“Uh-huh.”
“And we aren’t pretending we are married, just that we’re going to get married. You see?” The little girl nodded uncertainly and Victoria added, “Like when the Prince gave Cinderella the shoe.”
“’Kay.” But John saw the little V of confusion still puckering Esme’s brows and doubted she truly did understand. Visions of the already fragile pretense collapsing around them like a house of cards floated before his mind’s eye. He understood Tori’s point about the consequences if they didn’t tell the kid and she found out from someone else. At the same time, though, he didn’t want to watch the opportunity to do his job and get the hell back to the real world go down the crapper.
His mind began working fast and furiously to figure a way to control the situation. Come on, chief, you know women. Sure, Esme was hardly a woman. But even if she was a tinier person than he was accustomed to dealing with, she was still a female. And the trick with females was to figure out what they wanted and then give it to them. He turned to her.
“You want to play, too?” Ignoring Victoria’s jerk of protest, he watched as the little girl’s big dark eyes lit up and knew he’d latched onto the right approach.
She nodded eagerly.
“You know what would help make people believe our little game of pretend?” Suddenly finding himself the recipient of her complete focus, he had to suppress the urge to shift uncomfortably. But, God, she had a gaze that was amazingly compelling for a kid her age and it took a genuine effort to pull himself back to his agenda. “If you were to drop the mister and just call me John.”
“I can do that!” Plainly taken by the idea, she beamed up at him. “I’ll pretend you’re gonna be my daddy.”
“As long as you remember it is make-believe, Esme,” Victoria said firmly.
John had to suppress a spurt of irritation. But how many times did she intend to sing that refrain? They got it, already!
Even Esme seemed a little less enamored with her mother than usual. “And now I can tell Rebecca that he’s gonna be my daddy.” She stared at Victoria challengingly, then added before her mom could launch into a new chorus, “But not my pretend daddy.”
Tori looked hunted for an instant, but then she expelled a quiet sigh. “Yes, I suppose you can. Right now, though, it’s time for you to go to bed. So say good-night to John and I’ll tuck you in.”
“He can come, too,” Esme said. “’Cause from now on we’re gonna play mummy, daddy and me. You said so.”
John saw his own proclivity for playing all the angles in those five-year-old eyes and it frankly scared the shit out of him. He watched as she hopped off the couch and turned to thrust her soft little hand out at him.
“Come,” she commanded every bit as dictatorially as her mother. “You can read me my good-night book after Mummy tucks me in.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
DARK, HEAVY-BELLIED CLOUDS started rolling in over Denver the following Saturday evening as Jared and P.J. struck out for a place to spend the night. By the time they reached the locked cyclone fence that circled the construction site they’d checked out earlier in the day, the sky had turned an inky, premature black.
“I hope we don’t get lightning,” P.J. muttered as they scrambled up the wire fence. Swinging a leg over the top, she scowled up at the sky. “I hate lightning.”
“You do?” Jared spared her a brief glance as he started descending the other side. “I think there’s something awesome about it, myself.”
“Well, okay, maybe it’s not the lightning I hate so much as the—”
A blue-white bolt suddenly cracked across the sky as if summoned by their conversation, sending forked tongues of pure energy snaking toward the Rockies. P.J. screamed.
“Shhh!” Jared hissed, disgusted by her girly reaction. “Jeez, will you keep it down? If the joint’s got a security guard, we sure as hell don’t want to alert him.”
“Well, excuuuse the bejeebers out of me,” she whispered back fiercely. “But I take it back—I do hate lightning.” Clinging to the fence, she twisted to peer through the darkness at him as he dropped to the ground and turned to look up at her, his hands fisted on his hips. “But not half as much as I hate—”
Thunder boomed and she lost her grip on the fence, tumbling to the ground. Jared leapt to catch her, but he was a second too late. All he could do was extend a hand to haul her to her feet. “You okay?”
“Freaking dandy,” she snarled and jerked her hand free. Breath wheezed in her chest as she struggled to recover the wind that had been knocked out of her. But when he reached out to steady her she summoned enough air to snap, “Get your hands off of me,” and bat aside the limbs under discussion. “Go away!”
