A Match for the Doctor / What the Single Dad Wants…: A Match for the Doctor

He laughed shortly, shaking his head. “You like everyone,” he told her.

“But Kennon’s nice,” Madelyn insisted. Her tone said that she usually agreed with her father, but in this one instance, Meghan was actually right. “So, is she?”

“Is she what?” Simon asked, getting back into the driver’s seat. He quickly strapped himself in, then started up the vehicle.

Madelyn sighed loudly. “Is she coming back?” she repeated her initial question. “Daddy, aren’t you paying attention?” she asked in exasperation.

Now she sounded like her mother, the few times that Nancy had lost her patience with him. Even Madelyn’s inflection was the same. He had to stop doing this, Simon silently lectured himself.

“Sorry,” he apologized, easing away from the curb and waiting for his turn to enter the flow of snail-paced traffic. “My mind was wandering.”

“Where did it go, Daddy?” Meghan asked. At six she was a walking mass of question marks. “I didn’t see it go. Is it really little?” she asked, trying to lean forward. The seat belt restrained her and she wriggled in her seat.

“No, stupid,” Madelyn said impatiently. “Daddy just means he was thinking of something else.”

Which led Meghan to another question. “What, Daddy? What were you thinking of?” the little girl asked him eagerly.

Madelyn joined forces with Meghan and added her voice to her sister’s. “Yeah, what, Daddy?”

He glanced over his shoulder at their inquisitive, lively little faces. God, he wished he could be that young again. That young and able to bounce back from anything.

He couldn’t tell them that he was thinking about their mother, couldn’t chance bringing them down because he was a stickler for the truth. So he lied. It was kinder all around that way.

“I was just thinking about what two little girls might want for dinner.”

“Us, Daddy? Are the two little girls us?” Meghan asked eagerly, her green eyes shining.

“Yes,” he replied. Finally out on the main thoroughfare, he glanced at Meghan in the rearview mirror. The flow of traffic picked up. “The two little girls are you and your sister.”

“You still didn’t answer my question, Daddy,” Madelyn reminded him.

Madelyn was like a bulldog when she got hold of something, he thought. She didn’t let loose until she had what she wanted. In this case, it was answers to her question. This time, he needed no prompting to recall the topic.

“You really liked this woman?”

It was Meghan who piped up first. “Oh, yes, Daddy. She smells good.”

“Not an unimportant quality,” he agreed, amused. The light turned yellow. Alone he would have sped through. But he had the girls with him, so he slowed down and waited. The light turned red a beat later. “Anything else?”

“She talked to us,” Meghan added brightly with enthusiasm.

“All right.” He had already gathered that. So far, he wasn’t sure he understood what the girls’ excitement about the woman was. At least, not on the junior level. Had they been teenage boys instead, he would have easily understood the attraction. Petite, she appeared to have a shapely form and her facial bone structure was such that a plastic surgeon would have wept with envy.

His powers of observation had obviously become more acute.

When had that happened?

Madelyn, his resident little wise woman, apparently had picked up on the fact that he didn’t fully understand what her sister was telling him.

“No, Daddy, she talked to us,” she emphasized. “Not at us, to us. She treats like us people. Like Edna does,” she added in an effort to make him understand what she meant.

And as he didn’t, Simon thought. He knew he was struggling and somewhat remiss in his job as a parent.

As their only parent.

This was tough going. It wasn’t that he didn’t love them—he did, but he just couldn’t show it, didn’t know how to show it or how to express it. Moreover, although they were his blood, he had trouble relating to them.

His own parents had been distant while he was growing up and thus he had no real clue how to talk to his own children, not in the way he felt that Madelyn meant.

That sort of communication had been up to his wife and Edna. They had both dealt with the day-to-day business of the girls’ lives. He had never developed the knack. Work became his sanctuary, his excuse, his very validation. His contact with them heretofore was cursory. He only interacted with them on occasion, making sure that they were fed and clothed and thriving, at least physically. As for how they were faring emotionally, well, that was something else again, something he felt that he wasn’t equipped to handle. But that was all right as long as they’d had their mother.

But now they didn’t have her.

He knew that he had shortcomings. He’d never pretended otherwise. Serious shortcomings, highlighted by the fact that a complete stranger, practically walking in off the street, was better at interacting with his daughters than he was.

“Would you like Miss Cassidy to come back?” He asked the question to humor them. He assumed they’d say yes, but he wasn’t prepared for the loud chorus of “Yes!” that assaulted his ears. For two rather small girls, they had powerful vocal chords when they were motivated.

“Is she going to be our new nanny?” Meghan asked.

Madelyn frowned, instantly thinking ahead. “Doesn’t Edna like us anymore?”

He felt like Pandora several seconds after opening the legendary box. “Of course Edna likes you. She’s just not feeling well and, no, Miss Cassidy isn’t going to be your new nanny.”

“Then what is she going to be?” Madelyn wanted to know.

More than likely, a pain in my butt.

Simon had no idea where that had come from or why he was so certain that it was true, but he was. There was something about the determined look in the woman’s eyes as she had left the house that had put him on notice, telling him he was about to, willingly or otherwise, enter a heretofore undiscovered region.

He hoped he was wrong.

But the girls did like her, as apparently did Edna. The bottom line was that he did need to have the house furnished and he had no time to get involved in doing the job himself. Like most males over the age of five, he hated shopping. This was an additional, overwhelming chore he didn’t want to burden Edna with. She had enough to handle, taking care of the girls. And besides, the woman was getting on in years.

“Miss Cassidy is going to decorate our house,” he told them simply.

“You mean like for Christmas?” Meghan asked breathlessly.

“No, Christmas is in December. This is May,” Madelyn informed her sister haughtily with a sniff. “Don’t you know anything?”

Undaunted, Meghan shot back, “I know lots of stuff. Don’t I, Daddy?” she asked, looking to her father for backup.

“Yes, you do. You both do,” he added quickly. The one thing Nancy had managed to impress upon him was the need to treat the girls equally and to maintain neutrality whenever possible. “Miss Cassidy is going to be buying new furniture for the house.”

“Can we help her buy the furniture?” Meghan asked eagerly.

“Well, I can’t see why not. Sure, by all means, help her,” he agreed.

This way, the woman would be way too busy dealing with the girls to try to rope him into coming along on any of her shopping trips. He viewed it as a win-win situation.