Almost Perfect (17 page)

“I'd been trying to teach Matty reading and writing so he wouldn't start school behind the other kids, but he didn't catch on real well. I'd get frustrated with him, and he'd cry when he couldn't please me. And then I'd cry, and he'd try to make me feel better, and I'd cry worse. I was a basket case. The store was still going downhill, I had crack dealers in my back room, I couldn't afford good clothes for my kid, and I had a stash of crack sitting in my cash drawer instead of money.”

She sobbed and hated herself for doing so. She was past that stage now. She was strong. She'd had counseling. She understood the destructive forces that had made her do what she'd done. None of it helped. She wept and rubbed her eyes with the back of her sleeve.

And then Jared pulled onto the branch beside her, scaring her half to death. With one arm wrapped around her, one-hundred-eighty pounds of solid male crushed her into the tree.

“Stop it,” he hissed. “Quit beating up on yourself for my sake. I don't care what happened.” With his free hand, he brushed a tear from her cheek, then he pressed a kiss to her forehead.

She shivered all over, craving a healing touch, knowing she didn't deserve it. She simply needed to gather sufficient strength to push away. He pressed her tighter, as if reading her thoughts.

Oh, God, he smelled of male musk and aftershave and all those masculine things she hadn't known she'd missed so much. She wanted to collapse into his strong arms like some weepy teenager and simply let him handle it all. He
held her as if she mattered, as if she were actually valuable instead of a piece of shit. She so desperately wanted to believe she was worth something.

“Come on, let's get down.” His arm closed firmly around her waist, forcing her into close contact with his shirt. Cleo dug her fingers into male warmth and muscle, took a deep breath, shoved against his shoulders, and jumped.

She knew how to land like a cat, bending her knees and letting her hands and the balls of her feet break the impact. She could hear Jared cursing above her as he grabbed a branch and climbed down in more traditional fashion. She had a chance to run, to hide, to slam the door and lock herself in, but she didn't take it.

She didn't know why, precisely. It had something to do with his strength when he held her, the way he'd come up after her when she certainly hadn't encouraged him, the way he'd stood up for Gene and Kismet and took all the damage thrown in his direction. She couldn't brush him off as a polished yuppie any longer. Somewhere behind that smiling demeanor was a tough streak of incorrigible.

“I thought you'd be halfway home by now,” he admitted as he swung down.

He didn't attempt to hold her again, and Cleo relaxed. She couldn't have tolerated a touch right now. She needed her distance. “You didn't let me finish,” she said accusingly.

“I got it. You're not Linda. You got straight and protected your kid and then you strayed. What happened, cops find the crack in the register?”

He said it dismissively, as if it didn't matter. Even her own sister was horrified that she'd let it happen, but this man stood there all loose-limbed and accepting and ready to move forward.
She
couldn't get beyond what she had done, and he acted as if it were something that
had happened to some other person and had no relevance to here and now.

“On Matty's first day of school, I got high, that's what I did.” Dammit, she'd rub his face in what she was, make him
see
her. “Matty always adored animals, and I wanted to buy him a teddy bear to show how proud I was of him. Just a simple teddy bear. He'd never had one.” Hands on hips, she tried to glare at him, but a single tear strayed down her cheek.

Jared crossed his arms and watched her warily.

Satisfied, she continued. “People on drugs are
stupid
. Instead of going to Goodwill, I floated out with all the cash in the register and went to a toy store in a grandiose gesture to prove my love. I didn't have enough to buy even a baby bear. But I was high and brave and alternatives aren't what it's about with all that muck shooting out brain cells. I simply walked out with the biggest, most beautiful bear I could find.”

He snorted, but didn't say a word.

Turning her back on him, Cleo started toward the house. “The cops caught me a block from the store, of course. They knew I was high. They got a search warrant and searched the store, and I was busted for shoplifting and possession and illegal weapons. It's a wonder they didn't hit me with dealing after they pulled my California record. I didn't even get to meet Matty when he came home that day. Social Services did.”

She wouldn't cry. Not anymore. She'd cried until her lungs dried up and her soul shriveled, and she'd become an inhuman monster. She didn't go there anymore—only this once would she open that snakepit, for the sake of the kids. To make him understand.

He came up beside her. “They took your kid away from you?”

“Maya ran to the rescue.” She still sounded bitter, although she'd been eternally grateful and simply didn't know how to express it. She'd give her soul for Maya, if she had one. “She knew what it meant to be left to the state, and she wouldn't let it happen to Matty. She took care of him for nine months while I dried out again. If I hadn't been busted, I would have been doing crack within another day or two, and dealing soon after, so don't feel any sympathy for me. I can't control the compulsion any more than Linda can when she's under the influence. It's physical as well as psychological, and it never goes away.”

“But you
tried
,” he insisted. “You took your son away from dangerous forces, and Linda doesn't even recognize them. Don't make her into your image.”

Cleo laughed shortly. “Like my image is so great. Get real, McCloud. Linda tries. She gets jobs and keeps them and she stays sober for a while. She fixes the house up, cooks a great meal, and loves her kids, even though the kids' father got her disowned by her family and most of the town despises her for them. You don't know half the names they call those kids around here. Then one of them comes home crying over some insult, or the teachers finally get through to her and report their failings, and she goes off the deep end and loses her job and it's another snowball downhill.”

He walked silently beside her for a minute, considering, but he still shook his head. “That's Linda's problem. The kids shouldn't have to pay for it. They need to be placed in a safe home.”

Cleo climbed to the top step, and hands on hips, glared down at him. “Are you saying that I'm such a pitiful excuse for a human being that they're not safe with me?”

