Staking His Claim

by Karen Templeton

  "Not necessarily," she said on a sigh, then got to her feet and headed toward the kitchen. Cal followed, arriving as she was running water into a mug. "Not if the affair happened someplace else, or maybe before Mama moved to Haven. You want some tea?"

  "No, thanks. And I suppose that's true." He leaned against the counter, watching her clunk the mug inside the microwave.

  "What if you never find out? Can you live with that?"

  "Of course I can live with that. What do you think I've been doing for the past twenty-nine years? It's not as if I'm going to obsess about this or anything."

  "You? Obsessive?" he said on a chuckle, and she swatted at him.

  So he grabbed her wrist. Just to fend off the blow.

  Except he found himself disinclined to let go right away…especially when her pulse quickened beneath his fingertips.

  A tiny yee-ha! went off inside his head as triumph, mixed with a healthy dose of arousal, spurted through him. Which naturally led to his gaze dropping to her mouth, which had fallen open, although apparently only so the word no could get out…except she took a step closer as she said it and he thought, Oh, what the hell, and touched his lips to hers.

  And everything he wanted and needed, everything he'd been afraid to want and need, everything that had been missing in his life since she'd left all those years ago was right there, in that kiss, in the scent and feel and thereness of her—

  "No!" he heard, more sharply. And this time she was definitely backing up, cheeks blazing.

  "It was just a friendly little kiss, darlin'—"

  "That was not just friendly, and you damn well know it!"

  "So maybe it wasn't. What the hell are you so damn afraid of, Dawn?"

  "Nothing's going to happen between us, Cal! Okay?" He nearly winced at the terror screaming in her eyes. "This is why I can't be alone with you for more than ten minutes, because my brain shuts down and I lose control!"

  He frowned. "Pardon me, but I'm still not seein' the problem here. What's wrong with losing a little control now and again?"

  "Because this is what happens when I lose control!" Her right hand flattened against her slightly curving belly. "Because my entire life is out of control! Because—"

  "Dawn?"

  They both whipped around at the sound of Elijah's voice. His brow creased, the boy looked from one to the other, clearly wishing he was somewhere else right then. "I finished up with those leaves. But I need to get back, Daddy'll be wanting me to help him by now."

  "Of course," she said, every shred of her outburst immediately erased from her features, as if it'd never happened. "I'll just get my keys—"

  "I'll take him back," Cal started, but Dawn lanced him with her gaze. "No, I'll do it," she said in that tone of voice.

  "Thanks for bringing—" she cleared her throat "—thanks for the cradle. It really is beautiful."

  Okay…would somebody please tell him why, out of all the females he could've had over the past ten years, the only one he wanted was a freakin' crazy woman?

  A crazy woman who—he fought back a grin—wanted him, too. Lord, the heat simmering in her eyes, radiating from skin so soft it made him ache, that sweet little fluttering pulse at the base of her neck….

  It was everything Cal could do not to throw back his head and howl.

  "You're welcome," he managed to say, then leaned closer and added in a low voice, "This ain't over yet, darlin'. Not by a long shot."

  He couldn't quite tell whether that was stupefaction or anger in her eyes before he turned to leave, any more than he could figure out what it was that had blasted to hell whatever had kept him from making a second move all those years ago. Pure cussedness, most likely. The same stubbornness that kept him tied to a business that would never make him rich, which, if he had a lick of sense, he'd walk away from before he lost his shirt, his home and his sanity to boot.

  But then, he thought with a grunt as he started up the truck, he hadn't exactly relied on sense to get him whatever he wanted ever since he was little, had he? For nearly thirty years, luck and charm had paved his way…except when it came to the only thing he'd ever really wanted, he now realized. The only thing he'd been too scared to go after. Well, brother, his luck had run out, and his charm—not to mention his seductive talent—was worth squat. Which meant he was gonna have to rely on his brains for this one.

  God help them all.

  Chapter 7

  The GTO's engine was way too loud to talk over as Dawn drove Eli back home. But not, unfortunately, too loud to think over.

  Man, she was in deep horse pucky now. The only other time she'd seen that look in a man's eyes…Oh, God. Marcus Walsh. The firm's senior litigator. When he had the victim in his sights.

