Kitabı oku: «Her Second-Chance Man»

Chapter One

For an awful moment, Brian thought the puppy had died.

He glanced at his niece, sitting on the passenger side of his 1964 orange Ford pickup truck. Her hair—dyed an unlikely shade of black—fell in a limp veil, shielding her profile from his probing gaze. Beneath the thin straps of a tank top—also black—her bony shoulders were hunched forward as if she was protecting herself from a blow.

Even after six months of sharing a house with one, Brian Kemp—a bachelor—was no expert on the mysteries of teenage girls. He had been told they were remarkably resilient, and yet his niece, bent over that puppy with her hands quiet and tense in the golden fur, did not seem resilient. In fact, he was not sure if he had ever seen a more fragile sight.

He didn’t realize he had been holding his breath until the dog drew in a long ragged gulp of air, and then he did, too.

“Are we there?” Michelle whispered, with none of that normal, I-don’t-give-a-damn-about-anything hardness in her voice.

“Nearly,” he said, hoping it wasn’t a lie. He hoped he had remembered the correct turnoff. There were many such turnoffs between Victoria and Duncan, cutting inland away from the ocean. Telling her that he knew someone who might be able to help had been a dumb and desperate measure.

Now they were on this dirt road lined with heavy timber, in the embrace of deep forest. The timber thinned and then gave way unexpectedly. The road was lined on either side with roses. The bushes were huge, with flowers—a cascade of pink and yellow and red. Brian didn’t remember the roses. He thought it might have been winter when he last ventured down this road.

But now, in the last days of June, the flowers bloomed in untamed abundance. Their intoxicating scent poured through the open truck windows, wrapped around him, and filled him with the most dangerous of things—hope.

The vet had said to forget it. The puppy was not thriving. He would not live. He had recommended a merciful end.

Michelle had turned away at that pronouncement, tears spilling black down her cheeks as their hot saltiness melted her heavy-handed mascara. Brian had tried to touch her and take the puppy, but she had closed her body around it like a shield, refusing to part with it or be comforted. She had rushed by him and gone to sit in the truck.

Brian Kemp was not a man who asked favors of the universe.

But at that moment, watching through the window of the vet’s office as his niece sat hunched in the truck, he realized that she was still such a child—barely thirteen—and he felt a sense of failure and helplessness that were not totally unexpected. Hadn’t he known right from the start that he was probably not a good choice for the job of guardian? He had a track record of failing to bring happiness to the female of the species.

He was a cop, and even though Victoria was not a huge city—with a population of only 300,000—Brian dealt with his fair share of tough and terrible stuff. That was his job. He considered himself good at it. His lack of sensitivity was something he’d considered an asset in his life—right up until now. Now he realized that nothing about handling tragedy and chaos on a nearly daily basis had given him even the smallest inkling of how to handle a young girl’s breaking heart.

So, standing alone at that window, he had been humbled and amazed to find himself saying out loud, just as if something or someone was listening, “I don’t know what to do.”

It was a horribly hard admission for a man to make. But especially for one who prided himself in knowing how to take charge of even the most disastrous of situations. The truth was that most of the disasters he dealt with weren’t in any way personal. In fact, he was something of an expert at avoiding anything that smacked even slightly of the R word—as in relationships.

A man with no track record when it came to others did not a good guardian make. But six months ago his niece had been orphaned when her parents—Brian’s brother Kevin and Kevin’s wife Amanda—had been killed in a car accident. Brian was Michelle’s only living relative. She’d arrived, not as the little girl of Brian’s once-a-year Christmas memories, but as a young woman full of the hostility that comes from losing too much.

A desperate man, Brian had surprised her with the puppy two weeks ago, hoping it might give her something to do over the quickly approaching summer holidays and, deep inside he hoped it might be some sort of answer to the problems in their relationship. It had looked like it might, too.

After pretending indifference for five minutes, Michelle had named the golden retriever O’Henry, and the pair had become inseparable. The dog slept tucked under her arm. Brian caught her trying to smuggle it in her bag to school. Sometimes he heard her laughing, and it wrenched his heart that she wouldn’t do it in front of him, as if laughter was something she needed to feel guilty about.

