A Hasty Wedding

by Cara Colter

  "He called me several weeks ago, too," Rose said. "He sounded quite agitated, not himself somehow. He told me I could quit looking for a rich husband. Soon he was going to have enough money that he wouldn't mind throwing a few crumbs my way."

  Holly felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise, but before she could wonder why, her mother continued.

  "He always had a tendency to be so crass. Oh well. Let's not worry about him. Despite his contribution to your genetic pool, you have some very attractive features, and your eyes are truly amazing. You need to wear your hair down, because the shape of your head is too blocky, and that softens it. I'd see a hair-dresser if I were you. You need some highlights. Your hair! Your father's again. Terribly drab."

  Well, drab would not do.

  "By the way, who's the man?"

  "Pardon?" Holly drew her eyes reluctantly away from the mirror.

  "A woman doesn't take a sudden interest in her looks without a man in the picture."

  "Oh, really, no, there isn't." She didn't know if it made her sad or glad that her mother did not pair her with her boss, did not even think it might be him.

  "Well, whoever it is, he's a lucky man," Rose said, and kissed her on the top of her head. "I really don't know how two such horribly self-centered people as your father and I managed to raise a daughter like you. You're sweet, Holly."

  Holly didn't know what to say. She felt like she was going to cry. Thankfully, the phone rang. It was the juvenile center wondering if someone could come for Jamie Lynn tonight as they had a sudden urgent need for the bed.

  To her surprise, her mother said she would come with her to get the girl.

  They dropped off Jamie Lynn at the Coltons', her mother suitably impressed with the obvious wealth of the estate. She would have loved to meet Meredith and Joe, but they weren't in that evening.

  "You know," she decided suddenly, when they arrived back at Holly's cabin, "I think I'll stay at a hotel tonight. I can't imagine what I'll look like in the morning if I sleep in that cabin with all the cat hair. My eyes get puffy. And I think I'll just head on home in the morning. You don't mind, do you?"

  When had anything with her mother ever gone the way she expected it? Had she secretly hoped they might have a few more giggles together, a moment or two more of closeness? Holly suspected those were the very things that were scaring her mother away.

  "Not at all. Thanks, Mom. You really do know how to make a woman look her best."

  "Don't I though? I would have loved to get my hands on that girl we drove from the center. Poor thing. Did you see the eyeliner?"

  She was packing her makeup lovingly back in a bag, but left a neat row of items on the table. "This is what looked good on you. I'll leave these here."

  "Thanks, Mom. I can't say I noticed Jamie Lynn's eyeliner."

  "Well, other people will, and it's a bad start in life. Some doors will be closed to her before she even has a chance. Maybe you didn't notice her eyeliner particularly, but you probably did notice she looked cheap and hard, all because of terrible makeup, and those frightful clothes, that awful dye in her hair.

  "Well, ta-da dear. Call if you need anything." And with that her mother was gone.

  Six

  That you can use your experiences to make a difference in the lives of these kids is a wonderful thing. Maybe even a miraculous thing.

  Her words kept coming back to him, making him view his life in quite a different way, making him think differently.

  Blake was in his office. Not the place everyone would choose to be Saturday morning at seven o'clock, but what the heck. He'd never caught on to golf.

  Still, the work kept fading, he couldn't focus on it. The question kept coming back.

  Did he believe his life had been in any way miraculous? That all of his life meant something and that he was part of a larger plan?

  A nice thing to believe. Naive, but nice. Hopelessly optimistic, but nice. In a way, that was what Holly had been doing since she got here. Making things nice, taking the hard angles and coldness out of his world and replacing it with her warmth, her soft touch everywhere.

  He wondered about miracles, a subject he knew nothing about. What if there was a quota, and he'd used his all up? He could think of a number of things that, in retrospect, if looked at in that softer light, might qualify as a miracle.

