And the child had already been dead.
“You all right?” he asked.
She started playing with her owl pendant. “Just worried.”
“We don’t have time to worry. We need a game plan.”
“Game plan?” What did she know about games? Except that playing games meant you were either opponents or … “Does a game plan make us a team?”
“Let’s not push it.” He gave her a sideways smile that nearly stopped her heart. Their eyes held for a moment, and she hoped he couldn’t see what she was thinking. He shifted his gaze ahead. “We’ll stop along the way and distribute posters.”
He turned on the CD player, and classic rhythm and blues poured out of the speakers. He started to quietly sing along with a song about lonely teardrops. She hadn’t figured him for anything as soulful as R&B.
“I can’t believe that you believe in Lena’s vision,” she said.
“A person’s allowed to change their mind, aren’t they?”
“I suppose. I’d like to believe that. But no matter what happens, you can’t ridicule either her or me.”
“I promised, didn’t I?”
“Yeah,” she said, sitting back with a sigh. “But men break their promises.”
“Did Ross break a promise?” He looked a little surprised, as though he hadn’t intended to ask that.
“You talked about me, didn’t you? That day at your office. And they say women gossip!”
“We didn’t gossip. He regrets letting you go.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. His high-society wife is making all the right connections for him, taking him to all the right parties — not that I keep up with that kind of thing. I’ll bet he just misses the heck out of me.” Seeing Dylan’s smile, she asked, “Did he say that?”
“Do you want him to miss you?”
She wiggled to get comfortable in the seat. “I don’t care. Okay, it’d be nice if he did. It would be even better if he called her by my name once in a while, particularly during those crucial moments.” She gave him an impish grin, but it faded. “Nobody misses me. They wipe their hands over their foreheads and say, ‘Whew!’”
He grew quiet for a moment. “Still love him?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t think it was love anyway. More like intense infatuation. At the time … well, I admit to glancing at bridal magazines. I know the difference now.”
“Do you?”
The way he looked at her … Chloe felt her insides implode. “Oh, yeah.” She cleared her throat, embarrassed by the strangled sound in her voice. “What do I know about love anyway?” All she knew was that what she’d felt for Ross was nothing like the way Dylan made her feel. “I’m over him.”
“Ah, so you want him pining away for you, convinced he made the wrong choice?”
“Exactly.” She gave him a grin. “Hey, he’s the one who broke my heart. Figuratively speaking,” she added, though she’d said too much anyway.
“Men are jerks,” he said.
“Really? Aren’t you betraying the fraternity?”
“I’m not part of any fraternity.”
“Oh, come on. You’re part of that crowd. Are you including yourself in that jerk comment?”
“Definitely.”
“Why do you say that?” She liked his profile, strong nose, nice chin. The beginning of a five o’clock shadow. She had an almost irresistible urge to reach out and run her finger along his jawline. To touch him, to connect. Fortunately she held herself back.
“Because I worked too much, put my firm ahead of everything in my life. My priorities were messed up.”
“You say that in the past tense. Does that mean you’re ready to change your ways?”
“It’s going to be Teddy first, then my business, if that’s what you mean.”
“That all?”
“What else?”
“Oh, a small thing like a wife like a mother for Teddy.”
“No wife. I’ve had enough grief. And so has Teddy.” His somber expression gave way to a sideways grin. “Applying for the job?”
“Heck, no. I don’t belong in your life. Think what the press would say.”
“I didn’t mean it the way it came out.”
“Sure you did. Don’t worry, I have no white lace fantasies where you’re concerned.” Black lace, maybe. “You’re way out of my league. I want —”
“I know, a poet.”
“A romantic poet. You strike me as being romantic as pea soup.”
He laughed at that, and for the first time she saw what a beautiful smile he had. “I’d be insulted if it weren’t true. I didn’t have much of an example to follow. Unless butcher knives are considered somehow passionate.”
“Er, no.” She pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them. “You don’t talk much about Wanda. Did you love her? I mean, you must have at one time.”
He focused on the road again, his expression sobering. “I’m sure I was in love with her once. I married her for the wrong reasons. I wanted someone in my life. Mistake number one. I thought I needed a wife. You know, to complete the picture. Mistake number two. And she presented herself as the perfect wife for a man who wanted to be a professional and move up in society. So I married her.”
“Mistake number three,” Chloe added before he could.
“Right. We moved apart after Teddy was born. Neither one of us did anything to repair the gap. My heavy work schedule didn’t help.”
He didn’t need anyone now. That’s what he was saying. “I don’t need anyone in my life either,” she said.
“That so?” He gave her a skeptical look.
“Very so. Way so. Who has time for romance, dating … bridal magazines? I have my own business, friends who care about me. I have my family, my cat and dog, and my pottery, for what that’s worth. What more could I need?” The thought of her frog prince betrayed that conviction. Forget the frog.
“If you say so,” he said.
“I do.”
Those two words hung in the silence, echoing in her head until they became part of a bridal fantasy with her desperately uttering those words. To her horror, she heard herself answer, “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t!” to the imaginary Chloe saying, “I do! I do! I do!”
