she was going to marry, Kennon began to doubt her ability to make any kind of a decent judgment call.
She was finally putting her life back in order when she heard that Pete and his wife were expecting. It had hit her harder than she’d thought. She had a real weak spot when it came to children.
“Yes, I was,” she replied, thinking it best just to go along with the excuse Nathan had just handed her. “I was working on the Preston home.”
He pushed the sketchbook aside, clearly indicating that he saw nothing worthy of her expertise. “Okay, let’s see it.”
The truth was, she had nothing to show for her efforts. She’d come up with better ideas her first year in college. “See what?” she asked vaguely.
“See what you’ve come up with,” Nathan said patiently.
“I think you’ve got this turned around, Nathan. I sign your checks, you don’t sign mine.”
“You also didn’t come up with anything, did you?” he asked.
She shrugged, looking away. “Nothing worth my time.”
“And that would apply to a broad spectrum of things,” he replied, circling her so that she could get the benefit of his pointed look.
She knew Nathan meant well, but he needed to back off for now. “Nathan, I’ve already got one mother. I don’t need two.”
“Good, because you don’t have two,” he told her briskly. “I’m just a friend who doesn’t want to see you wasting your time, missing a guy you shouldn’t have given the time of day to in the first place.”
She’d given Pete more than the time of day. She’d given him over two years of her life, she thought angrily.
“I don’t want to talk about him,” she said firmly.
Nathan nodded approvingly. “Good, because neither do I. Now splash some water in your face, put on some makeup and change your clothes,” he instructed. As he spoke, he opened a cabinet that ordinarily contained hanging files but now held a navy-blue pinstripe skirt and a white short-sleeved oval-neck top.
Whipping them out on their hangers, Nathan held the prizes aloft before her, even as he put one hand to the small of her back. He propelled her toward the bathroom. “We want you looking your best.”
Kennon stopped dead. “We? Exactly what ‘we’ are you referring to?”
“Why, you and me ‘we,’ of course,” he said, trying to sound innocently cheerful. “You always this suspicious this early in the morning?”
She took the clothes from him. “I am when you suddenly start acting like a social directing steamroller.”
“Fine.” Nathan held up his hands in surrender, backing away from her. “Look like an unmade bed and scare away our customers. See if I care. I can always go back to sleeping on my sister’s couch, having those little monsters jump up and down on me in those awful pajamas with the rubber bumps on the bottoms of their hard little feet.”
She capitulated. If she didn’t give up, the drama would only get worse. “I’ll splash water in my face, put on some makeup and change my clothes,” she sighed.
“That’s my girl,” Nathan declared with a grin.
She gave him an unsettled, puzzled look as she slipped into the pearl-blue-tiled bathroom and closed the door.
“By the way,” he addressed the door in a matter-of-fact voice that wouldn’t have fooled a two-year-old, “You’re meeting a client in Newport Beach in an hour.”
An hour? Nothing she hated more than being rushed.
And then she remembered.
“I didn’t make an appointment with a client for this morning,” she informed Nathan through the door.
“I know. I did.”
It wasn’t that Nathan couldn’t make appointments. But whenever he did, he always told her. Bragged was more like it. He took extreme pleasure in being able to say he carried his own weight and drew in clients.
“When?” she asked. “I was here all day yesterday—and last night. I didn’t hear you making an appointment and no one new called the office.”
“It’s a referral,” he told her.
Dressed, Kennon opened the door so she could look at Nathan. She began to apply her makeup.
“Oh? From who?” Kennon flicked a hint of blush across her pale cheeks. She needed to get some sun time.
“What does it matter?” Nathan said with a quick rise and fall of his shoulder. “One happy, satisfied customer is like another. The main thing is the referral.”
She put down her lipstick tube. Something was rotten in the state of Denmark. “From who?” she asked again. Nathan was being incredibly mysterious—even for Nathan.
“Initially, your aunt Maizie,” he said evasively.
“Initially,” Kennon repeated. He didn’t want to tell her. Why? “And the middleman would be …?”
“Of no interest to you,” Nathan assured her.
“Nathan.” There was a dangerous note in her voice. “Who is this ‘mystery’ person and why are you acting like a poor man’s would-be espionage agent?”
Nathan surrendered, knowing he couldn’t win. “The middle ‘man’ is your mother,” he mumbled. “Satisfied?”
“My mother,” Kennon repeated, stunned. “And Aunt Maizie? They talked? They actually talked?”
It didn’t seem possible. Her mother never spoke to her aunt. And she definitely never sought Aunt Maizie out, on that Kennon was willing to stake her life. From what she and Nikki—her cousin and Maizie’s only daughter—could piece together, it had something to do with the fact that Kennon’s aunt had married her mother’s brother, and her mother had not thought that Maizie was good enough for him.
Her mother was the only one who felt Maizie wasn’t good enough. As for Kennon, she adored her aunt and had told Nikki more than once that she envied her cousin’s relationship with such a forward-thinking woman.
“Anytime you want to trade, just let me know,” Nikki had said to her. At the time Nikki was somewhat upset because she claimed that her mother was forever trying to play matchmaker and set her up with someone.
These days, Nikki was no longer complaining, especially since, according to what Kennon had heard, Aunt Maizie was the one who had set Nikki up with the sensitive, handsome hunk she had just recently married.
Kennon supposed that was one thing in her mother’s favor. Ruth Connors Cassidy didn’t play matchmaker, at least not anymore, she thought with a smile. Not since all the eligible sons of her mother’s friends had been taken off the market.
But Aunt Maizie was making matches like gang-busters.
