Conflict of Interest (The McClouds of Mississippi 2)

He studied her for a moment. “Back in the kitchen, before Isabelle interrupted us?”

She swallowed, remembering the moment all too well. Maybe he was going to caution her about not complicating their business association just to satisfy their curiosity. Or lust. Or whatever the heck was building between them. If so, the warning wasn’t necessary.

“Don’t worry,” she said, keeping her smile bright and her chin high. “I won’t give it another—”

His mouth was on hers before she could complete the lie.

It didn’t surprise her a bit that Gideon’s kiss was powerful enough to curl her hair. This was exactly the way she had imagined he would kiss—and she had been fantasizing about it ever since she had arrived here and gotten her first good look at him. Nor was her response entirely unexpected; she wanted nothing more than to grab his shirt collar and drag him into the bedroom behind her. His bedroom, in which she had been sleeping alone for too many nights.

The same inclination was mirrored in his heated green eyes when he finally lifted his head. “I really wish I hadn’t done that.”

That was not what she had expected him to say. “Um, why not?”

He set her firmly away from him. “Because I’m about to face another sleepless night, and, as you pointed out, we need our rest. If you hear anyone pacing the hallways before dawn, it’s only me. But keep your door locked, anyway.”

He was trying to lighten the moment—or perhaps lessen the importance of the kiss—with a touch of dry humor. Attempting to respond in kind, she asked, “And if I leave the door open?”

“That could be taken as an invitation,” he replied evenly.

She studied him for a beat before nodding and stepping back into the bedroom. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, and closed the door firmly in his face.

The bedroom door remained closed all night. Gideon knew because he checked. Several times. He just happened to be walking by, of course.

It was probably for the best, since his life was complicated enough at the moment. But, judging from that all-too-brief kiss, it would have been worth some complications.

To take his mind off what he could be doing with Adrienne, he turned his thoughts to Isabelle as he lay on the big couch in his office, staring up at the shadowy ceiling. He figured there was a good chance she would rebel against going to school again in the morning. For one thing, they had made it too pleasant for her to stay home today. And for another, they still hadn’t solved whatever problem she’d had in the first place.

Adrienne’s plan hadn’t worked out. Isabelle had certainly enjoyed the movie, but it hadn’t relaxed her enough to open up about her issues at school. And that nightmare must mean that something was still eating at her. He was beginning to think a firmer hand was called for. The kid was only four, for crying out loud, and they had been tiptoeing around her as if she were the queen of England or something.

He tried to remember what his own parents had done on occasions in his youth when he had decided he didn’t want to go to school. As he recalled, his mother had taken his temperature and if it had been normal, she’d simply informed him that he was going to school and she didn’t want to hear any arguments about it.

No amount of griping or whining would get him out of it, but it would curtail his favorite after-school activities. Every ten minutes of protesting had earned him half an hour alone in his room without his stereo, his television or his old Atari game system. Once she had figured out he was perfectly content to stay in his room with his books or his notebooks, she had changed the punishment to time spent pulling weeds from her flower beds—a chore he had detested.

He hadn’t missed much school.

Lenore had been firm but fair, meting out rewards as generously as punishment. Stuart McCloud, on the other hand, had set standards that Gideon had found impossible to meet. It hadn’t been as tough for Nathan, who had been content to follow his father’s advice to enter law school. And Deborah could do no wrong in Stuart’s eyes, with the exception, of course, of getting involved with Dylan Smith, the only thing she had ever done in outright defiance of their father’s wishes.

When that romance had ended badly, and painfully, Deborah had listened to Stuart’s I-told-you-sos and modeled herself into the dutiful daughter again—until Stuart had shattered her faith in him, and perhaps in all men, by betraying her trust in him.

But even before the affair and divorce that had shattered the family, Stuart and Gideon had never gotten along. Nothing Gideon ever did was good enough, none of his dreams practical enough to suit Stuart, a man who had lived to lead and impress others, his eyes firmly focused on the governor’s mansion. He had expected his offspring to be ambitious, conformist and popular. For Nathan and Deborah, those things had come easily. But for Gideon—the moody, introspective, unsociable rebel—they were unbearable.

Gideon’s choice to attend a public state university to study a liberal arts curriculum had been bad enough, in Stuart’s eyes. Dropping out in his junior year to live on a modest trust fund from his maternal grandparents and pursue a career writing pulp fiction had pretty much severed any remaining ties between them. Rather than encouraging his younger son’s dream, Stuart had belittled it, predicting failure, poverty and misery.

As far as Gideon knew, Stuart had never read anything he’d published. And Gideon had always told himself he didn’t care.

Impatiently shoving those unwanted memories to the back of his mind, he rolled on the couch to check the time. Almost 5:00 a.m. Might as well get up and make a pot of coffee, maybe get a few pages written before it was time to wake Isabelle. Hell of a lot more productive use of his time than brooding over his father’s parental shortcomings.

And what did the past have to do with anything, anyway? Gideon wasn’t trying to be a father to Isabelle—he’d failed to learn that particular skill along the way. He’d never even pictured himself with kids, considering he would be as lousy at the task as his own dear old dad had been. All he wanted to do now was be a reasonably competent big brother and baby-sitter until someone more qualified returned to take the responsibility off his hands.

Chapter Nine

Adrienne completely understood what Gideon was trying to do Friday morning. They had tried her idea of catering to Isabelle, in hopes that she would get over her problems at school, and it hadn’t worked. Now Gideon was trying the firm, serious, adult-in-charge approach.

That wasn’t working, either.

“I don’t want to go to school!” Isabelle shouted through a storm of tears. “I don’t want to.”

“You might as well accept that you have to go to school,” Gideon answered flatly, his hands on his hips and a look of severely strained patience on his face. “Your nanna and Nathan are trusting me to take you to school, and I’m not going to let them down. And neither are you. Now, if there’s a problem at school, you can tell me about it and I’ll see what I can do to resolve it. If you refuse to tell me, you’ll just have to go and try to handle it yourself.”