But as soon as Karen completed the thought, another girl climbed from the car to prove her wrong. She came from the front seat with Ryan Morgan, and she was absolutely beautiful—slender, dark, wearing a simple white dress that could easily be hanging in Karen’s closet. This was a young woman with class, even if she was on Serenity Street, even if she was with Ryan Morgan. A dark-haired angel... who looked about seven months pregnant.
The sudden ache around her heart was physical, causing Karen to hug herself tightly to keep it in. Sometimes she thought she had come to terms with the fact that her body had betrayed her, that she could never have a baby of her own, could never know the awe-inspiring experience of feeling a child grow within her, of giving birth, of bringing an innocent new life into the world. Sometimes she thought she had accepted that there must be some other purpose for her—perhaps helping the children on Serenity, since she couldn’t have any of her own.
Other times—when she’d shopped for gifts for each of Michael and Valery’s two babies, for Smith and Jolie’s three and for Remy and Susannah’s son, or when she unexpectedly came in contact with someone obviously pregnant... and probably as ill-suited to be a mother as anyone could be, and whose child would have a father who should never be allowed in the same universe with an innocent baby... Those times, she was sure she would die before she accepted it.
Morgan hung his arm around the girl’s shoulder, called to his brother, Trevor, to find someplace else to spend the night, then started down the street. Seeming reluctant, almost embarrassed, Reid followed them, practically dragged along by the girl, who held on tightly as if he might try to escape. He made a point of not looking at Jamey, sitting only a half-dozen feet from where he’d left the car, or anything else. For a young man who was about to get lucky, he certainly didn’t look as if he felt lucky.
Karen slid further down on the cushion and turned her head so that her face was half buried in the pillow. She hadn’t gotten lucky, in any sense of the word, in too long to recall, but maybe coming to Serenity Street, contrary to everyone else’s opinion, would prove to be lucky for her. Maybe the changes she could make for the people here and the changes they would make in her would be a good thing.
Maybe her luck was about to change.
She wasn’t sure when she dozed off—after the Impala had driven away, after the voices had faded from the street, long after Jamey had gone inside, closed the doors and locked up O’Shea’s—but the next thing she knew her neck was stiff, her robe was tangled underneath her, dawn was breaking...and someone was in her yard. Not in her yard, exactly, but rather on the sidewalk where the gate stood open—the same gate that she had tried without success to open her first afternoon there.
Rising onto one elbow, she looked out. Except for a bone-thin puppy sniffing around the garbage cans next door to O’Shea’s, her uninvited visitor was the only one out. The street was quiet, the apartments dark, the only sounds the mournful whistle of a ship on the not-too-distant river and the creak of rusty metal grating against metal. She didn’t need the thin light from the closest working streetlamp or the ray or two of sunlight that had cleared the buildings to the east to recognize the man. It was Reid, and he was fixing that stubborn gate.
Filled with a silly sense of wonder, she watched until he was almost finished. Rising quickly from the window seat, she hurried into the bedroom, threw off her robe, pulled on a pair of shorts and shoved her feet into a pair of rubber thongs. Downstairs in the kitchen, she tossed a couple of pieces of bread in a bowl, covered them with milk; then, refusing to consider the wisdom of what she was about to do, she let herself out the front door.
He was finished with the gate, but he hadn’t left yet. She wondered as she made her way down the sidewalk if he had a place to go. Did he live by himself or with family, or did he bunk with whichever friend had room for him?
He was crouched on the sidewalk outside the fence, petting the dog. When the gate squeaked as she opened it, he jerked his hand back and got quickly to his feet, edgy as if he might run at any second. She had never met such a skittish young man. She was supposed to worry about her safety with him, but he looked far more afraid of her than she might ever be of him. She approached him as if it were the most normal thing in the world at dawn, still in her nightshirt, on a street like Serenity. “Is that your puppy?”
He shook his head.
