Luralene leaned one elbow on the table. "Honey, I wouldn't leave my dog in her care. Woman's drunk as a skunk more days than she's sober. And her hair looks like she took a weed whacker to it."
Sidestepping Luralene's non sequitur, Dawn said, "Which means, since Charmaine can't afford to hire a real sitter or put the kids in day care, she's stuck."
"That's right—"
"You got it—"
"Uh-huh."
"Okay, that's it. Scoot," Dawn said, shooing the redhead out of the booth. "I can't stand this any longer."
She found Charmaine in the ladies' room, jerking a cheap plastic brush through her hair. The brunette had been pretty in high school, still was despite the effects of stress and overwork. Now, however, her eyes sat cowering in their sockets, the harsh lighting in the utilitarian room emphasizing her sallow skin, her thin, pale lips.
"We need to talk," Dawn said.
"Talk?" Her blue-gray eyes flashed in the mirror. "Don't see where you and I have anything to say to each other."
"I'd like to help you find Brody. So you can get child support for the kids."
The brush clattered against the sink, echoing sharply in the tiny room. Charmaine yanked her hair back into a ponytail, her movements jerky as she wrapped a coated band around it. "I don't need your help," she said, dumping the brush in her purse, then turning to leave. Dawn blocked her way out. "Excuse me, but I got work to do. And my kids—"
"—have got four people watching them. They're fine. You're not."
"And how the hell would you know how I am? Now get out of my way—"
"Not until we clear the air about a few things. And until you understand that I'm on your side!"
The waitress backed up slightly; for a second, Dawn wondered if she was going to slug her. God knew she looked mad enough.
"My side?" she said on a humorless laugh. "That's a good one. Well, get this, Miss High and Mighty—I don't need you lookin' down on me, or feelin' sorry for me. You're no better'n any of the rest of us, even if you sure did act like it when we were in school. You and Faith Meyerhauser, both." She crossed her arms under breasts too small to fill out the top of her bilious-pink uniform. "Her thinking she was such hot stuff because she was the preacher's kid, and you with all your big plans for what you were gonna do when you finally got out of here. Lord, all anybody could talk about was how you got that scholarship to go to college in New York City—"
"Which nobody heard from me!"
"Oh, yeah? If you didn't tell, who did?"
"How the hell should I know? The stupid guidance counselor, would be my guess. God knows, nobody'd ever be able to accuse Gertie Schultz of taking secrets with her to her grave." At Charmaine's eye roll, Dawn lifted her hands.
"Okay, maybe I'm not real proud of the way I acted back then, but I am not about to apologize for something I earned! I studied my butt off because, yes, I wanted to do something with my life that I thought I couldn't do here. And since my mother had already scraped together everything she had for my education, getting that scholarship was the only way I could accomplish that. That's not a crime, Charmaine."
"And what good did it do you in the long run?" she said, her colorless mouth tightened into a smirk. "I mean, here you are, aren't you? Right back in Haven, knocked up and unmarried…and thinkin' you're too good to marry your kid's father."
Dawn lost her breath. "What?"
Charmaine shrugged, triumph hovering at the edges of her lips.
After two seconds spent regaining her balance, Dawn looked her old classmate straight in the eye. "My reasons for not marrying Cal have nothing to do with…that. And maybe I hadn't planned on coming back to Haven, but here I am. And whatever you might think about my leaving, if I hadn't, I wouldn't be in the position to help you find Brody and make him pay up."
They glared at each other for several seconds. Until Charmaine said, "And how do you plan on doing that if I don't even know where he is?"
Dawn let out a very…tiny…breath. "You got his social security number?"
That got a frown. "Yeah, I guess. From our last tax return."
"That's all I need." At the brunette's skeptical look, she added, "Charmaine, I live for these kinds of cases. And you need someone who's not emotionally involved to go after him."
"I can't pay you."
"Neither can most mothers in your situation. Don't worry about it."
