Читать книгу Husband By Inheritance - Cara Colter - Страница 11

After all these years, he still slept as though there was a possibility of someone sneaking in the room and putting a gun to his ear.

Even in Miracle Harbor, Oregon, where such things were unheard of.

He lay awake, now, listening, every muscle tense, ready, wondering what small noise had startled him awake in the deepest part of the night. The green glow of his clock told him it was just after 3:00 a.m.

The foghorn, he decided, not the creak of his front gate, badly in need of oiling. He allowed himself to relax slightly, and then slightly more, closing his eyes and willing himself to go back to sleep. He hated this time of night the most because he was unable to exercise his customary discipline over his mind. For some reason this was when the memories wanted to visit.

The sound came again.

The quiet crunch of someone’s muffled footsteps moving up the walk. He listened for and heard the scrape of the loose board on the second step up to the porch.

It was when he heard the soft groan of his front door handle being tried that he moved, fast and quiet, out of the his bed and to the window.

An old car, hitched to a U-Haul trailer, was parked out on the street. Thieves? Planning to clean him right out?

They’d be disappointed. He had no interest in “stuff.” His apartment was Spartan. No TV, no stereo, just his computer.

Had he once had an interest in “stuff”? He had trouble remembering small things like that. Though he had a flash now of his wife, Stacey, standing in front of something in a store, looking back at him, laughing at the outrageous price, but there had been something wistful in her eyes, too.

He flinched as if he’d been struck when he remembered what they had been looking at that day.

A bassinet.

A blackness that did not bode well for his intruder, descended over him. Wearing only the boxers he slept in, he made his way down the steps and through the darkened house, the of movement—stealthy, cautious, icily calm—second nature to him.

He slid out the back door, not opening it enough to let it squeak, his plan already formed. He’d use the walkway alongside the house and follow it to the front. The prowler would be trapped on the narrow porch. He’d have to go through him to get away.

Fat chance of that.

This intruder had picked the wrong house.

Home of Shane McCall, agent, Drug Investigation Unit. Retired.

The mist was thick and swirling, the cement of the sidewalk ice-cold under his bare feet, the rhododendrons so thick along the side path that his bare skin was brushing the rough shingles of his house on one side, and getting soaked by the rubbery leaves on the other. These details barely registered, he was so intensely focused. He came around the side of the house, stopped in the shadow of the fog and dense overgrown shrubs, and watched.

He saw a shape bent over the door; the night too dark and the fog too thick for more than vague impressions. A baseball cap. A build too slight to be threatening to him.

A kid, he thought, and felt his anger wane as he watched the intruder jiggle the door handle again. Was he trying to pick the lock? Shane should have just called the police. Maybe Morgan was working tonight. When the business was done they could have exchanged war stories.

Vastly preferable to going back up those stairs to bed when he’d finished here, to the memories that were waiting for him.

Knowing that calling the police was still an option, and knowing he wouldn’t take it, he moved quietly out of the shadows to the bottom of his steps.

It occurred to him that maybe he should have taken his service revolver out of retirement, that someone without the physical size to handle a confrontation might attempt to even out his odds with a weapon. A knife, a handgun. That was probably especially true of the kind of kid who would break into a house at three in the morning.

His mind working with that rapid, detached lightning swiftness that came naturally to him, Shane decided on a course of action—keep his distance, make it seem like he was packing a gun himself.

Hard to do, considering he was standing out here in his undershorts. But not impossible.

He went to the bottom of the stairs, and with the cold authority that came so easily to him, he said, “Put your hands up where I can see them. Don’t turn around.”

The figure bolted upright and then froze.

“You heard me. Hands up.”

“I can’t.” Fear had made the voice high and girlish.

“You can’t?” he said, his voice cool and hard. “You’d better.”

“I might drop the baby.”

The voice was so scared that it was quivering. The baby?

Shane went up the steps two at a time, put his hand on intruder’s shoulder and spun him around.

Her.

Two hers, a full-grown her, and a baby her, both looking at him with the same saucer-huge blue eyes. Blue eyes tinged with a hint of brown.

He dropped his hand from her shoulder, ran it through the dampness of his hair, and swore.

