"Does Cleo know she has a date?" Tim asked gravely, sipping from a beer on the newly repaired porch.
"She'll pretend she doesn't. I've never met anyone so determined to be antisocial."
"Caught by the old hard-to-get routine, are we?" Tim raised an eyebrow inquiringly. "Have you talked to any of your carpenters lately?"
Jared juggled his bag impatiently. "Why would I want to do that?"
"Because Cleo hired them. At least half of them are recovering alcoholics or deadbeat dads who are trying to get their acts together. She apparently knows every construction worker on the Carolina coast and all their stories. I get the feeling she's not your usual easygoing love-'em-and-leave-'em type."
Jared shrugged. "I want to get to know her better, not seduce her. Unlike you, I just let things happen. You gonna be all right here alone?"
TJ swirled his beer. "I'm fine. You're the one who seems to have a problem with solitude. Give my regards to Cleo."
So, he normally liked to party and solitude was wearing thin. He didn't see the problem, but he wasn't the introspective sort and didn't have time or patience to work it out. "Fine. Maybe I'll call a few girlfriends and have one come down and keep you company if you're planning on staying long. Be good for you."
He strode off before Tim could throw the bottle at him.
Cleo apparently hadn't had time to erect any roadblocks preventing access from the beach, or she probably would have thrown them in his face as he walked up the road to her place. He didn't know what his obsession was with the prickly pixie, but he needed to know her better. Maybe he just needed his questions answered.
Maybe he just needed to scratch this itch.
He hid his frown as he walked down her drive and noticed the kids sitting on the front step with a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter between them. They smiled at his approach instead of running, which was probably a good sign, but he'd hoped to have Cleo to himself for a change. "What's up, gang? Cleo won't let you sit at her table and eat?"
Gene shrugged. "She ain't home. We're waiting for her."
Well, he should have known it wouldn't be easy. He dropped the bag of greasy barbecue on the step. "Your supper is probably healthier than mine. Wanna trade?"
Obviously, shyness didn't apply to food. They tore into the sack and contentedly munched their way into the picnic he'd intended for Cleo. "You guys waiting for Cleo to give you a ride home? I can get the Jeep."
Kismet merely smiled and bit contentedly into her sandwich. Gene diligently chewed his way through a mouthful before answering. "Nah. Mom's gone into town and we're staying here. Want a Dr. Pepper? I can get you one."
Jared looked skeptically at the house that usually spat nails and dropped skeletons on him. "You can get in?"
"Sure. It ain't locked. We don't have no thieves out here." Without hesitation, Gene jumped on the step that normally set off the alarm and blithely entered the front door that dropped skeletons.
Damn perverse woman. She only set alarms to ward off intruders when she was home!
Chapter 8
Jared wasn't speaking to her.
Which was fine with Cleo. She hadn't invited him to her house or accepted his offer for supper. He'd just presumed he was welcome. Well, he wasn't. She had better things to do than amuse itinerant comics.
Sitting on her roof in the hot sun, she whammed a nail into a shingle. She'd chosen the expensive architectural shingles, figuring she didn't have much roof to cover, and they would last longer, even if they were more work. Besides, she liked the cottage look of the light wood and shadows it created. She might not be much on decorating, but she knew good material. With some dark Charleston green on the shutters, the place would look comfortable and welcoming someday. Pity a good coat of paint wouldn't do the same for her.
From up here, she could watch the steady stream of cars and trucks and motorcycles roaring down her private drive to Jared's place on the beach. He must have invited the whole effing town for a party, except her. She would figure he'd done it to get even, but she didn't think she rated that high on a celebrity's priority list.
Maybe she ought to build a widow's walk on the roof, a tower that loomed over the trees so she could have a view of the ocean. Sitting up and rubbing her aching back, Cleo contemplated the view from here. She couldn't see the beach house or the couples frolicking on the sand, only the distant lapping of waves toward shore. It was all the view she needed.
