He’d no sooner signed the paperwork than she said, “Got a minute?”
His insides did a little “uh-oh,” but he said, “Sure, I guess. What’s up?”
She shut the door and returned to her desk, where she sank into the big old leather chair that had belonged to Sherman Mosely before he retired. She indicated for him to take a seat, which he did, then said, “I’m not sure how to ask this delicately, so I won’t even try. As a widower, do you think two years is too soon for a man to get serious about another woman?”
Sam didn’t know Dawn real well, since she’d only moved back to Haven about a year ago after ten years in the East, but it didn’t come as much of a surprise that she’d be as direct as her mother.
“Depends on the man, I suppose.” Relieved this had nothing, apparently, to do with him personally, Sam relaxed in the old wing chair across from Dawn, crossing his booted ankle over his knee. “We talking about Lane and Ivy?”
“Do I look like a person with a death wish?”
Sam would have chuckled, except the gal looked really worried. “I thought they were getting along okay. This theoretical couple who aren’t Lane and your mother.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” she said, clearly giving up any and all pretense at speaking “theoretically.” “Until Mama said something the other night that made me realize maybe this isn’t as much of a good thing as I first thought. She’s convinced—and so help me, if you breathe a word of this, we’re both dead—that Lane’s not over his wife yet. That he sees Mama as some sort of a way station. The first way station, no less.”
“And…she’s serious about him?”
“That’s what she says.”
Sam blew out a long, low whistle.
“Yeah. I know.” Dawn leaned back, bouncing a pen on the desk. “I’ve never seen her this worked up before. Or this afraid. Believe me, it’s not pretty. I mean…” She huffed a sigh, tossing down the pen. “I know she’s always gone out of her way to make everybody think she’s this free thinker who doesn’t need a man, what it all boils down to—once you get past all her b.s.—is that nobody’s ever cared enough to stick around. To accept her just the way she is, attitude and all.” Her mouth flattened. “To put her first. If Lane’s only seeing her as a substitute…am I even making any sense?”
She had no idea her words were clanging around inside his skull loud enough to set off seismographs three states over. “Are you asking me if I think it’s possible for him to really be in love with her?”
“Sorry,” she said, waving her hands. “That wasn’t fair, putting you on the spot like that…”
“No, no…it’s okay. As long as you’re okay with my answer.”
“Which is…?”
“That I have no idea.” He rose, his heart pounding. “But it’s not like there’s a rulebook for these things, you know. They’re both good people. Who’s to say it wouldn’t work?”
“That’s what I’ve tried to tell Mama. But…” Her hands lifted, a gesture equally annoyed and helpless.
Sam thought a moment, mostly about how he was probably the least qualified person to be giving advice right now, then said, “Seems to me they’re the ones who need to be talking to each other, though. Not you and me.”
She smirked. “Sure, piece of cake.”
He laughed softly, then eased himself toward the door. Dawn thanked him—although for what, God only knew—they said their goodbyes, and Sam collected Travis and scooted out of there. But all the way back home, the conversation thunked and twanged inside his head, as a few things he hadn’t fully understood until now started fitting in place.
Whether or not Lane was serious, or might one day be serious, about Ivy, Sam had no idea. By unspoken mutual consent, Lane’s love life wasn’t something the two men discussed. But Sam meant what he’d said about not seeing any reason why it couldn’t be possible, a man falling—and falling hard—for the first woman he’d ever felt anything for after losing his wife. Because that’s exactly what was happening to Sam. Whether it made any sense or not, whether he wanted it to or not.
Funny how he hadn’t even noticed the hairline crack in the mantra of self-reliance he’d hung on to since Jeannie’s death, a crack now big enough to let a damn herd of elephants through.
Or at least to let one lonely, obviously confused woman in. Maybe.
He blew out a sigh sharp enough to bring both Travis’s and Radar’s heads around. There were still more obstacles to him and Carly’s getting together than there were cheerleaders in Texas. But there was something more, something that went way beyond surface issues, that he had no idea how to reach, let alone help her deal with. From where he was sitting, frankly, the whole thing had “Dead End” written all over it.