“Hey, whatever! Works for me.” He turned on his heel and headed into the interior of the three-quarters-completed building. The land-use sign they’d read earlier said the finished product would be a multiunit condo with retail space on the bottom floor. Jared didn’t give a rip. All that mattered to him was that it provided shelter and that no one else was using it tonight.
Dry shelter, he amended a second later when the skies suddenly opened up. Rain poured down so hard and fast the churned-up earth surrounding the building turned into a quagmire of thick, suck-your-shoes-right-off-your-feet mud. Peering out a hole that would eventually be a window in the exterior wall, his gut clenched. It wasn’t even truly cold yet and still the damp permeating the air and the concrete floors and walls created a chill that went nearly to the bone. What would it be like come fall? Or worse yet, during a full-blown Colorado winter?
P.J. trudged in an instant later, a tiny, indistinct shadow swearing a blue streak that concluded with, “Stupid, sonovabitchin’ night.” Another flash of lightning illuminated the area Jared had chosen for them and, hugging herself, she looked around. Then, her pointed chin thrust ceilingward, she made a production of stalking toward the opposite side of the room from where he’d dropped his pack.
He was hungry, damp and down to his last dollar. He was also so homesick he could die. What he was not, was in the mood to placate a thirteen-year-old’s temper tantrum. “What the hell is your problem?”
“I ain’t got no problem, bub.”
“Aside from your grasp of the English language, you mean? Then why are you acting like you’ve got a big, hairy bug up your butt?”
“I’m not,” she screeched and indignation made her voice sound even raspier than usual. “I already told you—I hate this weather. It sucks.”
“Yeah, it bites,” he agreed, scooping up his backpack and crossing the room to join her. “But look on the bright side. At least we’re dry. And we’ve got this whole place to ourselves. How often have we been able to say that lately?”
Thunder boomed again, although Jared hadn’t seen the lightning that usually preceded it. Feeling P.J. flinch, he slid his arm around her.
She immediately stiffened. “I don’t need babying!”
“Good, because I’m in no mood to do that. Jesus, do you think you could quit acting like Princess Pain-In-The-Ass for five fricking minutes? The temperature must have dropped thirty degrees since we got here. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I’d like a little body heat?”
“Oh,” she said in a little voice and quit straining against his hold. “Okay, then.”
He nearly smiled. God, she was independent. And stubborn as the proverbial mule. It was one of the things he liked best but drove him craziest about her.
They sat quietly in the dark for a while, with nothing but the sound of the pounding rain on the roof three floors overhead to break the silence. It didn’t surprise Jared to discover the heat and feel of P.J. pressed up against his side comforted him. The trickle of sexual awareness that also made itself known did, however, and jerking his arm away he scooted several inches across the floor from her.
He tried not to feel guilty about the thoughts that had flashed across his mind faster than tonight’s lightning. Hell, they probably had more to do with t
he simple fact she was female anyway—not to mention that it was dark and they were squeezed close together. No doubt any girl’s company would have given him the same reaction. Still, it bugged him that he’d gotten a boner over P.J., of all people, because she was sure as shit too young for him to do anything about it. And even if she hadn’t been, even if, despite everything he knew regarding her feelings about sex, she’d been willing and raring to go, she was still skinny, titless, mouthy—and more like his frigging sister than the type of chick he thought of as girlfriend material.
But she was probably a better friend than any other he’d ever had in his life, and when lightning lit up the room again and he caught sight of the tears dribbling silver tracks down her cheeks, he felt as if he’d been kicked in the chest.
“Heyyyy,” he said softly, scootching back closer even as he maintained enough distance to be sure they didn’t quite touch. “How come you’re crying?”
The room was once again hellhole dark, but Jared heard the quick rustle of her movements and didn’t need light to know she was adopting the belligerent, get-outta-my-face pose that seemed to be her standard default posture when anyone dared suggest she might be less than superhuman.
“What are you talking about, crying? Whatever gave you a dumb-ass idea like that?”
