Читать книгу Her Daughter's Father - Anna Adams - Страница 11

DEEP SADNESS HELD INDIA silent in the face of Colleen’s lingering grief for her mother. Colleen kept her eyes trained on the photo.

“They adopted me when I was only a few hours old. Mom always said adopted children were luckiest, because their parents chose them. I felt pretty lucky until she died.”

Aching for her, India lifted her hand to touch the girl’s arm, but she kept her comfort to herself as Colleen turned with an accusation in her eyes.

“Why does everyone in this town take Dad’s side about Chris when no one knows him the way I do?”

“I can’t speak for everyone else.”

“Why do you, then? What do you think you know about Chris that I don’t?”

Nothing here had turned out as India had expected. Her daughter no longer had a mother. And I can’t step in. She couldn’t tell the truth, and she definitely didn’t want to lie. Not now, when she needed to most.

“When I was your age, I made a mistake.” Putting her hand on her throat, India felt for the lump that made talking difficult. “I don’t know how to tell you this. I’ve never talked to anyone about that time. I hurt myself and my parents—I hurt too many people. Maybe, when I saw you with Chris, I thought of that. Maybe I just don’t want you to be hurt, and I don’t know Chris except for what I saw of him that night at the festival.”

“What makes you think your past has anything to do with me?”

Reaching behind herself, India gripped the lip of a bookshelf. She’d already confessed too much. “Colleen, I know—I know you think nothing bad will happen to you. You can tell right from wrong. You can’t imagine why you’d make a foolish decision.”

Her wide eyes slightly softening her air of haughtiness, Colleen stepped back. “Yeah? So?”

“I don’t want any girl your age to go through what I did.”

“No one in this town believes I’m capable of thinking for myself.”

“Maybe you should think about your grandparents and your father. Think of the place you live and how these people look at you.”

Colleen raked her fingers through her hair, a gesture so familiar to India it brought instant tears to her eyes. Colleen might have been India’s mother in youthful form. India bit the inside of her cheek again. No crying, no whining. I can take this. She’s the important one.

Colleen only shook her head in disgust. “I know how they talk. To them, I’m a child. You’re a complete stranger, and even you gossip about me.” Stranger came out of her mouth like an epithet.

“Colleen!”

India’s tears vanished at the harsh rasp of Jack’s voice. She turned. Tall and male, he vibrated with the wrath of an angry parent.

“Apologize.” Silk in his voice chased apprehensive shivers down India’s back.

“Dad, I—”

He stopped her with a fed-up look. She tilted her chin.

“I’m sorry, Miss Stuart.” Without warning, she relaxed, the stiffness falling out of her body as she tried to claim all of India’s attention. “Sometimes I let my temper go, but I understand what you tried to tell me.”

Touched beyond bearing, India turned to Jack. “She had a right to be upset.”

“I know you left the boatyard with Chris.” Jack closed in on his daughter. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? You have to get me back because you’re too young to date an eighteen-year-old boy?”

Colleen’s pink blush spread. She grabbed the loose cloth of his sleeve, evidently surprising them both. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Dad. I don’t like sitting in that boat shop, and the dust hurts my head. I just wanted to see—” She broke off and pulled her hand away, trying to retire back into her adolescent shell. Her eyes drifted over Jack’s shoulder to the photo of him with Mary.

As he followed her gaze, his face tightened with pain, but only long enough for him to catch himself. “Let’s go, Colleen.”

“Dad, I’m sorry.”

In the grip of need she didn’t understand or trust, India curled her fingers over the hard, strained muscles in his forearm. Why were they so reluctant to talk about Mary Stephens? What had happened to make them so protective of each other? She had no right, but she wanted to make it better. “Maybe you should—”

He stepped away from her, in a hands-off gesture she couldn’t ignore. In a moment of startling clarity, India realized her concern for Jack stood apart from her burgeoning, maternal anxieties for Colleen.

India backed into one of the panels. Mercifully, Colleen and Jack were too fixed on each other to notice.

His hands shook on Colleen’s sleeves as he turned her toward the door. Rooted to the floor, India ached to do something. Clearly Colleen regretted letting Jack find out she’d needed to see her mother’s picture.

India tossed her ponytail over her shoulder. Had he considered renewing the paint on his house? A watery smile curved her mouth, but Jack’s shadowed eyes cut to her heart again.

