by JoAnn Ross
“That is depressing.” And it hit home for her even more than it might usually have, considering her recent conversation with Charlie, which admittedly had her thinking more and more of marriage and soul mates. “Especially since we both already have cats.”
“Ah, but only one each. At the moment. Which means we’re not in danger of becoming cat ladies. But over time, if we’re not careful, that could change with the way Charity is always pushing those homeless animals on everyone in town. . . .
“Maybe it’s time to get proactive. Instead of waiting for Mr. Right to show up on his prancing white steed, maybe we should just make the first move. Women are allowed to ask men out these days.”
“You may have a point.”
Having discovered the pleasures of independence, Annie had no intention of ever getting married again, but after all the work she’d done to overcome the debacle of her marriage, didn’t she deserve some fun?
But not with a man who had a child. Because no way was she going to allow herself to fall in love with a little girl, or worse yet, allow a little girl to fall in love with her, when there wasn’t any path to a happy ending.
“You also happen to have a dating-expectations spreadsheet that no mortal man could ever live up to,” Annie said.
“Well, there is that.” Sedona sighed. “Thus is the curse of a perfectionist. But maybe it’s time to do a bit of editing on it.”
“That would be my advice. As for me, it’s already late and I have to change the shop window display to a Fourth of July theme, so as for what to do about my romantic life, or more specifically, lack of it, I’ll guess I’ll just sleep on the idea.”
“Alone.”
“Unless George Clooney suddenly shows up at my door, I’m afraid so.”
“We should be so lucky,” Sedona said with a laugh as she hung up.
The clock radio sat on the bedside table, within reach. All she’d have to do was reach out, hit the button that was already set to KBAY, and she wouldn’t be exactly alone.
“You’re close to needing an obsession intervention.”
Resisting the almost overwhelming urge, she turned off the light, rolled over on her stomach, and covered her head with her pillow, as if to shut out the deep baritone voice she didn’t need the radio turned on to hear.
17
Emma loved watching her daddy shave. She loved the way he swirled the wooden-handled brush on the soap, which turned into frothy bubbles on his face. But today, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, she was wishing that he would just hurry up.
“Daddy, we’re going to be late,” she complained.
“The party’s not for another three hours.” The razor cut through the white foam, leaving a trace of skin she knew would be soft and smell like soap. Not like her poppy, whose chin was scratchy. But she never minded because her grandpa had explained that was how old men were.
“I know when it is. Grandpa taught me to tell time,” she reminded him.
Peggy was having her sixth birthday party at the store called Memories on Main. They would all be making cards to hand out to soldiers who were marching in the Fourth of July parade. Emma felt as if she had ants marching under her skin as her daddy seemed to be moving as slow as the tortoise that was her kindergarten class pet.
“But we still have to have breakfast and visit Poppy and I’ll just die if I’m the only girl who’s late and misses something fun.”
“You won’t be late. I promise.”
He hadn’t broken a promise to her since he’d come back from the war. But Emma still worried. Her mother used to accuse her of being a fretter. Once she’d asked her teacher what the word meant and was told it meant someone who fussed a lot about unimportant things.
But Emma didn’t think she fussed. At least not nearly as much as Peggy. And the first party she was invited to since she and her daddy moved to Shelter Bay was not an unimportant thing.
“Why don’t you go get Peggy’s present while I get dressed? I’ll be down in five minutes.”
Recognizing the tone as the no-arguing one he sometimes used, Emma huffed a big sigh and went to get the Race Car Barbie Peggy had been talking about forever. Before they went to the store, her daddy had called Peggy’s mother to make sure her parents weren’t getting her one. Even though Emma thought that having two race cars would be better because then they could actually race each other.
While they were at the store, she’d pointed out the Pet Vet Barbie she wanted. After she’d had a playdate at Angel’s house and met her mom, who took care of sick animals, Emma had decided that she wanted to be a vet, too. Especially since Angel’s brother, Johnny, was going to be a veterinarian. Maybe they could get married and open an animal hospital together.
She’d begun playing vet with her stuffed animals and even, just last week, she’d cut open her Saint Bernard and sewn him back up again. Unfortunately, the only thread she’d been able to find in the house was red, but her grandpa was a doctor and sometimes cut up real people to save their lives and he had told her that her stitches were real straight for a first-time surgery.
Maybe if she took her daddy to the store again and told him how much she really, really wanted the Barbie who came with her own animal hospital supplies, he’d listen when she explained how much they needed a dog. Or even a cat.
Instead of always saying “One of these days.” Which seemed to mean “No.” Because they’d been living here in Shelter Bay since right before last Thanksgiving and the only real-life animals she had were two goldfish—who mostly just swam around in circles in their bowl with the fake plastic palm tree, which got boring after a while.
She was sitting on the bottom step when he came downstairs. “Ready to go?” he asked.
“I’ve been ready for hours.”
“Well, then, let’s get going. And I have a surprise for you.”
“We’re going to Dr. Tiernan’s shelter to pick out a dog?”