Aw, to hell with it. “These.” Closing the gap that separated them, he slid his arm back around her and reached over with his free hand to brush away the steady trickle of tears with his fingertips. “C’mon, Peej. Don’t cry.” It simply made it too damn tempting to give in to the urge to do a little howling of his own.
“Yeah, well, so, big deal, maybe I cried a coupla tears.” She slapped his hand away. “What do you care? You’re just gonna leave me like everyone else has.”
“Say what?” He tried to see her through the dark, but light was a meager commodity that shed less illumination than it seemed to begrudgingly provide the occasional patch of less dense shadow. “Where the hell did that come from?”
“You know.”
“Don’t tell me what I know and don’t know. If I fricking well knew, I wouldn’t be asking.”
“You think I’m stupid because I’m afraid of th-th-thunder.” Her voice caught on the last word, and—no doubt to cover up any sign of weakness—she poked him hard in the side.
“Ow! Stop that.” He caught her finger in his fist. “Being afraid of thunder is stupid. Hell, it’s just noise.” But feeling her shoulders quake with silent sobs, he released her finger and tightened his hold around her. Sissy as he found that particular fear, he still wished he had the power to control the weather so she wouldn’t be scared. The devil knew there was already enough crap in their lives to trip them up and freak them out without throwing weather into the mix.
“Yeah, well, you’re a crummy friend. You just walked away and left me when I fell off the fence!”
“What are you, nuts? You wouldn’t let me help you!” But that was because she’d been embarrassed, he suddenly realized, and his indignation faded.
As if reading his thoughts and interpreting them as pity, she stiffened, drew in a deep breath and knuckled her eyes. “Bull! I let you pull me up, didn’t I? And I let you put your stinking arm around me when you were cold. Not that you weren’t in a big, fat hurry to take it back again. But, hey, big deal. I don’t need to see the writing on the wall to know you’re tired of me and wanna get away. And we both know I’m talking about farther than moving a couple of feet away in this dump!”
“Both know, hell—I don’t know dick about what you’re talking about. God, you babble!”
“I do not babble, you stupid, preppy, sonovabi—”
“Then don’t be such an idiot. I moved away because I got hot, uh, warmed up, that is overheated for a minute.” He didn’t even want to have to explain that instant of lunacy if she hadn’t already figured it out for herself, so he ordered gruffly, “Look, don’t cry, okay? I don’t plan on going anywhere without you. Jesus, Peej, you’re the only thing that’s kept me sane since I hit this crappy town.”
Her head tilted against his chest and even through the dark Jared could feel her gaze. “Yeah?” she said in an insecure little voice.
“Oh, yeah. Absolutely.” He gave her a squeeze and felt more relief than the moment seemed to warrant when she returned a tiny squeeze of her own. Then he felt her rub her face against his chest. “Aw, man! Don’t be wiping your snot on my shirt!”
A watery giggle escaped her. “Sorry. I don’t have a Kleenex.”
“I’ve got that roll of toilet paper I lifted from Wolfgang Puck’s in my pack.” He pulled the backpack to him and rummaged one-handed through it until he found the tissue. “Here.”
She sat up and unwound several squares, tore them off, then handed the roll back to him, blowing her nose while he put the roll back into the bag. When he turned back to his place against the wall, she immediately reclaimed her position curled up against him. He slipped his arm around her again and tried to ignore the growling of his stomach. “So, what do you want to do tomorrow?”
“What is it, Sunday?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Stand Up for Kids will be at Skyline. We can get something to eat from them.”
The thought of food made saliva pool in his mouth. “That’s in the afternoon, right?”
“Uh-huh.” She yawned. “Maybe we can get a new tube of toothpaste from them, too.”
“That would be nice. Except…” He hesitated, then asked, “How are you set for funds?”
His fear that he already knew the answer was justified when she replied, “Pretty much tapped out.”
