Читать книгу Picket Fence Surprise - Kris Fletcher - Страница 10
ОглавлениеTHE NEXT NIGHT, over on the other side of town, Xander buckled Cady into her high chair, set a sippy cup of milk on the tray and took a neat step out of the line of fire before his darling child could spray him.
“Drink, pretty girl. Daddy already had his shower today.”
Cady banged the cup on the tray. “Cookie, Daddy? Pease?”
“After you eat your real food.” In short order, he had a bite-size smorgasbord in front of her—pasta, peas, bites of cheese and chicken. Cady scowled at the assortment.
“Want cookie.”
“Cheese.” He snagged a piece and popped it into her mouth. “Chow down.”
As he’d expected, Cady frowned but obediently chewed before picking up a bite of pasta.
Confident that the meal was under way, Xander grabbed his bowl of beans and followed suit. He used to wait until Cady was done before he attempted to eat, but then she would need a bath. Or she’d pull something over. Or decide there were too many tissues in the box, and it was her God-given duty to empty it. He would race after her and food would be forgotten, and he would fall into bed at night and realize all he’d had since breakfast was a cup of coffee and a handful of Cheerios. Nothing that he couldn’t endure for a day, but definitely not a habit he wanted to build for a lifetime.
So he and Cady ate together now. Not that she was thrilled about staying in her chair until he’d had a chance to catch his breath and unwind a little, but c’est la vie.
And even if she shrieked, and he had to shovel his food in while praying the neighbors didn’t turn him in as a possible child abuser, it would be a more successful dinner than the one he’d shared last night with the latest Ms. Online Dream Date.
“Looks like we’re still in the market for a stepmommy, Cady. Hope you’re not disappointed.”
She dropped a cheese cube on the floor. Lulu, their scruffy but well-loved beagle blend, gave an appreciative whine as she snapped it up.
“No food on the floor, kid. Lulu already had her supper.”
“Ruru supper?”
“That’s right. She already ate. Don’t want her to get sick.”
“Ruru sick?”
“No.”
Cady’s tiny blond head shook back and forth. “No sick.”
Maybe he was going about this dating thing the wrong way. Maybe he should stop taking women to nice restaurants and coffee shops, and start arranging to meet at Bits and Pizzas. He could take Cady, the date could fall in love with her—or not—and depending on everyone else’s reaction, then he could worry about details like his feelings for the woman in question. Or how Ms. Online handled the revelation of his time in the Big House.
“Except I feel like I have to tell them up front,” he said to Cady. “If that’s gonna be a stumbling block, I want to know straight out of the gate. It wouldn’t feel right to keep that hidden.”
Which he supposed was rather ironic—the former convict worrying about doing the right thing. But it wasn’t like history was destiny.
“Did the crime, did the time, from here on in my life is mine. Right, Lu?”
Lulu paused in her nosing of a piece of pasta long enough to glance his way.
“I shouldn’t complain.” He spooned up more beans. “It’s not like things were going really well anyway. I mean, she was nice enough. She has a kid, told me all about him, really loved the pictures of you, Cady girl. So you know she’s smart.”
Cady raised her cup at an angle he knew too well.
“Uh-uh. No shower, remember?”
“Milk!”
“Drink it.” He tapped the cup. She peeked up at him. He plastered on a stern expression, she sighed and cup met mouth.
“The thing was, Cade, she didn’t laugh a lot. I can’t see how you build something with someone you can’t laugh with. And I’m not saying I’m Mr. Comedy,” he added when Lulu rose and turned away from him. “But I had some good lines in there and some funny stuff happened. Like when the guy at the next table got a call. You could tell he was in the middle of being dumped, and instead of taking it outside, he sat there saying ‘but...but...’ and then he came out with, ‘Damn it, I even paid for you to get your cat fixed!’ I was busting a gut trying to keep from laughing. She—Amanda—she kept sending him dirty looks and complaining about cell phones in public. Which, hey, I totally get it. Still, there was something freakin’ hilarious going on beside us, and all she could think about was the rule that was being broken.”
“Cookie? Daddy? Cookie?”
