Her Homecoming Wish

by Jo McNally

  “He’s sixty-eight, Dan.”

  He winked at her. “Good for him, the old dog.”

  She straightened. “Ew. That’s my dad you’re talking about. No one wants to think of their father getting it on.”

  “My dad’s had a girlfriend for ten years now. Her apartment is right next to his at the senior center in Florida. I’m sure they’ve had a few sleepovers.”

  Mack grimaced. “My brain isn’t ready to embrace that yet. I just found out this morning.”

  “Ooh.” Dan stretched his legs out in front of him, leaning back against the table. He stared at the ground for a moment. “What bothers you more—that your dad’s seeing someone, or that he didn’t tell you?”

  She didn’t answer right away. Did it matter? She pressed her lips together.

  “Honestly, being blindsided pissed me off. A lot. Then they told me it all started when Dad started talking to Cathy about my problems. How weird is that? My failed relationship led to them being together.” She sighed, staring out across the freshly plowed fields on the opposite side of the road. “Oh, and he’s retiring. They want to ‘travel’ together.” She formed the air quotes with her fingers. She knew she sounded resentful. “He wants me to take over the store for good.”

  Dan was quiet, then he started to chuckle softly. “Man, you really have had quite a day, haven’t you? Is that why you were out walking when I found you?”

  When he found her. There was something about that word...found...that made her feel warm and fuzzy inside. Like he’d been looking for her. Like he cared. Like he’d pulled out that motorcycle just for her. Maybe she didn’t need him to be Danger Dan after all. Because she was really starting to like Good Guy Dan.

  “Mack...” There was gentle warning in his voice, and she realized she was leaning into him. She also hadn’t answered the question he’d just repeated a second time. She pulled back.

  “I was walking to settle my head, yes. And then you found me.”

  “And did I help or make it worse?”

  She held up his handkerchief, saturated with her tears, and shrugged. “Both?”

  He grinned. “Fair enough. You hungry?”

  “I don’t need any more maple sugar—my metabolism is buzzing enough already. And my face is way too messy for dining in public.”

  “I was thinking more along the line of burgers on the grill.” He stood and held out his hand. “At my place.”

  She took his hand. Bad idea? Good idea? Who knew the difference anymore? The only thing she knew for sure was that she was sliding on the back of Dan Adams’s bike and having dinner with him. At his place.

  Chapter Ten

  Dan put the perfectly charred burgers on the platter and set the buns on the grill to toast. Mack was just coming out of the house with a tray of condiments in one hand and two bottles of beer in the other. They’d stopped at the store on the way home and she’d juggled a container of macaroni salad and a box of cupcakes on the back of the bike, laughing all the way. He already had some baked beans in the cupboard. It wasn’t fancy, but then again, it was Thursday night, which meant it didn’t need to be fancy. This was just a midweek dinner between friends. Friends who’d kissed each other’s lights out an hour ago.

  Right before she’d burst into tears. But if there was one thing Dan was used to, it was dealing with people in emotional situations. He’d learned the worst thing you could do was try to tell someone to stop once a hysterical crying jag came on. Best to just support them without judgment while they worked through it.

  Knowing what to do and liking it were two different things, though. It had broken his heart to see Mack, always so pulled together and in control, just...lose it like that. He wondered how long she’d been holding all that in. How painful that must have been.

  “I didn’t realize how hungry I was until I stepped out here.” She smiled at him. “Those burgers smell amazing. I think I found everything we’ll need.” She held up the beer. “Even adult beverages.”

  She hadn’t said much about the white Victorian he lived in, or all the signs of Chloe everywhere, from drawings on the fridge to trays of beads on the dining table. Mack knew he was a single dad, of course, but he wondered how she felt about being confronted by it. They sat at the glass patio table.

  “You okay?” he asked. “You were quiet after we got here.”

  She took a sip of her beer. “Always the detective.” He tensed, and she set her beer down with a frown. “Sorry. I forgot you don’t like being reminded of your job.”