When her foot connected with his shin, he was reminded, painfully that he had forgotten rule one: never let your guard down ever.

“Fire,” she screamed. “Fire.”

Without thinking he clamped his hand over her mouth before she managed to roust the whole neighborhood, something he was not exactly dressed for.

She was beautiful. Blond hair, very short and straight, poking out from under a Cubs ball cap and framing a face of utter loveliness—perfect skin, high cheekbones, a shapely nose. Her eyes were her dominating feature, though. Huge, the color partly a sea blue he had only seen once, a long time ago, off the coast of Kailua-Kona, in Hawaii, and partly brown. The combination was nothing short of astounding.

Those eyes were sparkling with unshed tears.

He swore again. She was shaking now, and the baby looked anxiously at her mother, screwed up her face and began to howl.

The noise seemed to reverberate in the fog, and he glanced uneasily at the neighbor’s houses again.

“Promise you won’t scream,” he said. “Or yell fire.” Fire. All right. She was beautiful, but obviously deranged.

She nodded.

He moved his hand fractionally, and she backed away from him until she could back away no more, her shoulder blades right up against his front door, her eyes wide, her arms folded protectively around the baby. It wasn’t a small baby. In fact, she was quite sturdy looking, possibly two.

“Stay away from us, you pervert.”

“Pervert?” he sputtered. “Pervert?”

“Hiding in the bushes in your undershorts waiting for a defenseless woman to come home. That’s called a pervert.”

“Home?” He stared at her. Her voice was shaking but her eyes were flashing. She probably weighed less than him by at least eighty pounds. And he knew she was going to take him on if he came one step closer.

She nodded, licked her lips nervously. Her eyes darted by him, looking for an escape.

He folded his arms over his chest. “This happens to be my home. I thought you were a prowler.”

Her mouth fell open, and then her eyes narrowed with suspicion.

He could see what she was thinking: that perverts were damnably clever. But he could also see the confusion in her face, her eyes searching for and finding the black iron house number over the wall-mounted porch light.

He was not sure he’d ever been quite so insulted. A pervert? Him? And she didn’t seem really deranged. Just exhausted. He could see dark crescents bruising the skin under those beautiful eyes.

She studied him a moment longer, and then he could see some finely held tension ease slightly.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I’ve made a mistake. I’m very tired. I—”

To his horror, little tears were slipping down her cheeks now, too. She wasn’t wearing any mascara, which he liked for some foolishly irrational reason. Her shoulders were shaking under a jacket that looked too thin to offer any kind of protection from the penetrating chill of the night.

The baby’s howls intensified when she saw the tears dribbling down her mother’s cheeks.

Striving for dignity, the woman pulled back her shoulders, lifted her chin. The gestures wrenched oddly at a heart that he would have sworn, only moments ago, had been cast in pure iron.

“Could you just direct me to a motel?”

“I could, but you won’t have any luck.” This did not seem to surprise her. “Why fire?”

“Pardon?”

“You yelled fire,” he reminded her. “Are perverts scared of it? Like holding a cross up to a vampire?”

She laughed nervously. “I read once that nobody listens when a woman calls for help. But they will if someone calls fire.”

She wasn’t from around here, he decided. Not even close. Survival tactics of a big city woman. Her voice was intriguing. It wasn’t sweet, like her face. It had a little raspy edge to it.

“Why aren’t there any motels? There were ‘No Vacancy’ signs on every motel for the last fifty miles it seemed.” She wiped impatiently at her eyes with the back of her sleeve, and then wiped the baby’s face, and kissed her on the nose.

A magical effect. The baby, an exact replica of her mother, except with blonder hair that was, wildly curly and unruly, ceased howling. The girl turned her head enough to look solemnly at him out of the corner of one eye, but apparently the glance failed to reassure, and she began to cry again, louder than before.

“There’s a major resort going up on the edge of town. We have contractors, carpenters, plumbers…you name it they’re here.”

He doubted there was a room to be had anywhere this night.

Unless you counted his empty house. Three bedrooms. One up, two down. The place had been a duplex until a few months ago when, with his landlord’s permission, he had turned the upstairs kitchen into a workroom.