“Two more bites.” He pushed the necessary pieces in her direction. As expected, Cady ignored the small portion he’d set in front of her and raked up a handful from the remainder.
“Eat slowly, kid. Don’t want you to choke. Sloooooooooow.”
Which was advice he should have given himself last night. Instead, as soon as Amanda had finished commenting on the lack of consideration and broken rules, he had gone for the ultimate test and told her about his own experience breaking the rules. And the law.
To her credit, she had listened to the whole story—at least the thirty-second version he had perfected. She had nodded and said something about everyone making mistakes, and downed the rest of her wine pretty fast.
“But I really wasn’t surprised when she left to go to the ladies’ room and never came back.”
“Back?”
“She went bye-bye, babes.”
“Bye-bye,” Cady echoed. “Cookie? Pease?”
He checked the tray, then the floor. Either Lulu was getting faster or Cady really hadn’t dumped it all overboard. “Okay. You earned a cookie. Maybe even two, but don’t tell Mommy.”
“Mommy?” Cady swiveled toward the door. He needed to work fast.
“Mommy in the morning, Cade. After night-night. Look, here’s a cookie! Who do we have—is it a lion? Yeah, I think it’s a lion. What does Leo the Lion say?”
“Rawr.”
“Good trained monkey.” He dropped a couple of animal crackers on the tray and gave thanks that Cady wasn’t yet old enough to tell Darcy everything that went on at his place. Not that Darce would care about an extra hippo or tiger. She was into nutrition, but she wasn’t overboard. But he could live without having her hear about his Adventures in Dating from their daughter.
“The problem is, you’re too smart, kid. Pretty soon I’m going to have to keep all my stories for Lulu. Either that or find someone else to share them with.”
Of course, that was the rub, wasn’t it? If he had someone to share things with, he wouldn’t be off on these fiascos in the first place.
“Ah, well, Cady. I never thought I’d have you, and here you are.” He bopped the end of her nose. “And that right there makes me the luckiest daddy on the planet.”
She beamed up at him and whapped her cup against his arm.
“Ow!” He pulled the cup from her grasp and did the parental finger wag. “No hitting. Got it?”
She scrunched up her face in what he knew was the precursor to a wail.
“Tough, kiddo. You hit Lulu last week and now me. Not good.”
Tiny pink lips quivered.
“No. Hitting.” He squatted in front of her and tweaked her ponytail. “And no complaining when you do something and have to face the music.”
She searched his face and broke into a slow, sunny grin.
“Guess I’m not so good at taking my own advice, am I?” He returned to his chair, picked up his bowl. “I’ve been doing a lot of complaining myself. I’ve gotta move forward. Stop whining. Go with my gut.”
My gut is the last thing I need to listen to.
“You know, Cade, Heather didn’t send me her résumé.”
Cady picked up her second cracker and waved it in the air. “Rawr.”
“Technically, I don’t think giraffes roar, but what the hell.” He shoveled in another bite. “Maybe I should drop her a line, remind her that I was serious about the offer.”
The giraffe giggled.
“What? It’s a friend thing. Perfectly legit.”
Lulu barked sharply.
Xander sighed. “Yeah, I know, girl. It’s probably not a good idea.”
But Heather knew all about his past. It had never stopped her from hanging around with him at the North events.
“Of course,” he mused, “there’s a big difference between goofing around in a group and...and whatever.”
But she was so easy to joke with.
“And if I ask her out and she says no?” he asked Lulu. “I bet there’d be lots of jokes at Thanksgiving dinner after that.”
Yeah. Bad idea.
He tossed his bowl in the sink and grabbed a washcloth. Cleanup time. That was what mattered at this minute: cleaning and chattering and singing and pushing all thoughts of Heather from his mind.
It would have been a lot easier if she hadn’t been wearing those shorts.
* * *
HEATHER LOOKED AT the résumé on her laptop and blew out a breath of pure exasperation.
“All the years I’ve put into building you up, and this is how you thank me?”
It wasn’t a bad résumé. She was still objective enough to see that. It was a solid, administrative-type, semi-impressive recounting.
It was also as boring as a piano recital when your kid wasn’t one of the performers.
