by Tami Hoag
Not waiting for her to agree or disagree, he climbed into the cab and slid across the seat to the passenger side. Lynn got in after him, casting him sideways glances as she started the truck and put it in gear. They rumbled down the tree-lined street, turned the corner, and headed toward Broadway with an ominous grinding of gears.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate the help,” Lynn said grudgingly, her conscience finally winning out over her stubbornness. “It’s the sentiment behind it I’m not so sure about.”
“I know.”
She shot him a look of annoyance as they pulled up to a stop light and waited. “That’s all you have to say—‘I know’?”
Erik’s broad shoulders rose and fell. His gaze locked on hers with that magnetic quality that still unnerved her. “Talk hasn’t gotten me very far with you,” he admitted. “I’ve decided to let my actions speak for me. I gave a lot of thought to what you said this morning. You were right about some of it. In my own defense, I have to say that I don’t usually have the opportunity to get very deeply involved in a cause. There are too many of them and too little time.”
“But we’re going to be the privileged exception?” Lynn said dryly, turning her attention back to the street as traffic began to move. She gritted her teeth and wrestled the big steering wheel around, the truck lurching and groaning as it heaved around the corner and onto Rochester’s main downtown drag.
“I want to prove to you I can care about something besides my own popularity polls,” Erik said, raising his voice to be heard above the horrible noises coming from under the moving van’s hood.
“You don’t have to prove anything to me, Senator.” Lynn was careful not to look at him as she spoke, certain he would be wearing that expression of utter sincerity that kept suckering her in. Puppies could have taken lessons from him for heart-melting looks. She glanced out her side window instead, catching a glimpse of the latest fashions in the windows of the elegant Centerplace Galleria building.
“Besides,” she said, “isn’t that a contradiction? If you care, you care. If you’re only doing it to prove something to me, then that negates the rest of it, doesn’t it?”
“No. I want to care. I want to help you, and by helping you, come to understand the problems your girls are facing. Proving myself to you is a separate issue.”
“And unnecessary,” Lynn declared. She didn’t want him proving himself to her. She didn’t want to be the object of a quest.
She hit the blinker and steered the truck onto Seventh Street, bracing herself so hard her fanny came up off the seat. She bit back the groan of effort, but didn’t even try to contain her sigh of relief as they completed the turn and she was able to relax again.
“Now I know how truck drivers have room for all those tattoos,” she said. “I can feel my biceps growing even now.”
“Want me to drive?” Erik queried.
“No.”
He chuckled to himself and shook his head. “I didn’t think so. You have to do everything the hard way, don’t you? No delegating, no passing the buck, no shortcuts.”
“I don’t like being indebted to people, that’s all.”
“Afraid of how they’ll want to collect?”
Too many debts incurred, she thought, an old hollow ache throbbing anew in her chest. Debts she couldn’t ever hope to pay off for sins she wished she hadn’t committed. The weight of her past pressed down on her, feeling somehow heavier than usual, the regret that accompanied it more bittersweet. She didn’t allow herself to wonder why.
She stomped on the clutch, wrestled the gearshift into position with much protest from the truck, and hauled the wheel hard right, turning into the parking lot of the rental place. The truck bucked up over the lip of the driveway, slamming Erik into the passenger door and window with a thud, and jolted and rattled its way across the gravel lot. Lynn stood on the brakes and the truck rolled on like a horse with a bit between its teeth, finally coming to a grudging halt behind the rental office where all its compadres were parked.
Lynn turned off the ignition and fell back against the seat, winded and drained from the physical effort of driving and from the emotional tension of having Erik so near and knowing she couldn’t allow him any nearer. She stared out the windshield, pensively watching the clouds of dust they’d kicked up floating away toward John Marshall High School.
Erik watched her as he sat absently rubbing the side of his head where he’d connected with the window. She seemed a million miles away, the weariness in her eyes old and sad. Almost certainly she had somehow fallen back into the past. Erik wanted to reach out to her and pull her back to the present and into his arms. But when he reached for her, she flung open the truck’s door and shied away, sliding down out of the cab.
