The Taming Of Reid Donovan

by Pappano, Marilyn

  Cassie would never settle for him. Reid would never let her.

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Books by Marilyn Pappano

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Copyright

  Cassie would never settle for him. Reid would never let her.

  But it didn’t hurt to wonder, did it? It didn’t hurt to indulge in a fantasy or two. He’d been doing it all his life, wanting and never having. Wanting a mother like he’d seen on TV. Wanting a father of any sort. Wanting to be a normal kid in a normal family living a normal life.

  But wanting what you couldn’t have could hurt. Every time he looked at Cassie, it hurt way deep down inside. Knowing that he had no one to blame but himself made it worse. Maybe the odds had been against him. But people beat the odds all the time. He’d had a chance, and he’d blown it. He’d made so many bad decisions, and now he was paying for them.

  He was afraid he would be paying for them for the rest of his life.

  Dear Reader,

  Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays of all sorts and welcome to another fabulous month’s worth of books here at Intimate Moments. And here’s a wonderful holiday gift for you: Captive Star, the newest book from bestselling, award-winning and just plain incredibly talented author Nora Roberts. The next of THE STARS OF MITHRA miniseries, this book has Nora’s signature sizzle and spark, all wrapped up in a compellingly suspenseful plot about a couple on the run—handcuffed together!

  We’ve got another miniseries “jewel” for you, too:

  The Taming of Reid Donovan, the latest in Marilyn Pappano’s SOUTHERN KNIGHTS series. There’s a twist in this one that I think will really catch you by surprise. Susan Sizemore debuts at Silhouette with Stranger by Her Side, a book as hot and steamy as its setting.

  And then there are our Christmas books, three tantalizing tales of holiday romance. One Christmas Knight, by Kathleen Creighton, features one of the most memorable casts of characters I’ve ever met. Take one gentlemanly Southern trucker, one about-to-deliver single mom, the biggest snowstorm in a generation, put them together and what do you get? How about a book you won’t be able to put down? Rebecca Daniels is back with Yuletide Bride, a secret child story line with a Christmas motif. And finally, welcome brand-new author Rina Naiman, whose A Family for Christmas is a warm and wonderful holiday debut

  Enjoy—and the very happiest of holidays to you and yours.

  Leslie J. Wainger

  Senior Editor and Editorial Coordinator

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

  Marilyn Pappano

  THE TAMING OF REID DONOVAN

  Books by Marilyn Pappano

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Within Reach #182

  The Lights of Home #214

  Guilt by Association #233

  Cody Daniels’ Return #258

  Room at the Inn #268

  Something of Heaven #294

  Somebody’s Baby #310

  Not Without Honor #338

  Safe Haven #363

  A Dangerous Man #381

  Probable Cause #405

  Operation Homefront #424

  Somebody’s Lady #437

  No Retreat #469

  Memories of Laura #486

  Sweet Annie’s Pass #512

  Finally a Father #542

  *Michael’s Gift #583

  *Regarding Remy #609

  *A Man Like Smith #626

  Survive the Night #703

  †Discovered: Daddy #746

  *Convincing Jamey #812

  *The Taming of Reid Donovan #824

  Silhouette Books

  Silhouette Christmas Stories 1989

  “The Greatest Gift”

  Silhouette Summer Sizzlers 1991

  “Loving Abby”

  *Southern Knights

  †Daddy Knows Last

  MARILYN PAPPANO

  After following her career navy husband around the country for sixteen years, Marilyn Pappano now makes her home high on a hill overlooking her hometown. With acreage, an orchard and the best view in the state, she’s not planning on pulling out the moving boxes ever again. When not writing, she makes apple butter from their own apples—when the thieves don’t get to them first—putts around the pond in the boat and tends a yard that she thinks would look better as a wildflower field, if the darn things would just grow there.

  You can write to Marilyn via snail mail at P.O. Box 643, Sapulpa, OK 74067-0643.

  Chapter 1

  Cassie Wade walked into the freshly painted classroom and gave a great sigh of relief. Everything was finished. The walls had been painted, the windows washed, the blackboards hung. Low tables in geometric shapes were scattered around the room, with child-size plastic chairs drawn up close. A sunny yellow bulletin board was hung near one corner, opposite a bright red one, and held a gaily decorated banner welcoming the kids to school. Whimsical animals spelled out the alphabet on the walls, and painted numbers danced across the tile floor. Against all odds, the work was done right on schedule.

  The school’s remodeling budget hadn’t allowed for hiring professionals, not that any carpenter, painter or plumber she knew of would have been willing to come to Serenity Street for a job. It was all strictly amateur work, shared by Cassie, her boss, Karen, and husband, Jamey, his son, Reid, and the female staff and clients of Kathy’s House, the neighborhood women’s center. Cassie hadn’t been convinced that they could pull it off in time for Monday’s opening, but Karen had insisted they could. Once again, her boss’s cockeyed optimism had paid off. The grant had come through, the two classrooms were ready, the teachers had been hired and the schoolbooks had arrived. In two more days at eight o’clock, the Serenity Street Alternative School would open right on schedule.

