Fiancé in Name Only

by Maureen Child

  A bright smile lit the kid’s face. “Thanks!”

  He hustled out of the kitchen, down the back steps and around to the side of the house.

  Micah followed more slowly, and as he walked, he took a second to appreciate the view. All around him fall colors exploded in shades of gold and red. The dark green of the pines in the woods beyond the house made them look as if they were made of shadows, and he idly plotted another murder, deep in the forest.

  “I could have some kid find the body,” he mumbled, seeing the possible scene in his mind. “Freak him out, but would he be too scared to tell anyone? Would he run for help or run home and hide?”

  “Who?”

  Coming back to the moment at hand, Micah looked at the child staring up at him. “What?”

  “Who’s gonna run home? Are they scared? Is it a boy? Cuz my brothers say boys don’t get scared, only girls do.”

  Micah snorted. “Your brothers are wrong.”

  “I think so, too.” Jacob nodded so hard his hair flopped across his forehead. He pushed it back with a dirty hand. “Jonah gets scared sometimes and Joshua needs a light on when he sleeps.”

  “Uh-huh.” Way too much information, Micah thought and wondered idly if the kid had an off switch.

  “I like the dark and only get scared sometimes.” Jacob shifted impatiently from foot to foot.

  “That’s good.”

  “Do you get scared?”

  Frowning now, Micah watched the boy. For a second he was tempted to say no and let it drop. Then he thought better of it. “Everybody gets scared sometimes.”

  “Even dads?”

  Micah had zero experience with fathers, but he suspected that the one thing that would terrify a man was worrying about his children. “Yeah,” he said. “Even dads.”

  “Wow.” Jacob nodded thoughtfully. “I have a rabbit I hold when I get scared. I don’t think my dad has one.”

  “A rabbit?” Micah shook his head.

  “Not a real one,” Jacob assured him. “Real ones would be hard to hold.”

  “Sure, sure.” Micah nodded sagely.

  “And they poop a lot.”

  Micah hid the smile he felt building inside. The boy was so serious he probably wouldn’t appreciate being laughed at. Did all kids talk like this? And whatever happened to not talking to strangers? Didn’t people tell their kids that anymore?

  “There it is,” Jacob said suddenly, and pointed to the garden as he hurried to the gate and waited for Micah to open it. Once he had, Jacob raced across the uneven ground to one of the dozen or more pumpkins.

  Micah followed, hands in his jeans pockets, watching the kid because he couldn’t very well leave him out here alone, could he? “Which one?”

  “This one.” Jacob bent down to pat the saddest pumpkin Micah had ever seen.

  It was smaller than the others, but that wasn’t its only issue. It was also shaped like a lumpy football. It was more a pale yellow than orange, and it had what looked like a tumor growing out of one side at the top. If it had been at a store, it would have been overlooked, but here a little boy was patting it tenderly.

  “Why that one?” Micah asked, actually curious about what would have made the kid pick the damn thing.

  Jacob pulled a weed, then looked up at Micah. “Cuz it’s the littlest one, like me.” He looked at the vines and all of the other round, perfect orange blobs. “And it’s all by itself over here, so it’s probably lonely.”

  “A lonely pumpkin.” He wasn’t sure why that statement touched him, but he couldn’t deny the kid was getting to him.

  “Uh-huh.” Smiling again, Jacob said, “None of the other kids liked him, but I do. I’m gonna help my mom draw a happy face on him for Halloween and then he’ll feel good.”

  The kid was worried about a pumpkin’s self-esteem. Micah didn’t even know what to say to that. When he was a kid, he’d never done Halloween. There’d been no costumes, no trick-or-treating, no carving pumpkins with his mom.