Now, this tiny puppy, the life preserver Brian had tossed to his niece, was going to be taken from her, too?

“So, if you know what to do, show me. Please,” he had said, and then frowned at how the words sounded suspiciously like a prayer. His frown deepened when a memory tickled his mind. Of another girl, a very long time ago, bent over another dog.

She might not even live down this road anymore. It had been at least fourteen years since he had been here. They had both been in high school. A lot could happen in that many years.

The road opened abruptly into a clearing, and Brian felt his mouth drop open. It was the same place, but transformed, whether by season or by time he was not entirely sure.

The road of his memory had not ended in a place like this. This road, the one his desperate heart had led him down, ended in enchantment.

The clearing was filled with flowers, topsy-turvy, cascading, peeping, climbing. Long grasses were braided with dainty yellow blooms. There were clumps of reds and oranges, towers of blues and indigos. He recognized some of them—the deep purple of Canterbury bells, the sassy white of daisies—but most he could not name. Colors, wild to mild, danced together, and scents sweet and sharp mingled, tickling his nostrils and his mind.

Off to the side of the blissful abundance and embraced by the deeper greens and shadows of towering cedars, was a cottage. It squatted on a stone foundation, small, steep-gabled, green, blending into the space around it.

Even Michelle momentarily forgot her distress over the puppy. “Oh-my-god,” she said, her favorite expression. “It’s awesome.”

“You almost expect seven little men to come trundling out, don’t you?”

He’d managed to say the wrong thing again, because his niece shot him the ever popular you-are-hopeless look. Did she think he had mistaken her for a baby because of the reference to Snow White? He wanted to ask, to try and cross this minefield between them, but she had already fenced him out and returned her attention to O’Henry.

A miniature pickup truck—red and shiny—marked the parking area, which was a half-circle of gravel. Brian pulled in beside the vehicle and cut the engine. Bird song, riotous with joy, filled the air. A butterfly flew in one window of the truck and out the other. He watched its crooked, floating flight.

“Is that her?” Michelle asked.

He turned his head toward his niece. She was looking out the near window and he followed her hopeful gaze. Then, despite the tranquility of the scene, he felt his own heart plummet.

So, she was not here. He should have guessed that fourteen years was too long to expect a person to stay in one place. He should have guessed that a new owner, with an eye for creating beauty and a green thumb, had taken over. He should have guessed that his memory of a hardscrabble little cottage and weed-filled acres had been more accurate.

For that couldn’t be Jessica Moran, rising out of the flowers with her straw sunhat askew.

Jessica had been a short, pudgy girl, hopelessly homely, her hair a peculiar shade of red that had hung long, with untamable bumps and waves in all the wrong places.

The woman who emerged from the flowers was as lithe as a woodland sprite, her naked shoulders slender, tanned and toned. She wore a white sleeveless tank that molded to her small shapely chest and hugged the line of her flat tummy. She had on those pants that men didn’t quite get—something between shorts and slacks that ended just above a shapely calf.

Capris, he remembered Michelle correcting him with a roll of her eyes when he had called them pedal pushers.

The slacks were white, too, or had started out that way, but were now smudged dark at the knee.

The woman took off her hat as she came toward them, and her short hair sprang free and danced around her head in a fury of cheerful-looking auburn curls.

She had a basket over her wrist that overflowed with freshly cut flowers and greenery. Under different circumstances, he might have appreciated her loveliness and that of the scene a great deal more. But all he could think now, was, It wasn’t her.

He got out of the truck, and she skidded to a halt. Her eyes went very wide, and then she glanced over her shoulder, looking like a deer who wanted to bolt back into the safety of the deep green forest that surrounded this little meadow.

He was a big man, and he knew his size could be intimidating, especially to a woman who was in the middle of nowhere and not within shouting distance of a neighbor.

“Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” he said, and leaned against his open truck door. He let it provide a slight barrier between them, making no move toward her and keeping his voice deliberately deep, calm and soothing. “I’m hoping you can help me. I’m looking for…”

But the words didn’t come. She tilted her chin and moved toward him again. He stopped speaking and studied her, feeling the shock of her eyes. They were green and deep, as refreshing as a midsummer dip in a calm, forest pool. They were the kind of eyes a man never forgot, ever.

