Headed for Trouble - By Suzanne Brockmann Page 0,61

overseas.”

“You know I love you,” Jules said just as quietly. “And I hate the idea that something I do makes you miserable.”

“So make it up to me.” The heat in Robin’s eyes made Jules smile.

“You sure we don’t have anywhere else to go tonight?” Jules asked. “Anyone else to help rescue? Any other crisis to handle?” As if on cue, his cell phone rang.

He took it out of his pocket to silence it and then, without looking at the caller ID, holding Robin’s gaze the entire time, he tossed it into a basket of laundry that was sitting near the bottom of the stairs.

And then there they stood, halfway up the stairs, just gazing at each other.

Robin blinked first. “You better get that,” he said. “What if it’s Arlene. Or, you know, the President?”

Jules nodded. “Yeah.” With a sigh, he went down the stairs, and dug his phone out from the clean towels.

Missed Call, it read. But it was neither Arlene nor the U.S. President. “It was Yashi,” he told Robin.

Joe Hirabayashi was one of Jules’s subordinates and a good friend. If he truly needed to get in touch with Jules, he would call back. But hopefully not for a while. Still on the stairs, Robin smiled and held out his hand.

Jules took it—and raced him to the top.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Arlene sat on her old sofa in Will’s living room, with Maggie’s head on her lap.

Her daughter had cried herself dry—they both had—and she now slept, as Arlene ran her fingers through her hair.

They’d discussed quite a few difficult topics—sex being at the top of the list. But as Arlene had hoped, Maggie’s threat to get pregnant was just that: a threat. Even with Lizzie’s less than spectacular example, Maggie wasn’t even close to being ready to become sexually intimate with any of the boys she knew.

Although Arlene did find out that she had a crush on Lizzie’s older brother, Mike, who had told Liz that he thought Maggie was pretty. He was a junior in high school, and Arlene absolutely was going to send Will and Jack over to speak to the boy. And okay, yes, not so much speak to him as scare the hell out of him. She made a mental note to talk to Dolphina about him as well, to ask her to keep an eye on things and …

God, she didn’t want to go back. She wanted to be an active part of her daughter’s life.

She and Maggie had talked—for a long, long time—about that, too. About duty and honor and keeping promises.

And then they’d talked about Jack.

“How come you never told me about him?” Maggie asked.

Arlene shook her head. “There was nothing to tell. He was Will’s best friend. I was Will’s kid sister. And then I met your father …” She shrugged.

“Jack told me he cried,” Maggie told her. “When he found out you were marrying Daddy.”

“Really?” She winced even as the word came out of her mouth. She sounded like one of Maggie’s middle-school friends.

“He told me all these stories about you,” Maggie reported. “I talked to him for like two hours at Jules and Robin’s wedding. I knew he was totally in love with you even before he said it because he called you music. It was right when I first met him. He goes, You’ve got to be Arlene Schroeder’s daughter, and I go, yeah, and he goes, Your mother, she’s music. That was what Will said when he first told me about Dolphina.”

“So naturally you email him to see if he’d be interested in being my new baby-daddy.”

Maggie avoided eye contact. “I guess … I thought it was worth a try. I think it would be cool to have a brother or a sister. I could babysit, help take care of him. Or her.” She glanced at Arlene out of the corner of her eyes. “I think Jack would make a great father.”

“He’s got two sons,” Arlene told her. “Luke and Joseph. I think Luke’s ten and Joey’s seven.”

“Sweet,” Maggie said with enthusiasm. “We could be like the Brady Bunch. With the new baby, there’d be six of us.”

Arlene just looked at her.

“I’m just saying,” Maggie said—which was one of Will’s expressions. Jack’s too, come to think of it.

“What am I going to do with you?” Arlene asked as she ruffled her daughter’s unruly curls.

“Tomorrow, nothing,” Maggie said with a grin, “because you’re having lunch with Ja-ack.”

It was obvious that Maggie was ecstatic about that, and Arlene found herself thinking