  Micah had one fuzzy memory of his mother and it drifted through his mind like fog on a winter night. She was pretty—at least, he told himself that because the mental picture of her was too blurred to really tell. She had brown hair and brown eyes like his and she was kneeling on the sidewalk in front of him, smiling, though tears glittered in her eyes. Micah was about six, he guessed, a little older than Jacob. They were in New York and the street was busy with cars and people. He was hungry and cold and his mother smoothed his hair back from his forehead and whispered to him.

  “You have to stay here without me, Micah.”

  Fear spurted inside him as he looked up at the dirty gray building behind him. The dark windows looked like blank eyes staring down at him. Worried and chewing his bottom lip, he looked back at his mother. “But I don’t want to. I want to go with you.”

  “It’s just for a little while, baby. You’ll stay here where you’ll be safe and I’ll be back for you as soon as I can.”

  “I don’t want to be safe, Mommy,” he whispered, his voice catching, breaking as panic nearly choked him and he felt tears streaking down his face. “I want to go with you.”

  “You can’t come with me, Micah.” She kissed his forehead, then stood up, looking down at him. She took a step back from him. “This is how it has to be and I expect you to be a good boy.”

  “I will be good if I can go with you,” he promised. He reached for her hand, his small fingers curling around hers and holding tight, as if he could keep her there. With him.

  But she only walked him up the steps, knocked on the door and gave Micah’s fingers one last squeeze before pulling free. Fear nibbled at him, his tears coming faster, and he wiped them away with his jacket sleeve. “Don’t leave...”

  “You wait right here until they open the door, understand?”

  He nodded, but he didn’t understand. Not any of it. Why were they here? Why was she leaving? Why didn’t she want him to be with her?

  “I’ll be back, Micah,” she said. “Soon. I promise.” Then she turned and left him.

  He watched her go, hurrying down the steps, then along the sidewalk, until she was lost in the crowd. Behind him, the door opened and a lady he didn’t know took Micah’s hand and led him inside.

  His mother never came back.

  Micah shook off the memory of his first encounter with child services. It had been a long, confusing, terrifying day for him. He was sure he wouldn’t be there long. His mother had said so. For the first year, he’d actually looked for her every day. After that, hope was more fragile and, finally, the hope faded completely. His mother’s lies stuck with him, of course.

  Hell, they still lived in a tiny, dark corner of his mind and constantly served as a reminder not to trust anyone.

  But here, in Banner, those warnings were more silent than they’d ever been for him. Watching as Jacob carefully brushed dirt off his pumpkin, Micah realized that this place was like stepping into a Norman Rockwell painting. A place where kids worried about pumpkins and talked to strangers like they were best friends. It had nothing at all to do with the world that Micah knew.

  And maybe that’s why he felt so out of step here.

  * * *

  That’s how Kelly found them. The boy, kneeling in the dirt, and the man standing beside him, a trapped look on his face—as if he were trying to figure out how he’d gotten there. Smiling to herself, Kelly climbed out of her truck and walked toward the garden at the side of the house. Micah spotted her first and his brown eyes locked with hers.

  She felt a jolt of something hot that made her knees feel like rubber, but she kept moving. She had to admit it surprised her, seeing Micah here with Jacob. She hadn’t pictured him as the kind of guy to take the time for a child. He was so closed off, so private, that seeing him now, walking through a fe
nced garden while a little boy talked his ears off gave her a warm feeling she couldn’t quite describe.

  “What’re you guys up to?” she asked as she walked closer.

  “I showed Micah my pumpkin,” Jacob announced. “He likes mine best, he said so.”

  “Well, of course he did,” she agreed. “Yours is terrific.”

  The little boy flashed Micah a wide grin. Micah, on the other hand, looked embarrassed to have been caught being nice. Interesting reaction.

  “It’s okay I came over, right?” Jacob asked, looking a little worried. “Micah was cooking, but he opened the gate for me and stuff.”

  “Sure it’s okay,” Kelly told him.

  “Okay, I gotta go now,” Jacob said suddenly, giving his pumpkin one last pat. “Bye!”