  “It’s not that...it’s just...” Dan wasn’t sure what it was. He didn’t want Mack to see him as his job. He wanted her to see him as a man. Maybe even as her man.

  “I know. Cartoon character and all that. I get it.” She looked up at the house. “It’s a bit surreal to be here at your house. It’s so...domestic.”

  He chuckled. “That’s me. Domestic Dan.”

  She laughed. “Who knew?” She took a bite of her burger. “Oh my God, you really are Domestic Dan. This is delicious.”

  They ate in comfortable silence, interspersed with an occasional comment about the food or the nice weather or something else with no meaning. They were opening the package of cupcakes when things took a more serious turn again. Mack gave him a level gaze over the top of her bright pink frosted cupcake.

  “So you know why I got divorced. What’s your real story?”

  He didn’t answer right away. Partly because his mouth was full and partly because he wasn’t sure how to answer. He swallowed hard and shrugged as casually as possible.

  “I usually say we grew apart, but that sounds like such a cliché. Our jobs didn’t help. She’s a nurse, and her shifts at the urgent care center tended to be the opposite of mine, until we were just passing each other in the hallway most days. We planned it that way at first, so one of us could be with Chloe. In hindsight, it wasn’t the best idea for the marriage.” He took a bite of his cappuccino cupcake. “Oh, man, this is good.”

  He told Mack how he and Susanne became more like roommates than husband and wife after a while. How neither of them seemed to mind that it happened. And how sad that realization made them both.

  “She tried. She took a job at the clinic here in town, with more regular hours. But after the local police department dissolved and got absorbed by the sheriff’s department, I didn’t have much control over my hours. And being a cop is...” He blew out a breath. “It’s not a nine-to-five job. We’re on call all the time if something big goes down. And we’re spread thin, so I might be thirty miles away dealing with an accident at the end of my shift, meaning I’d be way late getting home. And often not in the best of moods. Add in the fact that she was always worrying about me...”

  Mack nodded. “It must be hard. What you do. What you see.”

  She had no idea. No one did, except other first responders.

  “Susanne would try to get me to talk about it, but that’s not anything a cop wants to bring home with them, you know? She’d freak out if I did tell her anything, and it would just make her worry that much more. It reached the point where she was texting me twenty times a shift to make sure I was okay. So I stopped talking about it.” He took a swig of beer. Quite a combination—beer and cupcakes. “Eventually she stopped asking, and that’s when we knew it was over. We decided to split while we were still friends instead of hanging in there so long we hated each other.”

  “Much better for Chloe that way.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Susanne’s still here in town, then?”

  “About a ten-minute walk.”

  Mack set what was left of her cupcake down.

  “You live in the same neighborhood as your ex?”

  “I live in the same neighborhood as my daughter. And technically, they’re different neighborhoods, just close. This place is a hundred years old, while their house
is in a more recent development.” He looked up at the house. It had taken him a couple years of hard work to bring it back from the brink of disrepair, but it was turning into a home he was proud of. “Chloe can ride her bike back and forth easily, she can catch the same school bus from either house, and she’s close to her friends no matter where she’s staying.”

  “Wow.” Mack finished her beer. “That’s very...civilized.” He started to roll his eyes at the sarcasm, but she quickly corrected him. “No, I mean it! Not many people would be willing to do that, even for their children’s sake, but you and Susanne figured it out. Good for you.”

  Yeah, good for him. Their marriage had failed. Because of who he was. But at least they had managed to do the right thing by Chloe. He nodded, staring at the table for a minute before meeting her eyes.

  “There was no single trauma that tore us apart. No affairs. No big fights. No games. Our marriage faded more than died. Not like yours, I’m assuming.”

