Читать книгу: «Seductively Yours»

1

FOR GENERATIONS, scandal had haunted the McBrides like an avenging spirit. At times, Trevor McBride felt as if the sole purpose of his family’s existence had been to provide fodder for the avid gossips of Honoria, Georgia. Yet up until now, he had considered himself immune to the curse.

A straight-A student in high school, town baseball star, college scholarship winner and distinguished graduate, he’d gone directly from law school to Washington, D.C., where he’d quickly earned notice as an up-and-coming young statesman. His marriage to a woman from a distinguished and scandal-free old Virginia family had produced two beautiful children, and had generally been regarded to be happy and successful.

Trevor had managed to evade his family legacy for thirty-one years. But he’d just discovered, to his chagrin, that scandal would not accept rejection from a McBride. And when it finally made an appearance in Trevor’s life, it did so with a vengeance. He was finally learning to ignore the whispers, for the most part, but he had never learned to accept them.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Martha Godwin and Nellie Hankins watching him as he pushed a grocery cart down the cereal aisle. Their mouths moved rapidly and he had no doubt he was the subject of their conversation—even though, unlike the scandalmongers in D.C., they didn’t know the unpleasant details of his wife’s death nearly a year earlier. No one in Honoria knew, and Trevor intended to keep it that way. “Come on, Sam,” he said. “Stop dawdling.”

His five-year-old son had stopped to examine a particularly enticing box. “Can we get this one, Daddy?”

Trevor glanced at it. Chocolate puffs with chocolate-flavored marshmallows. “Don’t think that’s a good choice, son. Let’s stick with what we’ve got. Now, come on. Abbie’s getting hungry.”

“Me, too.” Sam abandoned the sugar-laden cereal and hurried after his father and sister. “Can I have a Fun Meal? They’re giving away race cars this week.”

Looking at the shopping cart filled with nutritious food, Trevor almost sighed at his son’s daily request for a dry burger and greasy fries accompanied by an inexpensive toy. He tried to give in to the request no more than a couple of times a month. “Not tonight, Sam.”

From her seat in the shopping cart, fourteen-month-old Abbie babbled something incomprehensible. Trevor gave her a distracted smile and pushed the cart past the gossip mavens, hoping they would be content to talk about him without feeling the need to talk to him. Maybe if he pretended not to notice them…

“Trevor. Oh, Trevor, dear.”

He would have cursed if his children hadn’t been listening. Reluctantly realizing a conversation was inevitable, he stopped and turned, feeling Sam crowding close to him. He made no effort to smile, but he spoke cordially enough. “Good evening, Mrs. Godwin.”

Nellie Hankins, he noticed, had bustled away. No Hankins would be seen associating with a McBride—the result of another old scandal.

Martha Godwin, blessed with all the tact of a tornado, moved to stand directly between him and the cash registers. “How have you been, Trevor? We haven’t seen you around much lately.”

“I’ve been busy, Mrs. Godwin.”

Her expression changed to one he detested, but had seen far too often during the past year—cloying pity. “Poor dear. It must be so difficult for you trying to raise these two adorable children on your own.”

Sam pressed his face more tightly into Trevor’s leg. Sam hated having attention focused on him—especially this sort of attention. Abbie babbled and crammed her fist in her mouth, slobbering enthusiastically.

“Precious child,” Martha crooned.

Abbie blew bubbles, making a sound that summed up the way Trevor was feeling. “Excuse me, Mrs. Godwin, the kids are hungry. Goodbye.”

He moved the cart forward so that she was forced to move aside or risk losing a few toes. She left in a dignified huff when it became obvious that she would pry no interesting comments out of Trevor today.

“Guess you put that old battle-ax in her place.” The supermarket checker spoke with a satisfaction that bespoke her experience of being on the wrong end of Martha’s gossip.

Ignoring her, Trevor waited impatiently to escape the supermarket and get back to the blessed privacy of his own home.

ON THE FIRST DAY of her summer vacation, Jamie Flaherty sighed happily and wiggled her brightly painted toenails, letting the sun soak into her mostly bared skin. She wouldn’t stay out long, she promised herself, thinking of all the damage excessive exposure could do to a woman’s skin. But it felt so good to just sit and soak up rays for a few blissfully lazy moments.

In the end, it was vanity that forced her to move into the protective shade of a poolside awning. A few months away from her twenty-ninth birthday, she had no intention of risking premature wrinkles; she planned to fight aging as long as modern technology made it possible.

