by Loree Lough
“Well, what would you call it?” Not ten minutes had passed since he’d handed her proof positive that her father—the man she had always thought could do no wrong—was a fraud. Jake Mackenzie had been her protector, her provider, her hero, for goodness’ sake, for thirty years. If he had feet of clay…
“No one will ever have to know about what happened at Pinnacle,” he was saying.
What had happened at Pinnacle in and of itself would have been more than enough to stagger her. She wouldn’t have thought it possible to top the news, and then Noah had pitched his either-or proposition.
Some choice! she thought. Marry Noah, and Dad’s reputation as an honest businessman stands, or…She pictured the plaque on the office wall, commissioned by the men and women who had worked for Jake Mackenzie. Friend and Father to Us All, it said. What would they think of their “friend and father” if they knew he’d stolen company funds for—
What did you do with that money, Dad? she demanded. Perhaps if she knew the answer to that, she’d understand why he’d done something so out of character in the first place. You’re grasping at straws, she thought, cupping her elbows. You want easy answers, and there are none.
Dara began to pace as a plethora of thoughts flitted through her head, among them, that her fondest childhood dream had turned into a nightmare. She hadn’t even gone to kindergarten yet when she began believing in the beautiful fairy tale—a handsome prince would carry her off on his white steed to a life of picket fences and the pitter-patter of little feet. But if Jake Mackenzie—whom she’d admired all her life—could do something so underhanded, it could only mean one thing: her handsome prince wasn’t coming, because no such man existed.
She heaved a sad sigh and glanced around Noah’s family room, at the tidy furnishings, the ceiling-to-floor flagstone behind the woodstove where the family photographs hung. Why hadn’t she noticed it before? There wasn’t a knickknack or collectible in sight. No throw pillows on the couch, no scatter rugs underfoot. I’ve seen homier rooms in furniture advertisements.
And then it struck her. That was what Noah was looking for…someone to give this place a woman’s touch. She frowned, staring at the nubby texture of the beige carpeting beneath her feet. Why doesn’t he just hire somebody? It sure would be easier.
She stood at the French doors, staring out across the frosty expanse of lawn. Pressing her forehead against the smooth, cool glass, she closed her eyes. “I don’t think you really want to saddle yourself with a wife, Noah,” she said softly. Straightening, Dara drew a frowny face in the vapor her breath had created on a windowpane. “You want a nanny. A housekeeper. Both, maybe.” She tucked her hand into her sleeve, wiped the smile away. “The Yellow Pages are full—”
“Been there, done that,” came his brusque interruption.
She turned in time to see him run both hands through his hair.
“Look, I’ve had it up to here,” he steamed, stroking a fingertip across his throat, “with women who’re content to put in a nine-to-five day, who’ll do only what’s absolutely necessary to earn their paychecks and not one whit more. My kids need more than a clean house and well-balanced meals. They need…”
He clamped his teeth together, lips and eyes narrowing in frustration. “I’ll tell you what I want, Dara.” He stood between the coffee table and the sofa, feet planted shoulder-width apart, and jabbed the air with a forefinger. “What I want is someone who will love my kids as if they were her own, someone who’ll genuinely care about every minute detail of their lives—from what they wear to bed to who they choose as playmates to whether or not they say their prayers.” He threw both hands into the air. “If I had access to all the money in the world, I couldn’t buy that!”
Dara’s eyes widened with surprise at the ferocity in his quietly faltering voice. He closed his eyes, as if to summon self-control, and, chin resting on his chest, whispered, “I know you’d be good for Angie and Bobby.”
“Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth?” she snapped.
Crossing the room in three long strides, he grasped her hands, gave them a gentle squeeze. “It’s a win-win situation, as I see it.”
“That’s not the way I see it! If I marry you, my father gets his good name back, you get a chief cook and bottle washer and your kids get a substitute mother.” She paused, lower lip trembling with frustration. “What’s in it for me?”