Still, it was like his parents had always told him, and he and Jeannie had always drummed into their kids’ heads—you don’t love somebody because of what you might get back. You love ’em because they need to be loved, in the way they needed you to love ’em. And Carly Stewart was clearly somebody who needed to be loved. Just for who she was.
Except…who, exactly, was that?
And was she even remotely open to letting him find out?
And—here was the biggest question of all—was he totally out of his gourd for even thinking about any of this?
“Daddy?” Travis said beside him. “Why’s your face all crumpled up?”
Sam looked over into his youngest’s anxious blue eyes, forcing himself to smile. “No real reason,” he said, reaching over to ruffle Travis’s now shaggy hair and grin at the boy’s relieved smile. “Just thinking.”
Yeah. About how he’d looked away for a single second, and his sanity had gone toddling off.
Chapter 10
Butterflies in her stomach would have been bad—and absurd—enough. Pterodactyls, however, just went beyond all reason.
But there they were, Carly irritably mused as she checked her reflection for at least the hundredth time, fwomping around in there with their huge, pointy wings and those ugly cresty things on their heads. And the beaks! Let’s not forget about the beaks, threatening to poke right through her gut any second now.
Dad had already left for Sam’s. Worry filming his features like fine dust, he’d said something about Ivy joining him, since Dawn and Cal were leaving Max with their housekeeper, Ethel. Something was going on with that, something strange and not good, but Dad wasn’t talking and Carly had enough on her mind with the pterodactyls and all that she’d decided to leave it for later.
The doorbell, which she realized she’d never heard before this very moment, ding-donged her right into a tizzy. More of a tizzy.
“Coming!” came out as a scrawny yelp. She stole one last glance—as if anything had changed in the last five seconds—before tripping downstairs in a pair of strappy bronze sandals she hadn’t worn in about a million years, as layers of feathery, beaded chiffon took flight all around her. At the bottom of the stairs, she took yet another peek in the mirror over the hall table, immediately deciding she should have worn her hair up instead of going for the deranged voodoo doll look. Oh, God. She was going to throw up. The bell dinged again, sticking on the dong, which didn’t release until she opened the door.
“Wow,” she and Sam said at the same time, officially declaring themselves Lame Couple of the Night. But hell, she’d had no idea the man would clean up this well. Even if “cleaning up” in this part of the world meant pressed jeans, a suede blazer the color of a perfect pie crust and a shirt so white, it glowed against his sun-darkened skin.
Yeah, like she needed any more incentive to jump the man’s bones.
Then she realized his grin for her had sort of frozen in place. He made a “turn around” motion with his finger. So she did, jostling the pterodactyls.
“You mind if I whistle?”
“Go for it.”
So he did, and she grinned like a goon. “I did good?”
“Oh, honey, good doesn’t even begin to cover it.
That is some dress. What exactly do you call that color?”
“Red.”
“Nope. I know red when I see it. Red is this color’s poor relation.”
Naturally, she turned back to the mirror to try to see herself through his eyes. The color did go beyond your average Crayola, she supposed, the multiple layers of glittering fabric hovering between fuchsia and sort of a persimmon. The neckline showed plenty of breastbone, but only a hint of breast (which was all she had, anyway); the uneven hemline offered glimpses of thigh even though the dress officially fell to midcalf. Feeling silly at feeling so pleased, she picked up her tiny beaded bag and cashmere shawl off the table and swept past him and out the door. Oh, boy, did he smell good.
“You’re going to freeze,” Sam said.
“That’s why you’re going to keep the heat on in the…what are we taking this evening?”
“I thought the Caddy would be nice.”
Which would mean…yep. The van. The empty van.
“Where’re the kids?”
