Authors: Helen Conrad
"My cousin Carly is more than decent, honey. Come
on. You can see that for yourself."
Reluctantly, he turned and looked at the woman
Doris was talking about. She was perched on a stool at
the counter, her long, caramel blond hair hanging like a banner of silk down her back. The dark panes of her sunglasses stared back at him. Even though her eyes
were obscured, he could see she was pretty. Too skinny.
But pretty. Her long, slender legs were made for the designer jeans she wore. The plaid shirt was rayon
rather than cotton. And the short suede jacket was cut for fashion rather than utility. Expensive clothes. City clothes. This woman was no more a rancher’s housekeeper
than he was a stockbroker.
He thought of his two kids, Beth and Jeremy, and
that awful empty feeling in the pit of his stomach was back again. He felt like a man in a shipwreck trying to save his kids, trying to get each one something to cling
to while he searched for the life raft.
And all the time
the water was swirling harder and harder around them, and he was beginning to wonder if he was really going
to save them after all.
He needed help. That was certain. But this little piece
of city driftwood wasn't a life preserver.
"Give me a break, Doris," he growled, turning
back. "When it comes to feeding a family, the only
thing she'll know how to make is reservations. I need
someone better than that."
Doris set her round shoulders and glared at him.
"What you need, Joe, is a miracle. You haven't had
anyone who lasted more than four weeks with those
kids in two years of trying." She sighed and shook her
head of soft brown curls. "Well, Carly ain't no mira
cle. But she's about the only chance you've got of hav
ing your kids looked after any time soon. You'd be a
fool to turn her down."
He looked back at her and his wide mouth twisted
into a grin that held as much pain as humor. "Call me
crazy," he drawled. "But I'm not ready to take in
tourists yet, just because the Dewdrop Inn went and
burned down just when you needed it." His dark eyes
sharpened. "Say, why can't she stay with you, any
way?"
"I..." Doris hesitated. This was something of a sore spot with her and she almost blushed. "Well, you see, Brian's been sort of staying with me for a while now,
and he's lookin' to be just on this side of proposing.
Carly is my cousin and all, but.. .well, darn it, look at
her. She's just too... too good-looking."
His grin was affectionate but teasing. "And you
don't want Brian to lose his focus before he gets that big question out of the way. Is that it?"
She slapped at his hand and he threw back his head and laughed. "Even you can see that the woman is bad news," Joe told her when he sobered, glancing back across the room. "So why the hell would I want her?"
Carly watched the two of them nervously. Her slen
der hand reached automatically for her purse, going for
a cigarette. Stopping herself, she sighed softly. No more
smoking. That had been one of the conditions she'd laid down for herself. She was going to be clean now that she’d left city life
. Organic foods. Lots of sleep. She needed space to think, and clean living was going to be
her way of finding it.
She'd already quit smoking, actually. She'd thrown
away her last pack just before her bus had left Wash
ington, D.C. The funny thing was, she hadn't really
missed it. There had been so much to see and think about on that bus trip, she hadn't had time to miss it.
The bus. It made her smile to think of that trip.
She'd decided to take the bus to California because she knew Mark would search the airports. And the private
limousine companies. And maybe even the luxury
shipping lines for cruises through the Panama Canal. But he
would never think to check the bus lines. The concept of his little Carly taking a bus with the other plebeians
would be beyond his comprehension.
But she'd done exactly that and she'd been pretty darned proud of herself. She'd had plenty of time to calm down and begin to get her head together on the
long trip. And the bus had brought her right into town,
straight to where her cousin Doris worked as a wait
ress at the Kit Kat Koffee Shop.
The only problem was, Doris didn't seem to have
room for her.
"Why don't you go on down to L.A.?" Doris had
suggested. "You must have old friends there from your
high school years.''
"No." Carly had been glad for the dark glasses at
that point. Without them, Doris would surely have seen
the haunted loneliness in her eyes. Going to L.A. would be no
better than staying in Washington. She had to get away from that sort of life, those sorts of people. She'd come all the way across country looking for Destiny, the little town she remembered as a piece of slow, simple heaven just a few miles in from the Central California coastline.
This was where it started—the farms and ranches of the California heart
land.
"No, Doris, I don't want to go to L.A. I want to be here, to remember my childhood, to learn to breathe
again."
Her cousin's kindly face had softened. "How old
were you when your mama dragged you off to Hollywood to try to make you into a movie star? Let's see. I was
about eighteen, so you must have been..."
"Ten. I was just ten."
"And you never did become a movie star, did you?"
It wasn't said in a malicious way, but there was a
certain satisfaction in Doris's tone.
And why not?
Carly thought to herself.
Why not?
"No, I never did become a movie star, or even anything close," she admitted with a smile. "That was my
mother's dream, not mine."
"But you've done pretty well for yourself in the
East, haven't you? Didn't you say you were a secre
tary...?"