“I wish I’d learned to swim better,” she said as she watched them leave. “I’m in way over my head here.”

“India?” Viveca Henderson’s voice preceded her hand on India’s shoulder. “To whom are you speaking? Are you aware you’re quite alone?”

AS INDIA SLIPPED INSIDE her hotel room, Mick came through the adjoining door, holding a towel to his chin as if he’d just finished a shave. His smile made her feel normal again.

“We’ve had company,” he said.

“Who now?”

“I left his name—” Mick crossed back into his own room, and India followed in his footsteps. He bumped into her as he turned with a business card he took off the desk. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

“We have to get out of town.”

“You sound like a Clint Eastwood movie.”

India snatched his towel away. “Mary Stephens died three years ago. Colleen can’t talk to Jack, and Jack’s heart is broken.”

Mick stepped back. “You expected a fairy tale?”

Though they’d disagreed so often for so many years, Mick’s pragmatic acceptance of Colleen’s family comforted India. She might be overreacting if he didn’t panic with her. “I like happily-ever-after, Dad.”

“So you want to run away before you see if she gets one?”

“Run away? I’ve tossed myself nearly into the middle of their problems. I have to get out before I confess who I am.”

Mick shook his head. “You won’t. You know you can’t.”

“I’m dying to.” India slumped on his neatly made, rust-colored hotel comforter. In the silence, water dripped from a faucet. The heater struggled to live but gave in with a gurgle. India lifted her head. “Thank you for coming with me. I’m so grateful I can be honest with you.”

“See? I don’t know how many times I’ve told you to come to me when you have a problem. Tell me about Jack’s heart.”

She froze. “I usually don’t come to you because you hear and see too well.”

“We painters.” He waved an admonishing finger at her. “People talk to us. You might think bartenders hear it all, but give a man a paint can, and he looks like he’s waiting to solve all your problems. Remember Tom Sawyer.”

“He worked his way out of painting.”

Mick gave a move-it-along motion with his right index finger. “Jack’s heart?”

“Colleen came to the library to look at her mother’s picture, but Jack was in the picture, too.” Searching for the meaning underneath, India frowned. “Maybe she wanted to see her parents together again? Anyway, I don’t think she told him she was coming to the library. I think they’d had some sort of argument, and she’d pulled a disappearing act.”

“Familiar story.”

“You mean for her? No, you mean me, but I only disappeared when you couldn’t help me anymore.”

“Your mother and I are your family, just like Jack is Colleen’s. We were supposed to help, especially when you needed us most. Look at Colleen. She’s the same age you were when you got pregnant. Now, make me believe she could provide for a child of her own.”

India refused to contemplate his homespun truth, but neither could she take the absolution he offered. “When Jack showed up, he asked her where she’d been. Instead of answering, she just looked at the picture, and he looked, too. I’ve never seen anything like the pain in his eyes, but he covered it up so fast I almost thought I’d imagined it.” She rubbed her chest. “No, I didn’t imagine it.”

“You like Jack.” Mick leaned against the desk.

“I’m confused about Jack, because he’s Colleen’s father.”

“He’s a good father, but why won’t she talk to him?”

“Exactly.” India slapped her hands against her thighs. “And that’s the one question I cannot ask them.”

“I think you might hang yourself on several questions.” Mick straightened and held out the business card. “Like I said, we have a new client.”

India tilted the card toward the weak gold and green lamp. “Leon Shipp. Power Trucks for Power Men?”

“He wants us to paint his house. We could stay another week or so.” Mick nodded at the card. “If you think we should.”

“No, I don’t.” She blushed. “But I volunteered to help with toddler story time at the library, so we have to stay until Saturday.”

Mick laughed. “Run to the familiar? I’ll call this Leon and tell him to expect us tomorrow morning. Okay?”

India tilted her head sharply to one side. “I’m afraid.”

As if she were his little girl again—and she’d been a daddy’s girl once—Mick sank onto the edge of the bed beside her and tucked her cheek against his rough shirt. “I know you won’t hurt anyone—well, except yourself, and I’m here this time to help you if you make that mistake again. I don’t want you to spend fifteen more years wondering what might have been.”

“She’s your granddaughter, too. And she’s Mom all over again.”

His chin moved up and down against her forehead. “Mmm-hmm.”

Miserably she clutched his sleeve. “I wish I could give you back everything I took from you.”