She slid a pair of sunglasses from the top of her head onto her nose and glanced around, taking stock of the others who were enjoying the neighborhood pool on this Monday afternoon in early June. There weren’t many, since most people worked on weekdays—unless, like Jamie, they were fortunate enough to have summers off. Five or six children made use of the shallow end of the pool, some in inflated arm-bands, others showing off swim-class skills. Three women sat in chairs nearby, chatting as they kept watch over their kids.

A little boy of four or five sat on the edge of the pool about halfway down, splashing his feet in the deeper water. His blond hair was dry, and he didn’t look as though he’d been in the pool at all. He didn’t seem unhappy or bored, Jamie decided. Just thoughtful. There was only one adult in the water, a young woman playing with a squealing toddler in a floating plastic seat. The little girl was blond, and reminded Jamie of the boy sitting on the side of the pool. Siblings?

And then her attention wandered again.

At the deeper end of the pool, near the diving board, half a dozen teenagers postured for each other, though most of the local teens hung out at the more popular new pool on the west side of town. A young lifeguard slouched in an elevated seat, his attention focused more on a couple of pretty teenage bodies than on his duties.

Stretching out in her shaded lounge chair, Jamie smiled as she remembered the long-ago days when she and other girls her age had worked so diligently—but so subtly, they had believed—to distract buff young lifeguards. Her smile deepened as she fondly recalled how often they had succeeded.

“I know that smile. It always means you’re up to mischief,” a familiar voice observed.

“Just remembering mischief.” Jamie nodded toward the bikinied teenagers posing for the lifeguard’s benefit.

Susan Schedler groaned as she lowered her very pregnant body into the chair next to Jamie’s. “Oh, God. Was I ever that young and thin?”

“Hey, we were hot stuff.” Jamie pulled her gaze away from the girls to smile fondly at her longtime friend.

Susan glanced pointedly at Jamie’s hot-pink bikini. “One of us still is.”

“That’s very nice. Thank you.”

“Just stating facts.” Susan lay back in her chair and rested a hand lightly on her bulging belly.

“How are you feeling today?”

Since Jamie had asked, Susan launched into a detailed analysis of her condition and how impatient she was to reach the end of it. Most of her attention on her friend’s words, Jamie allowed her gaze to wander again. The teens had stepped up their flirting, she noticed. One of the girls had “accidentally” positioned herself so the lifeguard could look straight down her bikini top. With a frown, Jamie realized that he was taking full advantage of the silent offer.

While she had identified with the kids earlier, it perturbed her that the lifeguard was allowing his concentration to be drawn away from the pool. Jamie had worked as a lifeguard for three summers, and she knew the young man had been trained to resist distractions.

She glanced again at the shallow end, where children were still splashing and squealing. The young woman still played with the toddler in the floating seat, and the three women in the poolside chairs were heavily into a gossip session. Murmuring a response to something Susan said, Jamie turned her eyes to the spot where the little boy had been sitting. He’d moved, she noted. He’d probably given in to the lure of the cool water. She looked at the shallow end again, casually searching for his golden head among the other kids. She didn’t see him. Was she simply overlooking him? Kids looked different wet, of course.

Something drew her eyes back to the spot where she’d last seen him. The water was just over eight feet deep there, she estimated. She knew there were kids below the age of six who swam like fish, but he’d looked so small and alone.

She glanced automatically toward the bottom of the pool.

A moment later, she was on her feet, her heart in her throat. She reached the side in two steps, slinging off her sunglasses before making a clean, shallow dive.

The boy was lying facedown on the bottom of the pool. Jamie scooped him into one arm and kicked forcefully toward the surface. By the time she reached the side of the pool, the others had just realized what was taking place. The lifeguard, his face pale, was there immediately to lift the little boy out of her arms.

Jamie heard someone scream, heard a couple of the younger children start to cry, heard the panicked, excited babbling of the teenagers, but her eyes were on the child as she boosted herself out of the pool and rushed to kneel beside him. Still flustered by being caught so unprepared, the lifeguard hesitated, and Jamie automatically took charge. The child had a pulse, thank God, but he didn’t seem to be breathing. She rolled him onto his side, and lifted one arm above his head, hoping that would clear his lungs. She was prepared to do artificial respiration, but she was incredibly relieved when he began to cough and gag.

