But he’d turned down the invitation for a third one.
And then he’d asked her to lunch, and then to dinner.
With him and his daughter.
Aw, heck, she’d never been any good at figuring out why a man did the things he did or what he might do in the future, and trying only made her head hurt. Better she should stick with something she could handle.
Like pasta.
Brady woke up in the middle of the night, groggy, disoriented and unable to kick his brain into gear. For a moment he couldn’t figure out what had awakened him, then he heard voices and saw a dim glow at the end of the hallway and remembered.
Les.
Pushing back the sheet, he sat up and pulled on a T-shirt. He’d taken only a few steps, though, before heading back to grab his jeans off a chair and slide into them. There was nothing immodest about boxers—Les had changed into a pair of red-and-blue plaid ones and a T-shirt to sleep in—but it seemed improper for him.
He went down the hall and stopped in the living-room doorway. The light came from the TV. She was curled on her side on the couch, pillows under her head and a sheet tucked around her, and was watching a rerun of an old show he remembered from his childhood. After watching one episode, Logan had turned to him and innocently asked, Are other families really like that?
Had Les ever wondered the same thing? Had she wondered where her perfect family was, or what she’d done to deserve the life she had?
After a moment, he walked into the room and sat down on the arm of the easy chair. “Having trouble sleeping?”
Her expression swiftly turned to distrust and wariness. “I didn’t have it turned up loud.”
“No, you didn’t.” He gestured toward her. “You’re almost too tall to fit on the couch.”
“It’s okay,” she said with a shrug, then added, “For one night.”
“I’ll try to take off after lunch tomorrow and we’ll go shopping for some furniture. I don’t know if I’ll have time to get that room cleaned out before the weekend, but at least we’ll be able to get the bed in there.”
“Yeah, sure.”
After an awkward silence, he slid down into the chair. It had been almost ten o’clock when Hallie went home, and Les had walked out to the convertible with them. They’d had just enough privacy for Hallie to say one thing—Remember what we talked about. Since he had little doubt she would ask him about it the next time he saw her, he took a deep breath and said, “Listen, Les…”
She slowly sat up on the couch, and her entire body grew stiff. She was looking at him as if she expected the worst and hated him for it. Seeing things from her point of view, he couldn’t blame her.
“I, uh…” What would he say to her if he knew beyond a doubt that she was his daughter? The answer came easily. Giving voice to it was another matter. “I know you probably can’t tell it by the way things have gone, but…I’m glad you’re here. I, uh…I’ve thought about you a lot.” That part was true, just not recently. In the first months after he left Texas, both she and her mother had been on his mind constantly. After a while, though, he’d been forced to distance himself from them, just as he’d done with Logan after he’d disappeared.
You’re a very nice man when you aren’t so busy being distant, Hallie had said. What she didn’t understand was that being distant was how he’d survived. His parents might not have taught him much, but they’d taught him how to disconnect, and damned if he hadn’t learned the lesson well.
“She told you to say that, didn’t she?”
Deliberately, he avoided answering. “You know, I’ve lived my whole life without Hallie telling me what to do. Not that I wouldn’t take advice from her if she offered it. She’s a lot smarter than she’s given credit for.” And a lot better with people than he’d ever imagined being.
Les combed her fingers through her hair. It wasn’t standing on end now and, except for the color, looked fairly normal. All the earrings were gone, too, as well as the bar through her eyebrow, though the stud in her nose was still in place. He wondered what she would look like as an average kid—what color her hair was, if she was pretty, whether she resembled her mother at all.
Whether she resembled him at all.
There was her height, not that it was a particularly significant factor. Sandra was only five foot five, a full eleven inches shorter than him, so Les didn’t get it from her. And Les’s eyes were blue. Sandra’s were brown. Again, though, that wasn’t significant.
“I like Hallie,” Les said at last.
“I do, too.” And he meant it. Liked her in ways he’d never liked any woman, not even Neely. Liked her. Lusted after her. Looked for excuses to see her.