She wondered how Jared managed to know so many people after being here only a couple of weeks, but it wasn't any of her business. Country club sorts learned to socialize from birth. Despite his weird occupation, she pegged him for the country club type. He'd probably already been golfing over at Hilton Head. He should have stayed there instead of invading her primitive jungle.
Wistfully, she glanced up the road in the direction from which Matty should be arriving—except he wouldn't be here this weekend. Maya and Axell had promised the kids a trip to the zoo in Columbia, and Matty had wanted to go with them. They'd invited Cleo. She probably should have gone. It wasn't as if Maya and her upright pillar-of-the-community husband would lead her astray. She just hadn't been up to watching a happy family at play, knowing she was deficient in whatever it took to create that same ambiance for Matty.
She probably ought to go down and write something revealing in her journal right now, like: "I know I'm good and getting better, but I'm still a work in progress." Yeah, like that was real helpful.
From this viewpoint, she could see Kismet sitting on a log in the menagerie, scribbling in her sketchbook. Gene had the pig out, playing with it. Normal people had cats and dogs. She had pigs and iguanas. If the counselor wanted proof of her weirdness, he'd find it right there. People didn't give her unwanted cats and dogs. They gave her unwanted creatures. That was bound to say something about her personality.
Wiping her forehead with the back of her wrist, Cleo decided it was time for a break. She'd take the kids some lemonade. Their mother had lost her job last week and disappeared into the city. Again. She didn't have the heart to tell them that one of these days, their mother might not come home at all. She'd hate to see those kids lost in the vast wilderness of an underpaid, overworked Social Services department. She knew firsthand how children got lost in the system.
Maybe she'd talk to Linda again, when and if she returned. The AA program in town wasn't much help for crack addicts, but it was better than nothing. She could take her to one of the meetings, maybe make her feel comfortable by introducing her to a few of the others. As if she'd ever made anyone feel comfortable in her life.
Snorting at the idea, Cleo climbed down. Stick with lemonade. That was at least something she knew how to do.
The kids started chattering the instant she carried the tray of glasses into their hideaway. They blossomed with a little attention, and for a brief moment, she felt as if she'd finally learned to do something right. Then she noticed how proudly they showed off their new clothes, and she knew she had only done it half right. Jared had gone all the way by interfering where she never would.
And she'd been wrong. Linda hadn't come after him with a hatchet for buying the kids what she couldn't afford. If it had been Cleo, she would have taken his head off with hedge clippers, but she had a hard time remembering other people weren't like her. One of her less intelligent traits, along with prickly pride.
She sat on a log, sipped her iced drink from a plastic cup, and listened to Gene chatter about the new wrestling coach they'd have next week. It had never occurred to her that she could simply walk into the school, give them money, and they'd buy equipment to start a team. There had to be more to it than that, but Jared had pulled it off. Maybe his famous name had helped, but she had to admire the guts and sense it took to go for it. So maybe she shouldn't be so hard on him. Just because he was handsome and rich and a jerk didn't mean he didn't have any redeeming qualities.
She was going to have to break down and thank him.
S
he postponed the inevitable by gesturing at Kismet's sketchpad. "What do the teachers at school say about your work?"
She didn't know a thing about drawing, as her pitiful mechanical sketches proved, but maybe she ought to show Kismet's book to Jared, see if he could encourage the girl. Unfortunately, Kismet was dismally shy. She'd disappear into the ground if Cleo tried pushing her too far.
Kismet shook her head, and smiled quietly as her fingers fluttered over the array of stubby pencils she'd collected over the years. Cleo had bought her an expensive art set for Christmas, but she'd never seen it again after Kismet took it home with her. Cleo didn't think Linda could pawn an art set, but she might have sold it to a friend desperate for a last-minute Christmas gift.
There had been a time when she'd sold her own wedding ring and a birthday necklace from her sister to get a quick fix.
She didn't like looking back at those times. She was getting better. She'd never be cured, but even if she couldn't change her nature, every step she took away from the stress and horror of her prior life took her further away from the evil temptations of her past. She had to believe that or kill herself.