Dawn could see the war in her eyes, sense her waffling. So she added, "Hate my guts if you have to, but do this for your boys, okay? My father abandoned me, too, remember? Even if I never knew him, it hurt just the same. I didn't do what I did, or act the way I did, because I thought I was better, but because I decided I deserved better. There's a difference."
She left the bathroom, not realizing until she was nearly back to her booth that her knees were shaking.
* * *
Between the sleet hammering on the barn roof and the whuffling and crunching from upwards of two dozen horses chowing down their feed, Cal lost five years off his life when he turned around and saw Dawn standing a few feet away, drops of moisture sparkling in her hair. All wrapped up in one of those shawls or whatever they were that Ivy wore, flat black riding boots poking out from underneath the hem of her dark-red skirt, she looked like something straight out of an old novel.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you," she said breathlessly, her eyes on his as he closed the distance between them, the sound of his boots against the cement floor adding a base note to her "When you weren't at the house, I figured I'd find you here."
"Is everything okay—?"
"Are people saying I won't marry you because I think you're not good enough for me?"
Cal stopped dead in his tracks, his insides churning from a mixture of relief and shock. "What?"
"Are people—"
"No, I heard you." Frowning, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his sheepskin coat. "And what the hell do you care what people say?"
"Then it's true?"
His ragged breath misted around his mouth. Somebody whinnied behind him, adding her two cents. "I might've heard it once or twice. Not from anybody whose opinion means squat, though."
"Then have I ever done or said anything to make you think that?"
"No. For God's sake, Dawn—"
"You're sure?"
"Honey, what's this all about? After us barely exchanging ten words over the last month, you mean to tell me you came all the way out here in this weather to ask me that?" Sudden realization cramped his stomach. "In the GTO?"
A smile touched her lips, but it didn't do much for the troubled look in her eyes. "Okay. I won't. Although in my own defense, it was only cloudy when I started out. And I put new tires on the thing."
"I do have a phone, you know."
"I had to see you," she said, taking a step closer. "I had to know…"
"I'm a big boy, honey," he said over the ache in his gut.
"I don't break easily."
She nodded, then said, walking over to one of the stalls, "Where's Ethel?"
"Gone to Kansas City to be with her daughter over Christmas."
The mare, a four-year-old dapple gray, reared her head at Dawn's approach, then retreated farther into her stall.
"It's okay, sweetie," Dawn said gently, then frowned. "I don't remember this one. Is she new?"
"Yep. Just bought her last week."
"Poor thing…she looks scared to death. What's wrong with her?"
Cal joined her at the stall, trying to understand how, whether they'd been apart for ten minutes, ten days or ten years, the instant the woman slipped back into his life, it was like she'd never left. "Chronic homesickness, from what I can tell. I bought her cheap off a family who needed to move fast and couldn't take her with them. On paper she looked good. Hell, in person she looked good. Responsive, even-tempered, good stock…but she's taking her sweet time about settling in. What?" he asked at Dawn's bemused expression.
"You really needed another hors
e?"
He felt his mouth tilt into a grin. "Women don't need more than one pair of shoes, either. But a bargain's a bargain."
She laughed. "Yeah, but shoes don't breed in your closet and beget more shoes. Even if it does seem that way sometimes." Folding her arms on top of the stall door, she said, "I can see why you found her irresistible, though. She's beautiful."
Cal beat back the impulse to say something hokey about how irresistible he found Dawn. He might be crazy enough to buy another horse when he already had a barnful, but he wasn't that crazy.
"What's her name?" Dawn asked.
"Sunnyside's Blaze of Glory. Blaze to her friends."
At the mention of her name, the mare's ears flicked. Dawn smiled. "You say a family had her before?"
"Yeah. Husband and wife, two kids. She belonged to the oldest girl, who was going to train her to show."
"How old was the girl?"
"Not sure. A teenager."
"She wouldn't hurt me, would she?"
"I don't know. Gal seemed nice enough when I met her—"
Dawn whapped him in the arm. "Not the girl, dweeb," she said over his chuckle, then started talking softly to the mare. Nonsense, mostly, about some case she was working on or something. After a minute or so, Blaze lifted her head, her ears pricking in curiosity as Dawn kept up her soothing, one-sided conversation. Then the mare took a step closer, nodding her massive head and snuffling.