“I thought he looked hungry. Do you think anyone would mind if I fed him?”
Another shake of his head.
She knelt down, the sidewalk gritty under her bare legs, and set the bowl down. The puppy fell over himself to reach it and almost literally dove in. “Does he have a name?”
“No. He’s just a stray. Nobody wants him.”
“Then I’ll take him.” Not that she wanted him. Dogs were messy and required food and attention and visits to the vet. She didn’t have time to devote to housebreaking, and no animal should live in the dirt of her yard. Still, he would be company when she was alone, and he might prove useful with the kids in the neighborhood. All kids loved puppies. If she could ever catch any of the children outside, maybe this scrawny little creature could provide an introduction, and if she met the kids, she could meet their parents, and if she met their parents...
Smiling at the great expectations she had suddenly developed for a half-starved little ball of fur, she looked up at Reid and stuck her hand out. “I’m Karen Montez, and you’re Reid Donovan.”
He ignored her hand and instead directed that consummate scowl across the street. “Did he tell you that?”
“I’m sorry,” she said very seriously, hoping he didn’t mind a little gentle teasing. “I didn’t realize your name was a secret.”
He looked back at her, but still didn’t accept her handshake. He really was a good-looking kid—and she’d been right yesterday. His eyes were the bluest blue she’d ever seen. If he were twenty years older or she were twenty years younger, her heart would be fluttering.
She dropped her hand back to her side. “Thank you for fixing the gate.”
Color flushed his cheeks a dark bronze. He was at least twenty-two, rumored to be dangerous, bad news, trouble on two feet, and he could still blush over a simple thank-you. She was beginning to believe that there was a whole lot more to Reid Donovan than met the eye.
“If you oil the hinges, it should stop that squeaking,” he said, sullen now. “Don’t tell anyone...”
Once again she smiled gently. “You have a reputation to protect?”
He shrugged impatiently, as if his reputation was the last thing on his mind. “O’Shea said...” Another look across the street before he went on, grudgingly. “O’Shea said to stay away from you.”
“And do you always do what Jamey O’Shea says?”
“When it makes sense.”
Interesting answer. But why did it make sense to him to stay away from her? And if Jamey was so determined to get rid of her, why was he warning the troublemakers away from her? The answer came easily enough: because that was what Jamey did. He looked after people. He watched out for those too weak, too vulnerable—or, in her case, too foolish—to watch out for themselves.
Down the block a screen door slammed. Karen looked past Reid to see the girl from last night, the pregnant one, come out of one of the converted houses and start down the sidewalk toward them. She was dressed in yellow this morning, a bright, sunny color, and looked amazingly well rested to be heavily pregnant and to have just spent the night with Ryan Morgan. “Who is she?”
Reid glanced around. “That’s Alicia.” He gave her name the ethnic pronunciation of four syllables, making it sound foreign and exotic. “She’s Ryan’s woman.”
“Woman?” she echoed with a grin. “She can’t be more than twenty.”
“Last week.”
“When is her baby due?”
“I don’t know. Two months, maybe three.”
“Will you introduce me to her?”
He gave her a wary look. “Don’t
mess with her, lady. Don’t give Ryan a reason to mess with you.”
Feeling as if her life had taken a turn into permanent stubbornness, Karen got to her feet, taking the puppy with her. “Good morning,” she greeted when the girl had come close enough.
Alicia’s look was suspicious until it shifted to Reid. “So this is where you disappeared to. Tanya kept me up half the night, whining that you weren’t any fun anymore, before she finally went off someplace.” She gave Karen another long, judging look. “She’s a little old, isn’t she?”
Reid blushed again, but Karen smiled. “A little? Honey, I’m old enough to be mother to you both.” Offering her hand once again, she introduced herself. “I’m Karen Montez.”
“Alicia Gutierrez.” The girl gave her a quick, firm handshake, then gestured toward the sign. “If you’re Karen, who’s Kathy?”