Even way back then, when she had been a few pounds overweight, plain and beyond the pale of the high school hierarchy, even then he had looked into her eyes and felt enchanted.

Enchanted enough to say, “I’ll call.”

And, of course, then he had come to his senses. And never called.

He could see the same memory of that broken promise from long ago flit across the clear surface of her eyes, and he knew why she had wanted to run.

It wasn’t because she thought he was a menacing stranger. No, it was because Jessica Moran knew exactly who he was.

But she still moved toward him, halting close enough that he could smell the spice and lemon scent of her above the flowers. She squared her shoulders, pointed her chin, and came forward the final few steps, grace and confidence having swept away the clumsy, awkward girl he remembered. She hooked the basket over her forearm and extended her hand.

Her face was narrow, elfin, and dominated by the huge, soulful pools of her unforgettable eyes. Freckles dotted her nose. Surely, she had not always had lips like that, as plump and inviting as a ripe strawberry?

“Brian,” she said, and her voice was clear and melodious. Now he remembered her voice, too, remembered how it had been part of the enchantment. “I was so sorry to hear about your brother and Amanda.”

Her hand in his was small but surprisingly strong. He felt the oddest desire to linger over the handshake and explore the energy coming from her, but she pulled her hand back after the briefest of touches.

He recalled that his sister-in-law, Amanda, had been in the same grade as Jessica at high school. He could not imagine that Amanda, or her best friend Lucinda, had ever offered Jessica anything except small, not-so-subtle cruelties.

Lucinda was the girl who had kept him from ever making that call.

Something about Jessica’s graciousness made his voice stick in his throat. He now remembered things that he should have remembered long before coming down this road.

“Jessica,” he said, finally finding his voice and trying to hide his discomfort and his shock at her amazing metamorphosis. “I didn’t recognize you.”

“I’m sure I’ve changed a good deal since we last saw each other. What brings you here?” Polite, but nothing more.

He hesitated. Now would be the time to admit that he’d made a dumb error and just head on back down her driveway. Instead, he heard himself saying, “Do you remember that time I hit that dog at the end of your driveway, and we brought it here?”

Something flickered behind her eyes—it looked suspiciously like pain—and she nodded, a trifle curtly.

He cursed himself for coming here, for following a desperate whim.

He was glad that Michelle chose that moment to slide from the truck, her little bundle cradled in her arms, her eyes huge, begging. “Can you fix my puppy?”

Jessica gave him a startled look and then turned to the girl. Her eyes widened and she held out her hands. Michelle surrendered the weak puppy, and Brian could not help but frown remembering how his niece had refused to turn it over to him.

Jessica took the puppy, and he could see the tenderness of her touch as she cupped its body, ran her hands over it and then rested them above a heart beating too rapidly. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them she shot him another look. He saw a flash in their green depths.

Anger.

Not that he could blame her. He had come with an impossible task. He had placed her in a terrible situation. He could see, from the tiny muscle working frantically in her jaw, that she did not hold out much hope for the dog, and that she knew it was really a young girl’s heart that he had placed in her trust.

But there was none of that anger as she turned and with a movement of her shoulder invited Michelle to follow her down the winding cobblestone path that led to the cottage.

Tiny purple violets grew among the cobbles and every time he crushed one under foot he was enveloped in the soft fragrance of it.

“I’m Jessica,” she said over her shoulder to his niece. Her voice could have coaxed wild birds from their nests. “You look so like your mother, Amanda. I knew her in high school. She was beautiful, and so are you.”

He realized he’d been so thrown off balance by the appearance of the new and improved Jessica Moran that he’d forgotten introductions.

Jessica’s tone was so genuine that Michelle blushed and preened despite herself.

The sad truth was that his niece was far from beautiful, especially given her fondness for too much makeup. She dyed her hair that bleak shade of black. She was too thin, and she was having an outbreak of acne.

And yet Jessica’s tone made him look at his niece again. He saw something different than he had ever seen before. The deep blue of her eyes, the sweep of her cheekbones, the slender column of her neck.

