Kitabı oku: «Blame It on Cupid», sayfa 2
CHAPTER TWO
THE COMBINED ODORS of beer, cold pizza and cigars hovered in the air like nectar. There was a time for women, Jack thought, and a time when a guy just needed to relax.
A man could enjoy a woman, be challenged by a woman, love a woman. But for damn sure, he could never relax with one.
“Sorry,” he said, without an ounce of remorse in his voice, as he scooped up the heap of poker chips. The faces around the table reflected various degrees of aggravation.
“You’re damned lucky tonight, Mackinnon.” Robert, alias Boner to his guy friends, was the investment banker who lived two doors down.
“It’s not my fault I’m good.”
“You know what they say—lucky at cards, unlucky at love.” Macmillan was another neighbor. He worked at Langley, like Jack, and was the toughest poker competitor for the same reason he was great at his job—he knew how to keep his mouth shut and reveal nothing in his expressions.
“Yeah, but Jack here’s lucky at love, too. It’s not fair. Hell, his back door’s a steady stream of women leaving early in the morning. I should know, since I can see his back door from across the street.” Steve was his best friend in the neighborhood, and not just because he was suffering male-pattern baldness before the rest of them.
Still, Jack couldn’t let that dig pass. “Hey, you’re married, so you’re free to get it every night. A whole lot easier than being single.”
“What? You assume marriage means a guy gets it every night? Whatever gave you wild illusions about marriage like that?”
“I don’t have any illusions about marriage. Trust me. If I’m ever inclined to try the institution again, I hope one of you’ll be a good friend and give me cyanide.” He dealt the next round, already sucking it up because he knew he had to lose this hand. Years ago, he’d realized he had the strange problem of a photographic memory. It was a huge asset in his work, but hell on friends. At least if he was playing poker. Obviously no one would play with him if he won all the time. Jack couldn’t shut down his brain, but he did his damnedest to tune it out to make the game fair.
Most of the time, anyway.
He had to admit to a teensy competitive streak. He not only liked to win, but he hated to lose. At anything.
His house line rang. Rather than interrupt the game, he just took his cards with him and hooked the kitchen extension to his ear. The cord extended an ample distance for him to ante at the table. He’d drawn a slim pair of fours.
Steve and Boner, for damn sure, had nothing, because Boner was shooting back another beer and Steve was restlessly shifting his butt. Sometimes people were even easier to read than cards.
“Hey, Dad, how’s it going?”
Jack kept playing, but his “dad buttons” went on red alert. He knew his sons. Kicker, at fifteen, was already three inches taller than Jack, couldn’t make it through doors without bumping his head, planned on a football scholarship to get into college and had a theory that he didn’t need good grades. Kicker, thank God, put his whole personality out front where anybody could see it. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Totally nothing. Mom made me call, but I’m fine.”
So it was bad. “What happened?”
“Nothing, really. I’m home.”
“Home from…?”
“The emergency room.”
“Uh-huh. Break or sprain?” He swiveled the cord, anteed another two bucks, then backed up to the sink counter again.
“Neither one. Mom just insisted I go to the hospital. You know how she is. She freaks every time I play football. And we were just passing a few, you know?”
What Jack knew was that he didn’t want to get into another wrangle with his ex-wife. He was tired of losing skin, which was always how he felt after talking to Dianne. Unfortunately, he knew the boys played both parents against each other, so it wasn’t as if he could automatically take Kicker’s side without knowing more details. “Where exactly are you hurt?”
“Just a bump on the head. Nothing. But Mom’s on me again about quitting.” Jack heard out the whole tale. Kevin, alias Kicker, was his firstborn—by eleven minutes. Kevin was the jock, where Cooper was the brain, the quiet bookworm, the one who looked at him with those deep brown eyes and always made Jack feel as if he’d failed him as a dad. Girls chased after both boys nonstop. It’d help if the boys weren’t so damned good looking. Kicker attracted them with his charm and the sports-star thing, but just as many seemed to fall for Cooper’s loner brown eyes.