She grabbed her weekly bottle of root beer, raised it to her lips and breathed in. Ah, sweet bliss. Was there anything in the world that couldn’t be improved with root beer?
Then she blew out across the top of the bottle in a steady stream, making a sound much like a flute with indigestion.
In addition to the laptop, her kitchen table was littered with every book on writing résumés that the Comeback Cove library possessed. She hadn’t thought to check the publication dates until she got home and found that most of them still focused on the weight of the paper that the job applicant should use, and how to ensure that even the envelope left the right impression. Because every application still had to be snail mailed. Right.
Maybe it wasn’t as boring as she thought. She’d probably just been staring at it so long that she’d lost all perspective.
Which meant that, really, the best thing she could do would be to find some fresh eyes.
“Son of a sea biscuit.”
She slumped back in her chair, arms sagging, and stared up at the ceiling.
He made the offer totally voluntarily. It would be perfectly fine to shoot him an email and ask him to have a look.
Except...
Except she thought maybe he’d been scoping out her butt at the picnic.
In and of itself, that wasn’t a problem. She’d been checked out before, usually by guys who had their own theory as to the proper way to welcome a new transfer to the office. She had long ago perfected the fine art of saying no while keeping things friendly and light.
Except that deep down, beneath the logic and the sense, she kind of liked the idea of Xander finding her hot.
Nothing could ever come of it, of course. It didn’t matter that she liked hanging out with him at birthday parties and such. Or that when she bumped into him in town, she always walked away feeling a little happier. Or that watching him sneak peeks at her from behind the camera had made her want to assume the classic arms-back-head-tilted-breasts-forward bikini photo pose.
Or even—maybe mostly—that when she was with Xander, she felt like she was with someone who could understand how it felt to be living your second chance.
None of that mattered, though. Because she had spent the last hunk of her life easing her way back into Millie’s world, building a working relationship with Hank, doing everything she could to smooth the waters and prove that she wasn’t the same terrified woman who had thought that the best way to protect her child was to put most of a continent between them.
She was logical now. She thought things through and knew how to stop and step back and evaluate situations with her head, not her gut. She had systems and schedules and safeguards in place to ensure that she would never, could never play hell with Millie’s life again, even accidentally.
Doing anything more than sneaking a few peeks at Xander would be like typing up her schedules and systems and having them translated into Esperanto.
“Not because he went to jail,” she said out loud, because if any aliens were tracking her brain waves, she wanted them to be clear on this. “That’s not a selling point, but it’s workable.”
No. The issue was that Xander was too close. Too much a part of Millie’s extended family, and even more so in August when Darcy and Ian got married, and Millie and Cady became official stepcousins.
At least that was how Heather thought they’d be related.
A...whatever between her and Xander would be uncomfortable for everyone. It would shift the dynamics, and probably not in a good way. And when it ended—which was inevitable, given that she knew Xander was looking for Ms. Forever while Heather identified as Ms. Been There, Failed That, Never Again—it could get messy and lead to major awkwardness.
For herself, she could handle awkward. Seriously. She’d had plenty of practice over the years, what with attending events with her ex. And then his new wife. And now their new baby.
But Millie didn’t need that. Ten, even almost eleven, was way too young to have to deal with shifting loyalties and adult drama. Millie deserved peace and love and ponies and flowers, and a mom who made life easier instead of more complicated.
But if Heather wanted to be the mom Millie deserved, she was probably going to need to change jobs.
Which meant she really needed a kick-ass résumé.
Which meant that since most of her other trusted friends were her work contacts, she really should take Xander up on his offer.
Argh.
Quickly, before she could talk herself out of it, she typed up the email.
“Business business, see attachment, all business, thank you very much, I owe you forever—no, scratch that, business—and, send.”
There. There was no way anyone could mistake that for anything other than a grateful acceptance of a generous but semiprofessional offer. Not a hint of flirtation to be found.
At least, not until an hour later when she read his reply.
I took a quick look. I have suggestions, but it’s probably easier to do this in person. Are you busy tomorrow? I have Cady, but if you come over around naptime, I can give you my undivided attention.
Oh hell.
