“Really? Cool!” Her voice had flashed mercurially to bright, chipper, funny.
He scanned the crowd, but didn’t see the kids. Eyeing her carefully, he could see the edge of the tease and tried to figure it out, but couldn’t.
“Okay, what am I missing?”
“You actually like me enough for me to make you totally insane. That’s cool.”
“Wicked!” he corrected her. And yep! She had him pegged for sure.
Jaspar spotted them. Dad and Ms. Williams sat at a small table with four chairs at one end of the dog obstacle course.
Ms. Williams who Tam kept calling Perrin like they were best friends. Fine, if they didn’t want him around, that was just fine.
Though Tam had been cool as they’d gone to visit the dogs. And she’d said she was sorry that the boy in Captains Courageous hadn’t at least been captured by pirates rather than fishermen, so maybe she was still okay.
But now Dad sat holding hands with the costume lady. That didn’t feel right.
“Hey Tam?”
“What?” She was all involved in the dogs racing around the track.
He tipped his head toward the distant table and the grownups. Then he pretended he was more interested in the collie dogs that were coming into the ring so that it wouldn’t be like they were both spying if they got caught.
“Bet they’ve kissed.”
His sister was quiet so long that he turned away for a second to look at her. Her shrug said enough for a clear yes.
“Is she trying to marry Dad?”
Again the shrug, different meaning this time. This time Tam didn’t know. He turned his attention back to the dogs.
Stuff was changing again and he didn’t like this change one bit.
“Do you think we should be worried about the kids yet?” Bill looked at her nervously. He’d been doing his best not to fuss.
Over Bill’s shoulder Perrin spotted the kids down at the other end of the ring. Tamara noticed her attention almost immediately, which told her that the girl had been keeping a close eye on Perrin and her dad for some time. Tamara said something to Jaspar, then grabbed her brother, held rapt watching the dogs, and began towing him by the shoulder in their direction.
“Oh,” she turned her attention back to Bill. “I can make them appear if you want.”
“How?” He narrowed his gaze at her.
“Easy. They’re growing kids.” The kids had made it about halfway through the crowds. “Ready?”
“Sure. Do your worst, lady.”
Perrin closed her eyes and waved her hands over the empty table as if consulting a crystal ball. “Gee, I wonder if anyone’s hungry?”
“We are!” the kids shouted from inches behind Bill who practically levitated out of his chair he was so shocked.
He stuck his tongue out at her as he hugged his kids.
“You all go find us lunch. I’ll hold the table. I eat anything.”
Bill led them away and she sat there.
She felt odd, as if she both was and wasn’t Perrin Williams. If she was, it wasn’t a version of herself that she recognized.
She knew the driven designer, consumed by the need to create beauty and joy with each of her dresses.
She knew the “cheery loon” who kept both her friends and newly-met strangers on their toes. The one who could never seem to let a straight line lie on the ground untended, unquirked. The one who kept everyone at a safe distance, even those closest to her.
And the woman who drove men away before they could even begin to get close—her she understood less, but knew well. So often Perrin had wondered if that woman was afraid that she’d be tested and found wanting, or was she just plain afraid?
And she remembered the girl, remembered her far too well. The one who took years to learn that waking in terror was not normal. The one who didn’t understand for years more that she was the only one who prayed each night to wake up in the morning and learn that she’d been orphaned while she slept.
These were all at least familiar.
The one she didn’t know at all sat here ever so quietly. A hundred dogs running about her. And a man who had offered her a glimpse of another world, an impossible fantasy somehow come to life. This new Perrin scared her to death. Because she dared to want.
She could feel her heart start racing until it was in rhythm with the rushing dogs.
Look at you playing Happy Family games.
She couldn’t think.
Who do you think you’re kidding, you loser!
Couldn’t breathe.
Run!
She had to run!
She couldn’t stand!
Clawing at the table, she managed to gain her feet. A chair crashed to the floor somewhere behind her. An English Setter glanced her direction and missed a gate.
She turned to push free of the crowd too close around her.
She ran blindly into a man who wrapped his arms around her.
She fought, struggled, would have clawed if she could but the arms tightened around her until she couldn’t move.
“Whoa! Perrin. Perrin!”
The nightmare never knew her name. Not that name. It knew a different one, a name she hadn’t used in twelve years. Perrin was her safe name.
Safe name. Safe.
“Perrin!”
She knew that voice. She followed the voice back. Back until she found the face that…
“Oh Bill, I’m so sorry.” She covered her mouth and searched for the kids.
They were only now returning, heavily laden with trays of food.
She turned away, so they couldn’t see her face. “Give me a minute. Just a minute.”
He held her just a moment, an infinitely reassuring moment, then kissed her on the forehead and released her.
“Okay, land it there, kids.”
She heard a chair scraped upright. A dog bark. The slow return of normalcy about her.
It had been years since she’d lost it like that. Years since she’d lost her firm grip of control. She stepped farther away, hoping to find and leash a few more pieces of herself. Even Jo had never seen that part of her. Only Cassidy. Only her.
“A kiss on her forehead doesn’t count as number four, Dad,” Tamara teased somewhere behind her.