"Congressional aide," Carly corrected her quickly, then frowned, impatient with herself. As if
that really made any difference. It had seemed an im
portant distinction once, but the farther away from
Washington she got, the more those lines seemed to
blur.
"Whatever," Doris said. "But you work for some
body big in government or something, don't you? A good job in the big city. So what do you want to come back
here for?"
Carly hesitated. There was no way she was going to be able to explain such a complicated set of reasons to her cousin right here in the cafe between customers.
"I...I needed a rest," she said simply. "I wanted to
go back to my roots and remember who I really am."
Doris looked at her as though she'd suggested wor
shiping pyramids and having her body frozen for posterity. "Roots," she muttered rather scornfully. "Well, I never had no time to think about my roots. I've been too busy making a living all these years to worry about
things like that."
Carly knew there would be no percentage in trying
to explain, so she ignored her cousin's remark. "I just
wanted to come back, Doris. I wanted to see the town
where I lived my first ten years."
Doris pursed her lips and stared at her with a penetrating gaze, then leaned closer, saying in a low voice, "Are you sure that's all? You haven't come back looking for your father, have you? Because I can tell you right now he hasn't been seen in this town for
years and years. Let sleeping dogs lie, I always say. You
shouldn't go hunting for things that might end up hurting you in the long run."
Carly's heart skipped a beat and suddenly she was
short of breath. She put a hand over her heart, wondering at the panicky feeling that was welling up in her.
What the heck?
She swallowed and calmed herself.
Good grief.
She must be overtired from the bus trip.
What else could it be?
"No,” she said quickly.
“No, I didn't come back to find my father."
At least, she hadn't thought that was why she'd been
so obsessed with coming back here. Now that Doris
had put it in words, she wasn't so sure. "Did you…did you know him very well?" she ventured.
Doris shook her head emphatically. "My mama didn't have the highest regard for that man. You probably
don't remember, but she wouldn't even let me go over
and visit with you and your family that last year you
were in town. The next year, I went away and lived in
the Bay Area for a while, and when I came back, he
had left."
"Oh." She felt a pang of disappointment, but she made a face and pushed it flat.
Which was just as well. Something in her had
shied away from even thinking about her father for years. In planning to come back, she had never once considered that he might be here. But now that Doris had brought the subject up, thoughts began to tease her.
She had always said that she didn't miss her father, that her mother was all she needed. The memo
ries of that last year she knew him were full of arguments and hurt silences. She'd loved him, of
course, and he had never been unkind to her. But he'd never tried to contact her either, in all these years since
her mother had taken her away. That, and loyalty to her mother, had kept her from wanting to see him.
But her mother was gone now. Meeting her father might be interesting. What if she found him? Would
that help take care of this deep, dark emptiness she felt inside? She
shrugged those thoughts away and turned back to her
cousin.
"If you don't have room for me," she said, "maybe you know someone with a room to rent out for a few
weeks. I would certainly be willing to pay. And to help
with housework, or whatever, if that would make a
difference."
It was at that moment that a little light had ap
peared in Doris's eyes and she had looked over at the
table where Joe Carrington was having a late afternoon
snack of biscuits and gravy.
"I wonder..." she said softly, speculatively. Her
brown eyes studied Joe, then shifted and gazed at Carly
for a moment with a frown.
"All I need is a place to sleep," Carly was saying. "I
plan to spend most of my days sitting out in the sun
and smelling the good clean earth."
"Smelling what?" Now Doris was pretty sure her
cousin really was tetched. She made a face and shook
her head. "Roots," she muttered. She looked back at
Joe and a faint smile tickled her lips into a mischie
vous curl. "Oh well," she said with a short laugh. And
then she turned back to Carly, all business.
"What would you think about staying on a citrus
ranch with two cute little kids to look after?" she said.
"Kids?" Carly looked around and noted the man
Doris was staring at. He looked big and attractive. The last thing in the world she needed was another man in
her life. "I don't know about kids. I've never—"
"There's nothing to it. The kids are adorable. And
they haven't had a good woman to look after them for
almost two years now. That's when they lost their
mom. And it wouldn't be awkward or anything, be
cause Joe's mother lives with them, too. She's kind of
an invalid, but..."
A widower with two little motherless children. Carly frowned, pretty sure this was a situation she wasn't ex
perienced enough to cope with. "I don't know, Doris—"
"Don't be ridiculous! It'll be a piece of cake." She reached for a slice of pie and thrust it in front of her cousin. "You just sit here and eat this. I'll go on over
and ask Joe if he wants you."
"Doris!"
But Doris was gone and Carly could only stare after
her and wonder what it was she was getting herself into.
Little kids. A man who had lost his wife. This was a far cry from scheduling briefings with analysts and taking constituents out to lunch. She didn't have the slightest
idea how she would manage it.
But wait a minute. How hard could it be? Other women did this sort of thing all the time. Nurturing was supposed to be intuitive, wasn't it? She was a woman; mothering should come naturally.
Right?
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