Storybook Dad (Harlequin American Romance)

by Bradford, Laura

  Mark gave the nod he knew Seth needed, but stuck to his line of questioning. “So how did you end up all the way out here? By yourself?”

  “Gam fell asleep. She didn’t mean to, Daddy, but sometimes crying makes you sleepy. So I asked Geronimo if he wanted to help me find the hospital, and he said he did. But we found this tree house instead. When Mommy made the rainbow, we went back and woke up Gam.”

  Mark shook his head at his lapse in parenting. His own pain had been so raw when Sally passed that he hadn’t thought to go home for Seth until his own tears were in check. “Did you tell Gam about the rainbow?”

  Seth grew quiet on his lap.

  “Seth?” he repeated. “Did you tell Gam about the rainbow?”

  This time, his son shook his head and whispered, “No.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because the rainbow was my goodbye, Daddy.”

  Seth’s goodbye.

  A goodbye that could have proved disastrous if Emily hadn’t remembered Seth’s mention of a tree house.

  “Emily,” he mumbled under his breath, before glancing toward the ladder for the first time since finding Seth. “Where’d she go?”

  “She climbed back down the ladder a long time ago, Daddy. Right after she winked a big wink at me.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Because you were crying, Daddy. And Emily put her finger to her mouth, like it was a secret.”

  “I was crying because I thought I’d lost you.” Leaning his head against the wall of the tree house, Mark thought back over everything he’d heard. “And I can’t ever lose you, little man. I love you too much for that, okay?”

  “Okay, Daddy.” Seth gestured around the tree house. “So do you like it?”

  He let his eyes follow the path indicated, and nodded. “Did you at least tell Gam about the tree house?”

  Again Seth shook his head. “Gam wouldn’t like the ladder. She’d tell me I’m too little to climb it. Then all my dream time would be the scary nighttime kind again.”

  Opting to bypass the notion of nightmares temporarily, Mark asked the one question that still remained. “Seth? If you didn’t want to tell Gam or me about the rainbow or this tree house, what made you tell Emily about it that day at the beach?”

  “Because she wanted to live in a castle when she was little, just like me, Daddy. And just like Mommy did.”

  His breath hitched. “Your mommy wanted to live in a castle when she was little?”

  “Uh-huh. And she got to!”

  Mark smiled despite the tears that pricked his eyes once again. “She did?”

  “Yupper doodle. And she lived in it with you and me, Daddy. She told me her castle was our house.”

  “She did?” he asked, blinking rapidly.

  “Uh-huh. Every night when she kissed me and Geronimo good-night!”

  It took everything Mark had not to break into wrenching sobs, the sadness he felt nothing short of overwhelming. “I’m sorry, little man. I’m sorry you had to lose Mommy when you’re still so little.”

  With a lopsided shrug, Seth tossed his beloved animal into the air and caught him with a giggle. “That’s okay, Daddy. It was better to have a special mommy for a little while than no special mommy at all.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Emily pulled into the parking lot of Bucket List 101, her thoughts running in a million different directions, yet converging all in one spot. Seth was safe and sound, and that was all that truly mattered.

  It was time to put the rest of the story behind her, where it belonged. Her passion was her company. She needed to focus on making it the premier outdoor adventure destination in the region.

  No, she didn’t have a husband and the prospect of children to look forward to, like Kate. But she had a company that was changing lives. Was one really better or more important than the other?

  With a quick shake of her head, Emily grabbed her purse from the passenger seat and her keys from the ignition and headed toward the large white barn she’d converted into her offices, on the western edge of town. Here, she could be herself—adventurous, free-spirited and healthy. At least as far as her clients were concerned.

  She pulled the door open and stepped inside to find the reception desk empty. “Trish? I’m back. You still here?”

  The soft squeaking sounds of her assistant’s shoes preceded her appearance in the outer office. “My mom just called. She said the good news is all over the television and radio stations.”

  Emily felt the smile spread across her face. “We found him. Sleeping peacefully inside an old tree house in the woods behind his grandmother’s place, completely oblivious to the search taking place all over Winoka.”

  “Is that why you went tearing out of here this morning?” Trish asked, claiming her spot behind the desk.

  “I’m sorry about that, Trish. I really am. But all of a sudden I remembered something Mark’s—Mr. Reynolds’s—son had told me when I saw them at the beach after work the other night. He’d mentioned a tree house he’d found, and that he liked to go there to be by himself.”

  “Be by himself? Why does a four-year-old need to be by himself?”

  Emily placed her purse on the floor, and perched on the edge of the desk. “Well, considering this particular four-year-old lost his mom to cancer six months ago, I imagine he’s probably got more reasons than either of us could fathom.”

  Trish tsked softly. “Wow. That’s rough. Thank God you found him, though.” Reaching into her top drawer, she pulled out a couple of apples and offered one to Emily.