  He bolted through the gate and tore across the backyard toward the house next door.

  Micah watched him go. “That was fast.”

  Kelly laughed a little, then looked over at Micah. “You were cooking?”

  He shrugged. “I was hungry.”

  She glanced at the lavender sky. “Early for dinner.”

  “Or late for lunch,” he said with a shrug. “It’s all about perspective.”

  What did it say about her that she enjoyed the sharp, nearly bitten off words he called a conversation? Kelly wondered if he’d been any easier with Jacob, but somehow she doubted it. The man might be a whiz when typing words and dialogue, but actually speaking in real life appeared to be one of his least favorite things.

  “So, why keep the fence when you told me it doesn’t stop the deer?

  She looked around at the tall, white pickets, then walked toward the still-open gate. Micah followed her. Once through, she latched the gate after them and said, “Makes me feel better to try. Sometimes, I could swear I hear the deer laughing at my pitiful attempts to foil them.”

  He looked toward the woods that ran along the back of the neighborhood and stretched out for at least five miles to the base of the mountains. “I haven’t seen a single deer since I’ve been here.”

  “You have to actually be outside,” she pointed out.

  “Right.” He nodded and tucked his hands into his jeans pockets.

  “There’s a lot of them and they’re sneaky,” Kelly said, shooting a dark look at the forest. “Of course, some of them aren’t. They just walk right into the garden and sneer at you.”

  He laughed and she looked at him, surprised. “Deer can sneer?”

  “They can and do.” She tipped her head to one side to stare at him. “You should laugh more often.”

  He frowned at that and the moment was gone, so Kelly let it go and went back to his first question. “The fence doesn’t even slow them down, really. They just jump right over it.” Shaking her head, she added, “They look like ballet dancers, really. Graceful, you know?”

  “So why bother with the fence?”

  “Because otherwise it’s like I’m saying, It’s okay with me guys. Come on in and eat the vegetables.”

  “So, you’re at war with deer.”

  “Basically, yeah.” She frowned and looked to the woods. “And, so far, they’re winning.”

  “You’ve got orange paint on your cheek.”

  “What? Oh.” She reached up and scrubbed at her face.

  “And white paint on your fingers.”

  Kelly held her hands out to see for herself, then laughed. “Yeah, I just came from a painting job and—”

  “You paint, too?”

  “Oh, just a little. Window decorations and stuff. I’m not an artist or anything, but—”

  “Realtor, painter, website manager...” He just looked at her. “What else?”

  “Oh, a few other things,” she said. “I design gardens, and in the winter I plow driveways. I like variety.”

  His eyes flared at her admission and her stomach jumped in response. Not the kind of variety she’d meant, but now that the thought was in her brain, thank you very much, there were lots of other very interesting thoughts, too. Her skin felt heated and she was grateful for the cold breeze that swept past them.

  Kelly took a deep breath, swallowed hard and said, “I should probably get home and clean up.”

  “How about a glass of wine first?”

  Curious, she looked up at him. “Is that an invitation?”

  “If it is?”

  “Then I accept.”

  “Good.” He nodded. “Come on then. We can eat, too.”

  “A man who cooks and serves wine?” She started for the back door, walking alongside Micah. “You’re a rare man, Micah Hunter.”

  “Yeah,” he murmured. “Rare.”

  Naturally, she was perfectly at home in the Victorian. She’d grown up there, after all. She’d done her homework at the round pedestal table while eating Gran’s cookies fresh out of the oven. She’d learned to cook on the old stove and had helped Gran pick out the shiny, stainless steel French door refrigerator when the last one had finally coughed and died.

  She’d painted the walls a soft gold so that even in winter it would feel warm and cozy in here, and she’d chosen the amber-streaked granite counters to complement the walls. This house was comfort. Love.

  At the farmhouse sink, Kelly looked out the window at the yard, the woods and the deepening sky as she washed her hands, scrubbing every bit of the paint from her skin. Then she splashed water on her face and wiped that away, too. “Did I get it all?”

