“She doesn't know I’m here. I thought it would be better to
surprise people. I’m not sure that was such a hot idea. So far, yours is the
only friendly face I've seen.”
He strapped the baby into her high chair and said, “Can I get you
a cup of coffee?”
“I’d kill for a Coke if you have one.” When he started toward the
fridge, she waved him off. “I can find it myself. Looks like you already have
your hands full.”
She sat on a wooden bar stool with her Coke and watched him feed
the baby. He was patient and efficient, dodging tiny hands and effectively
navigating a squirming body and an eager little mouth, while managing to
deposit more food inside the baby than outside. “How is it,” he asked, scraping
strained peaches from his daughter’s face and redistributing them in her mouth,
“that we’ve never met?”
“I guess our paths just never crossed.”
He dabbed at Emma’s face with a dish towel, and the baby let out a
squeal of delighted laughter. “How long will you be in town?”
Colleen took a long, cold drink of soda. “I'm not really sure.”
She drummed her fingernails on the sweaty bottle, noticed that the polish had
chipped on one of them. She was in desperate need of a manicure, but she wasn’t
likely to find one in this town. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Go for it.”
“Was anybody planning to tell me?”
He glanced up, raised his eyebrows. “Tell you what?”
Her mouth drew together in a thin line. “That Dad sold the farm.”
“Ah,” he said, understanding lighting his face. “So you didn't
know?”
Irritably, she said, “No, I didn't know. I walked in and made a
damn fool of myself. Nobody tells me anything. I’m the black sheep, in case you
didn’t know.”
“Funny, I hadn’t heard that about you. But then, I tend to avoid
all the family drama. I get enough of that from my side of the family.”
“And who the hell is this Harley Atkins? Besides being a rescuer
of mangy and pathetic dogs?”
“So you met Harley?”
“Oh, I met him, all right. He walked into his kitchen and found me
standing there. Washing his dishes.”
The grin returned. It made her fidgety. “That would’ve been worth
seeing,” he said.
“He waltzed in, covered with mud, and carrying this filthy stray
dog. They both looked like creatures from some direct-to-video horror movie.
Somehow, he managed to rope me into helping give the mangy thing a bath. He was
wearing so much mud, I doubt I’d even recognize him if I saw him again.” She
thought about those piercing blue eyes and reconsidered her last statement.
“What’s his deal, anyway?”
Rob shoveled another spoonful of peaches into the baby’s waiting
mouth. “He’s from some little town in Georgia. I guess he went to law school at
USM before he moved to New York and made a pile of money. When he started
hankering for the simple life, he remembered how much he’d liked Maine, so he moved
here and bought your father’s place.”
“The guy is a
lawyer
?” Good God. He’d looked more like a street
bum. Her embarrassment factor rose. Exponentially.
“And he has a twelve-year-old daughter. Annabel.”
“Why the hell would he want to live here, of all places?”
Her brother-in-law stood, carried the empty jar of baby food to
the sink, and returned with a damp cloth. Wiping Emma’s face, he said, “Why not
here? I came here. I stayed.”
“You’re here because my sister is here. You have an excuse.”
“There’s a certain level of truth to that statement. But the place
grows on you after a while.”
“Right.” She picked at the chipped nail. “Like a bad fungus.”
He unsnapped the straps to the high chair and lifted Miss Emmy Lou
Who from her seat. “I have to get her some clean clothes,” he said. “Here, hold
her for me.” Before she could protest, he thrust the child into her arms and was
gone.
Colleen held the baby gingerly. How the hell had this happened?
She didn’t like babies. Had never liked babies. Wasn’t comfortable with anybody
she couldn’t interact with on an adult level. Her niece was staring at her with
wide-eyed wonder. She should probably say something. At least acknowledge the
kid. “Hi, Emma,” she said.
Emma’s green eyes widened. Except for her blond coloring, which
came from her father, the baby looked so much like Casey that it was scary. Softening,
Colleen said, “You cutie-patootie.”
“Gah.”
Something inside her melted at that single syllable. It had been
so long since she’d held a baby. Inexplicably and without warning, tears
flooded her eyes. Quickly, in case her brother-in-law returned before she
managed to get herself under control, she buried her nose in Emma’s hair and
breathed in that wonderful, unforgettable scent. The smell of fresh, clean baby
was like no other. A single tear broke loose and rolled down her cheek. “Sweet
thing,” she whispered, cradling the baby more closely against her breast. “Sweet,
wonderful baby Emma.”
Somewhere in the distance, a door opened and shut. “Rob?” her
sister called out. “I’m home.”
Footsteps echoed down the hall, and Colleen hastily blotted her
wet cheek with her shirt sleeve. Casey appeared in the doorway, laden with
grocery bags, her eyes absorbing the warm little domestic scene taking place in
her kitchen. She blinked twice, and in astonishment, said, “Colleen?”