  She huffed out a laugh. “My marriage blew sky-high, Dan. Nothing left but ashes. If I’d been paying attention, maybe I’d have seen it coming. All the signs were there. Staying in the city overnight. All those work trips. Late nights ‘with the boys’ at the club. The way our social group—I can’t really think of them as friends—couldn’t maintain eye contact with me after a while. They all knew, of course. Not one of them told me I was being made into a laughingstock.”

  She told him how Mason loved having her on his arm at business functions and formal parties. How well she’d played the part, charming his clients, chatting with their wives, golfing with the ladies at the club every Thursday, running fund-raisers for the trendiest of Greenwich charities, sitting in the same church pew every Sunday at her husband’s side. It was all about appearances.

  “It wasn’t even a so-called friend who told me. It was Carly Fitzgibbons, the backstabbing president of the ladies’ charity society at the club. She and I had tangled over which charities the society funded. I didn’t think the ritzy private school in town needed help as much as the homeless shelter might, and she never forgave me for calling her out on it at a meeting.”

  Mack went quiet, and Dan had a feeling she was done talking. That was okay with him. He already knew her husband had cheated on her. He didn’t need the sordid details. He started to stand, figuring they should move inside before the bugs came out. Springtime in the mountains meant blackflies, or what some called “no-see-ums.” They were nasty, tiny bugs with bigger appetites than the summer mosquitoes, and that was saying something.

  He was just starting to stack the plates when Mack spoke again.

  “Carly sent me to the storage room in the middle of the annual fund-raiser for the society. She said they were short a centerpiece and asked me to go get one because the staff was busy serving appetizers. Made a big deal out of it and said the florist must have left one in there when they were setting up.” Mack ran her finger around the top of her empty beer glass. “I thought it silly, but I was on the committee and she was chair, so away I went. I walked in on Mason and one of the cocktail waitresses.” Her gaze met his. “She was up on a stack of boxes. His tuxedo pants were down around his ankles, and her legs were wrapped around his waist like a nutcracker. The three of us just looked at each other, then I walked out. I left the door wide-open behind me and told everyone I passed that there was free champagne being served in there. Quite a few guests got an eyeful before Mason could hobble over and lock the door.”

  “Good for you, Mackie.”

  “You’d think so, but people were more scandalized over my actions than his. I ruined their very classy event, you see. Mason’s behavior was bad, but boys will be boys, right? Wives aren’t supposed to be tacky about it.”

  “Screw that.”

  “Indeed.”

  They both laughed, and the tension that had been growing around her eyes disappeared. They moved everything inside and loaded the dishwasher. She asked if he wanted another beer, but he declined. He wasn’t on shift until tomorrow, but with the task force investigating the opioid crisis, he was always on call.

  “A crisis? In Gallant Lake?”

  “The theory is we’ve somehow become a substation for a supplier who’s funneling the stuff into the city, but they’re very happy to sell it locally, too. It’s getting bad fast. We’re losing too many good people. All incomes. Any neighborhood. The task force is working with the DEA and the state police to figure out who the local connection is and where they’re stashing the stuff. Hopefully we’ll get the head of the snake, but right now I’d be happy to just get this crap out of my town.”

  She hung the dish towel on the oven handle. “I’m sorry. That must be tough.”

  She didn’t pry any more than that. Didn’t ask for details. Didn’t shrug it off. Didn’t get dramatic. Just empathized. It resonated inside of Dan. Maybe it was his nonstop focus on finding who was responsible and dreading that it might be someone he knew, like Owen Graber. Or maybe it was the way Mack made him feel. Like she got it. Like she accepted that he’d said all he could and all he wanted to. It was nice. She was nice.

  His kitchen wasn’t that big, so it was easy to reach over and pull her close. Was that first kiss just a motorcycle and maple sugar sort of thing? Or had it really been as good as he’d thought? Judging from the way Mack melted against him, she was more than willing to explore that question with him. In fact, it was Mack who went up on tiptoe to press her lips to his. It was Mack who went exploring—first with her tongue, then with her hands, which wandered down his back and squeezed his butt the same way he’d done to hers out on the farm.

