The Father Factor. Lilian Darcy

radio music played. No sounds came from the house itself.

      Stepping onto the porch, she felt like a trespasser. She rang an old-fashioned electric bell which seemed to peal inside the house like a fire station alarm, and she knew she probably wouldn’t have pressed that little black bakelite button if she’d really thought that anyone was home. After a two-minute wait and another press of the bell, she hadn’t sensed any sound or movement inside.

      Time to leave.

      Except that she couldn’t seem to do so just yet. She really wanted to know if the house was empty and unlived in, or just temporarily unattended. Its secrets seemed to whisper at her in the breeze that stirred the trees. The front windows were curtained, but she cupped a hand against her cheek and forehead and peered through the glass anyhow, in case there was a gap.

      Yes. A couple of inches. It was dark inside the house, however, and she couldn’t see. Just a few dim shapes, edges and angles. Furniture? She thought so, but wasn’t sure.

      She decided to make a quick trip around to the back of the place. Successful ex-beauty queens tended to be thorough. If there was anything to be learned here, she would learn it now and not need to make a second visit.

      The back porch, like the one at the front, was wide and substantial and in need of repair, and a couple of the windows that looked onto it had raised blinds and no drapes. She saw a dining table through an open doorway and a primitive-looking kitchen with this year’s calendar on the opposite wall, still showing the February page.

      Behind her, she heard footsteps and a voice. “Shallis, hi…”

      Whirling around, she found Jared half way up the back porch steps. She took a too-hasty step and her dove-gray spiked heel rammed through a splintery crack between the old floorboards. She tripped, ending up on both hands and one painful knee, with the other foot bare and its shoe still jammed in the crack, some inches behind her.

      “Shoot, this porch needs some work!” Jared dropped beside her and touched her shoulder. He didn’t let the contact linger, but his voice was resonant with concern. “You okay?”

      “I’m fine.”

      “Sure? Your foot—”

      “Apart from the crowd of splinters having a family reunion in my knee.”

      Shallis steeled herself for Jared to make the kind of comment that usually came next. Something along the lines of how lucky it was she hadn’t tripped like this on pageant night in front of the whole of America. She geared up to laugh and politely pretend she hadn’t heard variations on the same joke a hundred times here in Hyattville, on every occasion when she did anything even the slightest bit graceless or messy or natural.

      But all Jared said was, “Let me have a look, okay? Got tweezers?”

      “I possess tweezers, yes.” Go away. Stop looking at my knee like that. “But I don’t carry them around with me.”

      This was another assumption she had to contend with on a regular basis—that she carried an elephant-size makeup and grooming kit in her purse everywhere she went, and did she happen to keep aloe vera tissues/a corkscrew/spare panty hose/a socket wrench set in it, by any chance?

      “Mono-brow doesn’t grow back that fast, I guess,” Jared murmured, with such a straight face that it took her several seconds to react with a very unprincesslike snort of laughter. “You don’t look comfortable,” he added.

      “I’m not.”

      Still thrown off balance by a kind of humor she wasn’t used to, except maybe from Dad, Shallis rotated to a sitting position, and mentally added twenty minutes to her schedule so she could go home and change. The splintery wood had pulled several threads in the fabric of her skirt, and the gray of the porch dust wasn’t an exact match for the gray of the silk.

      Since it was an expensive designer suit, she cared about the pulled threads a lot more than she cared about the splinters in her knee. Skin healed. Silk didn’t.

      “Let me take a look,” Jared repeated. “Can I remind you that helplessness is considered an attractive quality in a Southern woman?”

      “I can do it, thanks. I was an L.A. woman for five years. I don’t do helpless anymore.”

      Especially not with you.

      “People always wuss out on their own splinters. Splinters need tough love.” She felt the warmth of his breath on her knee, but he didn’t touch her. “None of these are stuck all the way under the skin, from what I can see. I can get them.”

      “You don’t have tweezers.”

      “We’ve already discussed this.” He looked up from his inspection. “Neither do you.”

      “I have nails.”

      And a gorgeous French manicure that would probably get as ruined as her skirt if she used her nails to get the splinters out. She’d counted five of them. Too bad. She wasn’t letting Jared’s fingers anywhere near her knee.

      He’d gotten the message now, apparently.

      Gritting her teeth, she scraped at her skin, pincered her nails and got four of the splinters out while Jared took out a pocket knife—not the kind equipped with tweezers, unfortunately—and used its strongest blade to lever the gap in the floorboards wide enough to pull her jammed shoe heel free.

      “It doesn’t look too good,” he said, examining the piece of expensive Italian footwear. “The leather is all scraped.”

      She glanced up from her inspection of a section of newly chipped nail polish. “It looks better than my knee.”

      “How’re you doing, there? I haven’t heard any ouches.”

      “I’m keeping them to myself. The last splinter wouldn’t come.”

      “Okay, my turn.”

      “I’ll get it out at home.”

      “No, let me have a try.” He put the shoe down beside her, rested a hand on her knee before she could make another protest, and told her in a cheerful tone, “This is probably going to hurt.”

      “Did you ever consider going into medicine?”

      “For a couple of months when I was eighteen, but I dropped the idea pretty fast and took on the traditional Starke family career. Why?”

      “Good decision. Because your bedside manner is way off. Ouch,” she added.

      “Yeah, can’t help it,” was all he said, still cheerful.

      How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways…

      He pinched up her skin, scraped, pinched again. Shallis sat back on her hands and closed her eyes. She could hear his breath whistling softly between his teeth and over his firm lower lip. She could imagine the golden glint of concentration in his eyes. His hand was warm—ouch, again!—and confident. His knee pressed into her outer thigh, chafing her skin softly with the fabric of his summer-weight suit.

      Focusing on the splinter, he probably wasn’t aware of the contact, but Shallis was. She felt like a traitor to Linnie and Ryan, but even more of a traitor to herself for the powerful and familiar tingle of physical response that built inside her.

      He’d dropped the lawyer facade, and he was such a sexy man. A thousand women must have thought so. Chemistry on two legs. A dangerous assailant on at least four of her senses.

      But he was the wrong man.

      He always had been.

      She’d met enough men with the same win-at-all-costs mentality in Los Angeles. And thanks to Linnie’s history with Jared she’d always recognized pretty fast what they were really like underneath the charming, sexy veneer, and that they hadn’t really wanted her, they’d wanted…

      Well, take your pick.

      Arm candy.

      Another