“One of these days,” he said.
“When?”
“Soon. Don’t you want to know what the surprise is?”
“Okay.”
He reached down and ruffled her hair. “I called ahead to the Grateful Bread and had a RESERVED sign put on the bus. Just for us.”
Emma loved the booth that was made out of the front of a real van painted all over with flowers and other fancy designs, some of which her daddy told her were peace signs, meaning that the world should stop having wars. But as much as she liked eating in the bus, she decided that she deserved a pout since he was probably going to make her wait forever for a dog. Maybe even until she was in third grade.
“Okay.”
He rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling, where a spot still needed to be painted over from when she overflowed a bubble bath last week.
Then, since he could never stay frustrated with her for long, he laughed, picked her up, flung her over his shoulder, and carried her out to his pickup.
The same way he could never stay annoyed at her, Emma couldn’t stay mad at her daddy. By the time they reached the restaurant, she was looking forward to the strawberry waffles and telling her poppy all about Peggy’s party.
Maybe she’d even be able to make him a Fourth of July card. Her daddy said he’d helped save the world from bad guys when he was a sailor. A really, really long time ago. In the olden days before computers or even TVs.
In the scrapbook her poppy had been making with the lady who ran the store where Peggy’s party was going to be there was a picture of him when he’d been a little boy, not much older than her, sitting on the grass beneath a tree, his arm around a white dog with a big black spot around its eye. If she could get Poppy talking about that dog, maybe her daddy would decide that one of these days could be now.
18
After insisting that she was in a hurry to leave the house, Emma had taken ages to make up he
r mind between her usual strawbetty waffles and the marionberry-stuffed French toast. Finally, after some assurances from the owner of the restaurant that she would love the toast, she’d ordered it. And she did love it. But although the delay had them running late, Mac wasn’t about to skip the visit to Still Waters.
There were more and more days when he wondered if his grandfather had even remembered he was coming, but having belatedly realized the power and importance of family, Mac wasn’t going to risk failing Charlie the way he had his wife and daughter.
After yesterday’s night off, Mac’s mind was on tonight’s show when he entered his grandfather’s room and found her there. The woman he’d run into last week. Today’s sundress was white silk, with a full skirt bordered in tulips like the ones blooming in the gardens outside the window. And while he remembered reading somewhere that tulips were unique in the flower world for not having a fragrance, underlying the scents of institutional disinfectant she smelled like a summer garden.
Since her back was to him as she filed away her scrapbook-making materials in her wheeled bag, Mac spotted her before she did him. When she turned around, instead of looking annoyed as she had the last time he’d seen her, her gray eyes widened and she looked strangely stunned.
Her gaze went immediately to his eyes, which, thanks to some optic surgery and a corneal implant, were nearly as good as new. While he would never be recruited to be a Marine sniper, his vision was nearly as strong as it had always been. He did still have a tracing of scars beneath his eyes, where the goggles he’d been wearing hadn’t completely protected his face from burns, but the plastic surgeon had done a good enough job that people didn’t look shocked at his appearance.
But she did.
Okay, maybe not shocked as if she’d just seen a zombie or a vampire.
But definitely surprised.
“’Bout time you showed up,” Charlie greeted him. “I was afraid you’d miss meeting Annie. This is the nurse I told you about,” he said slyly, proving that some things did stick in his mind. “The one you should ask out.”
While his memory might be hitting on all cylinders today, Charlie’s filters were down, allowing him to speak his mind, whatever he might be thinking. Mac watched the soft color, the same hue as the pink tulips on her skirt, bloom in her cheeks.
“Hi.” Seeming to recover, she managed a forced but polite smile. “I’m Annie Shepherd. I’ve been working with your grandfather on his scrapbooks.”
“You’ve been doing a great job.” It was the truth. He’d sensed an improvement in his grandfather since the scrapbook project had begun. While Emma’s poppy might still live mostly in the moment, the photos seemed to be helping him hang on to the old memories and family ties. “I’m Mac Culhane.”
“You’re Midnight Mac?”
“You listen to the show?” He couldn’t imagine a woman who looked this good and smelled so luscious having any reason to be alone at midnight.
“From time to time,” she said casually, knocking his rising ego down a peg. Apparently not finding him all that much more appealing than the first time they’d met, she bestowed a genuine, sunshine-bright smile on Emma.
“You must be Emma, the artist your great-grandfather keeps telling me about,” she said. “The one who drew all these beautiful pictures.” She waved a graceful hand at the walls that were becoming more and more covered with Mac’s daughter’s drawings.
When Mac imagined that hand, which wasn’t wearing an engagement or wedding ring, creating a happy trail down his bare chest, then beyond, he felt as stunned as she’d looked when she’d turned and first seen him standing in the doorway. Her voice sounded vaguely familiar, which he wrote off to that conversation they’d had when he’d dissed cats.
“I was going to be an artist,” Emma said, her little face beaming as if someone had turned on a lightbulb inside her. “But now I decided to be a vet. Like Dr. Tiernan.”