“What?”
“Fourteen thousand ninety-two.”
“Okay.” He gave her a smile. “Won’t you have to move if you get married? Isn’t it against some kind of law for a man to live in Lilithdale?”
“Maybe the laws of nature. There’s no law that says you have to be — or think you are — psychic or extraordinary to live there either. If you’re not different, you wouldn’t want to live there. If I hadn’t been raised there, I wouldn’t live there.”
“Because you’re the only left-brained one in the bunch, but they love you anyway.”
She smiled. “Yeah, they do.” She caught him watching her and wiped the marshmallow look off her face. “And it’s not because I’m tender.”
“I know, I know. Or cute.”
“Right.”
He shook his head. “It’s just too bad that you’re both.”
CHAPTER 14
Despite Dylan’s earlier words, he and Chloe became a team, leaving fliers at every store on the way. It was well into the night when they stopped at a pizza joint for dinner.
They ate buttery rolls covered with garlic as they waited for their pizza. He watched her lick the butter from between her fingers and wished the woman didn’t have such a hold on his libido. She was cute, and she was tender, neither of which he wanted in a woman. Because he didn’t want a woman at all, he reminded himself. Yet, she tantalized and bewitched him. He liked the way the corners of her mouth turned up, as though she knew a secret no one else knew. A good secret. And though her hair was cropped short, the strands still looked so silky, he wanted to run his fingers through them.
“Oh, the heck with fat grams,” she muttered, grabbing another roll.
“Tell me about your
father,” he asked, hoping to steer his mind away from licking that buttery mouth of hers.
“Only if you tell me about yours.”
“I don’t have anything else to say about mine.”
“Then neither do I.” She nibbled around the edge of her third roll. “He was a truck driver. Produce. He drove fruit and vegetables all over the state of Florida. Sometimes he’d drop off a case of oranges or beans, but he never stayed long.” She kept licking the butter off her roll as she talked, running the tip of her tongue along the edge, totally oblivious to the erotic effect it had on him. Dylan lined up the bottles and jars on the table.
“He always said he loved me, but he never hugged me. Don’t you hug someone if you love them? Oh, you probably don’t hug either. Except for in the hospital, and I had to ask you, and you hated it.”
She paused, as though remembering. He remembered that hug too, how he hadn’t wanted to let her go. Had the craziness started then? “I didn’t hate it.”
“You didn’t?”
“Go on with your story.”
“Anyway, after my mom died — after she killed herself — my aunts moved me down here, and I hardly ever saw him. Sometimes he’d call, or send a card for my birthday, but that was all. Not even a green bean. He probably didn’t want to be associated with the weird women of Lilithdale either.”
She said it all so casually, but he could see the pain in her blue eyes. There wasn’t much she could hide with expressive eyes like that. Dreamy eyes.
When the pizza came, Chloe wrestled one of the cheesy pieces from the pie. He sat back and watched her for a few minutes. She rolled her slice from the tip upward until it resembled a long roll, then started eating it from the end. Pepperoni grease and tomato sauce oozed out the back end and dripped down her pinky finger. She stopped mid-chew when she realized he was watching her.
“Do you miss your father?” he asked before she could ask why he was watching her. He wasn’t quite sure why, or why he was enjoying it so much.
She swallowed her bite. “Yeah. But there isn’t anything I can do about it. I don’t even know where he is anymore. Not like you. Your father is here, and he wants to make peace. I wish my father would do that.”
“Would you forgive him for deserting you?”
“I thought I was too mad at him, but now I know … yes, I would. Think about this, Dylan. What if your father died before you had a chance to make things right?”
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
She blinked in surprise, then took another bite. “Theoretically. I mean, we’re all dying if it comes to that.” She looked at his untouched pizza. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
“I haven’t been hungry lately. Too much on my mind.”
“You have to eat. You’ve got to keep yourself healthy for Teddy.”
They both looked down at the pizza and laughed.
“Pizza’s healthy,” she said. “All four of the food groups are represented. Bread, vegetables, dairy and protein. If pepperoni has protein, that is. Now eat.”
“Bossy, aren’t you?”
“I can be. Someone’s got to take care of you.”
Her voice had gone soft at those words, and the tenderness in her eyes snagged his heart. For a moment he forgot that he took care of himself. For a moment he wanted her to take care of him and soothe his aches and pains. Just as he understood how a man would be drawn to take care of Chloe, he also knew how magical it would be to let her take care of him. She hadn’t moved as their gazes locked together, and he realized he hadn’t moved either. If he didn’t do something, he was going to lean across the table and kiss her. Or worse, the crazy words flying through his mind would burst out of his mouth. How beautiful she was, how lonely he’d been and hadn’t even realized it, how much he needed a woman like Chloe to bring him back to life.
So he did what he had to do. He stuffed a piece of pizza in his mouth.
Before they left, Chloe told the man working behind the counter about Teddy and asked if they could hang up a poster. He nodded toward a bulletin board at the end of the restroom hallway.