He blinked. Licked his lips. “I—I, ah, I guess I never looked at it that way.”
She snatched back her hands, folded them tightly in front of her and shot a furtive glance at the doorway. If only she could leave, right now!
Dara stared outside, where the snow was falling harder than ever. It was everywhere now, two feet deep and mounting steadily; clinging to tree limbs, hugging the twigs of shrubs and bushes; blanketing the wrought-iron deck furniture; burying flower beds. When she’d peeked out the front door earlier, it had climbed halfway up the tires of her car. It was sure to have hidden them by now. Escape was impossible; she was trapped.
She heard him quietly step up behind her. Inhaling the faint masculine scent of his woodsy aftershave, she felt the heat and weight of his hands on her shoulders.
“We have an awful lot in common, you and I,” he whispered into her ear.
“Like what!”
“We get along pretty well, and you seemed to like my cooking,” he joked. “And I can see it in your eyes when you look at Angie and Bobby—you really care about them.”
“Well, of course I do. A person would need a heart made of wood not to care about those—”
“Then give me one good reason we shouldn’t get married.”
There were a whole host of reasons—not the least of which was that they’d only just met—but the most important reason screamed in her head. “Because we don’t love each other,” she said. Surely he couldn’t argue with that.
The sandy brows drew together as his lips tightened beneath the tawny mustache. Like a swift punch to the jaw, Dara’s straightforward remark seemed to have caught him off guard, as if he’d expected her to smile and pull out her pocket calendar, start talking dates and gowns and—
“It’s been my experience that good marriages have to be built on a stronger foundation than love alone,” he said. “If they’re to endure the test of time, they’d better be made of sturdier stuff—more dependable stuff—than—”
“But without love,” she interrupted, “your so-called strong foundation might as well be sand. You ought to know that better than most, since your marriage to Francine was so…so perfect.”
Dara blamed her terse comment on having just discovered that everything she’d believed all her life about her father was a lie. On feeling cornered by Noah, his proposal. On the weather. The late hour. She pressed her fingertips into her eyes.
“Hey,” he said softly, “don’t cry.”
“Give me one good reason,” she said distractedly.
Noah gently cupped her face in his hands and ran the pads of his thumbs over her cheeks. Slowly, he studied her eyes. A smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “Having a woman respond to his marriage proposal with tears doesn’t do much for a man’s ego,” he responded honestly.
Under the circumstances, she didn’t want his simple admonition to get to her. But it did. And try as she might to fight it, she felt sorry for hurting his feelings.
“I’m not crying because you proposed to me…” She met his gaze and forgot what she was about to say.
She stirred uneasily as a warning flashed in her head. If she thought her car would make it through the snow, Dara would leave right now, because she wanted nothing more than to hole up in her room and hide under the covers, at least until the snow stopped falling. But she wasn’t going anywhere, and she knew it.
“I wish I could tell you what you want to hear, Dara,” he was saying. “I like you…like everything about you, but…”
He thinks you want to hear him say he loves you before—Why else was he looking at
her with that expression on his face? What else could explain the way he’d softened his tone and tilted his head? He feels sorry for you!
She replayed the evening in her mind at fast-forward speed, scanning her memory for the thing she’d done or said that might have given him such a ludicrous notion. Love, she wanted to say, is the furthest thing from my mind at the moment.
But she hadn’t spent all those years under the same roof with Gloria Mackenzie for nothing. Dara was a guest in Noah’s house—a fact that wouldn’t, couldn’t change until morning at the earliest, thanks to the twofoot blanket of snow on the ground. She couldn’t very well tell her host that he was beginning to sound like a conceited, self-absorbed man.…
Or could she?
Dara opened her mouth, fully prepared to tell him what she thought of him and his buy-a-wife deal, when he slid an arm around her waist and led her to the couch.
“I owe you an explanation. Please sit down and let—”
“You don’t owe me anything, least of all an explanation,” she said, enunciating every word.