  When he was fifteen he'd opened up a stolen motorbike full bore on a highway slick with black ice. He'd lost it in a corner, and the bike had slid out from underneath him, and he'd gone skidding across the highway like a surfer on a wave—except his body had been the board. Not a scratch.

  Then there was the time he and one of those dubious characters he'd called a friend back then had been swiping stereos out of cars on a nice quiet residential street and the dog squad had showed up. They said it couldn't be done, but Blake had outrun the dogs. His buddy wasn't so lucky, and was still scarred from the twenty-six stitches it had taken to close his leg.

  He couldn't count the number of times in his life that he'd had his back against the wall, been outnumbered and outpowered, and still managed to come out of it with his head high.

  They were not exactly the kind of situations one expected miracles in, nor had he ever been the kind of guy who expected to get them. And yet, looking back now, he felt the smallest little niggle of wonder. Maybe. Maybe they had been after all.

  And of course there was one bona fide miracle in his life, even if the others didn't quite qualify. Joe Colton taking an interest in him, insisting on seeing qualities in him he could not see in himself. Joe believing it so implacably, Blake had come to believe, too. That he was worth something. That was a genuine miracle for a boy who'd been shuffled between his estranged mother and father like an unwanted pet.

  His desperate need for affection unmet, he'd learned to settle for attention. At least when he was in trouble, his parents acknowledged he was alive. Blake remembered his mother coming to retrieve him from jail the first time. Her face had been white she was so livid. She'd been at an afternoon card party. There had been an interesting gentleman there. How could Blake do this to her? What if people found out? Of course, the more she cared about people finding out, the more he didn't. He began to take a certain pride in his renegade reputation. In the end, that back-fired too and he wound up in foster care, and graduated to the thrill of stealing motorbikes, at first just for the joy of it, and later for profit. Eventually, he ended up being on pretty intimate terms with most of the juvenile detention facilities in Northern California.

  Over the years now he'd watched other kids get on that same train he'd gotten on, kids driven by desperation and fear and anger and frustration. They didn't always get off where he had. No mansion on the country estate for them.

  Nope, all their cards ended up reading "Go straight to jail. Do not pass go."

  So, he'd already had his fair share of miracles, now that Holly had him thinking along those lines. Had he used them up?

  He needed one more. Desperately.

  He needed to get those kids back on this ranch. They needed him, just as once he had needed Joe. This ranch was one way of stopping the train, at least for some of them, that train of despair and hopelessness they had gotten on way too young.

  They needed to be here. They needed the structure and the security. Blake needed to get them back so he could start all over again. Make them feel safe. Like the world cared about them.

  A much harder task now that some of them had been poisoned.

  He tried to get his mind on more practical matters. He was reviewing job applications for a new counselor to replace Celia Walters who was getting married, but his mind kept wanting to wander back to miracles.

  Not one kid or member of his staff had died from that water.

  That was a miracle.

  And here was one of a fairly major nature: how a barracuda like Rose Bennet had produced Holly. In fact, Holly's father struck Blake as pretty predatory, too. A shark and a barracuda—out comes a g
uppie. Impossible. Incredible.

  He heard the outer office door whisper open, and went out of his own office.

  Her hair was down again today, falling like a curtain over her face as she tried to get her sticky key out of the lock. Her hair was golden and fluid, shimmering with light. It made him think maybe he'd made a mistake. Not a guppie, after all. Maybe a goldfish.

  "Hi," he said. She had on a neatly pressed white blouse and a pair of navy trousers, sensible flat shoes. It was probably her idea of casual, since it was Saturday.

  She looked up, startled. "Oh, hi."

  "You forget something?"

  "No, uh, I just came in because Jamie Lynn was released last night and I wanted to call her grandmother and let her know she's okay."

  "I'll do it. It's your day off. Go golfing with your mom."

  "I don't golf."

  Well, that was a point in her favor.

  "Take her shopping or something, then. There's a new restaurant open in Prosperino. The Red Herring. Supposed to be good."