"See if she'll take this," Cal said, cutting a chunk of apple with his pocket knife and handing it to her.
"Treat time," she said to the horse, holding out the apple, flat palmed like Hank, Sr., had taught them so many years ago.
"Although if you feel anything like I do right now, you'd probably prefer one of Ruby's ice cream sundaes. And don't you dare tell Mama," she said in an aside to Cal. Bit by bit, the mare got closer, finally wriggling her lips to take the fruit from Dawn's hand.
Only to immediately retreat once more to the back of her stall, eyeing Dawn morosely.
"Don't take it personally, honey," Cal said. "She looks at everybody like that."
On a soft sigh, Dawn said, "I thought maybe she was just missing the sound of a woman's voice. That—I don't know—maybe…she needed someone to talk to who understood how she felt." Her gaze flashed to his, then back to the horse. Smiling, she said, "Somehow it didn't sound stupid while it was still in my head."
Cal leaned one hand on the stall's door frame, close enough to get a whiff of that flowery stuff she used on her hair. "It's not stupid at all. And yes, I'm serious, so you can wipe that look off your face. Animals are a lot more attuned to what's goin' on in our heads than a lot of folks give 'em credit for. But it takes time for 'em to learn to trust somebody, just like it does people. See," he said, when the mare nodded, "she's agreeing with me."
Dawn smiled, but some time passed before she said, "Promise me you'll teach our child how to hear what the horses have to tell us."
Cal waited out the thumping in his chest and said, "I'll do my best," and she sighed, like a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
"You can't stand seeing anything unhappy, can you?" he said.
She laughed softly. "I suppose not. Although my drive to fix things is way beyond my ability to fix things."
"Bet the people you've helped don't feel that way."
She shrugged, wrapping the shawl more tightly around her, as a little more vulnerability leaked through those hairline cracks in her tough exterior.
"You had supper yet?" he said. "Ethel left enough stew to feed half the state, I could heat some up for us if you like."
She blinked up at him like somebody just awakened out of a deep sleep. "Oh, no…I need to get back—"
"Like you're going anywhere in that car in this weather."
Her brow knotted. "I did manage to get here without doing myself in, Cal. And since when do you tell me what I can and cannot do?"
"Since you're carrying my kid, dammit! You wanna take your own life in your hands, you go right ahead…but not as long as that baby's inside you!"
Dawn gawked at him for a moment, then dropped onto a nearby hay bale as if all the fight had drained right out of her. "Oh, God…I'm sorry, that was a totally knee-jerk reaction. I'm just so used to only having myself to think about…" One of the cats jumped up into her lap. "Sorry," she said, stroking the loudly purring tabby's fur. "It's been a long day."
Lord, but the woman was going to be the death of him. "Don't take this the wrong way," he said, "but you got a real problem with letting people look out for you, don't you?"
She batted the cat's tail out of her face to look up at him. "Yeah. I do. With good reason. You lean on somebody, they walk away…wham! You fall on your face."
"Who said anything about leaning?" he said, because he figured that was safer than going anywhere near the walking away part of that sentence.
Confusion clouded her eyes for a moment. "You did. Didn't you?"
"No, ma'am." He reached out, grasping her hand to pull her to her feet. Then he hung on, just because he felt like it.
"I'm talking about caring. Enough to maybe point out dangers the other person might not be able to see. To catch 'em when they stumble, push 'em back up, if need be." He entwined their fingers, feeling his heart rate pick up at the simple skin-to-skin contact. "I'm talking about the kind of relationship," he said carefully, looking deep into her eyes, "that makes each partner stronger, not weaker."
He watched her pupils darken, her throat convulse.
"That offer of stew still stand?" she said.
Cal just grinned.