  “Oh, thanks, I missed lunch.” She reached for the fruit and took a bite, her mind wandering back through the morning, but stopping short of the many reasons seeing Mark had been so hard.

  “Wow. So that guy—the one who was in here for the orienteering class? He lost his wife and then he couldn’t find his son? Wow.” Trish narrowed her eyes in thought as she crunched her own apple. “I think if I were that kid’s dad, I’d be tempted to stick him in a bubble where he couldn’t ever get lost, or sick, or whatever.”

  Pulling the apple from her mouth, Emily tossed the barely eaten fruit into the trash and stood, her appetite suddenly squashed. “No. Mark’s preferred bubble isn’t one that keeps Seth in, it’s one that keeps everyone else out. Of Seth’s life.”

  She heard the bitterness in her voice, felt the weight of Trish’s questioning eyes and literally grasped for the first topic she could find to change the subject. Her hand closed over the first in a long line of pink sticky notes attached to her assistant’s desk. “I take it I missed a few calls while I was out? Anything important or truly exciting?”

  Trish glanced downward, running her fingernail along the line of messages. “I signed up this person…and this person…and this one, all for next week’s Intro to Nature’s Workout Room and…oh, yeah, this woman—” she peeled off the fourth note and gave it a quick glance before handing it to Emily “—is from Winoka Magazine. She wants to do an article on you.”

  Taking in the reporter’s name and information, Emily nodded. “You mean an article on the company, right?”

  “No. On you. She says she’ll touch on the company in the story, but this particular piece is on female entrepreneurs and the spark that lit their proverbial match, as she put it.”

  “My proverbial match, eh? Hmm. Something tells me a little kid with a big imagination and a sixty-four pack of crayons probably isn’t
the kind of tale she’s looking for.”

  “I’d read it,” Trish quipped, moving her finger to the next note and pausing.

  “Yeah, I guess I’d read it, too. And I’d probably send a copy to my mom for her scrapbook. So I guess we’d have three readers, if nothing else.”

  “Boss?”

  At the change in Trish’s tone of voice, Emily glanced up from the notes in her own hand. “Yes?”

  “There was one other call. From a man named Jed Walker.”

  “And?”

  “He started out as a prospective client at first, but then…”

  She looked from Trish to the note in question and back again. “But then what? Is there a problem I should know about?”

  Her assistant peeled the note from her desk and crumpled it in her hand, shrugging as she did so. “Nothing we can really do anything about. But I still felt bad.”

  “Bad about what?”

  “Not being able to help this guy. I mean, he knows he can’t go wheeling through the woods with a compass or whatever, but it’s kind of a shame that he can’t take one of your survival seminars simply because he can’t get down the stairs and into the classroom, you know?”

  Finally, Emily was able to make sense of what she was hearing. “Is this guy disabled or something?”

  “He’s in a wheelchair. Lives on his own. He’s got this dream of learning how to scuba dive one day despite the fact that he’s paralyzed, and he was hoping he could sign up for one of your scuba trips to the Caribbean this winter. I told him that wasn’t possible, but that we might be able to get some people in here to carry him in and out of the classroom if he wanted to sit in on one of your survival classes, but he said no. Said he gets where he needs to go on his own, without anyone carrying him around like a baby.” Trish tossed the paper wad into the trash beside her desk. “The guy was a real firecracker, I tell you. Real determined to live life on his own terms, just like you. When I mentioned the survival class idea, he said it wouldn’t do him much good anyway, since most campgrounds have gravel parking lots and are situated much too far from the actual facilities.

  “Made me kind of sad when he said that. I guess I’m so used to being able to walk that I never really stopped to notice how life isn’t set up for people like Mr. Walker.”

  Emily peeked into the trash can. “And this guy wants to learn how to scuba dive, when he can’t walk?”

  Trish nodded. “Said it was his dream long before the car accident that confined him to his wheelchair—”

  The ringing of the office phone cut their conversation short, sending Trish into full-blown assistant mode and Emily down the hall toward her office, the image of the wadded-up pink sticky note front and center in her thoughts.

  She understood all about determination. It was why she was standing in the middle of a building she’d purchased with the intention of starting her own company. A company that was now thriving, thanks to her own refusal to give up.

  She understood the desire to live life on one’s own terms. It was why she wouldn’t let Kate cajole her into a life she was no longer meant to have.

  And she understood the man’s refusal to let people carry him around. The mere thought of being in that position one day with her multiple sclerosis was enough to drive her batty.

  So how could she continue to tout Bucket List 101 as a way to fulfill lifelong dreams if she wasn’t equipped to do that for everyone—especially someone as driven and full of heart as the man whose name was scrawled across a piece of paper now crumpled in Trish’s trash can?

  Deflated, Emily reached inside her office door and flipped on the overhead light, her gaze going to her desk and the pamphlets Mark had left behind prior to the barbecue and a night she wished she could forget, but knew she never would.