“That’s a very good goal. I adopted my cat from her shelter.”
“You have a cat?”
Mac nearly groaned at the excitement in his daughter’s voice. Wouldn’t it just figure that this woman had a cat? No wonder she’d put the Arctic chill on him the last time they’d met.
“I do,” the woman said. “His name is Pirate because he was found in the cove where pirates used to hang out.”
“Real pirates?”
“So the story goes. I run a shop called Memories on Main,” she told Emma, who looked enthralled. “And even if you’ve decided against being an artist, have you ever thought about making cards?”
Emma’s sky blue eyes widened. “I’m going to a card-making party there today!”
“Peggy Murray’s party?”
“That’s it!” While Emma had been excited about the party all week, she was suddenly behaving as if she’d just won a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Or a trip to Disneyland. “We’re going to make cards for soldiers in the parade!”
“I know.”
Well, of course she did, since she ran the store and was putting on the party, but Mac liked the way she validated Emma’s enthusiasm with an equal pleasure of her own.
“We usually send our soldier cards overseas through Operation Write Home and Cards for Soldiers, but I thought this would be a nice personal touch to thank our local military men and women.”
“Poppy was in the Navy,” Emma said. “And Grandpa was a doctor in Vietnam. That was a war.”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Then Daddy got blown up in Afghanistan. That’s another country that’s far, far away, which was why he was gone a long time. But he’s all okay now.” She reached out and tightly clutched his hand. “And he’s going to stay home with me forever.”
“How lucky for both of you.” She lifted her gaze from Emma back to Mac. Although she was still smiling, he recognized that invisible wall going up again. “I realize it’s come to sound like a cliché, but thank you for your service, Mr. Culhane.”
Although the Purple Heart he’d received was nothing like the Navy Cross Sax Douchett had been awarded, since coming back Stateside, Mac had begun to understand why his friend was always visibly embarrassed when people brought up his hero status.
“Hey,” he said with a shrug, “I was just the guy on American Forces radio who found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“That may be, but I suspect the troops who tuned into your program appreciated you being there for them.” Her gaze swept over his face again, lingering for a moment on the scars. He waited for the pity and was relieved not to see it. Then again, her expression had gone oddly unreadable, making it impossible to sense her thoughts.
Mac studied her in return, from the top of her dark head down to her feet, clad in pink flats with bows on the toes. When his gaze got up to her breasts, he remembered all too well how they’d felt against his chest. Which, in turn, had him feeling like a sex-crazed, hormone-driven sixteen-year-old now. Not that he’d actually experienced sex when he’d been sixteen, but he’d sure as hell thought about it a lot. The same way he was thinking about dragging her outside in the summer rain that had begun to fall so he could see what she’d look like wet, with that flowered dress clinging to her body.
Would the silk turn transparent? A question that got him thinking about what kind of underwear she had on beneath it. A woman who looked that hot wouldn’t be wearing practical cotton. It’d be lacy, and maybe her bra would be one of those half-cup things that revealed just an intriguing hint of dusky nipple, and . . .
Hell.
His fevered mind stopped just as his lips were about to taste heaven when he realized that all three people in the room were looking at him and decided that either he must have been staring too long or they were waiting for a response to some question. Hopefully none of them had noticed his totally inappropriate hard-on.
“I�
�m sorry,” he said. “My mind wandered off for a second. . . . To a work problem . . . down at the station.”
“Well,” she said briskly after a short pause, “I’d better get over to the shop to set up all the supplies and card-making kits for the party. We’re also having punch and cupcakes,” she revealed.
Emma clapped even as Mac figured that after that breakfast and the party, his daughter would be bouncing off the walls all night long from the impending sugar high. “From Take the Cake?” she asked.
“Where else?” The genuine smile was back, suggesting it was only him she had a problem with, since she was also friendly with his grandfather. Surely she wasn’t still pissed about the damn cat remark?
She bent down and brushed a kiss against Charlie’s cheek. “See you soon, handsome.”
Her tone was jesting, but it still had an effect on Charlie, because beneath the red-and-white-striped flannel bathrobe he was wearing over a bright green, blue, and yellow Hawaiian shirt covered with palm trees, his shoulders squared and he sat up straighter, looking much more like the proud young man in that photo of him on the bulletin board outside his door.
“And I’ll see you soon,” Annie told Emma as she ran a finger down the slope of his daughter’s nose. Then paused. “Perhaps you might want to have your daddy stop by the drugstore and pick up some concealer to help cover up that eye.”
Emma’s shiner was definitely getting more vivid by the moment. Worrying that it might cause the other girls to tease her, Mac was thinking he ought to have gotten something to try to cover it up when Emma surprised him yet again.
“Thank you,” she said politely. “But I like it because it shows everyone that I was sticking up for family.” She went over and put her arms around her great-grandfather. “Poppy says that family is the most important thing there is.”
It could have just been a trick of the light, but Mac thought that the woman’s eyes, which reminded him of the sun shining through rain, misted up a bit.