Don’t, he told himself.

But he did, feeling slightly put out that he’d frightened her so badly, but even more put out that the baby was going to wake up the whole bloody neighborhood.

“Look, maybe you better come in for a minute.”

He reached past her for the door. Which was locked. The baby’s crying was affecting him so badly, he considered a well-placed kick to the old wood, but contained himself.

“No,” she said, firmly, her suspicion leaping back in her eyes. “I’m leaving. It’s all right. Really. I’m tired. I drove too long. I must have the wrong address.”

She went to move by him and then stopped, the porch opening onto the stairs too small for her to squeeze by without touching him. It was when he saw the delicate blush rising in her cheeks that he remembered he was in a state of undress.

“Wait right here,” he said sternly, using his no-nonsense cop voice, a man to be taken seriously, even in his underwear. Boxers, thank God. The plaid kind that could be mistaken for a pair of gym shorts in a thick fog. Maybe.

She was scared still, it was written all over her face.

Scared that if he was not a pervert that had been hiding in the bushes, she had accidentally knocked on the door of Miracle Harbor’s only axe-murderer.

“I’m a cop,” he said reluctantly, “Retired.” He knew she’d see it. The stance, the look in his eyes, the cut of his hair.

Her eyes wide on his face, she nodded, then as soon as he stepped back, she flew by him, and scurried down the walk. He let her go, listening to the snap of the locks on her car doors when she was safely inside it.

Then he listened to the unhealthy grind as she turned the ignition.

Not his problem, he thought, at all. Thank God.

He went back down the sidewalk, and in his back door. He ordered himself up the steps and into bed. He made it up the steps, but his mind, never disciplined at this time of night, listened for the sound of the car pulling away. Nothing.

He opened his window, took a look out, and heard again the grind of the starter.

“Hell,” he said, and picked up a pair of jeans off the end of his bed. “Double hell.”

Despite a shin that should have told him otherwise, the woman had a vulnerable quality in her eyes. He wanted to leave her to her fate, and couldn’t. She wasn’t dressed warmly enough to be sitting out there in a freezing car, and the child probably wasn’t either.

Minutes later, snapping up his jeans, he turned on the porch light and flung open the front door.

She could come in if she wanted to.

But she didn’t.

Stubborn. That was written all over her face. Beautiful, yes, but stubborn, too. He snuck a glance out the door.

The wind lifted the fog enough for him to see her. She had her forehead resting against the steering wheel. She was probably crying. But she wasn’t going to ask for his help. Not him. The pervert.

Sighing, he pulled a jacket over his naked chest. He’d taken an oath, years ago, to protect and serve. And retired or not, that oath was as much a part of his makeup as anything else. It ran through his blood, and he found himself almost relieved at the discovery that his personal tragedy had not stolen that part of his nature from him.

He was not capable of leaving her out there in the cold.

She didn’t see him coming, and started when he tapped on her window. There, he’d managed to scare her again, which should warn him to give up any notion of a new career in the damsel-in-distress department.

She opened her window a crack. “Yes?”

“Do you want me to call somebody for you? Have you got road service?” Old habits died hard. Her license plates said Illinois. There was a parking sticker on her windshield for a lot in Chicago. He’d been right when he guessed this woman was a long way from home.

“I’ll be fine,” she said proudly. “In Chicago this is picnic weather.”

“Yeah,” he said. She was shivering. “I can see that. Is that baby as cold as you are?”

She gave the child a distressed look, and turned back to him. “Are you really a police officer?”

“I was, yes.”

“Have you got a badge?”

“Not anymore.”

“Why aren’t you a policeman anymore?”

His aggravation grew. It occurred to him it was the most he’d felt of anything for a long, long time. He actually felt alive. Aggravated, but alive.

“Lady,” he said, “are you going to make me beg you to come in?”

She seemed to mull that over, then with a resigned sigh, she undid the lock and reached for the baby. She followed him up the walk.

He held open the door for them. The baby was nestled into her mother’s chest now, sucking her thumb. When she glanced at him, she scrunched up her face again, and opened her mouth so wide he could see her tonsils.