  Oh…God.

  And she'd never kissed Marcus Walsh. A thought that produced a shudder due equally to revulsion and gratitude.

  How could she make Cal understand she simply could not let this so-called life of hers get any more chaotic than it already was? That she didn't dare let herself get sucked into the whirlpool of need she'd seen in his eyes, felt in his kiss.

  Felt reciprocated in some place so deep inside she couldn't have found it with a brace of bloodhounds and a Pentagon-generated map—

  "Hey! We were supposed to turn back there!" Elijah yelled over the engine's roar. "What's wrong with you?"

  "Nothing's wrong with me, you rotten kid," she yelled back, making a U-turn, then backtracking to the weed-choked entrance to the road leading to his house. So she couldn't take on Cal and whatever it was about him that scared her to death and made her want to crawl inside him at the same time, but she could take on a smart-ass twelve-year-old boy with kleptomaniacal tendencies.

  "So why were you yellin' at Cal, anyway?" the twelve-year-old in question said, loose gravel pinging this way and that as they bumped along.

  "Grown-up stuff," she said. "Nothing for you to concern yourself with. Now hush. Trying to talk over this noise is giving me a headache."

  The kid crossed his arms and scowled the rest of the way to the house. To her surprise—and apparently to Eli's as well—Jacob Burke was dressed and out in the yard when they pulled up, surveying the drifts of yellow-gold ash leaves smothering what little grass there was. Leaning on a metal cane, he pivoted awkwardly as they pulled up, radiating an almost fetid resentment as the wind whipped his too-long, somewhat curly dark-brown hair. The dog, his leash trailing him, woofed and wriggled up to the car to get at his boy.

  Dawn felt him tense in the seat beside her. "It's okay," she said softly. "I won't tell. About the magazine."

  "You think I care about that?"

  "Yeah. I do. So sue me."

  The boy gave her a puzzled look, then banged open the car door and got out. The dog jumped up, nearly knocking him over.

  "That the lady you were telling me about?" his father asked.

  "Yes, sir. This here's Dawn."

  Who was out of the car by now, her hands stuffed in her sweatshirt pockets. Blue eyes, pale as smoke but hard as diamonds, scrutinized her for a long moment from a too-thin but still startlingly handsome face. She was suddenly aware she had on her sorriest jeans—with the zipper undone to accommodate her expanding middle—the sneakers with the mismatched laces because one had broken and she'd been too lazy to go buy a new pair, the leaf bits that still clung to her hair.

  "Dawn…Gardner, ain't it? The midwife's gal?"

  "That's right. How'd you know that?"

  "Your mama delivered my boy." He clutched the cane, his stooped posture camouflaging his true height. An otherwise well-defined mouth stretched into a shapeless grimace. "The wife insisted."

  His obvious annoyance regarding his wife's birthing choice rankled. "She was in good hands with my mother," Dawn said, patting the dog when he trotted over to say hey. "The best."

  "I s'pose. They tell me you'd gone off to New York City or somesuch."

  "That's right," she said, wondering who "they" were, since it was highly doubtful
he entertained much.

  His eyes narrowed. "Why'd you come back?"

  "Personal reasons."

  She thought maybe she saw a flicker of a smile, decided it had been a trick of the light. He shifted his weight on the cane. "The boy give you any trouble?"

  "Not at all. He's a good worker. Which I suppose you already know."

  After several more seconds of subjecting her to that relentlessly unnerving gaze, he said to Elijah, "Go on inside, start peeling those potatoes for supper."

  Then, on the heels of the screen door slapping shut, Jacob moved close enough for her to see that, despite his thinness, his shoulders were nothing to sneer at. "I'd appreciate you not lookin' on us as some sort of reclamation project," he said in a low voice. "Elijah and me, we've been gettin' on fine for nearly nine years without anybody's interference. And we sure as hell don't need it from some upstart gal with her big-city ways, out to save the world. So good day to you, but we won't be needin' your 'help' anymore."

  With that, he turned and made his slow, obviously painful way back to the house, leaving Dawn feeling as though she'd been dropped into the middle of a bad made-for-TV movie. What, exactly, "big-city ways" would he be referring to? Her designer attire? Her salon coiffure? Or maybe it was her high-toned accent.