“Just humor me, then.”
She sat, stiff and straight and silent, and listened.
“Francine…she was my wife—” He stopped and looked down, then started again. “It was cancer that took…” Noah inhaled sharply. “That…” He blew a stream of air through his lips before continuing. “I, ah, I don’t make a practice of talking about this.”
Suddenly, Dara felt sorry for him. “And you don’t have to talk about it now,” she said, her voice and manner softening.
“No, no. I need you to understand why I…”
Dara really didn’t have any business listening to any of this. She barely knew the man, after all. If only she could go home, hide under her covers and go to sleep. At least then she wouldn’t have to think about what Jake Mackenzie had done. Because if he hadn’t stolen the money, Pinnacle wouldn’t have hired a CPA firm to find it. So it was her father’s fault, in a roundabout way, that Noah had gotten his absurd idea in the first place.
He stroked his mustache between thumb and forefinger. “I made a lot of promises to her at the end.”
Well, at least while you’re being Mother Confessor you won’t have to think about Father Done You Wrong, she thought ruefully. “What kind of promises?”
“‘Yes, honey, I’ll remember your mother’s birthday,’ and ‘No, honey, I won’t forget the kids’ piano lessons’ and ‘Of course I’ll make sure they say their prayers’ and…” Facing forward, he leaned both elbows on his knees and clasped his hands in the space between, head down. His frown deepened, and so did his voice. “And I said I’d see to it they had a loving mother as soon as possible.”
And loving him and her children as she had, Francine hadn’t realized she was asking the impossible of him, Dara thought. Hadn’t she seen how much he loved her, and that because he did, remarriage was the last thing on his mind? Dara sat quietly, watching, listening. Oh, he was trying hard, she could see, to hide his true feelings behind that stern expression and those no-nonsense words, but he was hurting. She knew because his voice took on a special softness, and a certain sadness-tinged-with-longing glinted in his eyes when he spoke of his wife.
Lord, Dara prayed, will I ever know a love like that? She tucked in one corner of her mouth. Not likely, since there isn’t a decent man left on the face of the earth.
Now, that isn’t fair, she quickly corrected herself. Noah is decent enough. It’s just that…
Just that what?
“Look at me, Dara,” he said, interrupting her reverie. He cupped her chin in a palm. “I’ve never told anyone any of this before. I wouldn’t be telling you now, except…”
There was no mistaking the hitch in his voice. It made her wonder if she had the stuff it took to listen to him anymore. He was facing her now, but his gaze seemed to settle on everything in the room except her eyes.
“I grew up in an orphanage, raised by Franciscan brothers.”
“Is that one of them,” she asked, “in the picture on the mantel?”
He nodded. “That’s Brother Constantine. Closest thing I ever had to a father.”
“You looked like a good, sweet boy.”
“By the time I was fourteen, you might say I was a ‘hard case.’”
“Noah, really,” she said gently, laying a hand on his forearm, “you don’t have to tell me any of this. It’s none of my business anywa—”
“Yes, I do have to tell you,” he interrupted. “I made it your business when I asked you…when I…” He cleared his throat. “I was in trouble more than I was out of it. Cops and courtrooms were as familiar to me as my cot in the boys’ barracks.” He chuckled bitterly. “It got so bad for a while there that one particular judge knew me by my first name.”
“I never would have guessed it,” she admitted. “You seem so…so…like such a Goody Twoshoes.”
He sat, silent and blinking for a second or two before a grin slanted his mustache. “You couldn’t come up with something a little more macho than ‘Goody Twoshoes’?”
She returned the smile. “Well, you do seem to be the type who goes by the book…a little uptight even.”
“Uptight?” He laughed, but the merriment never quite made it to his eyes. “You make me sound like one of those bow-tie-wearing, pencil-necked nerds in flood pants and Ben Franklin glasses.”
“Flood pants?”
“You know, with cuffs that end about three inches above your shoes?”