The baby was wearing a knitted sweater with a little pink hood and pom-poms.

A memory niggled, so strong, so hard, he nearly shut the door.

Their baby was going to be a girl. The amniocentesis

had told them that. Stacey had begun to buy pink things. Little dresses. Booties.

“Are you all right?” the woman asked him.

No. He wasn’t. Two years, and he still wasn’t. He had accepted it now. That he was never going to be all right. That time would not heal it.

But he lied to her. “Sure. Fine. Come in.”

She stepped hesitantly over the threshold. The baby craned her neck and looked around.

“I’m Abby Blakely,” she said, and freeing a hand, extended it. She was small, but in the full light, she looked older than she had outside. Mid to late twenties. Not the teenager the Cubs cap had suggested. Her figure was delectable—slender, but soft in all the right places.

He took her hand, noting for a hand so small, it was very strong. “Shane McCall.”

“And you really were a policeman?”

“Why do you find that so hard to believe?”

“It’s not the policeman part I find hard to believe. It’s the retired part.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t look very old.”

The mirror played that trick on him, too. He looked in it and saw a man who looked so much younger than he felt.

“Thirty,” he said.

“Surely you’re a little too young to be retired, Mr. McCall?”

“Shane. Uh. Well. Semi, I guess. I’m a consultant on police training, now. Look, do you want to come in and sit down?”

Her eyes found his ring finger, and he saw her register the band of soft, solid gold that winked there. “Are we going to wake your wife?”

“No. I’m a widower.”

“I’m sorry.” After a moment, “You seem young for that, too.”

“Tell God.” He heard the bitter note in his voice, and would have done anything to erase it. “Look, are you coming in or not?”

She hesitated, looked like she was going to cry again, wiped at her face with her sleeve. “I don’t know what I want to do. I’m so tired.” She brightened. “I know, I’ll call one of my sisters.”

He liked the way she said sister, somehow putting so much love into the word that he knew her sister wouldn’t mind her calling at this time of the night. But why hadn’t she thought of that before?

She thrust the baby at him and bent to undo her shoes. It seemed to him he’d been in a better position when she didn’t trust him. He wasn’t good with babies.

He held the chubby body awkwardly, at arm’s length. “Uh, just leave your shoes on.”

“On these floors. Are you crazy?”

He looked at the floors, not sure he’d ever noticed them before. Wood. In need of something. Tender loving care.

The baby was regarding him with a suspicious scowl. Like mother, like daughter. “Me, Belle,” she finally announced warily.

“Great. Hi.” He still held her out, way far away from him.

She wiggled and he could feel the lively energy, the strength in her.

Abby straightened, and he went to hand the baby back. “Could you just hold her for a minute? Just until I use the phone?”

It would seem churlish to refuse. “The phone’s through here,” he said, leading the way, past the closed door that went into the empty main floor suite, and down the hall to the kitchen. The baby waggled away on the end of his held-out-straight-in-front-of-him arms.

“She won’t bite you.”

“Oh.” He made no move to change his position. Belle wiggled uncomfortably.

“Does she smell?” Abby asked.

“Belle no smell,” the baby yelled indignantly.

“Uh,” he managed to unbend his arms a little, draw the baby into him. Sniffed. She did smell. Of heaven. Something closed around his heart, a fist of pain.

And whatever emotion it was, it telegraphed itself straight to the baby, because she stared at him round-eyed, then touched his cheek with soft fingers, took the collar of his jacket in a surprisingly strong grip, and pulled herself into him.

“That’s otay,” she told him, nestling her blond curls under his chin and her cheek against his collarbone, and beginning to slurp untidily on her thumb. Drool fell down the vee of the jacket he hadn’t taken off for fear of reoffending Ms. Blakely’s sensibilities with the view of his naked chest.

“The phone’s right there.”

His intruder gave his kitchen, which was as Spartan as his bedroom, a cursory glance, went to the phone and picked it up. He could hear her calling information. How come she didn’t have her sisters’ phone numbers?

When she hung up she looked discouraged again.

“They’re not here yet. My sisters.”