“Number four what?” Jaspar sounded grumpy.
“So dense,” Tamara complained to her dad.
Jaspar made a raspberry sound.
She could feel them waiting for her to join them. A nice, normal family. They had no wife or mother, but were a good, solid family nonetheless.
And they’d all begun to cast her for the missing role… her! Perrin Williams! How could they be so wrong? She closed her eyes. Perhaps if she couldn’t see them. She focused on the excited panting of the dogs in the nearby ring and the hum of the crowd’s conversation. Perhaps if she couldn’t hear them. Perhaps then she could walk away.
But she could hear them. And when she managed to turn, she could see them; involved in some game for which the prize was someone else’s French fry. Thankfully, Bill had seated the kids with their backs to her.
Ten steps. Ten lousy steps and she could rejoin them.
Or she could turn and run.
She looked over her shoulder toward the entrance, the chaotic Seattle weather had now allowed sunshine to light the wet street beyond the glass entry doors, making it glisten. The distant view of daylight painfully bright and real compared to the industrial lighting inside the hall.
Perrin turned back and took the ten steps to the table. They were hard. Maybe the hardest thing she’d ever done. She had to count each one under her breath to make them real, to prove to herself that she was making progress.
But she made it.
She’d soon lost half her French fries to Jaspar, clearly the table’s master of the game she didn’t bother trying to understand. He may have been targeting her specifically, but that didn’t seem likely. Bill ended the game at that point anyway. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t
sure if she could eat much.
Bill’s knee pressed hard against Perrin’s own as he teased Tamara about her third career choice of the week: opera singer, fashion designer, dog trainer.
Bill’s knee. It was all that anchored her in place. But it was enough.
Bill felt her pressing her knee so hard against his. What had just happened? The woman beside him made the lost waif look rational.
“You gotta see them!” His son started towing Bill out of his chair and pointing toward the grooming stations at the back of the dog show.
Once he was on his feet and the table was cleared, Tamara had started leading them. But she drifted back to coax Perrin out of her chair when she didn’t follow right away.
Perrin had scared the daylights out of him. The stark terror on her face exceeded anything in the awful movies his kids sometimes made him watch, even the ones he wouldn’t let them watch. He’d certainly never seen anything like it in real life. For a moment Perrin had been gone and the woman in her place had been terrified for her very life.
Somehow, she’d reached deep and pulled it together. He’d watched her fight some titanic battle while he’d distracted the kids. It had almost killed him to not go to her as she stood so alone in the aisle, facing whatever demons had sent her crashing into him. But he couldn’t.
She was also right, they were going to have a talk, and real soon. If there was something he needed to know to protect his kids, she’d have to explain it, shields or no shields. Or else they were through.
A glance back showed that Tammy had slipped a hand around Perrin’s forearm, for Perrin’s hands were plunged deep in her pockets. She’d looked like a ghost of herself. She was slowly recovering, but he could see the brittle layer, the near transparent façade holding her together.
He almost called Tammy away, maybe Perrin had been right about not bonding with the kids.
But he couldn’t do it to her. She looked so frail, and that wasn’t the woman he knew. That wasn’t the woman who had brought his daughter back to him so effortlessly, and had designed those magnificent costumes.
He’d wait and see. He just hoped he wouldn’t be left with some huge disaster to clean up.
“Here they are,” Jaspar practically squealed.
In moments both kids were down on their knees. A beleaguered Cairn terrier looked up that them as eight little puppies walked all over her.
“Aren’t they just so cute?” Tammy scooped one up carefully to show him the little brindle-coated pup.
Bill glanced at the owner, a big man relaxing comfortably in a small folding chair, he offered a friendly nod. “Your young ‘uns know the way of it.” His accent Kentucky or Tennessee, but with an overlay of watching too many episodes of Game of Thrones.
“Be ready to adopt in another month. The sire is over to yonder giving his all for Best in Show. Won’t get it, but we won’t be tellin’ him.” The man winked to show he was just glad to be here.
Perrin drifted up to Bill. She tentatively reached out and touched him lightly on the hand, asking permission. He wrapped his fingers around hers and she clamped down hard, proving that all of the sewing had made her a very strong woman indeed.
Not releasing his hand, she again glanced for permission, far more tentative than she’d been even half an hour before, then knelt behind the children. For a moment he feared that the life had gone out of her, as if that wild spark of life and fire were gone.
“Your dad swore that we’d never convince him to get a dog,” her voice was close to normal. “Not even if we all ganged up on him. What do you think, should we try?”
Okay. So, the spark wasn’t gone. She’d simply been asking if she’d tanked permanently. Not yet. His antenna were now out, but she was still okay.
He squeezed her hand briefly to let her know they were still okay.
“But no dog,” he told the three of them.
He hoped she’d ease up on her grip soon, before his fingers went completely numb.
It took a while to extract the kids, but Bill had made it out with his fingers intact, and no dog. But it had been a close thing on both counts.
In the sunny afternoon, they’d walked along the waterfront, doing all of the touristy things together. They rode the Seattle Great Wheel, the hundred-and-seventy-five foot Ferris wheel standing at the end of one of the piers, their gondola practically scraping against the low scudding clouds at the top of the trip. They poked into Ye Olde Curiosity Shop and made faces at the shrunken head and explored one of the most amazing kitsch collections he’d ever seen.
