The Girl Most Likely To...

by Dorien Kelly

  “Dana?”

  Hallie ran to her side. “I heard the noise from the top of the stairs and called the police…ah, Cal. The door was jammed with something and I couldn’t get in,” she said while pulling off her sweatshirt. She pressed the cuff of one sleeve to Dana’s forehead.

  Dana yelped. “Watch it, that hurts!”

  “I think it’s just a little nick, but those scalp wounds like to bleed,” Hallie said without letting up the pressure.

  “Should I call an ambulance?” asked another voice.

  “Would somebody shut Henderson up? Got a gag on you, Chief?” a third voice called to Cal.

  Dana pushed enough of the sweatshirt out of her face to see that a crowd had come down the steps and gathered in the entry of the salon. Anna, the bartender from Truro’s, stood next to them with about half of the tavern’s regulars behind her. Though she couldn’t see him, she thought she heard Mayor Talbert’s booming voice.

  “Is anyone not here?” she muttered to Hallie.

  “Sandy Bend at its finest,” was her friend’s philosophical answer. “Now sit down before you faint.”

  “Only sissies faint,” Dana answered, but settled in the styling chair as directed. She was seeing some pretty interesting shooting stars, not that she’d ever admit it.

  She wiped something slick from her cheek. Damn Mike. It smelled like her favorite rosemary-infused, fifteen-bucks-a-jar hair pomade. Feeling marginally better, she began to take stock of the damage to her salon. Tonight’s battle made the first break-in look like the amateur night it had been.

  “Missy Guyer’s going to have a fit. I’d better start coming up with a new insurance plan,” she murmured.

  “You can probably hang on for an hour or two before coming up with a plan,” Hallie said.

  Her friend had a point.

  Dana saw that Cal had handcuffed Mike and hauled him to his feet. Cal’s mouth was drawn into a tight, angry line.

  “What are you all staring at?” Mike snarled to the crowd. Cal hitched him tighter under his elbow, but Mike kept going. “I dumped her again and she’s got a temper, okay?”

  “Shut up.” Cal’s voice was low and threatening.

  “Can’t take the truth? You think you’re the only one who’s had Dana in his bed lately? You’ve been sharing, Chief, and you didn’t even know it.”

  Cal clamped one broad hand on the back of Mike’s neck and shoved him through the crowd and out the door.

  In his wake there was nothing but silence.

  Dana ducked her face into Hallie’s sweatshirt and waited for the world to go away. She had spent a lifetime telling herself and anyone who would listen that she didn’t care about what others thought. That she was tougher than rumor and gossip.

  It had been a lie.

  The pain was so wrenching she couldn’t breathe. Cal Brewer was lost to her, and Dana didn’t care to go on.

  14

  WITH MORNING came clarity. Dana knew what she had to do. In some bizarre way, her mother had been right. She couldn’t continue to let the insanity of her life poison Cal’s.

  His future was to be decided by the town council this afternoon. Dana suspected that future would be less murky if she removed herself from it.

  She pushed through the police station door before she lost her nerve. Cal was on the phone. He nodded a quick greeting in her direction, and Dana looked away before the tears could start. Her stomach sunk as she noticed Mitch and Jim Caldwell, the county deputy she’d met when Mike burned her appointment book. She hadn’t been prepared for a public breakup, especially not after last night. To make matters worse, Mitch was headed her way.

  “Hey,” he said, then pressed a quick kiss on her cheek. “Are you doing okay this morning?”

  Because she knew words would give away her heartbreak, Dana simply nodded.

  “Mike’s been transferred over to the county jail,” he said. “I’m willing to bet no one will post bond for him, so you should be rid of him until the trial.”

  “Good,” she managed to whisper.

  Cal finished up his phone call and came to stand by his brother.

  “Is there someplace we can talk?” Dana asked.

  He glanced around and then said, “Would you guys mind giving us a minute alone?”

  Mitch and Jim stepped out the front door.

  Cal brushed back her hair to check the nick on her forehead. “Looks like you won’t have a scar,” he said.

  At least, not one that showed, Dana thought.

  She drew in a breath. “I don’t want to see you anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not working…it’s not what I had expected.” Those words held a world of truth. She hadn’t expected to fall in love with him. She hadn’t expected to find that a man in so many ways different from her could also be her soulmate.

  “Just when did you decide this?”

  “I’ve—I’ve been thinking about it for a while.” She pulled together the shreds of her tough chick persona. “You knew this wasn’t serious between us, Cal, so don’t bother getting angry. You’re better off this way.”

  She couldn’t look at him anymore, not without breaking down and crying. “I’ll see you around,” she said and bolted for the door.

  “YOU’RE BETTER OFF THIS WAY.”

  Cal leaned back in his chair and shook his head. She’d actually expected him to fall for that load of manure. Of course, not so many months ago, he had back in Chicago. The difference was that time when she’d run, she’d been scared. This time she was being crazy.

  Comforted by one saving thought, he grinned at the ceiling. She’d been wearing the necklace he’d given her, and he knew that when Dana booted someone from her life, she did it totally. That necklace was just where it belonged, and soon, he would be, too.

  His complacency was short-lived. Cal sat up as a horrible realization came to him. This was Dana, a woman who was a virtuoso in stubbornness. If she decided she was dumping him, he could consider himself dumped.

  “It’s not happening, sweetheart,” he said, though he knew she was well down the street and probably busy coming up with one-year and five-year plans to avoid him.