“Here yet?”

“We’re all moving here. It’s a long story.” She looked exhausted and broken.

“All? Like how many dozen are you talking?”

She laughed a little. “Just three. I’m one of triplets.”

Three of her. That was kind of a scary thought for a reason he didn’t want to contemplate. The baby was sleeping against his chest, snoring gently. He registered the warmth of her tiny body, the light shining in her curls, and braced himself, waiting for some new and unspeakable pain to hit him.

“I’ll call a road service for you,” he said, tight control in his voice, “But I wouldn’t count on anything happening right away. This isn’t Chicago.”

She looked at him, startled.

“License plates,” he said. “Parking sticker on the left-hand side of your windshield.”

“You really are a cop.”

“Not now,” he corrected her.

Still leaving him with the baby she began to fish through a bag nearly as big as she was. She came out finally, triumphant, with a piece of wrinkled paper.

She handed it to him.

He awkwardly shifted “Me-Belle” to the crook of his arm and took the piece of paper. He stared at it. Blinked rapidly. Looked again. His own address was written there in a firm, feminine hand.

“There’s some mistake,” he finally said.

“Why?”

“This house is number twenty-two, Harbor Way.”

She looked deflated. “I must have written it down wrong.”

“You must have.”

She slumped down on a chair, took off her ball cap, ran a hand through her straight hair. It was sticking up in the cutest way. “Now what? I have to go. Obviously.”

That was obvious all right. Her hair was tangled and damp, and her face was pale with weariness. And still, all he could think, was that she was damnably sexy. She was wearing jeans that were way too big for her, accentuating the fact she was as slender as a young willow. She couldn’t stay here. Obviously.

“Look, for what’s left of tonight, you can stay here,” he heard himself saying. “The house actually used to be two self-contained units. It also used to be a summer rental. It’s all furnished. There’s linens in the closets. I’ve never even used the bedrooms down here. They’re across the hall.”

“You’re a complete stranger!”

“I admit it. Stranger than some.”

She managed a small, tired smile.

“There’s a lock on the door. Not that I’m in the habit of attacking people. In my underwear.”

He could tell that clinched it. The lock. Not his reassurances. The lock and the fact that she was tired beyond words and probably close to collapse.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

“Whatever. In the morning, I’ll help you get your car straightened away, and find your house.”

“Shane?”

“Yeah?” He wished she wouldn’t have called him his first name. He didn’t want to be her friend. He didn’t even want to be her rescuer. He just didn’t have any choice.

“You’re making me very sorry I kicked you so hard.”

From behind the locked door, Abby listened to Shane go up the stairs, and wondered if she’d lost her mind. Not only had she packed every earthly possession that she cared about and trekked across a whole country with her baby, now she was under the same roof as a man she knew nothing about.

Well, not nothing exactly.

He had been a cop.

And she had never in her life seen eyes like that. It wasn’t the color, precisely, though the dark chocolatey brown was enormously attractive; it was the look in them. Intense, the gaze steady and strong and stripping.

It was those eyes that had kept panic from completely engulfing her when he had come up behind her as she tried to make her key fit in the front door. His front door.

While part of her had been screaming in pure panic—near-naked man lurking in the bushes at three in the morning—another part of her had registered those eyes and told her that the hard beating of her heart might not have a single thing to do with fear.

Naturally, she wasn’t going to listen to that part of herself. She was resigned to the fact that she was not a good judge of masculine character. Belle’s father being a case in point. Still, even when she’d been desperately trying to think of how to get by that formidable man who had trapped her there on that tiny porch, some traitorous little part of her had been staring at him in awe.

Registering every detail of him. His height, the width of his shoulders, the smooth unblemished skin, the clinging night mist showing off his impressive physique as surely as if he was a bodybuilder, oiled.

Because he had been tense, geared for action, he had seemed to be all enticing masculine hardness. Mounded pecs, the six-pack stomach, the ripple of sinew and muscle in his arms and legs.

She shouldn’t have been so surprised when he’d said he used to be a cop, because he had policeman hair—the cut short, neat and very conservative and the color of cherry wood. And there had been a certain authoritative hardness in his face, too. A look of readiness in the taut downturn of his mouth, the narrow squint of his eyes. He was a man who was prepared to do battle.