* * *
PROMPTLY AT 2:00 P.M. the next afternoon, Xander looked up from the front step where he was waiting and spotted Heather riding what seemed to be an ancient pink bike up the street. She looked athletic, like she had energy to burn.
Not that he could think of any way to help her expend that energy. Nope. He was operating in a strictly advisory-friend-helper capacity today, doing his duty and offering his suggestions and then moving along, all before naptime ended.
And if he’d had other possibilities in the back of his mind when he had asked Heather to come over—because yeah, for a few minutes there he had given in to Saturday night wildness—well, he’d come to his senses since then. There would be no checking her out. No discussion of anything more suggestive than experience and education. If his gut didn’t like it, then tough.
Because somewhere between last night and this morning—probably when he had stepped into Cady’s room to check on her before he went to bed—he had remembered why Heather was doing this. She wasn’t coming over for him. She was doing this for Millie.
All he had to do was crank the volume on the baby monitor he’d brought outside with him to remind himself that kids came first. Always.
She turned into the driveway, braked and hopped off the bike. He broke his vow just long enough to check. She wasn’t wearing the shorts from the party.
Thank God.
He pushed off the step and ambled down to the driveway. “Doing your part to reduce your carbon footprint?”
“That, and exercise, and I spend enough time in my car already. I wasn’t going to let a gorgeous day go to waste.”
She took off her neon blue helmet, shook her head and sent her short blond hair swirling around her face like a halo.
He dragged his gaze away. “Yeah,” he said. “Gorgeous things shouldn’t be wasted.”
“Is Cady asleep?”
“Probably. She went down a few minutes ago.” He tapped one of the smaller rust spots on the handlebars of her bike. “Family heirloom?”
“What can I say? I value function and frugality over fashion.”
“Yeah, but is it worth it when you have to have a tetanus shot every time you ride it?”
“Don’t insult Johnny.” She ran a hand over the duct tape holding the seat together. “We’ve had a lot of good times together.”
“Johnny?” He stepped back and eyed the bike, taking in the pink paint, the wicker basket in front and what looked like fading silver sparkles on the bars. “You named this Johnny?”
“For Johnny Cash.”
“Oh yeah. I see the resemblance.”
“It’s not because of the way it looks, okay?” Her lips twitched. “It’s because the first few times I rode it, I felt like I was sitting on a ring of fire.”
He burst into laughter. She joined in, so free and joyful that he snorted all the harder, sending himself into a coughing fit that had him bent over with his hands on his knees.
“Careful.” She patted his back, once, twice. “Breathe, okay? It wasn’t that funny.”
“I’m fine. Really.”
“Good.” She delivered another whack on his back. “Because honestly, you’re no good to me if you’re dead.”
He wheezed again before glancing up and sideways to catch her eye. He’d meant to simply nod to let her know that he was fine.
Instead, he caught her watching him with something that most definitely wasn’t concern.
And for the briefest of seconds, she ceased pounding his back. Instead, her hand flattened, her palm warming his skin through his T-shirt.
For an even briefer moment, he gave thanks that he was already crouched over.
She jumped back. He thumped his chest and straightened.
“Well,” she said. “Why don’t we get this résumé done so I can, you know, get out of your hair before I use up all of naptime?”
She’s here for Millie. Not you.
“Yeah. Right.” He rested a hand on the bike. “Do you have a lock for Johnny? Or do you want to put it in the garage?”
“Somehow, I don’t think this is high on anyone’s must-have list.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want anything to happen on my watch.” He hefted the bike and nodded toward the door at the side of the garage. “Can you get that?”
She scooted ahead of him, opened the door and stepped back. He deposited the bike beside his car and returned to the sunshine.
“Okay,” he said, brushing his hands together. “Let’s go.”
Ten minutes later, after he’d finished spouting the résumé knowledge bullshit he’d used as an excuse to invite her over, he realized he’d gone through the entire schpiel on autopilot. His body was at the kitchen table, but his mind was stuck outside at that moment when he’d caught her looking.
It didn’t help that she was as unfocused as he was. She kept repeating herself, shaking her head and stopping midsentence. Like she was trying to work up the nerve to say something, but couldn’t quite do it.