And Colleen smiled. “Surprise,” she said.
Casey
She found him waiting for her in their bedroom, sprawled on the
window seat in the moonlight, wearing just a pair of jeans, one bare foot
braced against the floor, one lanky knee pointing due north. Casey Fiore
MacKenzie crossed the room to her husband, settled herself between his thighs,
and he wrapped a warm, possessive arm around her. “Hey there, hot stuff,” she
said.
He pressed his nose to her hair, kissed the tender line of her jaw.
“Hey yourself, my gorgeous, sexy woman.”
She leaned back into him, and he adjusted his position. Recently
showered, he smelled of fresh, clean man and Ivory soap. “I bet you say that to
all the girls.”
“Only the ones I sleep with. And that’s a pretty short list.”
It was, but it hadn’t always been that way. There’d been a time,
after his second divorce, when Rob MacKenzie had bounced from woman to woman
like a red rubber ball. More than once, Casey had vehemently expressed her
disapproval of his lifestyle. But that was then, and this was now. These days,
there was only one woman on his radar. They were life partners, and partners
for life, their friendship ripened into something intense and breathtaking and so
powerful it shook her to the marrow.
Casey pressed her cheek to his bare chest and exhaled a sigh of
contentment. This was their private time, the last half-hour of the day, and
they tried to keep it sacred. With a big house to run, a new business just
getting off the ground, community responsibilities, a teenager, an
eight-month-old baby, a dog and a cat, it wasn’t always easy to find time to be
together. So they fought for it, worked to make it happen, treasured it, kept
it inviolable. Their marriage was too important to let it flounder in a sea of
mundane details.
She drew back the gauzy curtain from the window. “Look at all
those stars,” she said, snugging her head against his shoulder. “Is there
anything more beautiful than a winter sky?”
Together, they contemplated the star-studded heavens. “Did you get
everybody settled?” he said.
“I did. Emma didn’t want to go down for the night. She was a
little fussy. I think she’s teething.”
“Poor kid. I’ll have to give her a little extra Daddy time
tomorrow.”
“Paige is doing homework, and Colleen’s settled in the downstairs
guest room. So, what do you think?”
“About your sister? She was damn quiet during supper. Considering
that you and I lived inside each other’s pockets for the better part of two
decades, and this is the first time I’ve met her, I’d say she’s pretty
desperate. And probably pretty broke.”
One corner of her mouth drew up in a perplexed frown. “I don’t
understand it. I know her late husband was wealthy. Where’d all the money go?”
“Beats me, but did you get a good look at the car she’s driving?
I checked it out when I brought in the groceries. Looks like she just bought it.
There’s a temporary plate on the back. It’s rusted and dented, and the hood’s
been replaced. The tires are pretty close to bald. The damn thing belongs in
the crusher. How she made it all the way from Florida, I can’t imagine.”
“What do you suppose went wrong?”
“I don’t know, but it must be pretty bad for her to turn to you. The
two of you aren’t exactly close.”
“We were once,” she said wistfully. “When we were little girls, we
were each other’s best friend. We were inseparable. Then Mama died, and things
were never the same again.”
His warm breath tickled her ear. “Ah, baby, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. That was a long time ago. I’m over it. Things change, and
there’s nothing that can be done about it now. I can’t go backward and rewrite
history.” Casey gnawed at her bottom lip. “She obviously thought she was
coming home to Dad and Millie.”
“But why’d she come home in the first place? Based on what she
said to me, Jackson Falls isn’t exactly high on her list of favored places. And
there was something else. Something in her face and her attitude. Something
she’s trying to hide. She seems so…for lack of a better word, I guess I’d say
brittle. And she’s scared. But of what?”
“I have no idea. So what do we do now?”
“Well…if her visit’s as open-ended as I suspect it is, she’ll be
needing a place to stay.”
Casey let out the breath she’d been holding. She should have known
he’d come through for her. He always had, right from the start, years before
their feelings for each other ever took a romantic turn. “The apartment over
the studio?”
“That's what I was thinking. We’ve wrapped up Ray’s album, and things
are pretty quiet right now. It’s just sitting there, empty.”
She pulled away from him, sat upright, swept the long hair back
from her face. “Are you sure? I was afraid to ask. You’re not responsible for
my sister’s welfare.”
“Give me a break, Fiore. I’m as responsible for her as you are. I’m
your husband, and she’s family. You don’t turn your back on family, no matter how
crazy they make you. And it’s not as though she’ll be a financial drain on us.”
“No. But she could be an emotional drain. You don’t know her like
I do.”
“I don't know her at all. Are you worried? Because if you are, we
could always rent her an apartment somewhere in town until she gets back on her
feet.”
“You’d do that, wouldn’t you?”