He didn't answer fast enough.

Biting off another curse, Cleo swung around and
stalked into the house, slamming the door in his face and fastening the lock.

“Hey, Cleo. Look at
Scapegrace
!” Gene shouted from the kitchen, where he'd spread the morning paper across the table to read the comics.

Well, at least Jared's comic strip had the kid reading a newspaper, Cleo thought as she tried to balance her checkbook at the desk in her bedroom. Shoving aside the calculator, she followed the sound of Gene's voice to investigate. She'd originally thought the strip funny, but for the last few months or more, the strip's teenage boys had become irritatingly whiny, and obsessed with girls. Still, it did have a wry wit she could appreciate, and the man definitely had a talent for depicting teenagers.

Gene grinned and pointed as she entered. “Think that's your skeleton?”

The cartoon skeleton bore a striking familiarity to the one Jared had sketched earlier. She scanned the strip and grimaced at the characters' mischievous prank to scare off their science teacher. Jared had probably gotten away with those kind of pranks as a kid. She'd have been expelled.

She hoped and prayed he didn't intend to use his experiences here to fill his strip. She'd have to maim and murder him, for certain.

“He even calls this one Burt,” she said. There wasn't any point in worrying the kid with her concerns. He thought Jared hung the moon, and he needed that kind of male role model.

“Yeah,” Gene breathed in satisfaction. “Can I take this to school?”

“Sure. But you'd better hurry or you'll miss the bus. Where's Kismet?”

“Dawdling,” he said scornfully as he ripped the page out. “I'll go get her.”

Kismet seemed her normal, vague self as she drifted out the door with her brother a little while later, her arms full of books. Cleo watched from the porch as they climbed on the bus, then meandered back into the house with her insides in an uproar.

She'd moved here to achieve peace of mind as well as soul. She'd thought she'd accomplished that. Yesterday had proved how wrong she could be.

Why the hell had she dumped all that garbage on a comic strip artist? An itinerant skirt-chaser who knew how to get under her skin? She should have shut him out like she shut out everyone else. The world was so much simpler that way, with everyone going about their own business.

But Jared McCloud didn't know how to mind his own business, and for that, she had to be grateful. It grated, but she owed him for saving Kismet. That didn't mean she had to hand him her life story.

He'd found Gene a wrestling team. Maybe he could find counseling for Kismet.

What the devil was she thinking? She couldn't ask the man for anything. She'd chased him off, and he could stay chased off.

But Kismet needed counseling. His psychologist friend was right about that. She'd never placed a lot of faith in
shrinks herself, but it sure helped to talk things out when one didn't have anyone else to talk to. Kismet needed someone who could keep a confidence. Not that the kid would ever speak. Maybe shrinks knew tricks to make a kid talk.

Of course, if Kismet really told her tale, the counselor would probably report Linda to the police and have the kids jerked out of their home. Double-edged sword, that one.

She was waffling. Still, it was hard making decisions for someone else. She didn't have a lot of experience at it.

She could call and ask her counselor, but he'd want to know why she asked, and not knowing if he could report her confidences, she couldn't tell him.

Could Jared tell her if a counselor would report Kismet's mother to the authorities? She knew she was paranoid about the system, for good reason, but she had to get past her own fears and suspicions for the sake of the kids. Authorities had to abide by all sorts of rules and regulations that didn't make sense in terms of real-life situations—like tearing kids from a shaky parent but providing no substitute to take her place.

A balanced mind would attempt to see both sides and not think too irrationally about do-gooders who did more harm than good, so she ought to at least consider alternatives.

That would mean tackling Jared in his den, after she'd slammed the door in his face last night. She was an adult now. She should be able to overcome her childish neuroses and deal with uncomfortable situations.

She didn't want to. The whole point of living out here was to not get involved in stressful situations, so she could straighten herself out and get Matty back.

Kismet desperately needed help.

Shit.

The phone rang, and grateful for the reprieve, she actually answered it. She regretted it immediately as Jared's chocolate-warm voice poured through the receiver.

“Got a problem,” he stated immediately, before she could hang up.

Wrinkling her nose and leaning her elbow against the counter, Cleo poked at her cookie jar witch. “And that concerns me, because …?”

“It's your damned toilet and I'm no plumber. What do I have to do to make it stop running?”

“It's on a well. You could let it keep running,” she suggested helpfully. “You stole my skeleton,” she added, for good measure.

“You saw that?” He sounded more pleased than irritated at her comment. “I figured not too many kids could come up with skeletons, so I was safe using that prank.”

“It was a stupid prank. You've got an intelligent teenager with lots of potential, and you let him do stupid, superficial things.” So, maybe she was tired of people picking on her and felt like turning the tables.

“It's a
comic
, Cleo, not serious literature.”

“Yeah, like you're a comic, not scholar material. Excuses,” she scoffed. She wondered if the silence at the other end of the line meant she'd scored a point.

“All right,” he answered begrudgingly, “maybe the kid needs to think once in a while. He's not inclined toward pithy conversation.”

“He can learn.” She had a very odd sense that they weren't talking about the
Scapegrace
character any longer. Uneasy with the observation, she returned to the original topic. “I've got to get to work by ten. Did you jiggle the handle?”

“Give me a break,” he said scornfully. “I knew to try that much.”

“Well, if you want me to fix it, I'll have to come by
now.” She didn't know why the devil she'd said any such thing, but she just couldn't seem to shut Jared out. Probably because he ignored closed doors, and she admired his confidence entirely too much.

“That's fine. I've been working since six. And before you say anything, I
do
work occasionally. A daily strip isn't a flat-out cinch.”