As long as she understood nothing would ever come of it….
With a feeling that felt uncomfortably like guilt nagging at him, he stood up. “I’m heading back to bed. Six o’clock comes early. Good night.”
He was halfway down the hall before she softly spoke. “Good night.”
After turning off the television, Les sat on the couch, arms wrapped around her knees, for a long time and listened. The house was quiet. Once in a while the bed springs creaked down the hall—with a bed that noisy, she’d bet Brady wouldn’t be doing any fooling around for a while—but there were no other sounds besides annoying birds outside.
Once she was pretty sure he was asleep, she hauled up her backpack from the floor. The outside pockets held her CD player and a dozen CDs, and inside was everything she’d needed for the trip—money she’d lifted from Sandra’s not-so-secret stash, her makeup bag, chewing gum and candy bars, tissues, journal and pen. The journal was leather-bound and had the year embossed on the front in gold. It had been a gift to her stepfather on his last birthday, but since he’d never had an original thought to put on paper, she’d claimed it for her own.
Now she pulled it out and flipped past entries in purple and hot-pink ink, not stopping until the pages fell open naturally. It was a photograph that made them do it. She’d found the original in her baby book, packed in a box in the attic, and scanned it into her computer. After fixing the faded color and red eyes, she’d printed out this copy.
According to the date on the original, she’d been four weeks old when the picture was taken. That meant he had been twenty-one. He didn’t look much different than he did now. His hair was shorter, he’d put on weight and grown that mustache, and his eyes were bleaker, but she still would have recognized him.
Was part of that bleakness because of the way he’d abandoned her?
She hoped.
Sandra didn’t talk about him a lot, but Les knew she hated Brady more than all her other ex-husbands combined. Back when she was a kid, Les had thought it was because he’d broken Sandra’s heart. Then she’d figured out Sandra loved money more than people, and so she’d decided Sandra was pissed because she only got part of his money instead of it all.
Les didn’t care if her mother did hate her father. She’d just wanted to meet him…and to piss off her mother at the same time.
’Cause Sandra wasn’t at a spa in Mexico—she’d come back from there two weeks ago. She was home in Marshall City, and maybe by now she was wondering where her only child was. Maybe she was worried and calling Les’s friends—not that she knew who Les’s real friends were. She didn’t know anything about Les, except that she didn’t like putting up with her.
And now she’d met her father, and he didn’t want her, either.
But that was okay, she told herself, swallowing over the lump in her throat as she returned the journal to the backpack, then curling up on the sofa. It wasn’t like she needed either one of them. She was old enough and smart enough to get by on her own. Parents were a major pain.
And she’d had enough pain already.
On Wednesday, Hallie got moved into her house and Les got her bed. On Thursday, the two of them drove to Tulsa, where they spent the day shopping for linens and the tile for Neely’s kitchen. On Friday, feeling guilty for spending al
l her time living her own life, she took Les with her for the twenty-mile drive to Heartbreak to check on the construction. Then they went into the Heartbreak Café for a late lunch.
The café was empty except for two pregnant women, one on either side of the counter, two little girls and a baby boy. Hallie recognized the twins as the flower girls in the wedding—Elly and Emma Harris. Though their features were identical, they couldn’t have been more different unless they’d come from different species. Emma was as prim and prissy as any little girl could be, and Elly was rough-and-tumble and brimming with personality. She looked up from her ice-cream sundae when they entered the café, dismissed Hallie as unimportant, then gave Les a wide-eyed stare.
“Whoa!” the little girl said excitedly. “You got purple hair!”
For the second time, Les reacted self-consciously, mumbling, “Yeah, so what?”
“Do they make that in red? This kind of red?” Elly thrust out a plastic holster that held a toy gun, its color a strange fire-engine red/bitter orange.
“Yeah, probably.”