“If that was what you wanted. But I don’t think it is.”
“No.” She ran a hand along his thigh, worn denim soft against her
fingertips. “It’s not what I want. She’s my sister. What I want—” Casey sighed.
“Maybe it’s not even possible at this point. But what I really want is a second
chance to be her sister.”
“So we’ll talk to her in the morning. Give her the soft sell, very
low-key, salvage her pride. I have a feeling it’s taken a beating lately.”
“You’re a good man, Flash.”
“Hey.” He beckoned to her, tapped his bottom lip. “Put your money
where your mouth is. Plant one right here, Mrs. MacKenzie. A nice, long, slow one.
Then, let’s sneak down the back stairs to the kitchen and check the freezer. If
I’m not mistaken, there’s a new half-gallon of fudge ripple in there.”
She cupped his cheek, gave him a tender, lingering kiss. Opened
her eyes and said, “You must have read my mind, MacKenzie.”
Harley
Hunched over the ream of tax paperwork he’d spent the last four
hours trying to translate into some form of comprehensible English, Harley
Atkins took comfort from the dark and violent homicidal fantasies that crowded
his brain. The tax code had obviously been written by deranged and sadistic
individuals who took great glee in torturing the American taxpayer. Utter
gibberish. He was a lawyer, for Christ’s sake, and everybody knew that lawyers
specialized in obfuscation. But he had to hand it to those IRS people. They
took the blue ribbon with their distinct brand of claptrap.
With a sigh, Harley tossed down his pen. As hard as it was to
admit, he was going to have to turn it over to a tax accountant. And he
couldn’t blame it all on the IRS; part of the problem was that he was
monumentally distracted. All he’d been able to think about since dinner was the
woman he’d found standing in his kitchen this afternoon, washing his dishes.
He’d heard stories about Will Bradley’s younger daughter, had
heard enough about her to know he wanted to steer clear of her in the worst way.
The woman had walked away from her kid and found herself a rich husband, and in
Harley’s book, that was an unforgivable sin. Any woman who could do that had to
be a granite-hearted, frigid bitch. Like his ex-wife.
He hadn’t been prepared for the reality of that lovely,
heart-shaped face, for the enormity of those blue eyes, for the genuine sadness
they conveyed. Colleen Berkowitz wasn’t quite the hardass drama queen he’d
expected. Sure, she was a little brittle, a little caustic. But that was merely
the face she presented to the world. Self-preservation. Beneath that hard outer
shell, there was something else, something he recognized all too well: vulnerability.
He’d seen the panic on her face when she realized her childhood home had been
lost to her forever.
That was what got to him. If there was one thing that always
kicked him hard in the gut, it was vulnerability on a woman’s face. He’d seen
too much of it growing up, on the faces of his momma and his sisters, living
with Big Earl and his crazy ways. Harley had made his escape from that
particular hell, but he’d never forgotten. He carried the memory around with
him, heavy baggage he would have gladly lived without. Until he walked into his
kitchen and saw Colleen Berkowitz standing there, he thought he’d been
successful at burying that baggage so deep he’d never see it again. But the
vulnerability on her face stirred those memories and brought them floating back
to the surface in living, breathing Technicolor.
The woman was trouble, and he had no intention of getting involved
with trouble. He couldn’t allow himself to go anywhere near a woman like that,
no matter how afraid, no matter how broken she was. And Harley knew broken when
he saw it; the two of them, he and broken, had developed a close personal
relationship by the time he was eight years old, living on that hardscrabble
old farmstead in rural Georgia. Maybe that was why he’d felt such an
instantaneous connection with this woman he didn’t even know. Life had
obviously kicked her in the teeth a time or two, and she wore the evidence on
that gorgeous face of hers.
But she wasn’t his problem. He already had enough on his plate. His
little girl. This farm. Trying to keep their heads above water. Trying to be
both mother and father to a kid who didn’t understand why her mother had left
her. There was no room in his life for a blue-eyed angel with a wistful
expression and layers of pain even he, a total stranger, could see clearly. He
couldn’t take on anybody else’s pain right now. His was still too recent, too
raw. Amy’s defection had left him gutted, and he was just starting to rise out
of the ashes of that crashed-and-burned relationship. He was a little smarter
now. He wouldn’t be taken in again.
Annabel bounced into the kitchen, dressed in knee socks and a football
jersey that ended halfway down her slender thighs. At twelve, she still had a
boyish look, with scrawny arms and legs, but some time back, she’d started to
develop breasts. How the hell that had happened, he had no idea. Of course,
being the overprotective father that he was, he’d been in a rush to cover them
up, lest some perverted, prepubescent seventh-grade male consider his little
girl some kind of sex object. The ensuing conversation had been awkward, exacerbated
by Annabel’s determination to avoid all things feminine. He’d finally mentioned
his dilemma to Trish Bradley, who’d volunteered to take his daughter by the
hand and drive her to the nearest department store, where they’d picked out a
half-dozen training bras. He didn’t even want to think about what the hell they
were being trained for. Sometimes, ignorance truly was bliss.
