Cinderella After Midnight by Lilian Darcy

Author:Lilian Darcy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

There were toys scattered all over the floor of Patrick’s living room when he got home from work on Monday evening at six. Really cool toys.

He took a closer look.

No, actually the toys were quite ordinary on their own. Nothing high-tech. No batteries required. But the way they were set up withstood his scorching scrutiny and confirmed his first impression. Really cool.

Natural-toned blocks, homemade from offcuts of wood added to a brightly painted store-bought set to create a town. There were “logs” in different sizes and thicknesses, cut from twigs and branches and laid out to make bridges and edge roads. There were cars on the roads, and construction vehicles set up in a quarry, ready to load piles of beans—several kinds, ranging from small brown lentils to red kidney beans.

Some pieces of green cloth were draped over several of the throw pillows from his couch to make mountains, and there was a blue silk scarf winding through the center of the town forming a river.

Unrelated to any of this, a delectably savory smell wafted to his nostrils from the kitchen.

“Anybody home?”

Patrick was wondering the same thing, but that was his mother’s voice, calling from outside his front door. For some reason she rarely rang the bell like normal people, and he knew that if he’d lived in the kind of place that had a back door, Beth Callahan would invariably have used that. Without knocking first.

He loved her, and she drove him nuts.

“Yo, Mom,” he called and went to let her in, wondering how in heaven’s name he was going to explain the miniature landscape set out on his living room carpet.

It pretty quickly emerged that no such explanation would be necessary, because right behind Mom, just emerging from the elevator, were the explanations themselves, Cat and Sam.

Cat at once looked stricken. “I meant to get home before you did, Patrick,” she said. “I’m sorry, it’s a mess in there, and you have company and—”

“It looks great.”

“Oh, you saw it?”

“I’m home. I mean, I got home a few minutes ago. I’m just letting Mom in.”

Cat nodded silently, while Mom’s face dropped instantly into her most transparent, “Okay, so are you going to marry my son, or what?” expression. Having seen her eye—he calculated quickly—say, probably, eleven of his past girlfriends with this expression over the course of the past fifteen years or so, Patrick knew it all too well.

Inwardly, he winced.

He wasn’t known as Callahan Systems’ resident schmoozer for nothing, however.

“Mom, this is Catrina and her nephew Sam, who had a fire damage their house, so they have no place to stay for a few days.”

There. That about covered all the necessary data, and, he hoped, stamped out all dangerous sparks of parental curiosity.

“Catrina,” he went on, “This is my mom, Beth Callahan, who’s not as scary as she looks. Are you, Mom?” he added pointedly.

“If you say so, dear,” Mom answered humbly. Good, she’d recognized his cryptic warning. No more questions!

“Are you coming in?” he asked her, not as graciously as he could have.

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