“Crap. Me, too.” He blew out a breath. “Well, what the hell. At least we’re dry. And we’ve got the rest of the night to figure a way to scrape together enough change to eat in the morning.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A JAZZ QUARTET PLAYED softly at the end of the hotel ballroom where John and Victoria stood, but the woman draped in diamonds had no problem making herself heard as she leaned forward to peer at Victoria’s naked hand. “Why aren’t you wearing an engagement ring, dear?”
As soon as he realized Victoria’s response wasn’t likely to progress beyond a blank stare, John slipped his arm around her waist. “She didn’t want one, ma’am,” he said. “We plan on going the wedding band route.” He stroked his thumb up and down Victoria’s side as he flashed the woman his most charming, just-between-you-and-me smile. “Tori wants simple, but me, I’d like to see her in something with a lot of flash—something that any idiot can see from a football field away means she’s taken. I’m trying to talk her into one of those three-diamond numbers.”
The woman stared at him in fascination and for all that John was accustomed to getting what he wanted by charming the pants off women, her intense interest gave him an actual moment of discomfort.
Then she blinked. “An excellent choice.” Pulling her gaze away from him, she leveled a look at Victoria. “You’d be wise to listen to him, dear. One can never go wrong with diamonds.” With a final speculative glance at John, she excused herself and set off after a passing waiter circulating through the crowd with champagne.
Silence fell between John and Victoria, filled only by the music and lighthearted chatter of the guests gathered to celebrate their engagement. Pasting on a smile, he tipped up Tori’s chin with a gentle fingertip and gazed into her eyes. He was conscious of appearing the besotted groom-to-be to the casual observer, but his voice was anything but smitten when he murmured, “You’re going to have to do a whole lot better than this if you expect anyone to actually believe we’re getting married.”
To his surprise, she nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. She caught me off guard, and I’m not much of an improviser, I’m afraid.” A garbled laugh escaped her. “Oh, hell, who am I fooling? I’m not any kind of actor at all—let alone a natural like you and Esme.”
His smile grew genuine at the thought of his daughter. God, that kid. Spending time with her this pas
t week had been a lot like recon missions used to be back in his Corps days—the rush of adrenaline, the didn’t-make-a-lick-of-sense combination of terror and happiness at thrusting himself in the face of danger. Each time he’d walked away from one of his sessions with her, he’d been so jazzed he’d barely known up from down. And if that wasn’t uncharacteristic he didn’t know what was. Once or twice he’d even questioned all his reservations about trying to be a real dad. But who knew? Where was it written that he’d turn out to be a chip off the old block? Hell, maybe he wouldn’t be the complete bust at parenting he’d always assumed he’d be. Esme seemed to enjoy his company well enough.
Of course that could be nothing more than like calling to like. Because he was discovering that his daughter was similar to him in a lot of ways. And it did something to him that he couldn’t deny. Every time he spied one of his own qualities in the little girl—even those not-so-brag-worthy ones like his flair for the clandestine or his way of manipulating a situation for his own benefit—it elicited just one more thrills-n-chills mix of panic and pride. Right this moment, though, all he could feel was the pride and he grinned at Victoria. “She’s something, isn’t she?”
A return smile curved her lips and the tense set of her shoulders relaxed. “Yes, she is. I’m glad you’ve been spending some time with her.”
“So am I. She’s a pistol. It’s hard to believe the kid’s only five, because she’s sure as hell an operator.” He laughed. “I wonder if she’d be interested in a career in the Marines? Or, hey, I could always use her at Semper Fi. If I start her off now, in fact, she’ll probably be running the joint by the time she turns ten.”
Victoria threw back her head and laughed, and it was a deep, infectious, genuine belly laugh that struck John like a karate chop to the solar plexus. He stilled, staring down at her.
This was the second time tonight she’d managed to knock the breath right out of his chest. The first had been when he’d seen her sweep down the open staircase of the Hamilton mansion before the party began. Her hair was swept up in one of those styles that seemed to challenge the laws of physics. The whole heavy mass appeared mere seconds away from tumbling down around her shoulders, yet somehow it defied gravity and stayed in place. She looked both classy and sexy in the floor-length bronze gown that skimmed her figure and bared her smooth shoulders and creamy cleavage.
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