He knew the feeling.
Come on, Xander. Résumé. Job. Focus.
He pulled his laptop closer and opened the alternate version he’d created, because yeah, he did have a few recommendations. “What I’d suggest is that you switch things around, set it up like this. See how much cleaner this one looks?”
“Oh, I like that. That font is crisper, and the way you’ve abbreviated the headings—that’s good. You’ve given it a really fresh feel.”
“The other thing is that these days, you have to assume someone is going to end up reading it on their phone.” He grabbed his phone and accessed both her original and his revision. “Check it out. See the difference?”
She leaned his way—so close that if he wanted, he could reach an arm around her and tuck his hand at her waist. Not that he was going to do it, but still.
“You’re right. It’s much cleaner now.” She swiped between the two versions, back and forth, back and forth.
The play of her fingers on the screen was almost hypnotic. He couldn’t look away from the length of her fingers and the careful simplicity of the rounded nails. There was something about them...some anomaly flashing in and out of his vision...
There it was. One nail—the left pinky—bore a faint coat of the palest pink.
“What’s that?” He asked before thinking, his own finger hovering over the nail in question but not quite touching.
“What’s what?”
“You have nail polish on only one nail. I was curious.”
For a moment, she seemed to pull in on herself, like a turtle retreating into its shell. The only sound was a soft sigh from Lulu, asleep in the patch of sunshine coming through the window.
Heather lifted her chin. “That’s something I started with Millie, when I was away. It’s so I always had something on me that I could look at and think of her.” She curled her hand in, running over the nail in question with her thumb. “Not that I needed the reminder,” she said softly. “But Millie loved seeing it on me.”
So why did you leave her?
The question burned on his tongue. It made no sense. Heather was obviously head over heels for Millie, and while he knew that jobs could be hard to find, he doubted that she had needed to go to the other side of the second-largest country in the world to find something.
But along with patience, prison had taught him the value of keeping his questions to himself.
He settled for a light tap on the nail. “That’s a good idea. Kind of makes me wish I could do something like that for Cady. Not that we have the long separations like you had. But sometimes...”
“Sometimes it feels like, even though you’re her parent, you’re still on the fringes of her life?”
Yeah. Heather got it. “Like she’s the Earth,” he said softly. “And I’m a satellite.”
She said nothing. Her dipped head, and the way she held her pinkie told him that they were in complete understanding.
It hit him that at some point over the conversation, one or both of them had scooted their chair closer. They were now sitting at the table, the tiniest width of the corner separating them. It would be so easy to slide his leg forward and bump her knee, so very easy to let his hand move from her fingernail to her hand and then make a slow ascent up her arm. He wouldn’t even have to stretch.
Nor would he have to channel his inner gymnast to lean across the tiny spit of laminate and kiss her. Gently at first, light and casual, slowly feeling his way into this until she decided which way they should go next.
Except that even as the thought tiptoed through his mind, she grabbed her papers and stood up, so fast that Lulu actually opened an eye.
If she was psychic, he was dead.
“Well. Thanks. You’ve given me some great suggestions, and I really appreciate it, but I should probably let you get back to—whatever.” She rose from the table and moved toward the door. All business. On a mission.
“Oh!” She stopped suddenly, three steps before the door. Thank God he’d been hanging back to watch the sway of her cheeks. Otherwise he would have landed flush against her.
Which probably shouldn’t sound as enticing as it did.
“This photo.” Her pink-tipped finger hovered over the glass of one of the few pictures in the room that didn’t feature Cady. “It’s...jeez. It has such a feeling to it. The way that door is covered by the vines, like it’s some dangerous secret.” Her laugh was pure self-deprecation. “It sounds so cheesy, but it’s really mesmerizing.”
“Thanks.”
She twisted around, eyes wide. “Did you take this?”
“Actually, yeah.”
“Xander!” She looked from him to the photo and back again. “This is wonderful. Mysterious and enticing and forbidden...you have it all there. I don’t know how, but...wow.”
It shouldn’t matter that she’d honed in on the precise emotions he’d tried to convey when he took the picture. He shouldn’t feel like giving the universe a giant high five that she was the first one to catch what he’d been putting out there.