He could talk to his kid and play poker simultaneously any day of the week, but while he was leaning against the granite counter, he happened to glance next door. Charlie Ross’s kitchen window faced his. Actually, since neither man had ever lost a minute’s sleep about their lack of curtains, Jack could see in most of Charlie’s windows, and that was a vice versa as well.
The house next door, though, had been black as a tomb for two weeks, and suddenly lights blazed in every downstairs room. “Okay, Kicker. I agree, a concussion isn’t worth a federal case. It happens. But let’s talk in the morning. And try not to bounce any more balls off your head until the noggin heals, okay?”
Instead of hanging up the phone, Jack seemed to forget it for a moment. The view across the yard just…startled him.
He already knew the brunette was over there. He’d seen her zoom in the driveway past dark, slam on the brakes of her toy car, and run for the house. It wasn’t like he kept track—the guys had come over; he’d been busy—but as far as he could tell, she only had one speed. A boob-bouncing run. And he had to shake his head.
She was one gorgeous cookie, from those sleek long legs to the lustrous swing of chestnut hair. He had yet to notice a flaw, and Jack was good at noticing women’s flaws. In looks, she could make a monk perk up.
In personality, though, she did seem a little…floofy.
He leaned closer to the window, disbelieving his own eyes. The view into Charlie’s living room wasn’t as clear as the kitchen, so maybe he was mistaken—surely he was mistaken? Because there seemed to be a table-sized Christmas tree in that living room. A bonbon confection of a pink Christmas tree.
It was halfway through January, for Pete’s sake.
Not even counting the craziness of a holiday tree being baby-pink.
A shadow streaked past the window again. The brunette. She was charging around too fast for him to see much, but he still caught a delectable glimpse of a heaving upper deck in motion.
Not that looks were everything, but Jack was hard pressed to believe a man would ever need Viagra, even in his nineties, around a woman who looked like that.
“Hey, Jack. You’ve been called, you hustler. Show ’em.”
With a laugh, he hung up the phone and rejoined the game. By that time, he had three of a kind, ace high. The others took one look and made ugly hissing noises. Jack threw up his hands. “I can’t help it if I win,” he said, and this time it was dead true. He’d barely looked at his cards.
Between hands, he poured another round of beer—since everyone was walking home, no one had to fret intake—and shook out more chips for the salsa dip. They played the Wednesday night game as if it were Vegas. What was said there, stayed there. Not about the game. Whoever won likely broadcast that news through the neighborhood and beyond. But any private news was considered sacred.
“How many times you got laid this week, Jack?”
“More than you, that’s for sure.” Hoots naturally followed that insult. Jack folded, had a hand too lousy to waste a bluff on. Crazy, but he somehow found himself back at the sink, glancing out the window again.
And there she was. Not in the living room this time, but the kitchen.
Her back was to him. Jack could see her refrigerator door was gaping wide open—she was cleaning it out. Undoubtedly stuff was still in there from before Charlie died.
She was scrubbing like a fiend. And, God, what a butt she had.
Not that Jack was a fanny connoisseur, but, well, actually he was. And hers was whistling cute. Whatever she was wearing—sweats?—caressed the shape of that little butt just so. The farther she leaned inside, rubbing and scrubbing, the more fabric dipped down her spine. The swell of two fine, fine fanny cheeks were revealed. And…
Jack pressed his nose to the window.
A tattoo. By damn, she had a tattoo on one fanny cheek. And not a little one either. He—
“Jack, what the hell are you doing?”
“Nothing, nothing.” He hustled back to the card table and parked there, but that fanny tattoo was so ingrained in his head that he lost his entire photographic memory skill. And all the money that went with it.
Usually the game broke up by eleven—everybody had work the next morning—but tonight no one wanted to leave. They were having too much fun watching him lose.
“It does the heart good to see you suck, Jack,” Steve said affectionately.
“Does the heart good, hell. It does the wallet good. May you have a slump like this that lasts weeks,” Boner chortled, as Jack watched the last of his stash get cradled into the banker’s big fat hands.
“What is this? Does nobody have any sympathy?”
“For you in life, sure. For you in cards, never.”