“She was my sister.”
“Was?”
“She’s dead. Her husband beat her to death.” She said it matter-of-factly, as if it didn’t damn near break her heart.
Alicia accepted it matter-of-factly, as if she’d heard it too many times before. “Too bad. You taking in the mutt?”
“If nobody objects.”
“Nah, nobody around here’ll care. Nobody feeds him or nothin’, except Reid. He’s got a soft spot for strays, being that he was one himself.” Her smile for him was meant to soften the sting of her words. Karen wasn’t sure it worked. “I’ve got to get going or I’m gonna be late for work. I work mornings at a coffee shop in the Quarter.”
“If you’re free in the afternoons, why don’t you come by sometime?” Karen invited.
The girl looked skeptically at the house, then her, then nodded. “Yeah, maybe. See you, Reid.”
Karen watched her walk away. After she crossed into the next block, Karen looked back at Reid. He didn’t look skittish or embarrassed or sullen anymore. He looked angry. “I told you to leave her alone. Ryan might put up with you as long as you don’t mess with him, but Alicia and that kid are his. If she starts coming around here, you’re in trouble.” He muttered a curse. “Don’t you ever listen to anyone?”
“Not very well,” she said, her tone mild.
“You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t kill you. He’s done it before.”
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
For a moment he seemed so full of nervous energy that she thought he just might erupt. Then he drew a deep breath and unwillingly, grudgingly, answered, “No.”
“Then what are you doing hanging around with someone who has?”
She suspected that she already knew the answer, hinted at in Alicia’s comment about strays. He didn’t seem to have any family, certainly not any who cared about the direction he was headed. He’d probably never had the love and guidance every child deserved, had probably been on his own since he was young. Kids like that made a place for themselves wherever they could, usually with other kids whom no one loved or wanted. Ryan and Trevor Morgan and Vinnie Marino were probably the closest thing to family Reid had. Maybe no one else wanted him, maybe no one else had any use for him, but they did. He had a place with them...even if every instinct she possessed told her that he didn’t belong with them.
In the end he didn’t answer. He just gave her another angry look, muttered, “I’ve got to go,” and took off.
With a sigh, Karen looked down at the puppy in her arms. He was snuggled close, his eyes were closed, and he was starting to snore. She hadn’t particularly impressed Alicia, and she had only angered Reid, but the morning hadn’t been a total loss. At least this little guy had been won over.
“Now there’s a sight you don’t see every day.”
Jamey looked up from the newspaper he’d spread over the bar and saw his Friday afternoon customers, all five of them, looking out the door. He didn’t need to see the direction they were turned to know they were watching their new neighbor. It seemed to be all anyone on Serenity wanted to do lately. He couldn’t fault them, though. If he was honest about it, he’d probably spent more time focused on the house across the street than everyone else combined. The first thing he did when he got up in the morning was look that way. Every time he went out the door, every time he went near it—hell, even when he couldn’t see anything at all, he was still looking that way. It was getting pathetic.
Especially since looking was all he’d been doing. Karen hadn’t come to the bar since Tuesday afternoon, when she’d shared his sandwich and taken him to task for alerting Jolie to her presence in the neighborhood. She hadn’t wandered over the times he’d taken a chair outside to take advantage of the minimally cooler temperatures, and he hadn’t found a valid reason for heading over her way.
He didn’t try to resist the curiosity that had drawn his customers to the doors. Pushing the paper aside, he moved that way himself, taking a position in the one unoccupied doorway. Karen was outside for the first time in several days, wearing bright red shorts and a lemon yellow tank top, her hair somehow confined underneath an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. She looked about half the age he thought she was, about a tenth the age he wished she was.
It wasn’t just the sight of her that attracted so much attention; it was what she was doing. She had raised one of those upstairs windows without screens, climbed out onto the roof and was cleaning the gutters that ran above the veranda of probably forty years’ debris. Virgil was right: it was a sight a person didn’t see every day.