But he couldn’t stop himself from doing a tiny fist pump in the air when she turned back to the photo.
“Where did you take this?”
“Oh, that old place out on Becker. The one you can just see from Route 31. But only in winter when there’s no leaves.”
“Huh. I never... Wait.” Her head snapped up. “You mean the Cline place?”
He was pretty sure that was the name Ian had used when Xander asked about it. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Big brick place, lots of outbuildings? You have to go down Shannette Road to get to it?”
“That’s it. You’ve been there?”
“No.”
If he hadn’t got a clue from the clipped tone, he would have from the way she eyeballed him like he was some kind of biology project. “You know that nobody goes there, right? Except teenagers doing things they can’t do at home.”
Yeah, he’d got that idea from the bottles he’d spotted lying around. “I figured that might be the case.”
“What on earth made you go there?”
How to explain something he didn’t fully understand himself? “It looked... I don’t know. Interesting. And overgrown and everything, so, lots of good shots.”
“Until you crash through a rotting floor and break your camera. Not to mention your head.”
“I take Lulu with me.”
She shifted her attention to the snoozing dog. “Oh yeah. I see how she’d be a real help.”
“Well, she’s better than Lassie. She only helped when Timmy fell down a well. Anything else and the kid was out of luck.”
A smothered snicker was his reward. He suspected she would have gone full-out guffaw if she hadn’t felt obliged to lecture him.
Sure enough, her next sentence continued the warnings.
“Seriously, Xander. You really shouldn’t go there. Not alone, at least.”
“I’m careful.”
“Really.”
She didn’t have to say it. He could see the question in her mind, as clear as if he had developed abilities he didn’t believe in: As careful as you were when you broke the law?
Or maybe that was just his brain filling in the words his mother would say if she knew about his explorations.
“Well,” she said, turning back to the photo, “I guess I can’t be too hard on you, seeing as I like this so much. But don’t go again, okay?”
“Would you worry?”
Not a good question. He knew it. But damn it, a man needed some kind of clue.
“Of course. You’re my friend. I don’t want anything to happen to you.” She reached for the door and tossed a grin over her shoulder. “Especially when I might need you to give my résumé another tweak.”
“I feel so used.”
“You should.”
He should also feel a lot less excited at the prospect.
But he knew that wasn’t happening.
* * *
SHE WAS ALMOST home free.
Heather waited at the door to the garage while Xander went in to get the bike. Almost done. Just a couple more minutes and she would be riding old Johnny back to her place, her legs settling into the familiar tempo and the river breeze in her hair.
Except her pulse had fallen into a totally different rhythm. And no breeze could cool the low-level heat that had built inside her throughout her time at Xander’s table.
She had hoped—prayed—that heading outside, away from the potent blend of privacy and proximity, would slap some sense into her. But then she had seen the photo, whispering to her about hidden treasures begging to be uncovered. And then he had brushed past her on the way into the garage, and all the little hairs on her arm had stood up.
And now she couldn’t see anything but him.
The way his T-shirt hugged the muscles in his arms and chest when he picked up the bike with ease. The little bit of skin she could see when the shirt pulled away from his jeans, revealing what she was pretty sure was a tattoo. Either that or Cady had attacked him with Magic Markers.
But that was as far as she was going to explore. He was pushing the bike toward her. At any moment, he would emerge from the garage, and she would ride off into the sunshine alone.
Except when he glanced her way, he stopped walking.
And when she met his gaze, she stopped breathing.
For one crazy moment, she couldn’t move. Except—no. She could.
The wrong way.
Her stupid foot had inched her forward. Into the garage. Into the shadows. Away from the world.
Closer to Xander.
She had taken one full step before it registered. She took another while her body was catching up to her brain.
Then she took a deep breath and slammed into a wall of common sense.
“Here. I can get it.” She walked briskly toward the bike, took up residence on the opposite side from him and gripped the handlebars.
Except he didn’t let go.
And damn, she could feel every breath he took, all through her.
“Heather...”
She had to get out. Now.
“Thanks for all your help,” she said, and pushed the bike out the door. “I’ll talk to you later.”
