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  He sat very still, and then he said, “Why do you have your hair yanked back like that?” sounding as annoyed as she was.

  “Because it’s professional.”

  “Not if it keeps falling down.”

  “Thank you,” Andie said. “Now butt out. Ten thousand is too much money. You’re still trying to pay me off—”

  “Andromeda, I’m asking for a favor, a big one, and I don’t think the money is out of line. We didn’t leave our marriage enemies, so I don’t see why you’re hostile now.”

  “I’m not hostile,” Andie said, and then added fairly, “well, okay, I am hostile. You didn’t do anything to save our marriage ten years ago, but every month you send a check so I’ll think of you again. It’s passive-aggressive. Or something. You know the strongest memory I have of you? Sitting right there, behind that desk. You’d think I’d remember you naked with all the mattress time we clocked in that year together, but no, it’s you, staring at me from behind all that walnut as if you weren’t quite sure who I was. You have no idea how many times I wanted to take an ax to that damn desk just to see if you’d notice me.”

  North looked down at his desk, perplexed.

  “You hide behind it,” Andie said, sitting back now that she wasn’t repressing anything anymore. “You use it to keep from getting emotionally involved.”

  “I use it to write on.”

  “You know what I mean. It gives you distance.”

  “It gives me storage. Have you lost your mind?”

  Andie looked at him for a moment, sitting there rigid and polite and completely inaccessible. “Yes. It was a bad idea coming back here. I should go now.” She stood up.

  “She said the house is haunted,” North said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The last nanny. She said there were ghosts in the house. I asked the local police to look into things to see if somebody was playing tricks, but they found nothing. I think it’s the kids, but if I send another nanny down there like the previous ones, she’s going to quit, too. I need somebody different, somebody who’s tough, somebody who can handle the unexpected. Somebody like you. And you’re the only person like you that I know.” Suddenly he was the old North again, warm and real with that light in his eyes as he looked at her. “They’re little kids, Andie. I can’t get them out of there, and I can’t leave them there, and with Mother in France, I can’t leave the practice long enough to find out what’s going on, and even if I could, I don’t know anything about kids. I need you.”

  Ouch. “I don’t—”

  “Everybody they’ve ever been close to has died,” North said quietly. “Everybody they’ve ever loved has left them.”

  Bastard, Andie thought. “I can’t give you months. That’s ridiculous.”

  North nodded, looking calm, but she’d been married to him for a year so she knew: He was going in for the kill. “Give them one month then. You can draw your line under us, we don’t need to talk, you can send reports to Kristin, hell, take your fiancé down there with you.”

  “I’m the least maternal person I know,” Andie said, thinking, Ten thousand dollars. And more than that, two helpless kids who’d lost everyone they loved, going crazy in the middle of nowhere.

  “I don’t think they need maternal,” he said. “I think they need you.”

  “A psychotic little girl and a boy who’s growing up to be a serial killer. He didn’t push his aunt off that tower, did he?”

  “They’re growing up alone, Andie,” North said, and Andie thought, Oh, hell.

  The problem was, he sounded sincere. Well, he always did, he was good at that, but now that she really looked at him, he had changed. She could see the stress in his face, the lines that hadn’t been there ten years ago, the tightening of the skin over his bones, the age in the hollows under his eyes. His brother Southie probably still looked as smooth as a boiled egg, but North was still trapped behind that damn desk, taking care of everyone in the family. And now there were two more in the family, and he was handling it alone.

  And two little kids were even more alone in a big house somewhere in the wilds of southern Ohio.

  “Please,” North said, those gray-blue eyes fixed on her.

  “Yes,” Andie said.

  He drew a deep breath. “Thank you.” Then he put his glasses back on, professional again. “There’s a household account you can draw on for any expenses, and a credit card. The housekeeper will clean and cook for you. If you come by tomorrow, Kristin will give you a copy of this folder with everything you need in it and your first check, of course.”

  Andie sat there for a moment, a little stunned that she’d said yes. She’d felt the same way after he’d proposed.

  “I’d appreciate it if you could go down as soon as possible.”

  “Right.” She shoved her hair back, picked up her purse, and stood up again. “I’ll drive down tomorrow and see what I can do. You have a good winter terrorizing the opposing counsel.”

  She headed for the door, refusing to look back. This was good. She’d given back the checks and cut the connection, so she could spare a month to save two orphans. Will was in New York for the next two weeks anyway, and he’d come home to a fiancée with no debt, and then—

  “Andie,” North said, and she turned back in the doorway.

  “Thank you,” he said, standing now behind his desk, tall and lean and beautiful and looking at her the way he’d used to.

  Get out of here. “You’re welcome.”

  Then she turned and walked out before he could say or do anything else that made her forget she was done with him.

  * * *

  After Andie left, North sat for a moment considering the possibility that he’d lost his mind. He’d had the résumés of several excellent nannies on his desk, and he’d hired his ex-wife instead. Fuck, he thought, and deliberately put her out of his mind, which was difficult since she’d mentioned blow jobs. Which were irrelevant because he and Andie were over, had been for ten years. Blow jobs. No, she was right: Draw a line under it. He went back to work, making notes on his newest case as the shadows grew longer and Kristin left for the night, definitely not thinking about Andie, his black capital letters spaced evenly in straight rows, as firm and as clear as his thinking—

  He stopped and frowned at the page. Instead of “Indiana” he’d written “Andiana.” He marked an I over the A but the word sat there on the page, misspelled and blotted, a dark spot on the clear pattern of his day.

  There was a knock on the door at the same time it opened.

  “North!” his brother Sullivan said as he came in, his tie loosened and his face as genial as ever under his flop of brown hair.

  Say hi to Southie for me, Andie had said. It had been ten years since anybody had called Sullivan “Southie.”

  “You look like hell.” Sullivan lounged into the same chair Andie had taken and put his feet on the desk. “You can’t work round the clock. It’s not healthy.”

  Your whole life isn’t the damn law firm, North, Andie had said a month before she’d left him. You have a life. And you have me although not for much longer if you don’t knock off this I-live-for-my-work crap.

  “I like my work,” he said to his brother now. “How’s Mother?”

  “Now that’s health. That woman was built for distance.”

  North pictured their elegant, platinum-haired mother running a marathon in her pearls, kicking any upstarts out of the way with the pointed end of her heels as she crossed the finish line. She’d been thrilled when Andie left.

  “It’s you I’m worried about,” Sullivan was saying. “You’re working too hard, too much on your plate, trying to run the whole practice with Mother gone—”

  “My plate is fine. However, I am in the middle of—”

  “No, no, it’s time I helped out.” Sullivan smiled at him. “I’ve been thinking about what I could do, but I figure you’d fall on your number two pencil before you’d let me help with the practice.”

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