“Shh. You refused to take anything from us, India.”

“I love you, Dad.”

As she absorbed her father’s silence, she realized how long it’d been since she’d last said those words.

Mick cleared his throat. “I’d paint Leon Shipp’s house and his entire fleet of bumper cars to hear you say that again.”

India smiled. “Power trucks, Dad.”

“Whatever. Try not to ruin the moment, honey.”

AT THE TOP OF THE HOTEL’S rickety wooden steps, Jack hesitated. By the time he reached India’s door, his courage damn near deserted him. Whatever she’d said to Colleen at the library had made his daughter more receptive to him. On the way home, he’d kept silent, afraid anything he said to Colleen might only push her further away. But the moment he parked the truck, she’d announced she wouldn’t see Chris anymore unless they met within a group of her friends.

Which ought to cut down nicely on their time together. And Jack didn’t intend to look that gift horse in the mouth.

Still puzzled over India’s unexpected powers of persuasion, Jack stared at her sea-salted, pale gray door. He rubbed his palms against his jeans. Sweaty as a teenage boy’s, they bumped over the denim. If he didn’t knock now, he never would. He owed India an apology for the brusque way he’d treated her at the library, especially since she’d managed to help his daughter.

He’d shut down the moment he realized Colleen had come to see her mother’s picture. Memories of Mary sprang a truckload of feelings on him, just when he felt least prepared to deal with the past. Hayden had snapped that photo of them together the day they’d heard Colleen was coming.

Jack hated that picture. He wondered that no one else had ever seen the truth in his eyes. That morning, Mary had told him Mother Angelica had called. At the same time, she’d confessed she’d made love with another man. She’d said she couldn’t go on with their marriage without coming clean. The man had been one of the island’s summer people, and Jack hadn’t let her say his name.

“I just wanted to remember what love felt like without a purpose.”

Mary’s words still tore him apart with a deeper emotion than he’d ever felt for her again. Both desperate to have a child, they’d tried every crazy procreation theory anyone suggested. In some horrible, too-sane recess of his mind, he’d understood what she’d meant about needing a different kind of love.

In the same breath as her confession, she’d asked him to stay with her and adopt the infant girl Mother Angelica had offered them. How many times over how many years had he wished she’d kept her secret?

Able to feel such strange compassion for Mary, he’d believed he would be able to forget her betrayal. He never had. He’d loved her still, but he’d never loved her in the same way. He’d hidden from the truth behind work and behind his and Mary’s mutual joy in Colleen. She’d used him to keep the baby who’d, in a way, cost them their marriage. He’d accepted the compromise.

Why now, outside India Stuart’s room, had he lost his long-standing ability to shield himself from those memories? Impatient, he stepped forward and pounded on the door.

Startled at the shotlike echoes in the otherwise silent street, he peered at the windows around him. His resolute knock had sounded more like police on a raid. Just the kind of commotion to raise a dozen or more Arran Islanders.

Nobody answered the door. He knocked again, more gently, just in case India had ducked behind her bed at his first demand to be let in. Still no answer. He turned toward the stairs, feeling foolish. All that idiotic soul-searching, just so he could apologize to an empty room.

Glancing down the street to the bay, he saw India before he’d gone down one stair. In silky blue shorts and a white oversize tank top, she ran through the waning sunshine like a grasshopper, all arms and legs that flailed in way too many different directions.

He laughed to himself. “Exercise is exercise. I thought she’d be more graceful.”

Her clumsy stride didn’t detract from the taut line of her thighs or the sweet curve of her upper arms. Jack tightened his hand on the stair rail. Oh, my God—I just ogled her. Again he surveyed the surrounding windows. Thankfully, not a single curtain twitched. And India came toward him.

“Jack?” she panted as she crested the hill.

A stride like that ought to leave her out of breath. “India,” he returned, descending the steps two at a time. Movement made him feel less asinine, less as if she’d caught him loitering outside her door. Since she had.

“What’s up?” Her deep blue gaze narrowed. “Is Colleen all right?”

Well, at least she didn’t assume he’d come on his own behalf. “She’s fine, better even. I don’t know what you said to her, but you must have gotten through.”

India’s guilty start piqued his interest. “What do you mean?” she asked in an innocent tone he didn’t trust.

“She promised not to see Chris alone again.”

“You mean like on a date?”

