All the Way

by Beverly Bird

  She hugged herself. “Yeah. She has. Just let me talk to her first,” she begged, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Don’t put on some great big ‘Dad’ T-shirt and saunter into her room wearing it until I’ve had the chance.”

  Did she honestly think he would do that? “Let me know when the coast is clear.”

  “I won’t have to.”

  He frowned, then he understood. Vicky would let him know.

  “I’m going in now.” She turned away one last time, jerkily.

  “Sweet dreams.”

  “Maybe. In another three months.”

  God, he wanted to hate her, Hunter thought as he watched her walk back to the inn. He wanted to despise the way her hips twitched gently, the way her spine stayed so straight without robbing her of grace. He wanted to hate the dance of that brown-gold-russet hair against her back. He wanted to hate her for what she had done to him eight years ago and what she still would have done now if he hadn’t found a crazy judge to force her hand.

  But he was smiling bemusedly when Liv disappeared inside and Kiki came out carting a box. She crossed to him and dropped it at his feet.

  “I’m going now. Hurt either one of them and I’ll remove pieces of your person with a dull knife.”

  Hunter wisely remained silent. He believed her.

  Thirty minutes later Liv found herself wishing for all her life that Kiki had not gone home.

  She needed courage. She needed strength. She needed to be rational, not all knotted up inside after talking to Hunter in the moonlight. She had to forget what he had once meant to her and concentrate on Vicky. She needed Kiki to whisper all that sense she was so big on in her ear.

  Liv wanted desperately to find the path to being the kind of hero only a mother could be, the kind who would give her soul to the devil for the welfare of her child and do it with grace and aplomb. She wanted to be that woman, but faced with walking down the hall to Vicky’s room and telling her the truth of the past several days nearly dissolved her to helpless, frustrated tears.

  She knotted the belt on her robe, anyway, and stepped out into the third floor hallway. Cocoa, she thought. That would ease the way.

  She spent another ten minutes in the kitchen, eight of them given up to hunting the mix down in Kiki’s cupboards. She nuked the water and put a tray together, carrying it back upstairs. She knocked and pushed the door open with one hip just in time to see Vicky shove a book under the covers.

  “Oops,” Vicky said. “Caught.”

  “Red-handed. But I knew you’d be doing that.” Liv went in and put the tray on Vicky’s desk.

  The little girl pushed her hair back from her forehead. “Then why do you always give me grief about reading after lights-out? Is it a mother thing?”

  “Yup. Eight-year-olds should be in bed by nine o’clock, so I pretend to enforce the rule.”

  Vicky sniffed the air and frowned suspiciously, mother-rules forgotten. “That’s chocolate, isn’t it? What’s with the chocolate?”

  Liv carried the cups over to the bed. She wondered where Hunter was. Had he already moved into the room Kiki had vacated? She couldn’t do this with him under the same roof, distracting her, she thought desperately.

  She had to.

  Vicky peered into her cup. “Is this your version of cocoa, or is it Aunt Kiki’s with the shaved bittersweet?”

  “Dream on.” Liv sat on the edge of the bed.

  To her credit, Vicky laughed and guzzled, anyway. She was that kind of kid. “Something’s up, right?” She licked foam from her lip.

  Liv caught her breath. “Yeah. Big-time.”

  “You’re putting me up for adoption?”

  “I thought about it when you were two, but then I changed my mind.”

  “Good thing. I’m pretty happy here.”

  Liv’s nerves caught together and tangled. It hurt. “Are you?”

  “’Course I am. What’s not to be happy with? I have you and Aunt Kiki and Bourne. Except he’s a grouch most times. I have the horses.”

  “You have strangers trooping through your home.” Liv dragged in breath then spit the words out. “And you haven’t really had a dad.”

  Vicky’s eyes shifted oddly. “That’s okay. Mandy Singapore has one and he’s a worse grouch than Bourne.”