Sighing heavily, he climbed out of the truck and caught up with her beside a formation of small orange rental trailers. They were still behind the green cinder-block office building, well back from the street. This part of town was an unattractive combination of industrial and retail developments put up in the sixties with little consideration for taste. The area around them was fenced in by chain link, with weeds sprouting everywhere there wasn’t gravel or a pothole. The afternoon had remained as gray as the morning. The wind had kicked up a bit, hinting at a chance for rain later. It tossed Lynn’s long black hair behind her like ribbons and molded her lavender T-shirt to her small, round breasts.
This was hardly the time or the place, but Erik caught himself just wanting to stare at her, to drink in the sight of her. She might have seen that in his eyes because her brows dropped into a scowl and she tried to step around him. He cut her off, boxing her in between himself and a trailer.
“Everyone gets a second chance but me, is that it?” he said, dropping his hands to the waistband of his jeans.
Her lush, pretty mouth pulled down at the corners and she folded her arms defensively. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Maybe I’d stand a better chance if I’d spent time in juvenile hall for stealing cars or if I had a little problem with cocaine. Would that make it all right? Could I maybe get you to go out to dinner with me then?”
Lynn refused to take the bait. She’d counseled herself on the issue of Erik Gunther all night and half the day, turning the questions over and back in her mind, always coming up with the same solution: She couldn’t afford to get involved with him.
“I told you, I don’t mix business and my personal life,” she said, congratulating herself for her cool.
“I think your business is your personal life,” Erik retorted, his hold on his temper slipping a little.
She lifted her chin, green eyes glittering. “You don’t know anything about me, Senator.”
“I’m trying to remedy that situation, but you won’t let me. You’re too busy playing the reverse snob.”
Lynn’s jaw dropped. “Me? I am—”
“You’re looking down that pretty nose at me because I’m a politician, because I come from a normal family and had an uneventful adolescence,” Erik charged angrily.
This afternoon wasn’t working out at all the way he’d planned. He had thought to woo Lynn slowly and calmly as he proved himself to her, but it was fast becoming evident that where Lynn Shaw was concerned he had little control over her or himself. She provoked him in ways he hadn’t even considered before. Now he found a well of righteous indignation boiling up inside him and he couldn’t seem to stem the flow, regardless of what prudence dictated.
“I came to help you, dammit,” he said. “Maybe my motives were only ninety-nine percent pure, but it’s a hell of a lot more help than you’re getting from anyone else. And maybe I don’t understand everything you or your girls have gone through, but you’re not giving me much of a chance to, either.”
He was right. Lynn looked up at him, wishing she could deliver a scathing rebuttal, but there wasn’t one to give. She wasn’t being any fairer to him than he had been in his assessment of Regan that morning. And while two wrongs
might have kept her safe, they didn’t make a right.
She bit her lip and looked off across the ugly plane of the parking lot, where a Minnesota version of a tumbleweed was skittering along. The sky above the Highway 52 overpass was growing heavier with the promise of rain. The sounds of early-rush-hour traffic hummed in the distance. She felt caught between a rock and a hard place, with a minefield spread out around her for good measure. She needed Erik’s help, but she didn’t need a heartache. Her sense of justice demanded she give him a chance to learn and to care, while her sense of caution told her to keep her distance.
“Come on, Lynn,” he said softly. “Give me a break here, will you? I want to do the right thing.”
The gravel crunched beneath his sneakers as he shuffled nearer, closing the distance between them. Lynn felt his approach as clearly as she heard it. Her body had tuned in to his the first time he’d come within two feet of her. Standing there, bracing herself against retreat, she had the odd and terrible feeling that she would be acutely aware of Erik Gunther for the rest of her life. She almost flinched when he lifted a hand and gently brushed her hair back from her cheek.
“Come on, Lynn,” he whispered. “Give me a chance.”