"You know Jared draws, don't you?" she asked, uncertain how much Kismet actually observed or understood.
The girl nodded, and Gene wandered over to claim his share of the attention. "I showed her the cartoon in the newspaper," he boasted. "He does them on the computer, not on any silly piece of paper."
"He does them on paper, too," Cleo said quietly. "I have one at the house. Remind me to show you when we go back."
She didn't have time to register their reaction. The rustling of leaves warned someone approached, even if the peacock hadn't screamed an alarm. She hoped Jared's guests hadn't taken to straying this far inland.
Knocking back a hanging honeysuckle vine, Linda emerged into the clearing. Beneath the brassy blonde of her thick hair, her dark roots showed, but Cleo assumed she must have been a natural blond once for the children to have the coloring they did. Succumbing to heaviness in the waist and hips as full-bosomed women often did, the kids' mother still maintained a figure that would stop men in their tracks, particularly in the tight capri pants and belly-revealing knit tops she favored.
"I've been looking all over for you brats. Get on home now and quit pestering the neighbors."
Cleo could smell the bourbon from here. Linda wasn't a polite drunk or a druggie who sprawled comatose in doorways. She could be belligerent and nasty-mouthed when under the influence.
The children didn't immediately leap to their mother's command but looked to Cleo for a reassurance she didn't possess. "They're not bothering me, Linda," she said cautiously. "Want me to send them home in time for dinner?"
Cleo didn't like thinking about how she had looked and behaved when strung out on whatever drug her ex had brought home, but she did have some memory of being steered by a careful choice of words. She figured she had a fifty-fifty chance of that succeeding with Linda now.
Linda looked convincingly bewildered and disarmed enough to give in, but easily distracted, she glanced up at the shriek of a peacock and the sound of someone trampling the path on the other side of the clearing.
Cleo uttered a litany of mental curses as Jared navigated the shrubbery. Damn, the man not only had bad timing, he had to look gorgeous while he was at it. With his white linen shirt half unbuttoned to reveal a bronzed chest and a hint of pectorals no nerdy cartoonist should have, his yuppie khaki shorts creased and exposing long, strong legs that would have done a runner proud, he looked the epitome of wealthy manhood. Linda would either run, screaming, in the opposite direction, or suck up big-time.
Cleo intervened before either could happen. "Linda, this is Jared McCloud. He's living down at the beach for a few months. Jared, the children's mother, Linda Watkins. Kids, why don't you take the cups and pitcher back to the house, okay?" She'd be a real wheeler-dealer one of these days if she managed to keep all these balls rolling in the right direction without colliding.
"I want you brats home by supper, you hear!" Linda shouted after them as they hastened to obey Cleo. "I don't want you living over here no more."
"You'll be staying home, then?" Cleo had to ask once the children were out of hearing. She noticed Jared kept his mouth shut, for a change.
"I'll have welfare out here nosing around if they don't stay where they belong. I don't want them cutting off my money." She eyed Jared skeptically. "What you staring at, city boy?"
Cleo gritted her teeth and watched an ant crawl across a rock at her feet. It was so much easier not to get involved when she didn't have neighbors.
"Your children have been quite helpful," Jared said with careful politeness. "I hope you don't mind if they visit once in a while."
Cleo could just imagine the kinds of things Mr. America would be thinking about Linda—most of them accurate, if she was to be honest. Still, it rubbed the pain of self-knowledge deeper.
"Just keep your hands off my kids." Swaying only slightly, Linda shoved her way back through the shrubbery in the direction of the shack she called home.
Cleo listened to Jared's soft curses for a minute before she settled the roiling in her stomach and managed to stand. She didn't want to look at him. Some days, she didn't want to look at herself. She started off after the kids without speaking to him.
"Are you going to let those kids go back home to her?" he called after her in a tone of incredulity.