He thought, not for the first time, about hanging a poster-size
photo of his ex-wife on the kitchen wall, where he could use it for target
practice. The thought gave him immense pleasure, and for a few seconds, he
wallowed in it. Then he leaned back in his chair and said, “Why’re you still
up? You have school tomorrow.”
Standing in front of the open refrigerator door, his daughter looked
at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Dad…tomorrow’s Saturday.”
“Is it?”
As a rejoinder, it left a lot to be desired. But by this time of
night, his brain was too fried to come up with anything more pithy. His days
all flowed together anyway, into a single, continuous loop that played over and
over and over. Up at four, milk cows, feed cows, scrape down the barn, feed
chickens, repair ancient equipment, milk cows again, rinse and repeat. The work
was tedious, intensely physical, and repetitive to the point of madness.
And Harley loved it.
After ten years of the mind-numbing dullness of big-city corporate
law, of the office politics and the game-playing, of vying for that partnership
and the corner office with its breathtaking view of the Manhattan skyline, he’d
had enough. Amy’d been the one to get the office, along with a surfeit of
fringe benefits that included sleeping in the senior partner’s bed. Harley
hadn’t wanted the damned office anyway. Truth be told, he hadn’t wanted any of
it. The office, the partnership, New York itself. He was just a simple farm boy
from Georgia, one who liked walking into the local hardware store and being
greeted by name. All those late nights, all those billable hours, all the cut-throat
scrambling to reach the top, he’d done for them, for his family. For Amy and Annabel
and any unborn future mini-Harleys.
That had turned out really well.
Annabel took a Popsicle from the fridge, closed the door, and
crossed the room to where Ginger rested on an old blanket beside the wood stove.
Kneeling, she rubbed the dog’s belly. Ginger wagged her tail against the floor
and let out a long, contented sigh.
His daughter looked up at him with huge dark eyes like her
mother’s. “Why do you suppose somebody didn’t want her?” Annabel said.
Harley’s brows drew together in a scowl. There were names for
people like that, but he tried hard not to use them in front of his daughter. Sometimes,
he slipped up, but at least he made the effort.
“Some people,” he said, “don’t have any respect for animals. And
if they mistreat animals, chances are pretty good that they’ll also mistreat women
and kids.”
His daughter let out a long-suffering sigh and rolled her eyes. “I
feel one of those fatherly lectures coming on. Yes, Dad, when I start dating, I
promise I’ll never go out with any guy who ever pulled a cat’s tail.”
“I’m serious. There are real statistics. If you look at the stats
compiled by the Humane Society, you’ll see that there’s a direct correlation
between animal abuse and domestic vio—”
“Dad! Can you for one minute stop being a lawyer and just be my
dad?”
The kid had a valid point. “Sorry. It just happens to be one of my
pet peeves. No pun intended.”
She peeled the paper off her Popsicle. “Is that why you were a
dismal failure at corporate law?”
His mouth fell open. “Who told you that?”
She took a lick of orange Popsicle and grinned cheekily. “Mom said
it.”
“Oh, did she? Was that before or after she—oh, hell, never mind. I
was not a dismal failure. I was damn good at it. I just hated every stinkin’ minute
of it, that’s why I left.”
“I wasn’t trying to criticize. What I meant was that you’re too
nice to be a corporate lawyer. Who cares about corporations, anyway?”
Apparently, your mother.
He had to bite his tongue to keep
the words from spilling out. But as much as he hated his ex, that still didn’t
give him the right to poison his daughter’s mind. She’d figure out, soon
enough, just what kind of woman her mother was. But she’d have to figure it out
on her own. It wasn’t his place to enlighten her. “Bed,” he said.
“But—”
“There will be no buts. It’s late. You’re twelve years old. Give
your daddy a hug and get yourself on upstairs.”
She wrapped those skinny arms around him, turning his heart into a
soft puddle of goo. Soon enough, it would be some other man she’d be wrapping
those arms around, and he could barely stand the thought. Better enjoy it while
he could, because his days as her best guy were numbered.
“Dad? Can I go with you tomorrow when you take Ginger to the
vet?”
“As long as you’re up and ready by nine. Shoo, now, before I
change my mind.”
“Night, Daddy.”
“Night, angel.”
He watched her go, the little girl he’d taught to ride a bicycle,
the one whose discarded baby teeth he’d snuck out from under her pillow,
replacing them with quarters. He watched until she was out of sight, and then
he listened to the sound of her footsteps scampering up the old wooden
staircase.
And he snorted. Training bras, indeed.