“What’s she doing over there?” old Thomas asked.
“Fixing up the house,” Virgil replied.
“Why?”
“Because it needs fixing.”
Amen to that, Jamey thought skeptically. It needed more fixing than any five-foot-five hundred-and-ten-pound redhead could ever manage. Not that she wasn’t making headway, if the trash pile growing next to the driveway was any indication. She had replaced all the broken windows and had added two empty gallon paint cans to the garbage. She’d done some heavy-duty cleaning, and the front gate was still rusty, but at least it was back on its hinges. Idly he wondered how she had accomplished that without his noticing.
“She sure is a pretty little thing,” one of the men remarked.
“She obviously ain’t married.”
“How do you know that?”
“If she had a husband, he wouldn’t be letting her waste her time on a place like this.”
“No, he’d be keeping her busy wasting her time on him.”
“She’s got to be crazy to move down here.”
“Plumb out of her mind.”
“Yeah, but she sure is pretty.”
Karen picked that moment to notice her audience and raised one hand in a wave. “Good afternoon, gentlemen.”
Jamey watched their responses with a grin. Every one of them looked like a lovesick adolescent—shuffling their feet, avoiding her gaze, one or two of them shyly returning her greeting. After a moment, he touched old Thomas on the shoulder. “Watch things here, will you? I’ll be back in a minute.”
Without considering the folly in his decision—after all, he had stayed away more than seventy-two hours; why break his record now?—he crossed the street and let himself into the yard through the squeaky gate. From a position solidly on the ground, he tilted his head back and looked up at her. “You have an interesting effect on people. You’ve got men over there old enough to be your grandfather acting like lovestruck kids.” And one kid around here somewhere acting too much like a lovestruck man.
“That’s sweet.” She dropped a handful of slimy black muck to the ground less than five feet from him, then turned to sit on her bottom and gaze down at him. “Are you busy tomorrow?”
“The bar is open six days a week.” Then, wishing he wouldn’t, he asked, “Why?”
“I’d like to introduce myself to some of the people in the neighborhood. I thought it might go a little easier if I was accompanied by someone they know. But never mind. I’ll ask Alicia to go with me.”
His gaze narrowed,
and it had nothing to do with the sun behind her house. “How did you happen to meet Alicia Gutierrez?”
“I met her the same morning I met Jethro.”
“Jethro?”
“Yeah.” She gestured behind her, and for the first time he noticed the dog in the window. Standing on its hind legs, its forepaws balanced on the windowsill, it was just barely tall enough to see and be seen. “Doesn’t he look like a Jethro?”
The mutt was a mix of many breeds, most indistinct, but even from the ground, Jamey could identify the hound in him. It accounted for the longest ears and droopiest face he’d ever seen on an animal. “So you have a guard dog,” he said, half surprised to find there was little sarcasm behind the teasing.
“Heavens, no. He’s the biggest baby in the world. He snores like a freight train and pees every time something startles him—and everything startles him. It’s a good thing I don’t have any carpeting inside, or I’d be spending all my time cleaning up after him instead of getting ready to open.”
Mention of the opening of Kathy’s House added a layer of tension just when he’d been starting to relax. He ignored it, though, and returned to the original topic. “You know Alicia is Morgan’s girlfriend.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Don’t try to come between them.”
She gave him an angelically innocent look. “I wouldn’t dream of it.” Then... “Of course, if a stranger could affect their relationship, that would mean there wasn’t much of a relationship to start with, wouldn’t it?”
He should return to the bar and wash his hands of her. She wasn’t his responsibility. Just because he looked out for the customers in his bar didn’t mean he also had to look out for anyone else who wandered into the neighborhood. He owed her nothing, not even a few carefully emphasized warnings to the people most likely to cause her trouble. But he didn’t walk away. He’d done that once—with Reid—and had regretted it ever since.
Convincing Jamey Page 7