  And Cassie was one of the lucky teachers.

  The school had room for only fifty students, which was fine since not even half that number had registered. Besides, there weren’t fifty school-age kids on Serenity or the two sister streets, Divinity and Trinity, that made up its neighborhood. Most of the families who could afford to move away—like her own—had done so long ago, taking their children to safer neighborhoods. The only ones left behind were those too poor, too defeated or too stubborn to leave their homes. The stubborn ones had been the first to sign up their kids. They understood the importance of education. Most of the poor ones had come with their children once they’d heard about the tuition plan. Hours of volunteer work translated into tuition waivers, work they were eager to do if it meant a better life for their kids. As for the defeated ones who’d given up under the weight of their burdens... Well, Karen believed that someday they would come around, and she was usually right.

  Wandering over to the windows that lined one wall, Cassie looked out on what remained of the old crushed-shell drive. The school’s small size was ideal for its location: a detached garage that had long ago housed horses and buggies, followed by more-modern means of transportation. It filled one corner of the yard behind the three-story Victorian that accommodated Kathy’s House on the first floor and the O’Sheas on the second. Someday Karen had plans for the third floor...but someday would have to wait for time and money, something always in short supply at the center.

  Cassie was willing to wait
for someday, willing to work for it. After all, starting Monday, her career would be tied up with Serenity Street, and soon after, so would the rest of her life. Like Karen before her, she had decided that the neighborhood would be more than just a job. She was making a commitment to the school and the center, to the kids, their families and their neighborhood, by moving to Serenity Street.

  She hadn’t told anyone yet. To say her family would be dismayed was like saying that traditional Cajun cooking was a tad flavorful. After all, her parents had worked hard for years, raising thirteen kids on practically nothing, so that they could move away from Serenity. They had wanted to raise their children someplace safer, someplace not so defeating. They had wanted better for them than poverty, gangs and street crime. They wouldn’t understand how any one of them could even consider visiting Serenity, much less working or living there. They would be bewildered and confused by her decision.

  Her eldest sister, Jolie, would be most vocal. Jolie had spent seventeen hard years on Serenity, until a scholarship to the University of Mississippi had provided her with a way out. Her husband would be outspoken, too. Smith Kendricks knew little enough firsthand about Serenity, but what he knew came from his job. As an assistant U.S. Attorney for eastern Louisiana, many of the cases he’d prosecuted in the past few years somehow had ties to Serenity Street. As the recently appointed U.S. Attorney, he wasn’t likely to support this decision.

  Even Karen, who had faced the same opposition from her friends and family, was likely to protest. It had been one thing for her to leave her home four hours away, buy that great big dilapidated old house, sink everything she had in the world into it and make a new life for herself. She would still advise Cassie to stay right where she was, eighteen stories above the crime and the grime of the city, and commute each day, traveling with locked doors and rolled-up windows, coming after the sun rose and scurrying away like a frightened rabbit before it set again.

  But that wasn’t how Cassie wanted to live. She couldn’t spend her days teaching the kids that they could succeed, that they didn’t have to let the despair and depression of their neighborhood hold them back, and then return to her safe, luxurious home every night. She wanted to be a part of this community. She wanted to show them by example.

  So she didn’t intend to tell anyone until it was a done deal. Once she’d moved out of the high-rise condo Smith had made available to her rent-free upon graduation, once she’d gotten settled in her new place and made a home for herself, then she would come clean. Until then, she wouldn’t exactly lie to anyone. She would merely avoid being truthful.

  Circling the tables and pint-size chairs, she stopped in front of a cinder-block wall. It had been painted bright blue, with a remarkable rendition of the tiny park down the street in the center. Bright flowers bloomed along the iron fence, and happy kids played in the grass and on the swings. Along the outer border, in bright yellow paint, were the signatures of everyone who had worked on the school project. Cassie’s own name was in the lower right corner. Karen and Jamey shared the lower left corner. There were Susannah and Elly, their nurses; Viola, the dietician; Dr. Pat, the psychologist; and Shawntae, Marina, Becca, Nicole, Irene, Mandy, Opal, Ruth and Berta.

  The artist’s name was missing.

  She wasn’t surprised. Once Reid had decided to cross over to the law-abiding side of the street, he’d done little to draw attention to himself. In the beginning, she supposed, it had been safer that way. Some of his former partners in crime hadn’t wanted to let him go. Along with everyone else, they had been convinced that his attempt at walking the straight and narrow was just a temporary aberration, that sooner or later he would find honesty and respectability too impossible a goal and would return to his old pursuits with his old gang. It had been more than six months, though, and while Karen had faith in him, not many others did. Everyone was waiting for him to slip up, fall down and give in.