“Mama!” Elly raced to the pregnant woman on the stool. “Mama, could I get my hair like that, only in this color? Wouldn’t ’at be cool? An’ then you wouldn’t have to be tellin’ me to comb my hair all the time, and I would look neat! Can I, Mama?”
Her mother smiled patiently. “Honey, I let you wear cowboy boots when it’s a hundred and twenty degrees outside. I let you dress yourself, even though your tastes are a bit…ah, adventurous. I even let you wear your cowboy hat with your Easter dress—”
“But not in church,” Elly interrupted.
“Right. But, darlin’, there’s no way I’m letting you color your hair to match your holster. Sorry.”
Elly’s face fell, and her lower lip poked out. “Guess I’ll have to wait ’til I’m growed.” Then a sly look crept into her expression. “Unless maybe I can get Daddy to say yes.”
The woman behind the counter waved her hand airily. “Have a seat wherever you want. Today’s special is— Hey, you’re Neely’s sister, aren’t you? I’m Shay Rafferty, and this is Olivia Harris.”
“I’m Hallie Madison, and this—” Realizing Les had slowly drifted behind her, Hallie caught hold of her and pulled her around. “This is Les Marshall.”
“Nice to meet you, Les,” Shay said. “The special is pot roast with all the trimmings, and the menus are on the tables.”
Hallie chose a booth, and Les slid onto the opposite bench. When a young woman came to take their order, Hallie ordered a burger and fries. Les asked for the same. One brow raised, Hallie looked at her long enough to make her scowl.
“Yeah, I ordered a hamburger,” Les said irritably. “I’m gonna eat meat. So what?”
“Hey, it makes no difference to me. I’m just surprised.”
“Well, don’t be.”
“Do you mind if I ask when you decided to become a vegetarian?”
For a moment, Les stared hard out the plate-glass window, then the corner of her mouth started twitching. Before she could stop herself, she was wearing a full-blown grin. “When I found out that it drove Sandra freakin’ nuts. Brady didn’t even say anything. He just started fixing meals that didn’t have any meat. But Sandra…. She tries to control everything I do, but she can’t make me eat something I don’t want.”
Hallie leaned forward. “Sweetie, you’ve got purple spiked hair, a tattoo around your belly button and about twenty extra holes in your body. If that’s an example of your mother controlling you…”
“You know what I mean. She wants me to be just like her when she was a kid, only better. She wanted to be in all the clubs, so she tries to make me join them. She wanted to be cheerleader, so she made me try out. Her family was poor and she didn’t have nice clothes, so she buys all these clothes that she would have wanted and tries to make me wear them, even if they look stupid on me. My bedroom is done the way she wanted. I can’t even hang a poster on the wall because it doesn’t ‘go.’”
“So your mother’s controlling, and you’re rebelling.” Hallie smiled. “It’s not always easy being the rebel, is it?”
Les shrugged and mumbled something.
“I bet your father couldn’t care less if you wanted to cover your bedroom walls in his house with posters.” Of course, she would remember to tell him so when he picked up Les this afternoon. “How’s it going with him?”
“I think he’s afraid to be alone with me. That’s why he’s always asking you to stay.”
It was true that Hallie had had dinner with them every night since Les’s arrival. “Darn. Here I thought he might like me for myself, and now you tell me he’s really just using me as a buffer.”
“Do you like him? Not as a friend, but like, you want to go out with him, have sex with him—you know, boyfriend stuff?”
Hallie wished friendship was all she felt for Brady, but she’d never slept with a friend before. She’d never flirted with a friend before, either, or caught herself thinking about a friend darn near every time her attention wasn’t required elsewhere. She’d never lain awake in her bed at night, wondering what a friend was doing or placing bets with herself on whether he’d ever come to her bed again.
But she had no expectations, remember?
And the last time she’d told Brady that, he’d responded in a husky voice, Maybe you should.