They always played at his place. After the divorce, Jack told himself he needed this mountain of a house in the suburbs like he needed a spare ear, but he’d never put it on the market. It was so easy to have a guy function here, like the card game, because everybody else was married and the women all hated their messes. The real reason he kept it, though, was for his sons. When Dianne took off on him, she also uprooted the boys, stuffed them all in a city apartment in D.C.
Once the neighbors left, his mood nosedived. It was too darn easy to remember that whole divorce debacle—the custody war, his ex-wife’s selfishness, his feeling impotent and frustrated at trying to reason with a court system that catered more to moms than dads. Jack did not do helplessness well. And maybe the system should cater more to mothers, most of the time, but not in their case. And aw, hell, letting it all ooze back in his mind was like picking at a sore.
With the house yawning empty, the smells of stale beer and cigars weren’t quite so appealing as they’d been earlier. He cracked a window, started sweeping dishes into the dishwasher, then found himself stalled at the sink window again.
She was still up.
It was just a pinch away from midnight, but now all the lights were on, both upstairs and down. The preposterously pink Christmas tree had a visible mound of wrapped packages under it. In the kitchen, the fridge door was closed, but he could see heaps of stuff on the counters—fruit, bags, bread and what all.
He could also see the front doors—the double oak doors—gaping open.
In January. With snow drifting down like confetti, testimony to the temperature.
Maybe she wanted to chill the inside? Could she really be that flaky?
When he saw her breeze past another window, he turned off the sink light. Naturally he immediately suffered guilt for spying on her…but he could sure see better without the background light.
God knew what all the woman was doing, but she was sure doing it fast. Running. From room to room. Carrying things. Then vacuuming. And dusting. And then carrying more things.
Midnight passed. Then one.
By that time he’d long finished the cleanup, sanitized the chalk-and-granite kitchen, and was ready to hang it up for the night…but he couldn’t seem to resist one last look. She was still up. Still visible. He wasn’t sure what room she was in, because he didn’t know Charlie’s house that well, but she was still on the first floor—which meant she should have noticed the north wind blowing in her front door. She obviously hadn’t, though, because at some point she’d stripped off the bulky sweater he’d seen her in earlier. Beneath was a body-hugging tee, red as a raspberry, and a headline announcement that her front side was as exquisite as her damn-fine behind.
The boobs weren’t huge. Just perky. Firm. Not round-round, more…well, when it came down to it, nothing else was exactly like a perfect breast shape, so there was no point in trying to compare it to anything.
Jack vaguely realized he’d settled in, resting his elbows on the sink—and damn it, he had to work tomorrow!—but at that precise instant he couldn’t possibly move. She was peeling off that raspberry longsleeved tee. He saw a strip of black bra, but only from the back. Then he lost sight of her—until he picked up her moving around two rooms down, when she turned back into the Vacuum Queen.
Apparently she wasn’t stripping down to go to bed, like a normal human being past midnight on a weeknight. She was just peeling off clothes because she was hot from all that running.
He was definitely hot from all that watching.
With a sigh, he eased away from the sink, knuckled the sore muscles in his back, and grumped around until he located some shoes, then his jacket.
He hadn’t looked at a woman seriously in the last three and a half years.
There was a time he’d believed in honor, fidelity, loyalty and all the rest of that crap. There was also a time he thought he was different than his generation—because he really believed in marriage, in the vows, would never have gotten a divorce because of going through a stretch of trouble.
But that was then.
These days he took credit for being a commitmentphobic, allergic-to-rings kind of guy. If that made him irresponsible and selfish—well, he now wore those labels with pride. He’d done the honor thing and got kicked in the teeth. It was a “screw or be screwed” world. He had no intention of playing nice ever again.
Scowling and ticked off, he yanked open his back door and felt the prompt slap of ice air. Hell and more hell. All this voyeurism was going to completely ruin his workday tomorrow—he could already feel a lack-of-sleep headache coming on—and if he wasn’t still up, the hounds of memories wouldn’t have had a chance to chase after him.