Steadying him, Jamie watched as liquid sputtered from his mouth. He’d taken some water into his lungs, she realized, relieved that someone had run to call an ambulance. He hadn’t been underwater more than a couple of minutes, so there should be minimal danger of brain damage, but there was always a chance of complications from water in the lungs. Pneumonia, for one, she remembered. The child should definitely be checked out by trained medical personnel.

He was crying now, in choked, gulping sobs. Jamie drew him into her arms, murmuring reassurances. “You’ll be fine, sweetie. Just fine.”

“I didn’t see him,” the lifeguard muttered in a trembling voice. “I never even heard a splash.”

“A child this small doesn’t make much of a splash,” Jamie answered, trying to speak gently despite her annoyance with him. She could tell he would pay for his negligence by painfully imagining what might have happened had she not been there.

“Oh, God, is Sam all right? His dad is going to kill me.” The young woman who’d been playing with the toddler rushed to Jamie’s side, the dripping little girl on her hip.

The boy—Sam—buried his face more tightly in her neck, whimpering and shivering. Instincts Jamie hadn’t known she possessed kicked in, making her cradle the wet little body closer. Suddenly feeling smothered by the pressing crowd of gawkers, she looked at the lifeguard. “Maybe you could send everyone back to what they were doing?” she suggested in a low murmur.

He nodded, gathered his composure and stood, giving a short blast of his whistle. “Okay, everyone, back up and give the kid some room. You’re making him nervous staring at him this way.”

Even as the spectators slowly moved away, Jamie could hear a siren approaching in the distance. She looked up at the frantic woman with the little girl on her hip. The woman couldn’t have been much more than twenty. Her face was pale, her eyes wide and horrified as she stared at the shivering boy. “Is he yours?” Jamie asked.

“I’m their nanny. Oh, ma’am, is Sam all right? I’ll never forgive myself if—”

“He’s fine,” Jamie broke in quickly, patting the boy’s back and speaking in a tone meant to calm both him and the overwrought nanny. “Sam’s going to be just fine.”

“He was sitting on the side,” the nanny babbled. “He wouldn’t come in the water, so I told him to stay put while I played with Abbie. I checked on him a couple of times and he was fine. Then I looked at Abbie again, and the next thing I knew, you were pulling him out of the pool. Sam, why did you go in the water? You know you can’t swim.”

“I slipped,” the child murmured into Jamie’s neck. “I was just going to stand up and I fell in the water.”

“It’s okay,” Jamie said. “No one’s blaming you, Sam.” There was plenty of blame to spread around, she thought, but none of it was Sam’s.

Two medics rushed into the fenced pool area. Sam’s arms had to be pried from around Jamie’s neck. Apparently painfully shy of strangers, he refused to respond when the medics tried to talk to him, and he cried when they told him they were going to take him to be checked out.

“Go with me,” he begged Jamie.

Startled by the request, she stroked his wet hair. “Your nanny and your little sister will go with you, Sam.”

“He doesn’t like me much,” the young nanny said morosely. “I don’t know why.”

Jamie had a few guesses, but she kept them to herself. “You’ll be fine, Sam,” she assured the frightened little boy. “These people are very nice and they’ll take good care of you.”

“I’ll call your dad and have him meet us at the hospital,” his nanny promised. “You know he’ll drop everything and be there in no time.”

That seemed to reassure him. “My daddy will be there?”

“As soon as I call him.” She seemed to have no doubt about it.

“Sam,” little Abbie said from the nanny’s hip, waving happily at her brother.

Sam allowed himself to be taken away, though he looked soulfully over his shoulder at Jamie—as though he was leaving his only friend behind, she thought with an odd feeling.

She scraped her fingers through her short, wet, red hair, pushing it away from her face as she watched them leave. The lifeguard turned sheepishly to Jamie. “I’m sure glad you were here, ma’am.”

“Just keep your mind on your job from now on, okay?” Reaction had finally set in, leaving her weak-kneed and a bit shaky.

“I will,” he said fervently, and dashed back to his post.

The teenagers had gathered again at the other side, the incident already forgotten since it didn’t actually affect them. The three women who’d been sitting by the shallow end of the pool earlier were gathering their charges and their possessions, ready to leave as dinnertime approached. Susan, who had stayed back out of the way during the excitement, put her hand on Jamie’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”

Jamie’s smile felt lopsided. “I’m fine.”

“That was amazing, Jamie. You moved so fast, my head is still spinning. If you hadn’t been here…”

Jamie didn’t even want to think about that. “I just happened to notice him. I guess old lifeguard habits die hard.”