  But not Cassie. She admired the changes he’d made. It couldn’t be easy to turn your back on the only life-style you’d ever known, especially when the people who should be encouraging and supporting you were simply standing back and waiting for you to fail. She was surprised that he hadn’t said to hell with them all and gone back to his old life. When he’d been running the streets with Ryan Morgan, people had feared him. People had respected him—for all the wrong reasons, admittedly, but wasn’t that better than no respect at all? Wasn’t that better than the wariness and suspicion he got now?

  Obviously he didn’t think so. He was still making the effort. He was working mornings at Scott’s Garage just outside the neighborhood and evenings at O’Shea’s Bar across the street. In the past month and a half, he’d spent every weekend over here, helping Jamey build partitions to divide the garage into the needed spaces, sanding and painting, repairing the roof, building cabinets, tiling floors. Everyone else had volunteered their time for various reasons—the staff because they were do-gooders, the residents because the quality of their children’s lives was important to them. Reid’s reasons for volunteering had had little to do with the school, she suspected, and everything to do with Jamey. He hardly knew his father, and their relationship, at best, was strained. There was so much bitterness and guilt between them that at times they could barely carry on a conversation.

  None of which stopped either of them from wanting more. Reid wanted to be a good son, and Jamey wanted to be the father he’d never been, but neither of them knew how. So Reid tried to earn his father’s respect, and Jamey tried to forget his son’s past, and neither was succeeding very well.

  Sometimes she found herself foolishly wishing that someday Reid would want her respect. She would give it, along with just about anything else he wanted to accept.

  The acknowledgment made her laugh out loud. She sounded just like a schoolgirl with a crush. That would explain why, after a long week at her old job, along with hours of volunteer work at the center, she had always looked forward to the weekend work in here. It would explain why she, with her fear of heights, had volunteered to help repair the roof, why she had spent hours on aching knees helping Reid lay tile, why, after hearing that he liked blueberry muffins, she’d gotten up at four in the morning three Saturdays running to bake a double batch of them to bring to the work site with her.

  A crush. It would be embarrassing if it were true, but, of course, it wasn’t. She had outgrown crushes before she’d ever been old enough to have one. They were childish, and she had never indulged in things childish.

  Sometimes she wished she had. Then maybe she wouldn’t feel so grown-up now.

  “I thought I would find you in here.”

  Cassie turned from the mural to face Karen. “Everything looks great.”

  “Are you excited?”

  “Of course,” she replied, well aware that her voice gave no hint of it. She had no problem expressing emotion. She was the youngest of thirteen children born to parents blessed with wild Irish passion. She simply expressed everything in the same even tones. Serene, people called her. She would rather be fiery like her sister Meg, passionate like Jolie or vibrant like Allison.

  “Have you looked over the textbooks yet?”

  “I have the first two weeks’ lesson plans all ready. You’ve accomplished a lot, Karen. You should be proud of yourself.”

  The older woman smiled modestly. “I haven’t done anything on my own. I’ve had tons of help along the way—from you and Jamey, the staff, the people who live here....”

  “Reid,” Cassie supplied when her list trailed off. At Karen’s curious look, she gestured toward the mural. “I just noticed that he didn’t sign the mural with the rest of us.”

  “Sure, he did. He just wasn’t as obvious about it as we were.” Karen moved around to the wall, studying the scene intently before finding what she was looking for. “There. R.D. Reid Donovan.”

  Cassie bent to look closely just above Karen’s pointing finger. It was a tree inside the park, and carved into its trunk, visible only if y
ou knew to look, were indeed his initials. They were unobtrusive, barely noticeable—exactly the way he tried to be. As if the best-looking six-foot-tall blue-eyed blonde this side of the Mississippi could ever go unnoticed.

  “I see you brought a few things.”

  Turning, she saw that her boss’s attention was on the boxes sitting on one of the tables. “Just a few odds and ends.”

  “Paid for with your own money?” Karen’s tone was chiding, and it made Cassie laugh.

  “Don’t worry. This is the last time it’ll happen. I’m going to work Monday for poverty-level wages. I’ll need every penny I earn to keep myself going.”

  “Maybe someday the school will actually show a profit and you’ll get a raise.”

  “Maybe.” But showing a profit wasn’t what the Serenity Street Alternative School was about, and they both knew it. Giving intensive one-on-one instruction to kids who badly needed it was their goal. Helping kids succeed when they started kindergarten with two strikes against them. Undoing the negative messages they were bombarded with from society, the media and their own neighbors. If the school ever began to show a profit, the money would be diverted from raises into hiring more teachers and providing more services, as it should be.

  “I’m going to track down my husband before he goes to work. If you need anything, I’ll be around the house or at O’Shea’s.”

  “I’ll find you.” She had always managed before. Last August, when she’d barely known the woman, she had come looking down here and had found Karen, something to believe in and a prospective job. Now the job was reality, she believed in what they were doing more strongly than ever and Karen was still—always—there for her.