“I get it,” she said.
In the privacy of her mind, she’d called him pompous. Arrogant. A single-minded, stubborn man who saw everything as black or white, period. She’d figured him for a self-righteous prig who judged all people by his own narrow belief system, and she hadn’t needed any more proof of that than the way he’d pontificated about her father’s crime. “Why would a man in his right mind do anything so foolish?” he’d asked that day in Jake’s office.
A fussbudget, maybe. Supercilious, possibly. But she absolutely, positively, definitely, did not see him as a nerd. “I never meant to imply you’re stuffy and—”
“You think…you think I’m stuffy?”
“No. What I meant was—”
He held up a hand to silence her. “Too late to shut the barn door now. Bessie’s out and chompin’ oats.”
“Hay.”
“Huh?”
“Hay.” She smiled slightly. “Horses eat oats. Cows eat grain or hay.”
“Is that so?”
She nodded.
“I didn’t know you were so well acquainted with farming.”
“There’s a lot you don’t about me, Mr. Lucas.”
“You promised to call me ‘Noah,’” he reminded her. “And I know more about you than you realize.”
At least their verbal frolicking had sidetracked them both—Dara from thoughts about her father, Noah from completing his confession. For a reason she couldn’t explain, Dara didn’t want to hear any more about his past, because she had a feeling it led directly to his talking about his love for his wife.
Because on the one hand, it was touching, the way he seemed to miss Francine as much today as the day he’d lost her; on the other hand, it sent a wave of jealousy coursing through her like none she’d experienced before. It made no sense, feeling this way about a man she’d just met. Besides, who was she to begrudge him his memories?
“I imagine life in a place like that could thicken anyone’s hide,” she said. She could almost picture him—young, impressionable, lonely…and angry, very angry.
“What happened to your parents?” she ventured.
Another shrug.
The gesture had been intended, she supposed, to convey that he didn’t know. But she had a feeling he knew, and the pain of knowing caused a muscle to bulge in his jaw, made him clamp his hands together so tightly his knuckles turned white.
“How long did you live at St. Vincent’s?”
“They tell me I was two when…” He s
hook his head. “And they boot you out of a place like that when you’re eighteen—”
“But that’s so young! How did you support yourself? Where did you live?”
“As I was about to say, they boot you out at eighteen unless you’re a student.”
She sighed with relief. “So you stayed?”
“Much as I hated the lack of privacy, the noise, never having anything to call your own, it was the only home I’d ever known. So I enrolled at Loyola—thanks to some not-so-subtle string pulling by Brother Constantine—signed up for a bunch of nonsense courses—art history, English lit, home economics.” Another bitter chuckle. “Nothing that would take me anywhere near what I wanted to do with my life, but at least I had a place to call home, till they got wise to my scheme.”
He may have had complaints about the place, but he’d loved it. “And what did you want to do with your life?”
He smiled a bit at that. “I wanted to teach. Math, to be exact. So kids like me wouldn’t be afraid of numbers.”
“Kids like you?”
No response.
“So why didn’t you?”
“Teach, you mean?”
Dara nodded.
Another shrug. “Because I met Francine.”
Her brows rose in confusion.
“I knew it’d take more than a teacher’s salary to keep her happy. She’d been born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth, and I wasn’t about to risk her father objecting to our relationship simply because I hadn’t chosen a career with much earning potential.”
“She loved you. What difference could your potential income have made?”
Noah laughed again, genuinely this time. “How old are you?”
“Thirty. What does that have to do with—”
“I’d think that by now, you’d have outgrown your naïveté.” He winked, grinned. “It’s kinda cute, though, the way you still have a kids’-eye view of the world.”
“The way I still…” Dara clamped her teeth together. “How did you end up with a successful business of your own? And a CPA firm, of all things?” she asked, steering the conversation back on course.
“God seems to have blessed me with a talent for numbers. I have a good memory for them, and I know how to make them multiply.”