  Please, God, guide me here, Liv thought. “They’re not like that when you don’t live with them all the time,” she said. “I get grouchy sometimes, but if you only saw me once in a while, I’d be on my best behavior when I was with you.”

  “Mom, you do okay.” Vicky downed the last of her cocoa.

  Liv’s next prayer was an old one…for a normal eight-year-old. And, as always, she took it back immediately. She wouldn’t trade this child for the world.

  “Johnny’s not my dad and you want to tell me who is,” Vicky said finally, helpfully. “Right? Is that where you’re going with this?”

  Liv’s jaw dropped open. It was all the adults Vicky had spent her formative years with, she thought. It had to be. Eight-year-olds didn’t talk like this.

  Then Liv spit it out. “He’s upstairs in Aunt Kiki’s room right now.”

  Liv waited for her daughter’s shock. What she saw instead made the air hard to breathe. Vicky wasn’t surprised. She knew this child as intimately as she knew her own skin. She knew her eyes, her gestures, her flippant remarks. She knew the way she breathed. And Vicky wasn’t surprised.

  “Okay, cough it up,” Liv said edgily. “How did you figure it out?”

  “Who says I did?”

  “It’s the way you’ve collapsed on the floor in complete and utter shock.”

  Vicky didn’t giggle. Her gaze shifted again. “I heard you and Aunt Kiki talking about it once. Are you mad?”

  Liv’s heart chugged. She’d thought she’d always been careful. She hadn’t been careful enough. “No. If I hadn’t told you, what were you going to do about it?”

  “I was going to give you to the end of third grade to come to your senses.”

  Liv choked.

  “Then I guess I would have written him a letter or something.”

  “Without my knowledge?”

  “If I had to.” Vicky plucked at a loose thread on her bedspread. “There’s one thing I don’t understand, though.”

  Liv braced herself. “What?”

  “You always said you loved my dad bunches.”

  Something squirmed inside her. “Well, I did. I used to.”

  “Now you don’t like him at all. You said so.”

  “Things change. Grown-ups change.”

  “So you only thought you loved him bunches? Like I thought I liked pickles for maybe a day until I got sick from eating too many of them?”

  Liv’s stomach was starting to hurt. She couldn’t swallow any more chocolate. She got up from the bed to put her cup back on the tray. “Something like that, yes.”

  “So how come you’re letting him stay here?”

  I have to. “He wants to get to know you.”

  “Are you going to fight with him the whole time?”

  “I’m going to try very hard not to.”

  “How long will he stay?”

  “A few months. Maybe. Probably.”

  “That long?”

  “Unless you want him to go.” Then he would have to leave, Liv thought hopefully. He’d have to. Surely the judge would see that. “This is all up to you, Vicky.”

  “Well, how can I know that until I talk to him some?” Vicky asked with the lack of guile of youth.

  Liv went back to the bed to stroke her hair. “You can’t, baby. Of course, you can’t.”

  “Can I go talk to him now?”

  Liv’s heart stuttered. She glanced at the clock. It was twenty past nine. Past bedtime. And if she said no, what would that make her? “If you want.”

  Vicky scrambled out of bed. “Just for a minute.”

  Liv watched her race out of the room. And everything stopped inside her.

  She waited a full
minute to breathe again. When she did, the air in the room seemed thin and elusive. She understood what terrified her most now, and it nearly buckled her. It made her feel small.

  What if Vicky decided she loved Hunter more than her?

  Liv went to stand in the hall. She stared down to the end where the attic stairs were. Vicky had already disappeared up them.

  She knew she was being a fool. But…what if?

  What if—even though she’d been the one to nurse this child and raise her and coddle her and punish her—what if Vicky went for the guy who was only around for the good times? Because Hunter couldn’t be anything else. He would come back into their lives with gifts occasionally and happy laughter. Oh, she knew it, Liv thought desperately. And she, she, would be the one left to mete out discipline and say no.

  “It won’t come to that,” she whispered aloud. But as she turned back to her own room, she knew it could.

