Wife On Approval

“Not exactly. Aren’t you going to go look at the apartment?”

Jennifer wrinkled her nose. “She’d just try to pat my head again.”

Paige tried to smother a smile. “You don’t like Ms. Cade much, do you?”

“She’s sticky.”

And that, Paige thought, was a pretty good description. Tricia Cade had certainly clung to Austin like caramel on an apple. Paige closed the closet door and started for the kitchen. There were still the flowers to deal with, and then she could escape.

Jennifer dropped into step beside her. “If you’re not the housekeeper, who are you?”

“I’m just helping put things in order so you and your father will be comfortable here.” Paige took a heavy glass mug from the cabinet. “Will you hang on to this to keep it from upsetting while I arrange the flowers in it?”

From the doorway came a quiet voice. “There you are,” Austin said.

Paige’s hand slipped and water splashed across the counter. She hadn’t heard him come down the hall, but that was partly explained when she realized that he was alone. She wondered how he’d managed to dislodge Tricia so quickly.

“Go explore, Jennifer,” he said.

“I don’t want to.”

“I don’t recall asking if you wanted to,” Austin said gently. “Your room is just past the front door.”

With her lower lip stuck out and her feet dragging, the child went off. “Not my real room,” she muttered.

Paige put a shaggy mum into place in the mug.

“So it is you,” Austin said.

Puzzled, she shot a look at him. Had he not recognized her immediately? Surely she hadn’t changed so much that he hadn’t known her—though perhaps, since he hadn’t been expecting her to reappear in his life…

And yet, he’d almost sounded as if he had expected to run into her. So it is you, he’d said, as if he was confirming a hunch.

But of course, she thought, both Sabrina and Cassie had talked to him—frequently, in fact—during the weeks they’d been looking for and preparing his apartment. One of them might have mentioned her, and if they’d done so casually, using only her first name—well, it stood to reason that Austin wouldn’t have asked pointed questions about a woman who just happened to be named Paige, any more than she’d rushed to volunteer the facts the moment she’d heard he was in line for a job at Tanner. But of course, he would have wondered, and even been watchful.

“It’s me.” She felt incredibly foolish for not being able to think of anything else to say.

Austin folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the counter. “How have you been?” he asked genially. “And what have you been doing with yourself in the last…let me think, how long has it been, Paige? Six years, I suppose—since our divorce?”

CHAPTER TWO

PAIGE’S voice sounded so taut that Austin wouldn’t have been surprised if it had cracked under the strain. “Seven,” she said. “It’s been almost seven years since the decree was final.”

“Has it really?” Deliberately, he kept his tone lazy. “How time does get away.”

“When one is having fun, I suppose you mean to say?”

He moved across the kitchen and perched on the edge of a tall stool pulled up to the breakfast bar. Besides being more comfortable than standing, the seat had the advantage of being a safe distance from the counter where Paige was arranging flowers. The downside was that from the breakfast bar he could see three of her—the real one and two hazy blonde reflections in the highly polished stainless-steel doors of the refrigerator.

She didn’t look much different, really, than the last time he’d seen her all those years ago. She didn’t even look older. Her face was a bit thinner, the fine bone structure more prominent. But perhaps even that change was simply the result of her hairstyle—shorter than he’d ever seen it before, like a fluffy mane that looked as if she could run her fingers through it in the morning and be done with it for all day.

How typical of Paige that would be, he thought, with her almost-Puritan practical streak. While she’d always taken care to look neat and attractive and feminine, Paige had never put much emphasis on the glamorous extras.

He almost laughed at the understatement. In fact, he thought, she’d practically gone out of her way to avoid them…

It seemed to him that outlook of hers hadn’t changed in the least, despite the passage of time. Her attitude showed not only in her hairstyle—for flattering though it was, the cut had obviously been chosen for convenience as well as looks—but in her manicure. He watched her slim fingers as she worked with the flowers. Even from across the room, he could see that though her nails were evenly trimmed and buffed to a shine, they were completely innocent of polish.

She’d always avoided bright nail polish, he remembered. He’d told her once it was a shame not to emphasize the delicate grace of her shapely hands by painting her nails red, but she’d simply shaken her head and said brilliant nails were a waste of time, requiring almost constant care and upkeep, with attention to each minuscule chip or scratch.

Yes, he thought, she was the same old Paige….

He drew himself up short. She wasn’t the same old Paige, he told himself. If anything, she was probably even more set in her ways than she’d been seven years ago—and he’d be wise to remember it.

She stabbed another stem into the mug. “I should have thought our divorce would be an easy date for you to remember.”

Austin frowned. “I don’t celebrate it, if that’s what you mean.”

“Of course not. I’m certainly not saying that our divorce is important enough for you to recall it for its own sake.”

She’d gotten better at sarcasm, Austin reflected. More controlled, far more subtle. It flicked him on the raw nevertheless.

“But you can surely remember how old your daughter is,” Paige went on sweetly, “and how long it was before she was born that you met her mother. From there it should be no step at all to recall—”

“How long I’d been free at the time. I see what you mean now. If we’ve been divorced nearly seven years, and Jennifer’s soon going to be six…You’re quite right, Paige.” He let a congratulatory note creep into his voice. “It was very nearly the same time as when you filed for divorce.” He saw her tiny, almost-concealed shudder. “What’s the matter? Are you jealous because I moved on with my life, and you haven’t?”

“Of course I’m not jealous. Your choices have no significance for me. Besides, why would you think I’m stuck in a rut somewhere?”

“Your name, for starters,” he said. “The super called you Ms. McDermott—just as you asked of the judge in the divorce petition, when you got tired of being Paige Weaver.”

She shrugged. “I made the mistake of giving up my name once, when I married—and it was terribly untidy to get it back. Perhaps the next time around I was just wiser.”

“And perhaps,” he said curtly, “if you were talking about the truth instead of vague possibilities, you’d be making definite statements instead of subjective ones.”

She tilted her chin up. It was a gesture he remembered well; in the old days it had usually meant she knew she was on less-than-solid ground. “All right, so I haven’t married again. At least I learned my lesson.”

“Meaning what? That I didn’t?”

“What other conclusion is there? You got yourself mixed up with a woman while you were on the rebound—”

He picked up an apple from the polished fruit bowl on the counter and rubbed it against his sleeve. “You’re giving yourself quite a little credit there, I see.”

“If you’re talking about your bad choices, they’re not my responsibility.”

“No. I mean your assumption that I was on a rebound from you,” he said gently, and watched with slightly malicious pleasure as the dart hit her dead center. He bit into the apple with a satisfying crack.

Irritation flared in her big hazel eyes. “Oh, come on, Austin. Even bad marriages—especially bad marriages—have aftereffects. People do crazy things after a divorce, no matter how much they wanted to be free.”

“You sound as if you’re speaking from personal experience. What crazy things did you do?”