  Geez. No wonder the kid had problems.

  * * *

  A few weeks later Dawn understood why she'd never been inclined to take vacations before this. Now that she was past the first trimester blahs, with her "project" having been effectively swiped from her, having nothing to do was making her feel more drained than rested, like a battery running out of juice.

  And the fact that the only time she did feel energized was whenever she came into contact with Cal was doing nothing to assuage her grumpiness. Like this morning, when he'd shown up—unannounced, of course—with Halloween decorations and pumpkins and that damned cocky smile of his, and zzzzzt—she'd felt plugged into life again.

  Or just plain fried, one.

  He hadn't touched her, not even once. Hadn't tried to play cute, either. Instead, they'd spent half the day carving pumpkins and decorating the yard and gabbing their heads off, the way they used to when they were kids, as if they'd never had sex, weren't expecting a baby, weren't on opposite sides of an emotional minefield of unresolved issues. And for a while, as long as they stuck with safe, neutral topics such as her work, what had happened with Jacob, his breeding program—and didn't that make her heart swell, watching the way his eyes caught fire when he talked about what he loved so much—town gossip, things were fine. Only when he started talking about how Maddie and Jenna had wrought such incredible changes in his brothers did things get hairy. For Dawn, anyway.

  The wistfulness in his expression had nearly turned her inside out. It's my turn now, his eyes said, searing into hers. My turn for a shot at happily-ever-after.

  And it wasn't as if she didn't wish that happiness for him, or his brothers. God knows, she couldn't think of three people who deserved it more. But Ryan had only been married since May, and Hank hadn't even known Jenna five months ago. How could any of them be certain of their happily-ever-afters?

  How could anybody?

  "Dawn? Have you heard a single word I said?"

  Faith's voice jolted her back to Reality Central. She smiled for her friend, pushing the baby's stroller, her bulge disguised as a lasciviously grinning pumpkin. They never had gotten around to having lunch, what with each of Faith's kids, then Faith herself, being sick through most of October. But even though two of the kids still had horrible coughs, everyone had recovered in time for trick-or-treating. And Faith had asked Dawn to come along, since Darryl, she said, had declared he was just too worn-out to go traipsing all over town.

  Dawn had kept her mouth shut. Somehow. Although she had to admit, even though Faith moved about as fast as an arthritic snail these days, she seemed none the worse for wear. Woman seemed downright chipper, in fact, prattling away about people Dawn hadn't even thought about in a million years, as jack-o-lanterns flickered on every porch and the wind sent leaves swirling and branches clacking, lending a just-spooky-enough undercurrent to the giggles from all the excited little Ninja Turtles and SpongeBobs and satin-and-glitter bedecked princesses scampering about.

  "God. I'd forgotten how much I loved Halloween," Dawn said as the kids all yelled, "Trick or Treat!" in front of Hazel Dinwiddy's door.

  "Heck, I still do," Faith said, snitching a miniature Almond Joy from somebody's loot. "Did you know," she said around a full mouth, "that candy eaten while you're trick-or-treating has no calories?"

  "No, I did not. I'll have to remember that." She looped an arm through her friend's and squeezed. "This is fun. Thanks for asking me to come along."

  "No problem. Guess y'all don't really do this in New York, huh?"

  "Not in Manhattan, no." Just like that, she ached. "Kids go door-to-door in their own buildings, but the atmosphere's not quite the same."

  Faith chewed thoughtfully for a few seconds, then said, "It would drive me nuts, not being able to let the kids go outside whenever they wanted, or go down the street to a friend's house." The urchins cut straight across Hazel's yard to get to the next house, as Heather, Faith's oldest, screamed at her younger siblings to stop running, which set off a coughing jag.

  "I guess it's different when you live there," Dawn said mildly.

  "I suppose. So…" Faith unwrapped a miniature Kit Kat bar and stuffed it in her mouth. At this rate there wouldn't be anything left for the kids by the time they got back home.

  "You haven't yet told me about the baby's father."