  The room was all Kiki, Hunter thought as he shoved jeans into one of the dresser drawers. No matter that she had officially vacated it. The air still stirred from her presence.

  The attic was huge, but it had two sloped dormers that made the ceiling cant on both sides. He had to duck if he moved too much to the left or right of center. The bed—a huge four-poster—took up one end of the room beneath the vaulted V of the ceiling. There was some sort of ballet bar attached to one wall near the stair entrance. The other wall was dotted with windows—thin, narrow things that tried to look out on the barn and the garage and fell just short of succeeding.

  The bedspread was crimson satin. The curtains were more of the same. The carpet was white plush that made him think he’d better take his shoes off for the next three months before he stepped in here or Kiki would have his head. There were easily fifteen throw pillows on the bed and probably a dozen candles scattered about, and Hunter decided he didn’t want to know their particular history.

  There were no other personal touches. It was lush, but somehow simple at the same time. Kiki had always been an odd bird. She hadn’t taken that much out of here. There’d only been that one small box.

  He’d forgotten to ask where the bathroom was, Hunter realized. He scouted the room one more time and found no hidden doorways. Downstairs, then. He would have to share with the guests.

  He was pulling a shirt over his head to do just that when a knock came at his door.

  Liv. What was she up to? Was she going to fight this to the death after all? Hunter went to the door and hated the fact that something inside him quickened at the idea that she would come back to talk to him one more time. She’d left him. She’d destroyed him. He didn’t want to want her again. He flung open the door.

  “What?” he growled.

  There was no one at eye level. Hunter looked down.

  Victoria Rose stood there in a red calico nightgown. He was starting to catch on to the idea that red was her favorite color. Her hair was a black cloud, wild, disheveled. Her small teeth were impossibly white. She crossed her arms over her skinny chest.

  “I know now, so you can stop pretending,” she announced.

  It took Hunter a moment to find his voice. “Did I pretend?”

  “Sort of. It’s like the time my teacher said I cheated on a test, but I didn’t. I gave Mandy my answers a whole day before. So I did but I didn’t.”

  “How’d you know what was going to be on the test?” Hunter found himself asking.

  “It was last year. My teacher was old and not too with-it.” She swept past him into the room. She moved like her mother that way, Hunter thought again, pivoting to watch her—purposefully but with such grace that you hardly realized it. “It was always real easy to figure out what Mrs. Geary was going to ask on the tests, because it was exactly the same as our homework,” she explained.

  Hunter was mesmerized. “I get it.”

  Vicky flopped down to sit on the crimson bed. “So, anyway, now that I officially know and all, you can just act normal.”

  He wondered about this “officially” business. What did that mean?

  He went to sit beside her on the bed, but he kept his distance. He was terrified. She was maybe sixty-five pounds—tops—of precocious wonder. She was messy long hair and dark-blue eyes and she was only eight. But for the first time in his life Hunter was intimidated. Because everything he said now mattered. It mattered more than life itself.

  “You could get grumpy sometimes,” she continued. “Like Mandy Singapore’s dad. Who lives with her. So she sees him at his worst.”

  “You want to see me at my worst?”

  “What I’m saying is, it would be okay.”

  He thought of Liv again. “It might actually happen.”

  “Because, you know, I think if you were nice to me all the time, Mom might get freaked out.” She stood up from the bed again.

  “If I was nice to you, she would?” He was dumbfounded.

  “Like when I thought Mandy had a new best friend, I got sort of bent out of shape. So I’m just saying maybe don’t be too nice to me around Mom. Because she might not let you stay if you do.”

  She wasn’t eight, he thought. She was eighty. How had she become so wise? “I’ll take that into consideration.”

  “Okay, then. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.” She went back to the door.

  Hunter finally got his wits back a little. “Does your mother know you’re here?”

  Vicky looked back at him and nodded. “Yeah, but she looked like she swallowed a goose when I asked if it was okay. So I’m going to go back now and not stress her out anymore.” She swept one last glance around the room. “Night, Sarah.”