Despite the heat of the day, Lynn shivered. One look at his face told her he was asking for something more than an opportunity to spar with Elliot Graham on her behalf. But it wasn’t his entreaty that frightened her. It was the powerful, painful need inside her to say yes. To let him get that close would be the height of folly—for both of them. But she looked up into those Nordic-blue eyes and wanted … wanted so much, so badly. To be free of her past, free to have the kind of future that could include a man like Erik.
Silly, the cynic in her sneered, sending her tender heart back into hiding. He wasn’t asking for a future, he was asking for a date. He was asking for a chance to prove himself by helping her. She would have to have been a fool to turn that down.
“You want your chance, Senator Gunther?” she said, her eyes sliding away from his to the green cinder-block rental office building. “Fine. You’ve got it.”
This wasn’t quite what I had in mind, Erik thought two nights later as he hoisted a drapery rod into place above the living room window. He’d been given his “chance,” all right—his chance to do manual labor from sunup to sundown. Lynn had worked him like a horse and watched him like a hawk, gauging his every word and action. She had let him prove himself with a hammer and nails, had used his interaction with the girls as a measure of his character. But, whether by chance or design, he hadn’t been given much of an opportunity to woo her.
They hadn’t had a moment alone. The days had been filled with work and worry, getting things settled in the house and dealing with the problems being laid on Horizon by Elliot Graham’s Citizens for Family Neighborhoods. By the end of each day Lynn had looked so exhausted, Erik hadn’t had the heart to pursue her. His libido had taken a backseat to the need to simply comfort and hold her, but he hadn’t had the chance to do that either. It was getting damned frustrating.
He shot a look at her over his shoulder. “How’s this?”
Lynn stood back rubbing her chin, her expression grave as she considered the question of the drapery rod. She looked fresh and pretty in an apricot tank top and a filmy summer skirt that blossomed with blue and peach flowers. A wide leather belt accented her small waist and a pair of fine gold necklaces drew his gaze to the delicate hollow of her throat. This was the first time he’d seen her in something other than jeans and a T-shirt. The effect was wreaking havoc on his hormones.
“A little higher on the left,” she pronounced at last, shouting to be heard above the rock music blasting out of the boom box on the coffee table. Erik inched the rod up. She narrowed her eyes in scrutiny. Lillian was called into consultation. Tracy and Michelle joined the audience.
“I like it there.”
“I think it was better before.”
“I think the senator has a cute butt.”
Michelle and Tracy fell into giggles at Tracy’s proclamation. Erik felt his cheeks heat, but he wiggled his backside at them, drawing another round of giggles. What he hadn’t had to endure in the last two days during the course of toting, hammering, reaching, and lifting. The girls had lost whatever initial shyness they’d had and had progressed to teasing him the way they would have a big brother. His embarrassment threshold had been sorely trod upon, his male ego poked and prodded relentlessly.
His initial reaction had been an inclination to sternness, a desire to reprimand, but he’d held himself in check. This was Lynn’s territory, and she had raked him up one side and down the other the one time he had dared challenge her authority. Instead of asserting himself, he had decided to look at this as a test of his tolerance and an opportunity to gain insight into on-the-job sexual harassment.
He gritted his teeth as the muscles in his shoulders began to cramp, and he shot another look at Lynn. “Will this decision be made anytime in the next millennium? I’m hungry.”
“You’re always hungry,” Lynn countered, a wry smile curling one corner of her mouth. “It’s a good thing Horizon isn’t a home for boys. We’d go broke buying groceries.”
“Just for that, I’m ordering double dessert.”
“I have no objections, since you’re picking up the tab.”
Lynn turned toward her residents. Erik had done plenty of observing in the past two days, and one thing he’d noticed right away was that Lynn almost always tried to include the girls in the decision-making. He had questioned the practice at first, but he’d quickly seen the wisdom of it. Giving the girls a voice in where the furniture went made them feel more a part of the home than just inmates in it, and debates over various issues taught them valuable communications and thinking skills. And it was done so skillfully, so matter-of-factly, Erik doubted the girls realized what was happening. His admiration for Lynn was growing even more quickly than his desire. That surprised him a little, humbled him a lot.