There it was, the challenge she confronted every day of her life. It came in different forms, perhaps, taking a different face each time, but always there. What if someone had said that about Matty and her? What if Maya had given up on her and taken Matty away, or let Social Services take him away? She'd be dead right now.
She snapped a twig from a wax myrtle and didn't face him. "She's their mother. They need her. She needs them. I'm not God."
She left him to his shock and disbelief and strode away. Someone from his world would never understand. She didn't expect him to.
Jared crashed through the bushes after her and grabbed her arm with a strength she couldn't fight. "That's a damned selfish attitude."
Fighting fury, Cleo looked him full in the eyes. "She's their mother. She's the one who rocked their cradles and changed their diapers and gave them names. Do you think there is anyone on the face of this planet who will care for them any more than she does?"
"She's incapable of caring for them!" he shouted. "Good grief, woman, can't you see what she is?"
Cleo jerked her arm away. "Yeah, she's lost. She's the mother of two half-black bastards, ostracized by her family and most of society, a victim of drugs and alcohol and probably abuse and possibly incest and heaven knows what else. Everyone she knows thinks she's worthless. She thinks she's worthless. Hell, for all I know, maybe she is worthless. I'm just not the one to lay that judgment on her. All right? The kids know where to find me when they need me. That's all I can do, all I'm gonna do. Now go play with your pretty toys and leave us alone."
Shocked by her attitude, Jared let her go. Cleo didn't look any bigger than the children as she shoved through the shrubbery away from him, but he had the feeling that every fragile inch of that woman's body was packed with dynamite so volatile, it could blow him away. He knew better than to play with dynamite.
Still, the faint fresh smell of her soap stayed with him, mixed with a hint of tar. She'd probably been booby-trapping the road again. He knew she wasn't any sweetness and light socialite like his mother, pouring money on troubled waters. It shouldn't shock him when Cleo threw all his carefully cultivated beliefs back in his face with her callous attitude.
Or maybe shocking him was another one of her methods of scaring him off.
The logical next question was—why did she want to scare him off?
He ought to get back to the schoolteachers, but curiosity—probably driven by careening hormones—carried his feet along the path his mysterious landlady had taken.
Chapter 9
Jared rolled his eyes as he reached the lane in time to catch the roar of Cleo's burglar system threatening to shoot intruders. Having arrived in the forlorn hope of seeing some form of the overdue script, Jared's agent now sat on Cleo's front step, searching under the porch eaves for the source of the bellows.
The witch swung from Cleo's tree and the No Trespassing sign flapped, protesting intruders, to no avail. The high school vocational education teacher was busy dismantling the nonworking swinging gate. The guidance counselor widow had draped herself over the gate to watch, and TJ leaned against a tree, arms crossed, admiring the chaos.
Looked like the party Jared had abandoned earlier was in the process of breaking up.
Jared saw nary a sight of Cleo and the kids, which was probably a good thing. A Real Good Thing.
"I think your party may be getting out of hand," Tim called from his tree trunk, lifting a beer bottle and gesturing. "They're talking about skinny-dipping down at the beach. I never saw so many teachers get loaded so fast."
"Great party, Jared," the vo-ed teacher called as he examined the mechanical gizmo from the gate. "I think I found the problem on this here gate."
He hadn't found half the problem if he hadn't met Cleo yet. Maybe throwing a little get-together for the teachers to stifle some of the resentment he'd stirred by finding sponsors for a wrestling team and not funding textbooks hadn't been such a hot idea. So, who knew teachers could cut loose on a few beers? He'd thought he was helping the kids.
"I'm not certain Cleo wants the gate fixed," he said, gazing over the vo-ed teacher's shoulder at the broken gizmo.
"Miss Alyssum did this?" The teacher whistled in appreciation and began putting the mechanism back together again. "I need to get her into my mechanics class. Maybe she could persuade the little shits to build something besides bombs."
"Hey, Jared," his agent shouted from the porch steps. "How do you turn this thing off? It's creeping me out."
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