Jaspar had departed Pirate’s Plunder with an eye patch that he could see through, but looked opaque from outside. Tammy found a head scarf that made her look mature and, in pulling back her hair, exposed a younger version of Adira’s beautiful neck.
“That green color looks great on you, kid.”
Tammy had offered one of her enigmatic smiles.
“Makes you beautiful like your mom.”
That earned him the melty-happy expression he’d been hoping for.
It was only as they wandered into the Seattle Aquarium that he noticed Perrin wore an identical scarf.
“You like it? Tamara insisted we had to match.”
“What color is your hair? Really?” The scarf did look good on her, mixing the blond and the black into a soft cascade onto her back. He fooled with it a bit, relishing the softness.
“The white-blond is about as close as I’ve ever let it get. It was originally a gold-blond, but I left that behind long before I was eighteen. First goth black, then just any color that goes with my latest clothing design.”
He’d like to see that original color some day. See it grown out, all golden-blond. Maybe in that gold dress he’d seen the first day. But it wasn’t his place to tell her how she should look. And he liked the nutty style, it made her uniquely Perrin. But he’d wager that the true blond would be stunning. There must be something behind that eighteen line, all her stories stayed on this side of that line.
And that led him back to his earlier dark thoughts. Who was she, under the woman that she wore like a fine set of clothes? Who was the terrified creature he had glimpsed so briefly? The one who’d thought that he’d… He shoved the thought aside in disgust.
He knew he was falling in love with the first woman. He’d been in love with Adira, knew what that felt like even if they were so different. Adira his quiet anchor and Perrin who made him feel more alive than he ever had other than the first time he’d held his children. It was a shock, but he could recognize it in himself.
The second woman worried him. Worried him badly.
Chapter 10
“Jerimy!” Perrin raced into the Costume Shop and spotted him by a rack of Turandot costumes. He was boxing them for storage, they must be freshly cleaned.
“Perrin!” He shouted back and met her halfway. He gave her a strong and totally unjudgmental hug. She needed that right now. All Sunday and Monday she’d been so worried, fretting at the problem like a sore tooth.
Bill hadn’t changed how he treated her despite her panic attack at the dog show, but she’d felt different around him. Having revealed that awful fear inside her, she didn’t know how to go back to showing him only the carefree and happy woman she’d worked so hard to stitch together over the years.
Jerimy didn’t know any of that and she could just be her old, familiar self with him. He squeezed her hard enough that she had to gasp and giggle. She kissed him on each cheek before they let each other go.
“Do you knit? I need a bunch of knitters. Wait until you see. Where’s my portfolio?”
“The one in your hand, beautiful?” he teased.
“Well, no, but it will have to do,” she teased back and tossed it down on the table. Then she opened it and pulled out the final four drawings. She set them in a row and stepped back. These had come from somewhere deep. They were actually some of the best drawings she’d ever made, the women on the page practically breathed.
 
; Jerimy didn’t gasp, he didn’t marvel, he didn’t exclaim. He did something far more respectful, he went very still and silent.
When she couldn’t stand it anymore, she moved in to point at the yarn samples she’d taped along the side.
“They’re all hard jewel tones, but all in soft knit. Even the cables in their cloaks have a softness.”
“They’re pure light,” Bill said from close beside her.
Perrin actually cried out a little to find he’d come up so silently that she hadn’t noticed.
They were, pure light. “That’s the point. They are not tragic themselves, but are nonetheless caught in the Prince’s tragedy. It makes them so much more sympathetic.”
“I know these three women in real life. Who’s the fourth one?” he pointed at the Queen Mother.
“What are you talking about?” She turned back to inspect the drawings more closely.
Bill leaned forward, extending an arm between her and Jerimy to tap each drawing in turn. So close she could feel him, smell him. Her head whirled at the wonder of him.
“You, Perrin, in two roles, Empress,” he pointed to the drawing Jerimy had tacked on a corkboard on the wall, “and the True Love. Jo Thompson is the Princess and Cassidy Knowles her Maid-servant Confidant. I’d have expected that to be the other way around, but what do I know.”
Perrin looked at the drawings in surprise, he was absolutely right. Without realizing, she’d used the three of them as models rather than the opera singers she’d met at the rehearsals. Of course, Jo would be the Princess, for she was honor and truth incarnate as well as being typically ever-so reserved. Cassidy’s passion was a little closer to the surface though still reserved. She was the deep, quiet bond that strung them together. Bill Cullen wouldn’t know that yet about either of her friends.
“Who’s the fourth one?”
Perrin looked at the Queen Mother, the quiet bedrock of the world.
“Mama Maria. You’ll meet her tonight.”
All he offered to that was a soft grunt. He knew her mother was a part of a past she wouldn’t talk about. He thought it was a choice, but it wasn’t. She couldn’t talk about it; not and retain her control, perhaps not even her sanity. But nor could Perrin explain Mama Maria in just a sentence or two.
The Complete Where Dreams Page 73