“Libby swore she wasn’t ready.” His hand came to rest on the small of her back; Carly nearly bit her tongue. “Although she sure looked ready to me. I swear, if she’s looked in the mirror once, she’s looked in it a hundred times in the past half hour alone.”
Carly laughed—a strange, sorta pterodactylly sound—as he held open the passenger side door for her to get in. The heater was already on. She wrapped her stole around her and let out a long, quivery sigh.
Sam got in, slammed shut his door, looked over at her. Then reached for her hand, lifting it to press a soft kiss against her knuckles. His lips were warm and smooth and his eyes were locked in hers and her mind went blank.
An almost hesitant smile pulling at his mouth, Sam let go of her hand to touch two fingers to her hair, as if it were something precious. As if she were something precious. “My mama used to wrap our Christmas gifts so pretty, my brother and I would spend hours lying on our stomachs in front of the tree, starin’ at ’em. We were so fascinated with the glittery wrappings and the fancy bows we almost didn’t even care what was inside. But next to you, honey, those presents might as well have been wrapped in newspaper and string.”
Her eyes filled. Dammit. Blinking furiously, she turned around and said, “Thank you,” and he said, “You’re welcome,” releasing the clutch to back out of her yard, and she felt like Alice peering over the edge to the rabbit hole.
Not good.
Not an extra ounce of fat anywhere on the woman, and she still made his mouth go dry. Jeannie had been soft and round and luscious, Sam’s definition of beauty for more than twenty years. But Carly’s delicacy, the way her skin seemed to glide over her bones like silk…you’d almost believe the light would shine straight through her if you caught her at the right angle. Or at least from her eyes, which had gotten all glittery when he complimented her. He wondered how long it had been since a man had made her feel treasured, instead of just wanted.
They opened the door to his house to find Libby having a hissy because Wade, who looked like he’d been wrestling the pigs, kept trying to give her a hug. “Get away from me!” she shrieked, trying to find a spot not already taken up with a brother or some animal or other, and Sam wondered at how a girl who encountered, without complaint, gross things on a regular basis could suddenly turn into such a priss. “Daddy! Make him stop!”
“Wade, cut it out,” Sam said, except Libby had already moved on to gasping over Carly.
“Oh, wow! You look, like, so gorgeous!”
“You look pretty hot yourself, missy,” Carly said with a grin, and Libby blushed. As well she should, having dragged Sam through what seemed like every store in Tulsa before she found the “right” dress, a shiny, changeable blue-green number with spaghetti straps and a full, short skirt. Her clunky heels killed the effect, in Sam’s opinion—which clearly wasn’t worth much—but with her hair all curly and loose, and the more subtle makeup Carly had shown her how to do, he had to admit she took his breath away.
As she clearly did Sean’s, who, in khakis and a sport jacket he must’ve borrowed from his father, looked like somebody in sore need of the Heimlich maneuver. Still, Sam could feel the testosterone buzz clear over here. Although, come to think of it, he was probably generating a pretty good buzz of his own, so with any luck he and Sean would neutralize each other and both their dates would be safe. Lane came out of the kitchen with Travis clinging to him like a koala, a bowl of freshly popped corn in his hand, and over the bellows of swarming, hungry boys he sternly shooed them out of the house, but only after assuring Sam no less than three times that they’d all be fine.
On the way to the high school, Sam did his best to engage Sean in conversation, but gave up after five minutes of monosyllabic replies. “And by the way,” he said, “don’t think I can’t see you back there, so don’t get any ideas,” which earned him a disgusted, “Daddy! Jeez!” from his daughter and a muffled snort from Carly. Who then touched his arm, giving him a tiny smile of understanding when he glanced over, a gesture which kept him warm all the way to the dance. And if that wasn’t a comment on his sorry state of affairs, he didn’t know what was.
The high school gym had been done up in your basic crepe paper streamers in harvest colors, shards of light from the spinning disco ball swimming frantically around the room in an—vain—attempt to camouflage the basketball court and bleachers, while paper-clothed tables with enough food to feed a whole ’nother state stretched across one end of the room. Around the perimeter stood clumps of girls, their grown-up-ness, like their shoes, painfully new; of boys, silently daring each other to be the first one to ask one of the girls to dance.