But he hadn’t been volunteering for anything. A mere eight or ten hours later, she’d invited him into her room, and he’d turned her down flat. Oh, he’d softened the rejection by saying he would very much like to go inside with her, but the bottom line remained the same—he’d said good-night twenty feet from her door. And the closest he’d gotten to her since then was when he’d cornered her on his back porch Tuesday evening, when she’d thought he was going to kiss her.
“If it takes that long to think about it, then the answer must be yes,” Les said. She looked as if her conclusion pleased her.
“The truth, Les,” Hallie began gently, “is I’ve been divorced three times, and each time’s been a whole lot harder than the last. I can’t go through that again. So, yes, I like your father a lot and I find him very attractive, but…I’m not looking for another relationship. I just can’t do it.”
“Sandra says if a divorce hurts, you’re not doing it right.”
“Well, Sandra’s wrong. If a divorce doesn’t hurt, you’re not doing the marriage right.”
The conversation was lighter while they ate. When they finished, Hallie chatted for a few minutes with Neely’s friends, then went to the cash register with Shay to pay.
Over by the door, Elly Harris was standing on a bench, leaning over the back of the booth to talk to Les. “What kind of name is Les?”
“It’s a nickname.”
“What does it mean?”
“Nothing.”
“But it’s got to mean something.”
“It’s just less. You know, more, less? Less than nothing? That’s what it means.”
Shay’s gaze was sympathetic as she counted out the change. For a moment Hallie couldn’t move, then Shay folded her hand around Hallie’s, closing it over the money, then squeezing it tightly. Hallie smiled faintly, dropped the cash in her purse, then drew a deep breath before looping her arm through Les’s. “Come on, sweetie, let’s head back to Buffalo Plains. It was nice meeting all of you,” she said to Shay and the Harrises. “I’m sure we’ll see you around.”
The trip home was silent, partly because the top was down and the wind whipped their words away as soon as they were spoken, and partly because Hallie was thinking. As soon as she pulled into her driveway, she put those thoughts into words. “You need a new nickname.”
Les’s face turned as red as Elly’s holster. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Either you pick out a new nickname or I’m calling you Alessandra.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “I won’t answer.”
“I don’t care.”
“There’s nothing wron
g with Les. Alessandra should be beautiful and elegant and speak with a foreign accent, and that’s not me.”
“Les should be short, fat and bald—to say nothing of male—and that’s not you, either.” Hallie parked next to the house and shut off the engine, then turned toward the girl. “Is that really why you picked the name Les? Because it’s short for your name as well as ‘less than nothing’?”
Her jaw clamped tightly shut, Les jumped out of the car and started toward the house, then whirled around and came back. “That’s what she said, and it’s what he thinks, so why shouldn’t I use it?” Spinning again, she crossed the yard with long strides, took the steps two at a time and flung herself into the porch swing.
Hallie slowly got out of the car, then leaned in to get her purse. Les’s words made her stomach hurt—and made her want to punch someone, preferably Sandra. Since that wasn’t an option, she took a couple of deep breaths as she climbed the stairs. She unlocked the front door and set her bag inside, then pulled the rocker close to the swing. “I’m sorry your mother said that, but I can promise you your father doesn’t think it.”
“Yes, he does. That’s why he doesn’t want to be alone with me, and that’s why he abandoned me. He divorced her and just forgot I existed. He never wanted to talk to me, never wanted to see me. He sends a damn check every month. If he thought I was worth the trouble, he’d put a note in there for me once in a while, but he never has, not in fourteen years!”
Reaching out, Hallie unknotted Les’s fingers, then took her hands tightly in her own. “Divorce is hard, honey, and there’s a lot that the kids involved don’t know or can’t understand. But Brady’s a good man, and his reasons for doing what he did have nothing to do with you. It’s not your fault.”
“Of course it’s not my fault! I was a baby! What could I have done to deserve that?”
“You didn’t deserve it,” Hallie murmured. But Brady didn’t deserve the blame, either. How could he have known all those years ago that, after making such a point of convincing him he wasn’t her daughter’s father, Sandra was going to raise the child to believe he was?
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