He nodded. “Finally, one for our side.” Stop stalling. Say what you came to. “I’m sorry I was rude earlier.”

India backed up as if she’d stepped on a cat. “Not at all.” Color flooded her cheeks. Her gaze ducked his. “You were busy with your daughter.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I just—” She swallowed. The muscles in her throat tightened above the nest of her sharp collarbones.

“You just what?” Heeding a sudden need to know the texture of her skin, he trailed his finger through the beads of moisture that hugged her rounded shoulder. Unexpected desire raced in his blood. His mouth watered to taste her taut skin just beneath her jaw, where her pulse fluttered even faster now than when she’d stopped running.

Did his nearness affect her, too?

India looked down at his finger against her skin. Jack jerked his hand away and tried to remember what she’d last said. “You just what?”

She tilted her head, her defiant expression astonishingly like Colleen’s. “I admitted I’d used some bad judgment when I was her age that hurt my family.” The words spilled from her, as if they weighed too much to carry inside.

Jack frowned. Surprised. He didn’t want to know after all. “I appreciate your help, and I don’t know how to say this without sounding harsh, but I’m not sure she needs to hear about anyone else’s bad decisions.” He stopped, realizing he’d insulted her, though she remained stoic. “I mean—judgment.”

“She wanted to know why no one trusts Chris.”

“Why won’t she talk to me?” He shut his mouth, reluctant to follow in his daughter’s footsteps and pull India any deeper into their lives.

“I know I meddled, but the mistakes she can make are even more dangerous than the ones I made at her age. I should have thought harder before I spoke to her.”

Jack hesitated. “I’m grateful for her change of mind about Chris, but I don’t know if she should be talking to you about family matters.”

How could Colleen share her confidences with a stranger? Even a stranger who ran like a tipsy centipede and, in moments like rare treasures, smiled as if she knew how to make the most out of joy. Colleen should talk to him.

Now India’s smile turned brittle. “I’m sorry if I over-stepped.”

“No, I can’t imagine you did.” She’d disappeared that night at the festival. She’d all but refused his gratitude for helping Colleen. “I’m being rude again, but Colleen confuses me. I always thought her diaper days would be the hardest. You can’t go to the bathroom without making sure someone keeps an eye on an infant, but now she’s a teenager, I suddenly realize how much more she needs guidance.”

“Even if she refuses to believe she does?” India finished for him.

Maybe she had known how to talk to Colleen without saying more than she should. What mistakes had India Stuart made? What had she done that made her so anxious to help his daughter?

He lifted his chin. “You must know fifteen-year-olds. Nieces? Nephews?”

“No, I’m an only child.” Color stained her cheeks again, beautiful pale pink that deepened the blue in her eyes. “I’ve just worked with children.”

Intrigued, Jack settled one foot on the stair behind him. “You volunteer?”

India wrapped her arms across her rib cage. Her fingers looked too slender, splayed over her shirt. Her gaze became shuttered with reluctance. “I work at the library at home. I’m helping my father this spring. If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Stuart, I’m still sweaty, and the weather’s changing again.”

A librarian? She’d waited all this time to mention it? Why? “What did I say that turned me into Mr. Stuart? I was Jack when you ran up.”

India scooted past him, her back to the opposite rail. She must have run along the bay, but the salt on her skin was perfume. Drying, it left interesting, powdery patterns. Would her fragile wrist taste different than the full, earthy curve of her mouth?

She braced one hand on her hip and the other against the wooden building, as if she heard his thoughts. Restraint tightened her tone. “You asked me not to pry. Maybe you shouldn’t, either?”

He hesitated. One step closer, and he’d ask her questions a single man asked a single woman. Like why she was so afraid of the awareness that ran like a current between them.

But he wasn’t just any single man. As he searched the shadows on India’s face, he remembered he was a fisherman who worked on another man’s boat so he could pay to repair his own trawler. His daughter barely spoke to him from her side of the great adolescent divide, and his in-laws seemed to agree he was making a mess of things.

“Maybe I’m the one who’s overstepping.” Maybe, deep down, he’d come for more than a thank-you. He’d come for his own information, but he’d discovered too much. Finding out what had hurt her enough to teach her how to reach his daughter required a commitment he had no time to make. “I’d better get home before Nettie sets the kitchen on fire and Colleen decides it’s already too late to start her homework. Thanks again, India.” He stepped onto the sidewalk. “Good night.”