I looked down at the floaty negligee and smiled. “No. I’m Mrs. McCauley’s granddaughter.”
“Nuh-uh.” She shook her head. “You’re too old to be a granddaughter.”
An irrational sense of dismay swept through me. Ever since I’d turned thirty, I’d become sensitive about my age, and as the numbers crept higher—next fall I’d be thirty-two—so did my awareness of my biological clock.
“You look more like a mommy,” Sophie said, biting off an edge of cookie and considering me as she chewed. “But you’re dressed like a princess or the tooth fairy.”
It took some effort, but I didn’t laugh. “I promise I’m neither. But, Sophie—does your mom know where you are?”
She nodded solemnly. “My mommy knows everything.”
Her mother must have told her the old “mothers have eyes in the back of their heads” line that had made me search through my mother’s hair while she was asleep.
“She’s in heaven,” Sophie continued. “She lives there with God.”
“Oh.” The geoplates of my heart shifted. Losing my mother at the age of twenty-eight had been horrible. I couldn’t imagine losing a mother as a preschooler. “Well, your dad must be worried about you.”
“Nah. He’s busy.”
“So who’s watching you?”
“Gramma was, but she left and Aunt Jillian took over.”
“So... what’s Aunt Jillian doing?”
“She’s busy with Daddy.” She took another bite and chewed. “My sister hopes she’s gonna be our new mother.”
Ooo-kay. I wondered just how busy they were. “Where do you live, Sophie?”
“Next door.” She pointed to the left.
“Well, as soon as you finish your cookie, I think you should go ba—”
“Sophie!” A deep male voice drifted through the front screen door. “Sophie!”
“In here!” the girl yelled, so loudly I jumped.
Steps sounded on the porch. “Hello?” called a male voice.
“I’m in the kitchen with a lady who looks like the tooth fairy,” Sophie shouted. “Come meet her!”
The screen door squealed open, and a moment later, a tall manfilled the doorway. He had dark hair and blue eyes, and he was wearing a starched white shirt unbuttoned at the neck, with a loosened blue-and-gray-striped tie. He was good-looking, if you’re shallow enough to notice such things—which, unfortunately, I am.
I’d like to think it was the element of surprise that turned me into a tree and made me just stand there, rooted to the floor, but the truth is, he looked like a cross between Jake Gyllenhaal, Hugh Jackman, Bradley Cooper, and a young George Clooney, with a nose that looked like it might have once been broken, because it was just a little bit skewed to the left, and something about that slight imperfection made my stomach speed-bump. It took several beats of silence for me to realize he was staring back in a way that made me highly aware of my state of deshabille.
Deshabille—another of those old-fashioned, peignoir-related French words. Once something enters my head, my thoughts keep circling back to it at the most inappropriate moments. A friend who majored in psychology said it sounded like OCD, but I never talked to a doctor about it, because having ADHD was bad enough and if I was more screwed up than that, I really didn’t want to know about it.
Anyway. Here was this smoking-hot man in my kitchen, and I’m dressed like a 1940s screen siren, and it felt all kinds of weird. I shifted the cookie to my left hand.
“Want a cookie, Daddy?” Sophie asked.
“Uh, no thanks.” He pulled his eyes from me and knelt down by his daughter.
I couldn’t help but notice the way his thigh muscles bulged under the summer-weight wool of his gray pants. The guy was ripped.
“Sophie,” he was saying to his daughter, “you know you’re not supposed to wander off.”
“I came to see Mizz McCauley, but the tooth fairy princess lady was here instead.”