Most days, he wasn’t remotely bitter. He didn’t want Dianne back, was long over all that. He had a great time with his female friendships and sleep-mates. So did they. He didn’t want to hurt anyone. He just had no intention of putting himself in harm’s way ever again. Chivalry was very nice, but somebody else could do it. And if somebody thought that made him a cold, unfeeling creep, well, that was tough.
Still glowering, he crossed the yard, swore when the cold, wet grass sneaked into his shoes, hiked up her driveway and closed her damn front doors.
He didn’t do it to be nice.
He didn’t have a nice-bone left in him. He’d only done it out of plain old selfishness. He knew damn well he wouldn’t have been able to sleep, fretting that anyone in hell could have walked through those wide-open front doors. And if he didn’t catch at least some sleep, he was going to be completely worthless at work tomorrow.
He might enjoy looking at her delectable fanny, but he sure as hell was not going to enjoy living next door to such a witless woman.
MERRY WOKE UP TO the caterwaul of her traveling alarm clock. She slapped it off, then blearily opened one eye. Seven o’clock.
A god-awful hour for a girl who’d only made it to bed at four-thirty.
She stumbled off the couch, stretched, then forced both eyes open. She vaguely remembered trying to decide where to sleep, but then just pulling a blanket over her head in the living room. Everything about the house had seemed overwhelming at that point.
Still did, for that matter. She thought she knew Charlie Ross. And, of course, people changed when they matured. But where Charlie had been so warm and natural and likeable, his house seemed decorated by a robot. Almost all the surfaces were gray or stainless steel. The walls were filled with gargantuan canvases of scary modern art, and every room had technology so ultra-cool that she couldn’t even turn on the TV or set a clock on her own.
Okay, cookie, enough griping.
She stumbled toward the bathroom. Never mind all the looming crises ahead of her, she felt darn good about all the chores she’d accomplished last night.
When she’d first walked in the front door and looked around, she darn near panicked, but kept her mind on what mattered. Charlene. Getting the place prepared for the little girl to come home. So Merry’s first priority, obviously, was to put up the pink Christmas tree and presents—that little girl was going to get a Christmas come hell or high water!
And after that—well, the house had shaken her up on a zillion emotional levels, but just making it livable was the first challenge. Clearly no one had cleaned the house since Charlie died. There was a sock in the living room, a jacket hanging on a kitchen chair—nothing terrible—but reminders of her dad that Merry didn’t want Charlene exposed to the minute she walked in the door.
Once all that tidying was done, she’d recognized the ghastly smell in the kitchen as something rotting in the fridge. Hell’s bells, there went the rest of the night. She’d dumped the icky fridge contents, scrubbed and sanitized, chased out to an all-night grocery to bring in some milk and basics, then came back to do a dust and vacuum and bathroom-clean.
In the shower, shampoo streaming down her face, she admitted to herself that in real life, she didn’t mind being a slob. Or a relative slob. Far too many things were more interesting and important than dust, but Merry could justify her brief cleaning freak-out. It wasn’t about dirt. It was about trying to make Charlene’s coming home as painless and nontraumatic as possible.
After a fast blow-dry, Merry shimmied into jeans, a fuzzy yellow mohair sweater, socks. In the kitchen, she stared bleary-eyed at the fancy coffeemaker. It looked pizzazz-y, like something created in 2075. Shinier than lip gloss. And she could turn it on, she’d discovered last night. She just couldn’t figure out how to make it produce coffee.
It wasn’t fair to make a girl start the day without caffeine.
It wasn’t fair to make a girl start such a critical day without sleep, either.
She nabbed an apple—bought fresh last night—and reminded herself of the lawyer’s behavior the day before. Lee Oxford still grated on her mind. His mercenary thinking. His coldness. The fact that he’d never once even mentioned Charlene’s name.
Her resolve ballooned all over again. No matter how crazy anyone thought she was, there was no way—none in this universe—that Merry would abandon a kid. Ever.
She knew too well what abandonment felt like.
When it came down to it, maybe it was a good thing the lawyer had been such a barracuda. His attitude had hard-wired her determination. She bit a chunk of apple, grabbed her jacket, the directions to the rest home she’d gotten from the lawyer and then sprinted outside. A fresh skid of snow had fallen in the wee hours. Brushed with dawn light, the whole neighborhood looked pearl-soft.