  An unpleasant bubbly feeling stirred in the pit of Dawn's stomach, shoving aside the ache. "I know. I'm…working up to it."

  The blonde stopped short. "Oooh! That means I know who it is!"

  "Faith…"

  "Okay, okay, I'll wait. Impatiently, but I'll wait. So. You gettin' excited about the baby yet?"

  "About the same way I'd get excited about going down a roller coaster." She sighed. "Unbuckled."

  "Yeah, that sounds about right. At least, that's how I felt with the first one. By now, I'm like, whaaatever."

  "At least you're married!"

  Holy crud—where had that come from? Her words echoed over the wind and the kids' thanks-yous and somebody's dog barking. They were up to the next house before Faith said quietly, "That doesn't necessarily make it any easier."

  "I know that. It's just…" Realization thumped in Dawn's chest. "Faith? Is everything okay? Between you and Darryl, I mean?" She watched as another Kit Kat met its doom. "And does my mother know how much candy you're putting away?"

  "No," she said, chewing, "and don't you dare tell her. And Darryl and me are fine. For the most part. Marriage is just…hard, you know? I mean, we got married so young, on account of me getting pregnant and all, so we've had a lot of adjustments to make to each other along the way. And God knows, there are some days when I want to wring the man's neck. But then he'll do something real sweet, or I'll catch him playin' with the kids…" On a sigh she said, "And I figure I'll have my life back one day." Then she smacked Dawn softly in the arm. "And listen to me, gettin' all weird and mopey. I swear, I'm not like this except when I'm pregnant or PMS-ing."

  "But if you're having problems…"

  "We are not having problems! Not anything worth gettin' worked up over, anyway." Dawn reached inside her jacket pocket and ferreted out a clean tissue, which she handed to her friend. Faith dabbed under first one heavily made-up eye, then the other, then blew her nose. "Every marriage has rough patches, okay? That's normal. So don't you go making more of this than it is."

  Dawn thought of the college buddies she'd kept up with, how many of them had been in and out of marriage already—sometimes twice, for crying out loud—before their thirtieth birthdays.

  "So…you're happy?" she asked her friend.

  "Enough." Faith dug around in the loot bag until she found a miniature Krackle bar, her brow creased
as she unwrapped it. "I love Darryl. Always have. Mind you, he's no Brad Pitt," she said with a shrug as they walked to the next house, which happened to be Ivy's, "but he's mine. And he's all broken in, just the way I like. Besides, I'm not like you. I didn't have the options you do. I don't regret my choices, I'm not saying that, but if you're looking to me for answers, you're wasting your time…who the heck's that on your porch?"

  "Dracula, looks like," Dawn said. Assuming Faith would figure it out soon enough, Dawn watched the kids scoot up the sidewalk toward the house, to where Cal, fangs and all, had crouched down and was greeting them in his soft drawl, so as to not scare the smallest kids. Didn't work. One look and the air was filled with ear-piercing screams, until Heather yelled at them to quit being such babies, for heaven's sake, it was just a costume, was all.

  "Ohmigod," Faith said in a monotone as the screams became giggles. "Is that Cal Logan?"

  "Mmm-hmm," Dawn said, unable to stop the fizzy, fuzzy sensation inside her at the sight of this big man acting all silly with Faith's babies. Instinctively, her hand went to her belly as Faith's gaze zeroed in on the side of her face.

  "Cal Logan. Playing Dracula on your front porch."

  "Mmm-hmm."

  "Why on earth…?" Then she made this sound like a vacuum cleaner sucking up a penny. "He's not!"

  "He is."

  "Ohmigod." The kids came barreling back down the walk. Faith oohed and aahed over their latest acquisitions, then whispered, "What does this mean, exactly?"

  "We're still working exactly out—"

  "Hey there, Faith," Cal yelled out. "Lookin' good!"

  "You, too," she yelled back. "Love the widow's peak."

  He grinned, totally annihilating the scare factor. "Why, thank you, ma'am! I thought it was rather fetching myself! And just for the record? You are the hottest pumpkin I have ever seen!"

  "Flatterer," she said, then waddled on, waiting until two houses later to say, "You could do a lot worse than Cal Logan, you know."

  "That's not the point."