Strictly Business Page B

and smiling, stopping for a moment to look into a shop window.
    Most definitely not what he’d expected, he thought.
    “Nick, hold it,” she said, and pointed to a hand-painted porcelain clown mask.
    He waited patiently for the “ooohs” and “aaaahs” that accompanied window shopping.
    She leaned closer to him and said in a low voice, “I hate those things.”
    He shook his head. “You hate them?”
    “When I was a girl, I had a pair of them in my room. And then I saw the original
Dracula.
Every night for weeks after that, I stared at those things for hours, waiting for the blank eye-holes to suddenly glow in the dark.”
    “Why didn’t you take them down?”
    She arched her eyebrows. “I was nine, Nick, and I didn’t want to be a sissy.” She laughed. “Taking them down would have been admitting I was scared. Instead, I put my teddy bear outside the covers so the vampire would get him first.”
    “You were rotten.”
    “I was safe.” She grabbed his arm. “I just realized this is the street with the shark shop. I have to go to the shark shop, Nick.”
    “Shark shop?”
    “Yes, I forget the name of it exactly—something like Jaws and Junk. Wait until you see it. Everything in the shop has some kind of shark motif, including the … ah, powder room seat covers.”
    “You’re kidding!”
    “You’ll see.”
    “I’m not sure I want to,” he muttered.
    But he was smiling as she dragged him farther along the street. After she had grudgingly given in to spending the day with him, he had expected her to be silent and distant. Even a touch of sullenness wouldn’t have surprised him. When he emerged from his bedroom after changing, he discovered her curled up in his favorite chair, leafing through a builder’s trade magazine. He had felt a rush of pleasure at seeing her so at home among his things. She’d seemed content, too, as they’d driven through the countryside, looking at the spring foliage. They’d wound up here in New Hope. It turned out that neither of them had been here for years, and they decided to walk through the town and explore the shops.
    Sharks, he thought in amusement. There had to be something Freudian about bathroom seat covers done in sharks. He swore that if the shark on the cover had its jaws wide open for a bite, he’d buy it for her. Now that, he decided, was very Freudian.
    But when they arrived, it was obvious that ON THE LAMB wasn’t quite the shop Jess remembered.
    “Are you sure this is it?” he asked, staring at a lamb’s wool seat cover displayed in the store window.
    Frowning, she glanced around. “I know it wasright next to the Hummel place. That’s still here.… Darn it, I wanted to get a new cover for the bathroom in my father’s office. He loves the one in there now, but it’s falling apart.”
    “Somehow, little lambs in the executive bathroom don’t have the same devious appeal,” Nick said, grinning.
    “It would ruin his image,” she agreed.
    “When Marty finally got around to telling me about you, he said that your father is the chairman of several boards,” Nick said, casually taking her arm and steering her along the crowded sidewalk.
    She nodded. “He’s more of a figurehead really. Still, my divorce was very painful for him.”
    The only reason Nick could think of for her father to be so upset was that he had been socially embarrassed by it. He set his jaw to hold back his temper.
    “You see,” she went on, smiling wryly, “my ex-husband was the chief executive officer for one of the companies my father’s involved with, and my father introduced us. I can’t convince him to stop feeling guilty.”
    “I don’t think parents ever do,” Nick said, squeezing her arm in comfort. “As the older brother, I have a lot of guilt about raising Tony. It’s worse when you’re a guardian. You feel you have to be perfect and make sure the kid is perfect too.”
    She turned and stared at him. “You raised Tony?”
    “Since he was