Lynn turned toward the sofa, where Regan was sprawled in insolent repose, her arms crossed tightly over her chest and her combat boots on the table. “Regan?”
The girl’s expression was the consummate look of teenage boredom. “Who gives a rip?”
Lynn made no comment, but bent over and turned down the radio as Regan pushed herself to her feet and began roaming restlessly around the room. Lynn turned next to Christine Rickman, the painfully shy, very pregnant fifteen-year-old with honey-blond hair and big brown eyes. “Christine?”
The girl blushed a bit, a tiny smile curving her mouth. She glanced up at Erik but her eyes darted quickly back down and her blush deepened. “I don’t know.”
Tracy elbowed Michelle and said, “I think the senator should put his rod wherever he wants.”
Lynn arched a brow in silent reproach.
The doorbell rang and Erik groaned as Lillian went to answer it. “I don’t think this vote needs a quorum. Somebody make a decision!”
“Nail it to the wall, Erik,” Martha called from where she knelt on the floor with Barbara, sorting through stacks of books.
Barbara groaned. Tracy and Michelle burst into another round of giggles.
“Oh, my, it’s so good to hear laughter after the day I’ve had, I can tell you,” Father Bartholomew said. He followed Lillian into the room, wringing his hands and looking his usual disheveled self. A spike of brown hair stuck straight out from the left side of his head. Behind his crooked glasses, his eyes were bright with worry, and there was a telltale flush of color on his cheekbones. “I spent most of the day in Winona, with Bishop Lawrence bending my ear but good.”
Lynn’s heart gave a lurch as she turned toward the priest. “What did he have to say?”
“Plenty. God love him, he’s a wonderful man, but he can get on such a tear. Oh, my, you just don’t know.” Hands folded against his belly, he rolled his eyes heavenward and offered up a few muttered words in Latin.
“He’s seen Graham’s petitio
ns?” Lynn asked.
“Yes, and the news on television and in the papers.” He flashed Lynn a look of apology. “And I’m afraid I had to tell him about the refrigerator.”
“Of course.”
“Though I assured him it was not your fault at all, Lynn, dear. He wasn’t a happy man, but I managed to work the news in nicely with the biblical story of casting the first stone. He thought it would make an excellent homily.” His face lit briefly with a glow of pride.
“What did he have to say about Horizon House?” Erik asked. He lowered the drapery rod and left it balancing on the step stool as he gave his full attention to the priest.
Father Bartholomew gave a dramatic little sigh. His brows pulled together above his nose in a worried peak. He shoved his glasses into place and tried in vain to straighten them. “Well, he’s none too pleased with me about letting the house out without the permission of the parish council, but he’s backing me up for the moment.”
“Thank God,” Lillian intoned, one hand worrying the pearls at the collar of her crisp summer-print dress.
“Indeed we should,” Father Bartholomew said, nodding enthusiastically. His forehead crinkled and he sucked in a little gasp of air as he shuddered at the memory of the afternoon he’d just spent cloistered with the bishop. “Oh, my, we went around and around about it. I feel like I’ve been wrestling a bear. He agrees with me that as Christians we are obliged to offer help and refuge, but he’s not too crazy about the bad publicity. Pardon me, Senator, but he really doesn’t want the diocese to get embroiled in anything political just now.”
“But he’s letting us stay,” Lynn said, sounding more positive than she felt.
Father Bartholomew bobbed his head. “For the time being. We should all pray for the commotion to die down quickly. I don’t like to think what he’d do if there got to be too much trouble going on in the neighborhood.”
Lynn looked out the curtainless front window at the protestors parading up and down the sidewalk, led by none other than Elliot Graham himself, looking proper and upstanding in his shirt and tie. Her stomach slid a little. If Graham had his way, the commotion would not die down. And if the bishop threw them out of this house, it might well mean the end of Horizon. The only other building they’d been able to find was an empty county services office building located in the floodplain along the Zumbro River. Access to it had been denied “for safety reasons,” they’d been informed that very afternoon when she and Lillian had gone downtown to the courthouse to check on it.