  Before he could ask who Sarah was, Vicky was gone. And he couldn’t think about even one more woman tonight because two of them had already tied him in knots.

  Chapter 8

  F or a week, it seemed to Liv that Hunter kept to his side of her many lines.

  She watched Kiki sweep into the kitchen after breakfast on Friday, holding two platters that had been almost completely denuded. It was nine-thirty. Guests—their own as well as tourists from town—were already gathering at the barn for the morning’s trail ride.

  “He even ate the garnish this time,” Kiki muttered.

  Liv stepped closer to scowl at the plates. “Has he used the kitchen at all?”

  “If he has, he’s bringing in his own food and burning the evidence.” Kiki stacked the plates on the counter and went back to the dining room for more.

  Liv followed her. She didn’t care about this. It wasn’t her problem. “He doesn’t cook,” she said, anyway.

  “Neither do you, but I don’t hold it against you.”

  Liv barely heard her. Hunter had once existed on anything that could be eaten straight out of a can, she thought. His mother would rarely cook for him once he’d turned eighteen and began to regularly leave the Res. Later, when he’d visited Liv in Flag, they’d been big on fast food because they’d both been rock-bottom broke. She’d refused to whittle away her trust fund on groceries. Sometimes she’d brought home leftovers from the resort kitchen.

  But he wasn’t broke now.

  “He’s not eating out—at least not often—because he’s almost always here,” she fretted.

  “So starving him out might work yet. Want me to cut down on the breakfast portions?”

  “I’m not trying to starve him out! I just don’t want to cross paths with him any more than I have to.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m going to help Bourne saddle the horses,” Liv decided abruptly. There was no sense in arguing with Kiki once she’d made her mind up about something.

  She went outside. There was a bite to the air. It wasn’t near enough to deter the guests from the trails, but Liv couldn’t get warm.

  She found herself glancing back at the inn repeatedly until she saw Hunter come out the back door and head for the garage. Movie stars, she thought. Pacific Palisades. None of that had changed him. In so many ways he was still the same man. The ne
w polish was only skin-deep.

  He still had that same lean grace to him. She’d noticed it often during the course of the week. The leather jacket he wore was top-of-the-line. His boots, his black jeans and turtleneck, all had the look of money, as well. But his gaze prowled as he moved and there was that sense of volatility about him that had once sent her blood skittering with excitement and anticipation with a single glimpse of him.

  A moment later the black Monte Carlo moved off down the drive. Where was he going? Liv reminded herself that she didn’t care. She and Bourne got the guests mounted and they headed out.

  By the time they got back from the trail ride, Liv knew she really was getting sick this time. Her throat was raw, on fire. Her head throbbed, but not with the same nervous ache that had hounded her for weeks now. This was cranial and deep.

  This time it really was the flu.

  Bourne took one look at her when they had all gathered back at the barn and grabbed her reins from her hand. He was a borderline hypochondriac. “I’ll take things from here. Go inside. I don’t want your germs.”

  Liv held fast to her mare. This was something else she had to fix, she thought, another unpleasantry brought about by Hunter’s arrival. Bourne had been annoyed with her ever since the trail ride when Hunter had first shown up in Jerome.

  “In a minute,” she rasped. “We need to talk first.”

  “Then breathe the other way.”

  Liv pivoted obediently. “Better?”

  “If you say so.”

  She dragged air into her lungs and it burned going down. “He’s Vicky’s father,” she blurted.

  It startled the old man enough that he actually stopped moving and stared at her, right in the eyes, something he rarely did. “Who?”

  “Hunter. Hawk-Cole. The owner of the black Monte Carlo. He turned up on the trail ride that day, remember? He’s Vicky’s father.”

  “Thought Johnny was her daddy.”

  “No.”

  “She know this?” Bourne asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Now or always?”

  “Pretty much always,” Liv said hollowly.

  Bourne thought that over. “She ain’t never said nothing to me about it.”

  “You’re always grumping at her. Especially since the sweet-feed incident.”