It was probably that strength, a core-deep thing, that had convinced her to take a chance and trust him. Her instincts told her that of all the places she could choose to stay tonight, admittedly limited, she would not find one safer than this.

Her adopted mother would, of course, be horrified. Poor Judy wanted life to be so neat and tidy. She had worked so hard to give Abby a decent home, even though she herself had been a single mother.

Judy had thought it was insane to go to the lawyer’s office, even more insane to accept the gift. What would she think of this latest twist?

The situation tonight, Abby reminded herself, had been desperate. What else was she going to do? Sleep in her car? If it was just herself, that might have been okay. But with Belle? It was a terrible night out there, damp and cold. Even her mother would understand why she had chosen to stay here. Wouldn’t she?

Abby went unseeingly through the plainly furnished apartment, found the first bedroom, lay her sleeping daughter in the center of the big double bed, and went to pull the drape. As she did, she realized she was facing the street. Miracle Harbor didn’t look at all like it had looked when she’d been here a month ago. It had looked so beautiful then, with its quaint, weathered houses lining steep, narrow avenues that all led to the ocean. The main street had redbrick shops, with colorful awnings, big picture windows looking out on the beach and the ocean they fronted.

Tonight, with the swirling mist, it looked more like a scene out of a horror movie, set in the fog-shrouded streets of Gothic London.

How could she have written down the address of the house she had inherited incorrectly? How could she?

And how could a town that had looked so cheery and welcoming in the light of day look so distinctly formidable at night?

And how could her traitorous car just give up like that? Of course, it was old, and she had asked a lot of it, carrying her across the country dragging all her earthly possessions along behind it. Maybe it was a miracle that it had made it this far before it had quietly quit.

Miracles, she thought, and turned from the window. She checked the corners and under the bed for spiders or webs, and finding none, tumbled into the bed beside her daughter, too tired to find the bedding. Miracles, she thought again with a sigh. Isn’t that why she had come here, really?

Some part of her wanted to believe, more than anything else, that this old world could still work a miracle or two.

She thought of the conditions of her inheritance, the inheritance that would allow her to give her daughter everything she wanted for her. A home, a safe place to grow up.

If you didn’t count perverts in the bushes. She giggled tiredly at the thought.

Of course, there were those conditions. One to live here in Miracle Harbor for at least a year. No problem. But two?

Preposterous. How could someone get married just for personal gain? What kind of marriage would that be? And given her history with Ty, Belle’s dad, she simply knew she couldn’t trust herself in the all important department of mate selection.

So, why had she come, uprooted her whole life, knowing she had no intention of fulfilling that second condition?

During her brief visit with her sisters, she had learned they had been separated at about age three. She had no memory of them, but Corrine said she had foggy memories of something. And Brit’s adoptive parents had told her she was three when she came to them.

Abby had come because she wanted to know her sisters better, had to know them, had felt as soon as she had seen them, a deep sense of having found herself.

And maybe, in some small, lost part of herself, she really wanted to believe in fairy-tale endings, wanted to believe in a place with a name like Miracle Harbor, maybe she could expect anything to happen.

Maybe it had already started, with her at the wrong house, and the car not starting, all things linked together, part of a larger plan.

For her.

And what about him? How would he fit into that plan?

He wouldn’t. He’d done the decent thing tonight, she suspected because his training would allow him to do nothing else.

By tomorrow, he would be part of her history, somebody she could nod to when she passed him on the street.

There had been mile-high barriers in that man’s cool eyes, and she felt no desire to try and penetrate that mystery.

But even if she did decide to try and fulfill that ridiculous condition placed on her gift, she would never pick a man like him. She wanted someone sweet and kind. Someone who would make a good father for her daughter.

A little pudgy fellow with glasses, who took lunch in a paper bag to his office.

Upstairs, she heard the groan of a bedspring, and felt the oddest little stir in her stomach. A stir that a little pudgy fellow with glasses would never be able to create.

Which was just as well. That stir, she knew, led to nothing but trouble.