Dylan watched her take the poster to the crowded board and look for someplace to put it. He saw her body stiffen, and before he knew what he was doing, he’d joined her.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She nodded toward another poster that was half-covered with bulletins about a diving trip and a john boat for sale. A boy’s face peered out from between them, and above his picture the words: “Missing! Stranger abduction.” He’d been missing for three months.
She shivered, and he instinctively put his hands on her shoulders. She started to lean back against him, caught herself, and pulled back. Dylan walked to the end of the hall and asked the man if the boy had been found yet.
“Not that I’ve heard.”
“Then why is his poster buried under this other garbage?”
The grizzled guy shrugged. “What do I look like, the bulletin board police? It’s not my problem.”
Every muscle in Dylan’s body tensed. “A missing child is everyone’s problem. Our society is responsible for raising the perverts who take them; it’s our responsibility to make sure they don’t hurt anyone’s kid.”
“Dylan,” Chloe said softly from behind him, tugging his arm. “Let’s get going.”
He walked back to the cluttered board. That poster could be Teddy’s, that’s all he could think about, that in one, two, three months, his son’s poster would be buried beneath a poster of … he ripped down a sheet of paper … a trailer park’s rummage sale!
“It’s only news right after they disappear,” he said, tearing down the johnboat sign. “Or if there’s some juicy story surrounding it.” He ripped down another paper, then another, anger roaring through him. His face felt as though it were on fire. “A missing child should never fade into the background. It’s not right.”
A woman walked out of the restroom and stared at him with wide eyes before scooting down the hall. He kept tearing everything off the board until only the boy named Mac smiled at him from the corkboard. Then he added his own poster.
“Mister, you’d better leave,” the grizzly guy said from a safe distance.
“Dylan, we should go,” Chloe said, touching his arm.
He shook off her touch and stared at the board. That’s how it should look, both boys center stage until they were found. Only then could he turn and leave. The man moved behind the counter as they passed.
“You’re lucky that guy didn’t call the police,” she said the second they stepped out into the warm evening air.
He ran his fingers through his hair, realizing he was still shaking from anger. He’d lost control. He’d gone crazy for a few minutes. The reflection in his car window revealed not the together professional but a desperate man. He watched Chloe start to touch his arm, but she pulled back before making contact.
“Anger isn’t the way to express your emotions,” she said.
He met her gaze in the reflection. “What do you want from me, Chloe? Do you want me to break down and cry? Would that be more appropriate?”
She took a deep breath, taking in his face. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. But anger is never the right way to handle anything. Or doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“What you always do, mask your feelings. Your face closes up. You close yourself in and everybody else out. That’s why you exploded back there. You’ve been holding it all in, trying to be Mister Strong and Tough. Why can’t you accept that you’re not strong and tough all the time? That you need to reach out and share with someone?” He heard a strange thickness in her voice when she said, “Why can’t you reach out to me?”
Her pained expression in the window nearly broke him down, but he held firm. “Because one day I’ll reach out and you won’t be there.”
“I’m not your father.”
He almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of that statement. But he held it in the way he held everyt
hing in. Or almost everything. “No, you’re not.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “You know what I mean! I’m not going to let you down. I’m not your former wife either, hiding herself to please you. This is me, what you see is what you get. I may look … tender, but I’m not. I’m tough and I’m strong and I’m here. You saved my life; let me give you something back.”
Those last words made him look at her. He wanted to reach out to her, or at least some crazy part of him did. Which is why he absolutely couldn’t.
How shallow his marriage to Wanda had been, he realized. They’d never shared these kinds of moments. She never challenged him, or made him think, or made him need. Chloe made him look deeper. In these last five days, there were too many feelings to pad himself against. Chloe was sneaking under those layers, and he didn’t like it. Those layers had kept him sane for a long time. It was going to take all of them to stay that way.
“You’re doing it again,” she said, pulling at his arm, trying to get him to look at her and not just her reflection. “Just when I see a glimpse of who you really are, you put on that mask again.”
He turned to her, his mask firmly in place. “This is who I am. What you see is what you get. I’m not a soft-hearted poet. And I never will be.”
“Well, think about this: What do you have inside you to give your son when we do find him? I just hope you have an answer before then.”
* * *
Chloe and Dylan had said nothing more than a curt, “Good night,” before retiring to their respective rooms. When she joined him on the front porch of his bungalow the next morning, he was already looking over a map of the Keys. He pointed to Key Largo, one of the upper keys. “We’re here now. We can canvass this section today if we get a move on. Ready?”
“Good grief, I haven’t even had my coffee yet!” she said, sitting down next to him.
He got up and returned with a cup of coffee. “Here you go.”
“You’re either more thoughtful than I suspected or you’re in a huge hurry. Hm, let me think about that.” She shot him a look that bespoke her conclusion. “You’re lucky I’m not one of those women who requires an hour to prepare herself for the day.” She fluffed her hair, but he wasn’t amused. “Fine, let me see that map. Lena said there was something about birds. I know, there are birds everywhere down here. But maybe the name of the key has a bird’s name. She also said she saw a skull.”
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