Christmas in the City - Jill Barnett Page 0,60

you'll have the best view in the whole house. There's a company I work with for my buildings and I know they would love to make this room just perfect for a little girl. In blue."

"With lots of pillows."

He smiled. "With lots of pillows. Pink pillows?" he teased.

She shook her head vehemently. "Blue."

So by that afternoon, Ed had been to the building site, where there had been some trouble while he was gone. Some costly supplies and tools were stolen, so now they had to see about hiring Pinkerton security to guard the jobsite at night. Trouble. New trouble.

While the partnership of Lowell & Green was a good mix, he was seldom gone from the city. He could be depended upon to be there, day in, day out. He was the fixer, the one who could grease the wheel of a deal and make it happen; he had the connections, and so he handled the all-important social side of their business. But he also oversaw the budgets and the expenditure,

co-ordinated the contractors, and saw the creation, the initial design, while Hal was the engineering genius, the structure expert, the nuts and bolt man. The designs themselves were a partnership of vision and innovative engineering.

But these new, taller buildings with their elevators, deep foundations and steel-framed structures were new to the city. While they were at first accepted as a phenomenal achievement, and had, until lately, been awe-inspiring enough to be well-received, lauded, and written up admiringly by journalists, things were changing.

Now, apparently, a faction was on the warpath, complaining to the city about the height of them blocking sunlight from the sidewalks and streets below. Trouble--trouble he hoped with new security would eventually merely go away.

Now he was in his office, mid-afternoon--when Penelope was napping and he felt he could slip away from home--staring a pile of correspondence, notes about every fiasco that had happened while he was in San Francisco, every missed business meeting and appointment, the pile on his desk topped off with a new schedule that gave him almost no time for his niece.

What the hell was he going to do about her? How could he go about changing his life for her, juggling everything, being everywhere he needed to be, but there for her, too. So much for him being the fixer. He had no idea how to fix her.

She needed him. She desperately needed some kind of family, this shocked little girl, traumatized by a great loss, living with a stranger, in a strange house, in an even stranger city, in a room that looked like a grand suite at the Metropolitan instead of a home. He stared at his bloated schedule, shook his head, and vowed he would not let his niece down the way he'd let her mother down.

Chapter 3

"Are you ready?" Ed asked his niece as he stood in the doorway of her new blue bedroom and watched Miss Clement kneel down and button up Penelope's coat. She looked at him with those huge brown eyes and nodded. Not a single word passed her lips. Penelope had been like that for the last two weeks. His niece was cloaked in silent grief. She hadn't even spoken his name. She would just turn up at his side and touch his knee or his hand.

So they were off to see Thomas Cummings, a prot茅g茅e of G. Stanley Hall and a colleague of James Baldwin. Both men had studied under Wundt at his clinic in Germany and were new American pioneers of in the field of child development. Luckily for Ed, Cummings was now a professor of Psychology at Columbia, and even luckier, a fellow member of the Union Club. And he was willing to see Penelope and advise Ed.

He glanced around the bedroom as he waited. In his mind he had hoped his niece would take one look at the new bedroom and suddenly start chattering or laughing or some other miracle.

He was an idiot.

Oh, she liked the blue room, the smaller bed with its pale blue bedding, the smaller chairs near the fireplace covered in blue and yellow flowers and stripes, and the lighter draperies surrounding the window seat he had promised her, with its blue and yellow bolsters. The painted furniture and subtle wallpaper were light colors. Even the wood floors had been refinished in a golden color instead of the dark planks and were topped with thick, pale blue rugs with gold patterns. The room looked nothing like it had; it