  She’d been so angry when he’d brought the literature by, so quick to tell him she didn’t need any help from him or his foundation. But now, in light of the man Trish had had to turn away because they were unable to accommodate his challenges, maybe it was time to rethink that notion.

  When she was sure her assistant was off the phone, she pressed the intercom button. “Trish?”

  “Yeah, boss?”

  “We’re about helping people realize their dreams, aren’t we?”

  “That’s what the little thingy out here in the waiting room says.”

  “That’s what it says in here on my desk, too.” Leaning forward, she poked a finger at the replica of the sign that greeted her customers from atop a table in plain sight of Trish’s desk. “Which means we’ve got a whole bunch of work to do to make that happen.”

  “Isn’t that what we’re already doing, with the course descriptions and the classes we keep adding?”

  “But we can do better. We can do more. If we don’t, we’ll need to take down the sign we’re both looking at right now.” She swiveled her chair to the right and flipped on her computer, ready to begin the initial legwork for something she should have done a long time ago. “Oh, and Trish? When you get a chance, would you bring that message in here?”

  A pause gave way to a funny little snort. “Uh, boss? I already gave you all your messages.”

  “I’m talking about the one in your trash can…the one with Mr. Walker’s phone number on it. There are some things I’d like to discuss with him.”

  * * *

  MARK PULLED HIS CELL PHONE from the side pocket in his car door and scrolled through his recent calls, finding the number for Bucket List 101 among them. He found it hard to believe it had been only five days since he’d first laid eyes on Emily. So much had happened.

  She’d affected him in a way he hadn’t seen coming. Sure, he wished things were different, that they could have met twenty years in the future, when he didn’t have to worry about Seth quite so much. But they hadn’t and he did.

  His son had to come first.

  Seth.

  Leaving him with Gram for a much needed nap had been difficult. But the only reason Mark had been able to tuck Seth in for a nap at all was because of Emily. The least he could do was say thank-you.

  Unfortunately, it was all the other things Mark wanted to say and do to her that kept pushing their way into his thoughts and leaving him more than a little unsettled. He wanted to shower her face with kisses of gratitude. He wanted to run his hands down her exquisite body. He wanted to peel off her clothes and make love to her all over again.

  But he couldn’t.

  She was sick. And he was a father.

  His mind made up, he pressed the button for Emily’s office number and put the Blue Tooth device to his ear, the clamminess of his hand a shameful reminder of why he was suddenly so nervous. If a friend had led on a woman the way he’d led Emily on the other night, Mark would have been disgusted.

  And he was. At himself.

  Emily deserved an apology as much as she deserved a thank-you, and he would make sure she got both by the time their call was over. As he listened to the phone ring, he prepared himself for what to say and how to say it. But when it became apparent no one was going to pick up, his nerves gave way to disappointment.

  What was with him? Why couldn’t he just shut this girl out?

  A sixth ring yielded to a seventh before the call was finally answered. “Bucket List 101, this is Trish, how can I help you?”

  He steered his car around a parked car at the end of his mom’s road and stopped, his uncertainty over what to say rivaled only by his unc
ertainty over where, exactly, he was going in the first place.

  “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  Say something, idiot…

  “Uh…yeah, hi. This is Mark. Mark Reynolds. I took a class on orienteering from your company the other day and I—”

  “Mark, hi. Wow. I couldn’t believe it when Emily told me the missing boy was yours. I bet you haven’t let him out of your sight since she found him in that tree house for you.”

  He closed his eyes momentarily, the image of his son alive and well in the corner of the dilapidated tree house bringing a tightness to his throat. It was all still so surreal. “You have no idea, Trish. No idea.”

  She paused, then said, “I bet you want to talk to Emily and say thanks, huh?”

  Among other things, he thought. To Trish, he said, “I do. Can you put me through to her?”

  “Emily is out of the office at the moment. And since she didn’t tell me where she was going, I can’t be sure when she’ll be back—if she even comes back this afternoon at all. But I can certainly put you through to her voice mail, if you’d like.”

  It wasn’t the way he wanted to do it, but maybe it was for the best. That way he could thank her for finding Seth, apologize for his own shortcomings and then leave her to her life. “Yeah, okay, that’ll work.”

  But the second he heard Emily’s voice in his ear, he knew he couldn’t leave a message. Calling her wasn’t just about saying thanks. Or even apologizing. He wanted to hear her voice—talking specifically to him. He wanted to look into her eyes, wanted to scale a mountain with her by his side, wanted to learn about her past. He wanted to tell her one of Seth’s jokes and hear the way she laughed with her whole being. Heck, he just wanted to be close to her again....

  No. A voice message was not the way to tell her how he felt, or to explain why he couldn’t see her again.

  Ending the call, he turned left at the next cross street, his destination suddenly clear.