He felt his hackles rise. Was Jessica that much of a magician that she could make a man see things? Or was he just looking harder since he had obviously made such a poor judgement about Jessica herself in those awkward years of adolescence?

“This is my niece, Michelle,” he said belatedly.

“My dog’s name is O’Henry.” Michelle gave him a look that said the dog was the important one and Brian had gotten it all wrong. So, what else was new? As far as he could tell he hadn’t gotten one thing right since his niece had arrived. With the notable exception of the dog.

“After the writer?” Jessica asked.

Writer? He looked between the two females, baffled.

“Yes!” Michelle looked thrilled. So, Jessica got it right, first try.

Brian had assumed the dog was named after a brand of chocolate bar. He’d gone so far as to assume that Michelle liked them. He’d bought her one and slipped it into her lunch as a surprise. Another obvious error, since the lunch kit came back with the small gift of chocolate untouched.

“What do you like best by him?” Jessica asked. “No…let me guess. The Gift of the Magi?”

“Oh,” Michelle breathed, delighted. Something leaped in the air between his niece and Jessica, and the hackles on his neck rose again.

Back in high school they had called Jessica a witch and a weirdo. But he had known the truth, even though he had not come to her defense. She was not a witch, or a weirdo. Nor was she a magician.

She was a healer.

He had the uneasy feeling that he had not come here for the dog. In some way he did not fully understand, his request for help had brought him here.

For his niece.

And just maybe for himself.

He snorted out loud at the fanciful turn of his thoughts. He blamed it on the garden, the birds, her eyes and then shrugged the thoughts away before the unwelcome and less than pragmatic way of looking at things had a chance to attach itself to him, like a burr to the underside of a hound.

A perfectly wonderful day, ruined, Jessica thought, cupping the nearly lifeless body of the puppy in her hands as she pushed open the back door to her cottage with her shoulder.

Brian Kemp. Her very worst nightmare had now come back into her life. And how dare he be better looking than ever?

He was more somber now. The boyish recklessness had been chased from him. And he had lost all that adolescent slenderness and become the man whose promise she had seen a very long time ago. His chest was deep and powerful. His arms rippled with well-formed muscle. His legs were long and straight, the hardness of them evident even through the soft fabric of old jeans.

That dark swatch of brown hair still threatened to fall over one eye, and his eyes remained a place of mystery, as brown as melted chocolate, hinting at a depth that had not materialized when he was a boy. Jessica refused to give in to the subtle seduction of contemplating whether it had materialized later in his life.

His mouth, then, had always had a faint curve upward, as if he were ready to laugh. Now she noticed how the line of it was hard, the upward quirk missing. There were other lines in his face: squint lines around his eyes, the start of a furrow in his forehead.

And yet, if anything, he was even more handsome than he had been in youth. Something in those lines suggested great strength and character. But, of course, she had mistakenly thought she had seen those qualities before.

Jessica glanced around her kitchen and repressed a sigh. The cottage was old, and her attempts to spruce it up by painting the cabinets a delicate shade of periwinkle blue and stripping the wide oak boards of the floor and refinishing them did not hide the fact that the cupboards had gaps and the floors sagged.

Plus, this area doubled as her office and the work area for her mail-order seed and herb business. Drying plants hung upside down from the ceiling. Heaps of mint and sage crowded her countertops and kitchen table. Her mismatched chairs, one painted yellow, one bright red, had been pulled back from the scarred wooden table so she could move around it easily. The desk in the corner—an antique rolltop and the only really decent piece of furniture in the room—was almost lost under stacks of orders and paperwork.

If a person was trying to impress, this room would probably not forward their cause. But Jessica could not remember the last time she had felt the need to be anything but herself.

She had left that painful teenage world—full of angst, self-doubt and pain—so far behind her that it was easy to imagine it had never existed.

Until a six-foot-something reminder appeared in her driveway. She was pretty sure that was even the same truck.

“Why did you bring O’Henry here?” she asked the girl, keeping every hint of her resentment for Brian’s unexpected and unwelcome reappearance in her life from her voice.

The child reminded her of a bird with a broken wing, hurt and fear broadcasting past the mask she had painted on her face.