  "The truth is, Blake, my mom left earlier than planned."

  She ducked her head and moved by him to her desk. He dealt with enough kids whose parents had hurt them to know she was disappointed. And he'd known her for long enough now to know she wasn't going to let on.

  Interesting. Yesterday she had said that to him, Blake Fallon, I know exactly who you are. Now he felt the same way about her. There was a refreshing honesty between them now that he knew who she was.

  And right now she was hurt, and didn't want him to know.

  He thought of asking her if she wanted to go to The Red Herring for lunch with him. But maybe that wasn't such a good idea. Asking her to the dance had been enough of a mistake.

  Because ever since he'd done that there had been this funny little awkwardness between them. Nothing big. Nothing he could even put his finger on. Just something there that hadn't been there before.

  He missed what they'd had before. A kind of companionship, respect, trust, an easy camaraderie and flow to their relationship.

  That was why you didn't mix business with pleasure. That simple. Still, he couldn't leave her trying so hard to look brave, like she didn't care if her mother had left practically before she had even gotten here.

  This was the truth about mothers. Kids loved them. They loved them if they were junkies. They loved them if they were liars. They loved them if they broke every promise they ever made. They loved them if they were incapable of putting the needs of their children ahead of their own. They loved them, and believed every single word they said. If a mother said the world was made of blue cheese, then that was so.

  And what did these children ask as a reward for their love and devotion and loyalty? Nothing. But somewhere in this secret place deep within them, they wanted to be loved back.

  Sometimes by people who could not do that.

  He knew that was true if the kid was three or thirteen or thirty-three.

  He knew it was true of Holly, and he searched his mind for some small thing to make her pain less.

  "Your hair looks nice like that."

  She touched it self-consciously, did not look at him. She whipped the cover off her computer as if a national emergency required her immediate attention.

  "Oh," she said, "that's what my mother said. She said it helped my head not look so blocky."

  Blake had a sudden urge to throttle someone. He could even imagine his hands wrapped around Rose Bennet's wrinkle-free-by-surgery neck and squeezing until her eyes bulged.

  It was the kind of urge that he had relegated to his former life, that he liked to believe he had long ago left behind.

  The urge faded by itself as he watched Holly turn on her computer and stare resolutely at the screen. The urge shifted shapes unexpectedly, blindsiding him. It became an urge to hold her, to make it all right. To tell her her inner beauty was what mattered.

  She had said to him, "I know who you are," as if she could see his heart and soul.

  And he felt like he could see hers for a moment. A wonderful moment, when she met his eyes, and he saw that hers looked brown today, deep, kind, troubled.

  "You know, Holly," he said awkwardly, "you're twice as beautiful as your mother, without half trying."

  She stared at him, stunned. The most interesting shade of red was creeping up her cheeks. There. Sir Galahad had embarrassed her instead of helping out.

  "On the inside," he said hastily, "where it counts."

  And then he could have kicked himself, because it sounded like he thought she was a blockhead after all, and he didn't. It sounded like he was saying she wasn't pretty, and what woman wanted to hear that?

  He stared at her, wishing he could say what he felt. That she might be plain, but she was decent. That maybe she didn't have looks that would stop traffic, but she had integrity.

  But he knew he was only going to make it worse if he said one more word about the way she looked or didn't look.

  So he said, "Holly, you're the best damn secretary a man could ever have."

  "You're not so bad as a boss either," she said, her tone light. But he knew from the way she looked at her screen and wouldn't look back at him that he'd handled it all wrong.

  The problem was he knew all about women—and nothing about a woman like Holly. He retreated into his office, which he thought was a not bad form of damage control.

  And he vowed he was staying there until next Saturday night when he was taking her to that dance, and then they were getting back to normal.

  Or as normal as it could get without the kids here.

  * * *

  When she opened the door of her cottage the following Saturday, Blake stared at her, and knew it was never going to be normal again.

