.”

“Roman, actually. Borrowed from the Greek Heracles, son of Zeus. He was half mortal and half god.”

“Oh. We thought he was the god of strength or something.”

She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring so he’d assumed she was single. The “we” implied otherwise.

“He was, among other things,” Nate said. He resisted the urge to elaborate. She probably already thought he was a complete nerd. No point sounding like a walking encyclopedia and removing any doubt. “What kind of dog is Hercules?”

“A Yorkshire terrier.”

He laughed. “Good name. Does he live up to it?”

He slid the patio door open for her and waited for her to go inside.

“Only in that he has me and my daughter completely wrapped around one of his tiny little paws.”

“But not your husband?”

She met his gaze head-on. “I don’t have a husband.”

“I see.” He had wanted it to sound like an innocent question. It was anything but, and they both knew it. For a few seconds they stared awkwardly at one another, then she looked away.

“So…I’ll just grab the mop.”

He left her waiting in the family room and sidestepped the massive puddle on the kitchen floor. He looked in several places before he located the mop in the mudroom and the bucket in the garage.

In the kitchen, Kristi stood at the end of the peninsula that separated the kitchen from the eating area. She had set her enormous cupcake bag on the counter next to her and was looking at the monitor of the camera in her hands. The bag was a light purple color and printed with wildly colorful cupcakes, which the girls had gushed over. It was also large and completely stuffed. He’d heard all the jokes about the contents of a woman’s handbag, but this was over-the-top. How much stuff did one woman need to carry around with her?

“You have a great house,” she said, without looking up from the camera.

“Thanks.” You have great legs, he thought as he quickly looked down and up again, past the purple skirt and short, matching jacket with the big black buttons, relieved she wasn’t watching him.

He set the bucket on the floor, and Kristi reached for the mop.

He shook his head. “I’ll look after it. It was my fault anyway. I keep the door closed, so I put the water there because it was out of the way.”

As he ran the mop over the floor, he kept a surreptitious eye on Kristi. She wasn’t paying any attention to him. Instead something on the fridge door had caught her attention. The latest strip of pictures of him and the girls from the photo booth at the mall.

“Cute photographs,” she said.

“Thanks. We started taking them when their—” When their mother was dying. Daily visits to the hospital had become too much of a strain for her and too stressful for the girls, so he’d started taking the photographs to her instead. He couldn’t tell that to a stranger. “We started taking them a couple of years ago. It’s sort of become a tradition.”

“I think it’s lovely,” she said.

He worked the mop across the floor, keeping what seemed like a safe distance from her. Safe, that is, until his gaze sought out the shapely curve of her calves, the slender ankles....

The mop handle connected with something.

He whipped around in time to see her enormous cupcake bag slide off the counter, but he was too slow to catch it. Like a slice of buttered toast, it flipped and hit the floor upside down, and then there was no need to wonder what was in the bag because its contents were strewn across the damp kitchen floor. “Dammit.”

Kristi set her camera on the counter, laughed and knelt at the same time he did, the tip of her blond ponytail brushing the side of his face as she tossed it over her shoulder. She smelled like springtime and lilacs.

She started cramming her possessions back into the bag.

He gathered as many things as he could and handed them to her. A notebook, several pens, an empty Tic Tac box, a hairbrush, two tampons and…oh, geez…a condom? The warmth of a flush crept up his neck, but he was sure his red face was no match for hers. She held the bag open and he dropped everything inside, avoiding eye contact.

“Thanks.” She stuffed a bunch of receipts and a wallet into the bag. “I think we got everything.”

He stood up, and she stood up, wobbling a little on account of her heels. He grasped her arm to steady her, reminded of how she’d nearly tripped on Martha’s boot. She smiled up at him, and when he looked into the depths of her green eyes he felt like a cliff diver plunging headfirst into an unfamiliar sea.

“So…” she said, then stopped as though she wasn’t sure what else to say. A lot of her sentences started that way.

“I should get back outside. The girls are out there, and I still have work to do.”

“Me, too.” She flung the overstuffed bag over her shoulder. “Inside, not outside. It won’t take me long to finish up, then I was thinking I could just let myself out. Would it be okay if I come back tomorrow? In the morning, maybe, say around nine, if you’re not too busy. That’ll give me a chance to look through the photos I’ve taken, talk to my partners.” She stopped, drew a long breath.

She was embarrassed, probably in a hurry to get out of here, and it was his fault. If he’d been paying attention to what he was doing instead of admiring her legs, he wouldn’t have knocked her bag off the counter. And then, if he’d been paying attention, he would have left the little plastic packet for her to pick up and pretended not to see it.