“My uncle said he had seen you do a miracle once.” Her voice was more that of a child who still believed in the impossible than a young woman who had lost so much.

A miracle? How could Brian bring this poor sweet, damaged child here with such an expectation?

Despite her irritation with him, Jessica kept her tone light. “If I had those kind of powers, I would have turned your uncle into a toad.”

The girl regarded her steadily, and then asked, deadpan, “You mean you didn’t?”

Despite the gravity of the situation, or maybe because of it, a little giggle escaped Jessica. And then Michelle. And then they were both laughing.

“Hey, I don’t find that funny.”

Which, of course, only made them laugh harder.

Brian tried to look insulted, but Jessica could tell he was relieved to hear his niece laugh. She didn’t like the small ripple of tenderness this made her feel for him.

How nice it would be if he just remained the black-hearted popular boy who had promised to call the school’s worst social misfit and then reneged.

But he seemed so much more human now, than he had been then, far less godlike. His eyes, in the light of her kitchen, had a deep sorrow in them. And it was evident, from the sideways glance at his niece and the puppy, where those furrows on his forehead were coming from.

He had lost his brother and his sister-in-law and had become an instant parent to a teenager. Life extracted revenge, but somehow she found no comfort in the fact that he had suffered.

Jessica cleared a space at her table and made a nest for the puppy in an old towel. Michelle crowded close to her. “The vet told me he didn’t want to live,” she whispered, and Jessica glanced at her to see her shoulders hunching. Her voice cracked as she continued, “How could he not want to live when I love him so?”

If only love had the power to make things as a person wished, Jessica thought, and despite herself sent a sideways look at Brian.

Years ago, as a lonely high school senior who had fit in nowhere, she had fallen in love with popular, gorgeous Brian Kemp. But all the force of that love could not persuade him to do the thing he had promised. One small phone call.

A chance. She had been sure that, if given a chance to show him who she really was, he would love her. Instead, he had loved Lucinda Potter, or so it had seemed from the hungry kisses Jessica had witnessed them exchanging behind the Coke machine in the main foyer.

Instead, she reminded herself briskly, he had given her the best of opportunities. She had learned very young that she would have to love herself. No prince riding in on a white charger could make her life wonderful, she would have to do it. And she had done just that.

And now, she had to share some of that wonder with this troubled young girl and never mind the man who had brought her.

“The vet was wrong,” Jessica said firmly. “Every creature wants to live. Even a bug.”

“That’s what I thought,” Michelle said, her voice stronger.

Jessica closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind. It was a more difficult task than normal. Her kitchen seemed far too tiny with Brian’s bulk in it. Over the powerful scents of mint and sage, she could feel his restlessness and detect his presence.

Powerful. Masculine.

She opened her eyes to see him prowling restlessly, looking at her plants and jars with a scowl on his face.

“Brian, why don’t you wait outside for a minute?”

Rather than looking insulted, he looked relieved. She felt his energy leave the room with him.

She composed herself after he left by taking a deep steadying breath. She held her hands above the small, dangerously-close-to-death dog. Slowly, her mind emptied of all thought and filled with pure and brilliant light, a spectrum of colors, dancing. Her fingertips began to tingle. All else faded, except the energy moving between her and the puppy.

Finally, she opened her eyes and gazed down at the little dog. She touched him with great and reverent affection.

“Is he going to live?” Michelle asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, unwilling to give the girl false hope. “But there are a few things I’d like to try. I’ll give him some of this.” She chose a small jar from a case of them and squeezed a few drops into his mouth.

“Is that like medicine?” Michelle asked.

“Something like that. We’ll pick some fresh herbs from the garden and make him his own concoction.”

Brian was outside, sitting on her favorite bench. Someday, there would be a small pond there. The rocks and mortar waited there for her to find the time and the energy to undertake such a big project.

Meanwhile, Jessica could only hope the memory of his sitting there—his handsome face lifted to the sun, his hair touched by the wind, his posture so relaxed—was not going to spoil that spot for her.

He didn’t appear to notice them, and so she took Michelle to her herb garden and began to pick, explaining each plant carefully to the surprisingly eager young student.

“Well?” he said, coming up behind them, quiet and graceful for such a large man.