  He glanced at her and nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Good. I like painting, but I prefer the paint on the windows rather than on me.”

  Kelly got the wine out of the fridge while Micah heated the pasta in the skillet. She took two glasses from a cabinet and poured wine for each of them before sitting at the round oak table watching him.

  What was it, she wondered, about a man cooking that was just so sexy? Sean hadn’t known how to turn the stove on, but Micah seemed confident and comfortable with a spatula in his hand. Which only made her think about what other talents he might have. Oh, boy, it had been a long time since she’d felt this heat swamping her. If Terry knew what Kelly was thinking right this minute, she would send up balloons and throw a small but tasteful party. That thought made her smile. “Smells good.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Pasta’s easy. A few herbs, some garlic, olive oil and cheese and you’re done. Plus, some sliced steak because you’ve gotta have meat.”

  “Agreed,” Kelly said, taking a sip of her wine.

  “Glad to hear you’re not one of those I’ll just have a salad, dressing on the side types.”

  “Hey, nothing wrong with a nice salad.”

  “As long as there’s meat in it,” he said, concentrating on the task at hand.

  “So what made you take up cooking?”

  “Self-preservation. Live alone, you learn how to cook.”

  Whether he knew it or not, that was an opening for questions. She didn’t waste it. “Live alone, huh?”

  One eyebrow lifted as he turned to look at her. “Did you notice anyone else here with me the last couple of months?”

  “No,” she admitted with a smile, “but you do write mysteries. You could have killed your girlfriend.”

  “Could have,” he agreed easily. “Didn’t. The only place I commit crimes is on a computer screen.”

  “Glad to hear it,” she said, smiling. Also glad to hear he could take some teasing and give it back. But on to the real question. “So, no girlfriend or wife?”

  He used the spatula to stir the pasta, then gave her a quick look. “That’s a purely female question.”

  “Well, then, since I am definitely female, that makes sense.” She propped her chin in her hand. “And it was very male of you to answer the question by n
ot answering. Want to give it another try?”

  “No.”

  “No you won’t answer or no is the answer?”

  Reluctantly, it seemed, his mouth curved briefly into a half smile. “I should know better than to get into a battle of words with a woman. Even being a writer, I don’t stand a chance.”

  “Isn’t that the nicest thing to say?” But she stared at him, clearly waiting for his answer. Finally he gave her the one she was looking for.

  He snorted. “No is the answer. No wife. No girlfriend. No interest.”

  “So you’re gay,” she said sagely. Oh, she knew he wasn’t because the two of them had that whole hot-buzz thing going between them. But it was fun to watch his expression.

  “I’m not gay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Reasonably,” he said wryly.

  “Good to know,” she said, and took a sip of wine, hiding her smile behind the rim of her glass. “I’m not, either, just so we’re clear.”

  His gaze bored into hers and flames licked at her insides. “Also good to know.”

  Her throat dried up so she had another sip of wine to ease it. “How long have you been a writer?”

  “A writer or a published writer?” he asked.

  “There’s a difference?”

  He shrugged as he plated the pasta and carried them to the table. Sitting down opposite her, he took a long drink of his wine before speaking again. “I wrote stories for years that no one will ever see.”

  “Intriguing,” she said, and wondered what those old stories would say about Micah Hunter. Would she learn more about the closed-off, secretive man by discovering who he had been years ago?

  “Not very.” He took a bite of pasta, “Anyway, I’ve been published about ten years.”

  “I don’t read your books.”

  One eyebrow lifted and he smirked. “Thanks.”

  She grinned. “That came out wrong. Sorry. I mean, I read one of your books a few years ago and it scared me to death. So I haven’t read another one.”

  “Then, thank you.” He lifted his glass in a kind of salute to her. “Best compliment you could give me. Which book was it?”