* * *
Since the lights kept flickering as if the power was thinking about going off, the only light came from the haphazardly decorated Christmas tree in the corner and the fire Dawn had made while Cal had gone to take a shower. And he'd put on some seriously sensuous jazz in his handy-dandy, battery-operated CD player—unlike his brothers, his mother's love for classical music hadn't rubbed off on her younger son—that was threatening to turn her inside out. And despite that business in the barn, she was feeling very…relaxed, curled up on the old leather sofa, cozy and safe and warm while a sleet storm raged outside.
She decided not to think about the business in the barn. She decided not to think at all, for a change. Except to complete her thought, which was that she was stronger than all of it—the dim lighting and the sultry music and the coziness and the whatever-that-was in the barn.
That was her story and she was sticking to it.
"You call your mother?" Cal asked as he walked in from the kitchen, handing her a heavy crockery mug filled with Ethel's stew.
"Yes. And for the record," she said around her first bite of tender beef, holding the stew close in an attempt to mask the sing-it-to-me scent of freshly showered male, "she agrees with you that I should have my head examined for driving out here in this weather."
"Always knew I liked that woman," he said with a grin, easing himself down on the floor across from her with his own mug, his back propped against the wing chair. Tags jingled as dogs stirred, intrigued and hopeful.
Dawn snorted. For the next few minutes hunger staved off conversation. Until Dawn said, "I've come to a conclusion."
"Am I gonna like this?"
"Probably not." She scooped out the last bit of broth, then said, "I've decided pregnancy makes me weird."
Cal's eyebrows quirked. "Makes you weird?"
"Okay, weirder."
"That's better…get outta here, mutt!" Cal said, elbowing one of the Australian shepherds out of his face. He shoveled in a bite or two, then looked over. "You planning on explaining that, or do I get to draw my own conclusions?"
"I don't know if I can. It's just…scary. I mean, my biggest thrill these days is lying in bed and watching my stomach move. What's up with that?"
Cal chewed for several seconds, then said, "And you think that makes you weird?"
"Well, it sure as hell isn't…me."
&nbs
p; "Sure it's you," he said with what sounded like gentle exasperation. "It's just you, pregnant. Which you've never been before."
So, naturally, tears welled up in her eyes. For at least the millionth time in the past five months.
Dawn pushed herself up off the sofa, a task becoming increasingly difficult as the days wore on, and held up her mug. "You said there was more?"
"Sure," Cal said, getting to his feet. "Let me get—"
"No, I can do it…oh!"
One of the dogs got in her way, making her stumble. The empty mug went flying, landing safely on the sofa, as she landed—not so safely—in Cal's arms.
"Whoo-ee," she said, her heart break-dancing inside her chest, "you've got great reflexes."
"One of my many talents," he said, and swooped in for the kiss. And, man-oh-man, kissing him back wasn't even a question. His lips touched down and her own just smashed right up against his. Boy, and she clung to him, to his hot, gentle, possessive mouth, wishing he could somehow suck out her apprehensiveness and confusion as if they were snakebite venom.
She growled, low in her throat. Cal backed up, amusement dancing in his eyes. "Was that a please stop or a please continue?"
"Damned if I know," she said, and a grin eased itself across his face.
The baby kicked; Cal slipped his hand underneath her sweater, his palm warm and strong against her bare skin, and every nerve ending she had went Yes!!! As did the baby, who kicked one over the goalpost.
"Not now, kid," he whispered. "I'm busy."
He kissed her again and again, and some more after that until each and every brain cell she possessed tiptoed quietly out of the room, and her breasts, heavy with desire and pregnancy, begged Pleeease? Although they were being far more polite about it than another, much brattier area of her body which was screaming ME! NOW!
Which is when she snatched back a couple of those brain cells, plugging them in long enough to pull out of Cal's arms and whisper, "Damn."
Except for the fire's crackling, the dog's whine, a slow sax in the background, there was silence. Dawn raised her eyes to Cal's, expecting to see…something. Annoyance? Confusion? Disbelief? But his expression, his body language, were as mute as his vocal chords. Instead, he reached over to pluck her mug from the sofa cushions—assorted dogs had already attended to the clean-up detail—as well as his own from the floor, then calmly walked back to the kitchen.
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