  She stood in the doorway, the soft light from a lamp glowing over her shoulder, touching the side of her cheek, turning her hair to molten gold.

  Her hair was down, and her glasses were gone. Her eyes looked huge and soft. Her cheekbones looked like something from Vogue, high, chiseled, proud. Her lips—

  He found himself looking away from her lips in one hell of a hurry.

  "Come in for a sec," she said. "I'm not quite ready. Can I get you a drink?"

  He stumbled in the door behind her. She was wearing a soft beige shirt, embroidered horses galloping across the tops of her breasts, an even more dangerous area to look than her lips.

  The shirt was tucked in to a waistband, cinched in by a tooled leather belt. He realized he could span her waist with his two hands. The ensemble was completed with a chocolate brown suede skirt that ended just below her knees, but its fullness contrasted delightfully with the slimness of her calves, the daintiness of her ankles.

  Where had she been hiding this figure? Those suits she wore to the office made her look like a box.

  And where had this face come from? He realized the glasses she normally wore were far too large, and had covered everything from her brow to mid-cheek. The glasses had hidden the curve of that cheekbone, the pert line of her nose; they had diminished the astonishing color and depth of her hazel eyes.

  "Is something wrong?" she said uneasily. He saw the Holly he knew in the insecurity that flared in her eyes. "It was a barn dance, right? Western theme?"

  A reminder he had not really gotten into the spirit of it. Jeans and a sports shirt. He hadn't even dug his cowboy boots out of the closet, mostly because they were real cowboy boots crusted with all that stuff real cowboys worked in and it would have taken him an hour to get them clean.

  He smiled with what he hoped was reassurance. "Everything's fine."

  He'd failed to reassure her, because she gave him an uncertain look. "Did you want a drink?"

  "No thanks. I'll just wait."

  She disappeared into a room at the back. Before she closed the door he caught a glimpse of a white lace bedspread that made his mouth go dry. It was so sensual and virginal at the same time.

  What was he doing here? In his secretary's house? He look
ed around, trying to clear his mind of the new Holly.

  Her house was the old Holly. Friendly and warm. She had a red-checked tablecloth on her small table that matched her curtains. A jar full of wildflowers sat in the center of it. She had some comfy-looking furniture grouped around the fireplace, her cat snoozing on the chair he might have chosen if he felt like sitting down.

  Which he didn't. He felt edgy and ill at ease.

  He wandered around. Some of the kids' pictures had made it into better frames and were hanging in here.

  What was wrong with him? Why did he want to bolt for the door? Because she'd transformed from a guppie to a goldfish to an angel fish before he had time to adjust to it?

  She came out of the bedroom. She had brown high-heeled cowboy boots on, and they made her look as tall and willowy as a model, an illusion that was dispelled when she did a self-conscious swirl for him. His eyes widened as that dress lifted and showed legs so long and shapely they could have belonged to a chorus girl.

  "Too much?" she asked him worriedly.

  Way too much, but he gulped and mutely shook his head. He held open the door to her cabin for her, waited while she locked it, held open the door to the ranch vehicle.

  She slid in, put her hands primly in her lap and looked straight ahead.

  He got in and ordered himself to say something. Anything.

  But that was where the problem lay. What were the rules here? Did he treat her the way he'd always treated the women he dated? Did he instigate the light banter with the slight overtones that promised a wild romp later?

  His tongue was as tied as a schoolboy's.

  This was Holly.

  He couldn't bring her that part of himself, the part who only cared about getting his own needs met, and to hell with everyone else.

  "Uh, did you ever manage to get in touch with Jamie Lynn's grandmother?"

  "Yes. But nobody warned me she couldn't speak English. And my high-school Spanish is dreadful. She probably thinks her granddaughter has been mauled by a bear or something."

  They talked about that until it was pretty much exhausted. Ten or twenty seconds used up.