“At least someone around here benefited from rescue training.” Susan looked darkly at the lifeguard, who sat now watching the almost-empty pool with intense vigilance. “With all the people at the pool today, word will get out. I’m sure he’ll be reprimanded for what almost happened.”

Jamie remembered the stricken look in the young man’s eyes. “I think he learned his lesson.”

Susan held out Jamie’s sunglasses. “These are yours, I believe.”

She took them and slid them onto her nose. “Thanks.”

Making a production of wiping her forehead, Susan sighed gustily. “To think I came to the pool to relax for a few minutes. How could I have guessed it would be this exciting?”

Almost shuddering as she recalled the moment she’d spotted little Sam at the bottom of the pool—and knowing she would be haunted by that image for some time—Jamie murmured, “Personally, I could have done without the excitement.”

Susan turned serious again. “What you did was incredible, Jamie. Maybe someone else would have spotted him in time to save him, but there’s no guarantee. And by getting to him so quickly, you probably prevented him from having any lasting repercussions.”

Jamie was becoming embarrassed by Susan’s praise. “I’m just glad I was here to help,” she said dismissively, matching her steps to her friend’s as they walked together toward the exit.

“Not half as glad as Trevor McBride’s going to be,” Susan commented.

Jamie stumbled. Trevor McBride? She steadied herself quickly. “What does Trevor McBride have to do with anything?”

Susan’s eyebrows rose. “Didn’t you know? Sam is Trevor’s son.”

“No,” Jamie murmured, turning her face to hide her expression. “I didn’t know.”

Trevor’s son. The incident had just taken on a whole new significance for her.

Had things turned out the way she had once fantasized, she would have been the mother of Trevor McBride’s children.

“YOU’RE SURE he’s going to be okay? There’s nothing else I should watch for?” Trevor couldn’t seem to let go of his son, who had been clinging tightly to his neck for the past twenty minutes.

The doctor who had examined the boy smiled reassuringly. “Sam’s going to be fine, Mr. McBride. He took in very little water and he was apparently conscious throughout the entire episode. According to your nanny, he was only underwater for a very short time. He was more terrified than anything. You should probably watch for emotional repercussions. Perhaps you should get him into swimming lessons soon to keep him from developing a permanent fear of water as a result of this.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep your advice in mind.”

Just the mention of swimming lessons had made Sam hide his face again. He’d never liked water, and didn’t trust strangers enough to take instructions easily from them—something Trevor was hoping they could change by the time he started kindergarten.

Becky Rhodes, the nanny Trevor had hired only a month earlier, was sitting in the waiting room with Abbie, who’d fallen asleep on her lap. She looked up anxiously when Trevor carried Sam out of the examining room. “Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” Trevor answered shortly, resisting an impulse to add, No thanks to you.

Becky sagged in relief. “I’m so glad. I’m really sorry about this, Mr. McBride. I was busy with Abbie and he just fell in. I never saw him.”

Trevor’s arms tightened instinctively around his son. “Thank God the lifeguard saw him.”

Becky snorted. “The lifeguard had nothing to do with it. He was too busy flirting with a bunch of girls. If that woman hadn’t noticed Sam in the pool…”

Trevor had rushed straight into the examining room upon his arrival at the hospital. He hadn’t yet heard the details of his son’s rescue. “What woman?”

“The new drama teacher at the high school. You know, the one with the really red hair and lots of earrings and cool clothes? Ms. Flaherty. I think her first name is Jamie.”

“Jamie Flaherty,” Trevor murmured, his mind filling with almost fifteen-year-old memories of a young woman who had tempted him to be wild and reckless for the first time in his life. “Jamie Flaherty saved my son?”

Eyeing him a bit warily, Becky nodded. “Yes.”

Masking his feelings, Trevor motioned toward the exit. “I’ll drive you home. Can you carry Abbie?”

“Of course.” Becky shifted the sleeping baby to her shoulder.

Trevor scooped up the diaper bag and followed her out of the hospital, grimly aware that there were several things he had to take care of that evening—and none of them were going to be easy. Finding Jamie Flaherty to thank her for rescuing his son was one of the most awkward, but necessary, chores he faced.

The last time he had talked to Jamie, he’d rather bluntly told her that his future plans did not include her. Holding his son tightly in his arms, he was aware of a mixed sense of gratitude and dismay that she had reappeared in his life at this particular time.