  The kiss heated up as if doused with gasoline. Their hands were moving, their heads were turning and they both grabbed quick gasps of air before connecting again. Faster. Harder. And he knew where this was heading. Right up that center staircase and straight into his room. He started backing up in that direction, pulling her with him. She laughed against his mouth as she followed. They got to the staircase, and he stumbled, too focused on what she was doing to him to be bothered with what his feet were up to. Their momentum carried them down until he was sitting on the steps with her straddling him. Yes, please.

  He slid his hands under her top, fumbling with her bra while she did the same with his belt buckle. Dan normally craved control, but right now he was very okay with shedding their clothes on the wooden stairs and making love right here, right now. Green light all the way. They were both chuckling under their hurried breaths as they worked with all the frustrating fasteners keeping their clothing in place. His fingers finally moved the bra in the right direction and the hooks came free. Oh yeah. This was happening. He was vibrating with need. Vibrating...

  Damn it. That vibration wasn’t from need. It was the phone in his pocket. The pulsing vibrating pattern meant the worst possible thing. The task force.

  No no no no no!

  He considered ignoring it, but that wasn’t a serious option. He dropped his head back and it thunked against the step. Then he reached around and pulled the phone from his pocket with a groan.

  “Mack...babe...gotta get this...work...”

  She froze above him, raising her head and staring, wide-eyed. Her mouth opened, then snapped shut when she saw he was swiping to answer the call.

  “Adams.” He barked his name into the phone.

  “Easy, Dan.” It was Sam Edgewood from the state police. “It’s not like I’m calling at three in the morning.”

  He didn’t bother apologizing. He was too distracted by Mack lowering her head and running her lips...and her tongue...up the side of his neck. He bit back a moan, sliding his hand up to fondle her breast.

  “What is it, Sam?”

  Mack giggled against his neck, but thankfully Sam didn’t seem to hear.

  “A car was stopped on the Thruway for speeding this afternoon. The trunk was loaded with little baggies full of little white pi
lls.” Sam paused for dramatic effect, which was almost Dan’s downfall as Mack continued to unbutton his shirt, tracing kisses across his shoulder. He bit the inside of his mouth to keep from groaning out loud. He was grateful when Sam continued, giving him something concrete to focus on. “The driver clammed up, but the car’s GPS shows it came from Gallant Lake. A parking lot at some abandoned ski slope, then out to the Thruway. Oh, and he had a sawed-off shotgun under the front seat, as well as a handgun stuck in his belt. These guys ain’t playin’. The trooper saw the guy reaching and drew his weapon before he could do anything.”

  Dan sat up and Mack moved off him, sitting on the step below and watching in concern. Fun and games were over. “A ski slope? Gallant Lake Ski Resort? That place has been closed for ten years.” Dan did the occasional drive-by to check for vandalism, but he’d had no idea anyone was using it for drug trade. “You wanna meet me up there?”

  “I’m on my way now. We won’t have a lot of daylight, but we should see if there’s anything obvious before this guy has a chance to warn off his bosses. Who knows where his one phone call will go?”

  With a look of apology to Mack, Dan stood, extending his hand to help her up. She’d already fastened her pants again and was reaching back to hook her bra. It was one of those mysteries of women that men would never figure out—he’d practically needed an engineering degree to unhook it, and she had it refastened behind her back in seconds. He told Sam he’d see him in ten and ended the call. Mack gave him a slanted smile.

  “Duty calls?”

  “Damn, Mack. You have no idea how sorry I am. Of all the lousy timing. I...”

  “Hey, it’s okay. You told me you were on call. Task force?”

  Dan hesitated. This is where he always got in trouble with Susanne. Holding back. Or telling so much that she worried.

  Mack stared hard, then shook her head. “And if you told me, then you’d have to kill me, right?” She tugged the hem of her shirt, covering the last tempting stretch of flesh above her waist. “Can you drop me at home?”