Her neighbor was up, judging from the lights in his kitchen window, but she didn’t catch sight of him. More than once last night, she’d thought it’d be no hardship to have such a good-looking guy next door. So he was likely married. She could still look, couldn’t she? And he had a truck. He looked mechanical and handy. More things to love in a neighbor.
It looked as if she had lots of neighbors. Other cars were steaming in their driveways, warming up, the lineup resembling the start-up of the Indy 500—although this particular lineup was notably chunky gas guzzlers, suburbia getting ready to join the exodus to the freeways and work. A few waved at her.
She waved back, noting they all seemed to be in pinstriped suits—both the men and the women—and doing the wool-coat thing. Worry tried to rag her nerves again. She just felt like such an alien. She’d never owned a pinstriped suit, never wanted one. Still, she reminded herself that there wasn’t that big an age difference—she was joining the thirtysomething bracket as of her birthday next month.
She loved new experiences besides, right?
Her spirits zoomed higher as she turned on the freeway, the map crackled over the steering wheel in front of her. When push came to shove, it didn’t really matter whether she fit into the neighborhood or the house or not. Screw all that. This was about a little girl.
And she’d waited as long as she possibly could to get her arms folded around Charlene.
The directions to the place did seem a little tricky. She checked the map again, then eased to the right when another driver honked at her. Naturally she was concentrating on her driving. Mostly. But the appalling image of Charlene’s bedroom kept popping into her mind.
Nothing about the inside or outside of that darn house matched anything she ever knew about Charlie Ross, but the worst room—the absolute worst—was Charlene’s bedroom.
Another driver honked at her. She shook her apple at him. For Pete’s sake, was everybody cranky near D.C.?
Last night, there wasn’t anything she could do but put a couple fresh bouquets of flowers in Charlene’s bedroom. She couldn’t find a vase in the house to save her life, but she’d found big glasses, and the grocery store had thankfully sold cut flowers.
And once Charlene got home, Merry figured they could fix the room. In fact, it’d be a super bonding thing to do together. The poor kid had no spread, no curtains, no rugs. It just didn’t make sense. If her dad could afford that ghastly house, don’t you think he could have sprung for some nice, soft carpeting and pretty colors and girl stuff for his daughter? Merry pictured some Mary Eddy prints, maybe a canopy bed—the room was huge. They could throw out all that awful dark furniture, put in white. Maybe buy a little vanity.
Charlene had a fab stereo system, no question, ditto for the computer and all. But there were cute desks and centers to contain all that mess of wires these days, something with style and color. Maybe Merry knew zip about parenting—but she knew girls.
Her turnoff led her away from bustling suburbia. The last turn was into a remote old neighborhood with dignified shade trees and cracked sidewalks.
Where she pulled in, the big old frame house had been converted into an assisted-living facility.
Charlene’s one living relative was a great grandmother, who lived here—along with a dozen of her cronies over age ninety. It was no place for a child, but the foster-care system was predictably jammed up around the Christmas holiday, and the dietician who ran the home claimed they had a bed for Charlene—but only on an extremely temporary basis. Or that was the story Lee Oxford had told Merry when he’d first called.
The driveway was gravel, the only vehicle in sight an aging van. Merry hiked up the handicapped ramp, trying to rev herself up for this first meeting—not that she needed any revving. From the moment she made the decision to come, she’d been researching everything about eleven-year-olds she could think of. Her own memories of that age were intense, but obviously, trends and styles changed. She’d bought Bratz and Elle Girl magazines, listened to Ciara and the Click Five and the other groups the music store promised her were the “in” music for ‘tweens, hit the library, read some Blume and horse stories and tried to pick up on the writers the ‘tweens were into these days.
She rapped on the front door, and when no one immediately answered, rapped again. Abruptly a whitehaired charmer with a cane answered the door. The lady was dressed in a pink-and-green dotted sweater with purple pants and a huge red bow sagging over one ear. Lots of positive attitude. Just deaf as a rock.