  Cal knew it would take something major to show Dana that he couldn’t be scared off. Something public. Steve told Hallie he loved her in the middle of the Summer Fun parade, but no way was Cal waiting for the parade to come around again.

  He’d just have to make his own spectacle…something big enough to let every citizen of Sandy Bend know that he loved Dana Devine, and if that bothered them, they could adjust to life with Big Brother MacNee at the helm of the police force.

  Cal picked up the phone and dialed the number of someone he knew was very talented at creating a spectacle. “Hey, Hal,” he said. “Do you have some time you can spare me?”

  DANA LAY on the chaise in Trish’s room with a cold, damp towel over her eyes, which, after the failure of cucumber slices and tea bags, was a final resort in the fight to bring down the puffiness. As she lay there listening to calming New Age music, and feeling no calmer for it, she heard the bells on the front door chime. Then chime a few more times.

  She refused to be curious. Curious meant she cared what was going on in that awful world out there. And she didn’t. Not one bit.

  The bells rang again.

  “Dana, you’d better come here,” Trish called.

  “Don’t want to,” she muttered.

  Dana heard someone enter the room and then close the door. “Trish, whatever it is—”

  The damp towel was whisked from her face.

  “You look awful,” Hallie said.

  Dana gave her friend a deadpan stare. “Gee, I wonder why.”

  “This won’t do,” Halle said. She went back to the door, opened it a crack and called. “Trish, get in here. We need a little emergency repair.”

  Dana closed her eyes. Didn’t they know she was beyond repair?

  Hallie corralled her over to Trish’s
table and mirror. “Just sit on the stool and be good.”

  They applied makeup with such speed that Dana thought Trish might have missed her calling. She belonged on a pit crew at the Brickyard down in Indy.

  The two women hovered over Dana, fussing and primping. Dana rolled her eyes and gave a bored sigh.

  She would not be curious.

  “Okay, much better,” Hallie said in a satisfied voice.

  “Now, come on.” She wrapped her hand around Dana’s wrist and led her to the door.

  When it opened, Dana tried to take a hasty step backward. “No way!” Trish shoved her out.

  In an eerie echo of last night’s disaster, half the town had somehow packed itself into her reception area. Though she was too dazed to take inventory, Dana was pretty sure she saw Mitch, Steve and the mayor. She definitely saw MacNee looking ticked off. Next to him, Olivia and Mr. V were holding hands and smiling at her as if they knew a big secret. And her mother! Dana couldn’t begin to imagine what would move her mother to come through the salon’s front door. Unless it was to comment on the plywood over the broken glass.

  “Okay, what gives?” she asked.

  Hallie nudged her side. “Over there.”

  Dana looked in the direction Hallie was smiling.

  Cal sat in her styling chair.

  She blinked.

  Blinked again.

  This was a Cal quite unlike any Cal she’d ever seen.

  She moved a couple of steps closer.

  No, she definitely wasn’t seeing things. His gaze met hers in the mirror and he smiled. He swung the chair around, stood and walked to her.

  Dana’s shock had receded enough for her to find her voice. “Um…I don’t know if you happened to notice this but your hair is—”

  “Blue?” he replied in the most casual of voices. “Yeah, I had noticed. It took Hallie the better part of two hours to get it this color.”

  Dana shot her friend an alarmed look. “Do I want to ask what you used to do this?”

  Hallie grinned. “Probably not.”

  “Okay.” Trying to ignore the crowd watching her, Dana paced in a tight circle. “So all of this is supposed to mean what?”

  “What it means is that I’ve called a town meeting. We need to get some things straight around here, the first of which is that I love you. Now, I figure that’s usually a pretty personal thing, except apparently in Sandy Bend.” He paused to press a kiss against her cheek, and then addressed the crowd watching them with rapt interest. “And since most of you seem to feel you have a stake in who I love, I asked you here.”

  He went to stand in front of Mayor Talbert and the town council. “You might note that not only am I here taking care of personal business during work hours, but I’ve effectively trashed the department’s grooming policy.”

  They nodded, some looking righteous and superior, but most looking amused.

  “I wanted to make it easy for you to go ahead and give the police chief’s job to MacNee, here, if you’re so wrapped up in how a man looks or who he gives his heart to. Of course, if you give a damn about how the job is done, you’ll give it to me, because I can do it better than anyone else.

  “What you see is what you get…well, except the blue hair, if we can figure how to get the spray paint out.”

  “Spray paint,” Dana blurted. “Hallie Brewer Whitman, how could you?”

  Cal laughed. “Yell at her later, sweetheart.”

  He walked to Mr. V. “In a short time you’ve become a surrogate father…grandfather…hell, I don’t quite know what. All I know is that Dana values your opinion. I’ve already talked to her mother, and now I’d like your permission to ask for Dana’s hand in marriage.”

  Mr. V stood as proud as the flamingoes on his shirt. “You’d better marry her, or—”

  He looked ready to issue a threat, but Olivia elbowed him and gave him a stern look. “Or you’re just plain nuts,” he decreed.

  Dana smiled through the tears she could feel messing up Trish’s repair job.

  Cal stood before her and took her hands in his. “You love me, right?”

  The time for playing coy was long past, if it had ever existed at all.

  “With all my heart,” she said.

  “Please marry me, Dana.”

  Dana Devine recognized her destiny, even when he wore blue hair.

  “Of course,” she whispered, awed that this moment had arrived.

  And as she kissed Cal, the most marvelous wedding plans started dancing in her mind….

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-3442-0

  THE GIRL MOST LIKELY TO…

  Copyright © 2003 by Dorien Kelly.

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