The band—a local group that Libby had given a thumbs-up to—had already launched into their first set, and the floor soon crawled with gyrating young bodies. Blair, looking about as tickled as Coop Hastings displaying that thirty-pound striped bass he’d snagged a couple years back, suddenly appeared in front of them, a tall young man with thick, dark hair and a shy smile in tow. After shouted introductions, the four kids disappeared into the crowd.
“What are you thinking?” Carly yelled up to him, the shiny wood floor seeming to breathe under their feet. She’d begun to sort of vibrate.
Sam slipped his fingers around hers, plugging into the vibrations, her warmth. One brow lifted, but she didn’t pull away. “Just wondering when I stopped being one of the ‘young people.’”
“Ain’t that the truth.” The vibrating started to get more serious, like she was one big itch. “Aren’t you supposed to be working this thing?”
“Not until nine-thirty. Then the punch bowl’s all mine for a half hour.”
“People can’t get their own punch?”
“It’s not the getting that’s the problem. It’s the doctoring.”
“Spoilsport.”
“Kids gave me a mug last Christmas that said that very thing.”
She laughed, then nodded toward the nearest clot of girls, so self-conscious in their fancy dresses. “They look like they’re waiting to see the dentist, poor things.”
“Just one of those rites of passage. We all went through it.”
“Not all of us,” she said after a moment. He frowned down at her, and she shrugged. “I never went to any of my school dances.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Nope.”
“Nobody ever asked you?”
“I was a rebel, not a loser. Of course I got asked. I just refused to go. Even to my own prom.”
The music suddenly stopped, leaving a pulsing, blissful silence in its place. But only for a couple of seconds. The lead singer mumbled something into the mike, it was hard to tell what, but laughter shuddered through the crowd. Then the band started up again, an old Bee Gees number, sounded like.
“Oh, my God! Fifth grade flashback! Oh, nononononono…”
Sam tugged her out onto the dance floor, where he immediately executed a rusty, but still serviceable, John Travolta move.
Carly howled.
“I do not believe this!”
“Believe it. I saw Saturday Night Fever five times.”
“And you’re admitting this?”
“What can I say?” he yelled over the throb of the music. “I was a very weird kid.”
“Who then grew up to be an even weirder adult.”
“Says the woman with half a jewelry counter hanging off her earlobes.”
“Okay, you asked for it, buster. Move over!”
A smarter man would have been intimidated to be on the dance floor at the same time with this woman, but Sam was too damn busy just trying to keep up—not to mention too fascinated with the interplay of soft fabric and lean muscle as she swayed and writhed and turned, every move as precise as a finely tuned engine. But keep up, he did, somehow. With a lot more enthusiasm than grace, God knew, but suddenly he realized they were the only ones dancing, like Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in the dance scene in It’s a Wonderful Life, everybody ringed around them, clapping and letting out catcalls left and right. At one point he heard Libby call out, “Ohmigod, Daddy!” which got a huge laugh, but they kept on dancing.
Then the music changed to country—what the band lacked in technique, they more than made up for in versatility—a line dance, and it was Sam’s turn to chuckle, watching her go at it with her turned-out feet in those strippy little shoes. But damned if she didn’t give it her all, grinning up at him like one of his kids, and his heart turned over in his chest.
The music changed once again, this time to a ballad. Panting, flushed, Carly looked up at him, her eyes wide with questions, and he pulled her close so fast she stumbled slightly. He tucked her left hand against his chest, his other one settling nicely into that little hollow at the small of her back. The dress’s filmy fabric snagged on his rough skin, bunched up against the slippery lining, both layers together no more a barrier to the woman underneath than a flimsy nightgown. Her perfume roared through his senses as her hand came to rest on his shoulder, so lightly he could barely feel it.
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