“Well, aren’t you the pretty one, dearie-dear. Come on in…”
One step inside and Merry could smell urine. From the entry, she caught a partial view of a giant living room off to the right, where a wall TV did The Morning Show at screaming volume. Chairs and couches and wheelchairs cupped close to the set in a tight semicircle. At a glance, she counted around ten people in the cluster, but then she was distracted by a bony, hairless elderly woman barreling straight for her in a wheelchair, evidently bent on escape.
Quickly she closed the door behind her—which prevented the escape, but didn’t stop the wheelchair from clipping her in the knees. She winced, ducked, smiled for the charmer.
“Hi, I’m Merry Olson. I’m here for Charlene Ross. I don’t know if she’s around here or with her greatgrandmother? But I have papers—”
“Hey? You’re selling cookies, you say?”
“No, no. I’m not selling cookies. I’m looking for Charlene Ross—”
“Hey, Frank, I think she’s selling cookies!” the charmer bellowed and then blessed her with another warm smile. “I hope you’ve got those mint chocolate ones, honey, those are my very favorite—Wilhemma, quit ramming her with your chair, you old bitch—”
“Now, now.” A harried-looking man shot out of the kitchen, a dish towel over his arm. “We don’t use that language, Julia. I’ve told you that before—” A smile for Merry.
She was pretty sure he identified himself as Frank, and the caretaker of the place, but it was impossible to hear anything clearly over the eardrum-piercing volume on the TV.
She explained why she was here—or tried to—but she was so anxious to find Charlene that her attention kept straying to the living room. She didn’t expect to find a little girl in the middle of the geriatric set, but still, she wanted an impression of the place Charlene had been camping out in since the funeral.
Closest to the TV, she saw an old man, then an older man, then a man who’d clearly lived in the l700s and was just hanging on by a thread…then an old lady, who was holding hands with another old lady, followed by someone sprawled on the couch of indeterminate sex and drool drizzling down his chin…
There was only one face she couldn’t catch at all, someone in a big old Morris chair, and when she crooked her head forward she identified a young person. Her heart leaped—but only for a second. It was a boy, not a girl. The kid was bent down, playing some kind of computer game, but the clothes gave away his gender. He was wearing army fatigues—long tee and pants—with big boots, and had a brush cut as if he’d just signed up for the marines.
At least Charlene hadn’t been the only soul under ninety in the place. Almost everyone looked gentle and kindly, but still, the more Merry saw, the more she wanted to hustle Charlene out of there and get her home.
“Charlene,” she repeated again to the caretaker, worried that he hadn’t understood her because of the roaring television. “I have papers giving me permission to take her. Mr. Oxford should have called. The only reason she came here was because her great-grandmother was the only relative she had, until they found a guardian or—”
“Yes. Absolutely. We’ve been expecting you, like I keep saying. And she’s right there.”
He pointed at the kid, the boy.
Merry shook her head. God. In the last ten days, she’d argued with her dad and family and friends, quit a job, upended her whole life, packed up, suffered a god-awful two-day drive, landed in a terrifyingly highend suburb and then had to clean all last night. She wasn’t frayed exactly. She just needed one thing to go smoothly. “No. I mean a girl—”
But finally, over all the noise, the caretaker yelled “Charlene” loud enough to catch the child’s attention. When the child responded, Merry started to get it.
The skinny scrap of a kid—the one with the marine brush cut, the he-man fatigue shirt and forearm tattoo and combat boots—was actually her kid.
The child obediently put down the computer game, got up and hiked toward her. The caretaker ordered the kid to stick out a hand. The kid did. And though Merry desperately wanted to throw her arms around the child and hug her senseless, she found herself returning the polite, stiff handshake.
“Pleased to meet you,” Charlene said.
“I’m thrilled to finally meet you, too,” Merry said, but instead of the exuberantly warm, reassuring tone she had in mind, her voice came out faint as a whisper. The child looked like her dad, as far as the skinny build and small bones, the blond hair and blue eyes. But the all-guy outfit and the robotic walk and self-contained expression stunned Merry, and for damn sure, confused her.
This was Charlene?
The sweet young girl she’d bought sparkly bangles and pink socks for?
