The Perfect Match

by Kimberly Cates

  Alone with the images of his children clasped in Lisa’s arms. Alone with the memory of the girls’ absolute delight as they scrambled for her attention. Haunted by the way they hadn’t looked back at him as she drove them away.

  Cash knew they hadn’t looked. He’d watched for it. Waited. So sure Charlie, at least, wouldn’t fail him. He’d felt like hell when even she finally vanished from sight without so much as a careless wave.

  They’d forgiven their mother everything. Forgotten that she’d ditched them at Christmas. How she hadn’t come to see them. They’d been willing to start all over, give her another chance, even if he hadn’t.

  More nerve-racking still, Lisa had seemed different, too. More together. Stronger. Something stubborn in the way she’d scooped them into her arms, saying how much she’d missed them. Things were going to be different, now.

  Different? What the devil does that mean? Cash had asked himself that question a hundred times since they’d left. He liked things fine the way they were. His girls in his house with their mother three hundred odd miles away doing…whatever it was Lisa was doing now that she “had her own life to live.”

  That’s what she’d said she wanted when she walked out on the three of them. Her own life.

  She damned well couldn’t have his.

  She wouldn’t want it, he reasoned, trying to ease his nerves. Nothing had changed. Mac needed her therapy sessions more than ever and Lisa didn’t have the stomach for it. She hated small-town living and the kids were rooted right here: their schools, their friends.

  Their father.

  He picked up Mac’s bear, his jaw clenching against the fear scratching inside him. That he might lose his little girls.

  No. Hauling that wheelchair around for four days should remind Lisa how hard it could be. She’d probably overload the kids on sugar and let them stay up too late, playing mommy wonderful. He couldn’t help but hope she did. That way, Mac was bound to have a temper fit. That kid erupted like Mount St. Helens when she was up too late. And Charlie—she’d be asking all those impossible questions of hers, far too smart to be satisfied with the usual off-the-cuff answers grownups wanted to give.

  He wondered how Charlie was doing with her mom. If she’d spent the past hours scared of making a mistake and bringing Lisa’s disapproval down on her.

  Cash frowned. Charlie had accidentally stepped on Lisa’s taupe designer shoes when she’d flung herself into her mother’s arms. Sorry, his little girl had exclaimed, stirring up Cash’s memory of what Mac had told him the day of Charlie’s covert operation in the pet shop. That to Lisa, sorry didn’t matter. By the time you said it, it was too late to matter.

  Cash hoped his ex-wife would take a page out of her own rule book. And not…not what? Try to rearrange things? Try to be a real mother to the girls?

  Cash could almost hear Rowena’s voice scolding him. Isn’t that exactly what you should want? What’s best for them?

  “So, I’m a selfish bastard where my kids are concerned,” he muttered. “There you have it. One more ugly truth about Cash Lawless. I want to keep them to myself. Want to protect them from being hurt. I want Lisa to suffer for what she did to them.”

  And he wanted to see Rowena.

  Cash closed his eyes, leaned his head back and kneaded the muscles at the back of his neck. He’d spent the past week in withdrawal. Trying to get her off his mind, out of his dreams, his fantasies. But those hot kisses behind the laundry room door and the way her hand had felt encircling him weren’t on his mind the most. No. He wanted to see her across his kitchen table in the morning, wanted to talk to her—about how much he missed his kids. About how angry he was at Lisa.

  About all that poison inside him that made him unfit to love any woman ever again.

  He missed Rowena’s company, her smart-ass comments, the jangling of her bracelets and the way she cut to the chase, saying what needed to be said, not counting the cost.

  I’m doing the best I can… he’d defended himself, feeling at the end of his rope.

  You have to do better.

  If anybody else had said that to Cash he would have exploded. But he’d listened to Rowena. Tried…

  Destroyer pawed at him, then lifted his mammoth head and uttered a mournful howl that would have done a banshee proud.

  The damned dog was driving him crazy.

  What was Cash supposed to do to shut Destroyer up? When it came right down to it, he didn’t know a damned thing about dogs. Except for the fact that he should have taken Rowena up on that little vacuum cleaner bag deal she’d offered. And that this dog in particular was a mess when his kids were gone.

  What about you, boss? The dog seemed to complain. You’re just a party waiting to happen.

  “Well, we’ve got to figure something out,” Cash groused. “Otherwise we’re both going to lose our minds.” Cash hunkered down and scratched behind the Newfie’s ear. “And I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a lot of extra brain cells to lose.”

  Cash’s foot dislodged a Frisbee from somewhere in Destroyer’s pile of girl paraphernalia. The plastic saucer rolled a little way, then settled on the floor.

  A toy. That was the answer. Get the dog a new toy. A bone. Something to distract him, just like Cash distracted his kids when the girls got restless. There had to be some kind of plaything that would distract the mutt for a little while. And distract Cash, too. He’d load Destroyer in the SUV, drive down to Rowena’s shop and…

  She’d make them both feel better.

  Dangerous stuff, thinking like that, a voice whispered in Cash’s ear as he deftly reassembled his revolver and locked it in its metal box on the highest shelf in the house. Dangerous or not, he was too far gone to care.

  He nabbed the leash from a coat hook near the back door and snapped the lead onto Destroyer’s collar. “Let’s get the hell out of this fucking tomb of a house,” he told the dog. Destroyer’s tail drooped as much as his spirits.

  They’d both perk up once they saw Rowena, Cash promised himself. In fact, just thinking about seeing her managed to cheer him up.

  What was that old adage his mom had repeated over and over again? You’re never finished learning. About life. About yourself.

  Whoever would have imagined she was right again? He thought back to when he was a kid growing up in that tiny house overflowing with brothers. All those times he’d wished the whole tribe would get lost so he could just take a leisurely shower. Or lately, when his life had been so busy with his girls that he’d longed to sack out in front of the television and watch what he wanted to watch—no more singing sponges who lived in pineapples or cartoon girls with their pet monkeys.

  All those times he’d considered just how good it would feel—to do exactly what he wanted, when he wanted, he’d missed one minor point.

  Cash hated being alone.

  CLOSED.

  Cash’s mood plunged as he glimpsed the sign in the shop window. He checked his watch again. Okay. So the shop closed at nine and it was almost ten o’clock. But the light was on back in the office, so surely Rowena must be inside. Maybe working on the paperwork Vinny said had taken a backseat during the weeks Rowena had been helping out with the girls.

  Cash could have turned around, loaded his morose dog back in the car and headed home. Seen how many more of the kids’ toys Destroyer could add to the pile. Instead he knocked on the door, first softly, then more loudly, hoping she’d hear.

  It took barely a minute for Rowena to appear. Backlit for a moment by the office lights, she looked ethereal, like one of the fairy princesses in the books Mac liked to read. Her hair long and loose and gold, a violet blouse flowing to mid thigh, a subtle shimmer of gold threads at throat and cuff. Only her jeans, ripped at the knee, ruined the picture. She flicked on the shop lights and rushed to the door, a trio of puppies gamboling behind her. The kind with the pushed-in faces and tails that curled like a pig’s.

  As she opened the door she looked flushed and worried and almost
as glad to see him as he was to see her.

  “Cash! How are you?”

  The puppies leaped on Destroyer, trying to lure him into a game. The Newfoundland ignored them, and let out a pitiful whimper. He lay down and rolled over on his back, feet in the air, as if to say, “he let that stranger take my kids right out from under my nose! It’s killing me.”

  “That bad, huh?” Rowena hunkered down to scratch the Newfie’s belly.

  “He’s been like this for hours. It’s driving me insane.”

  Rowena scooped up two of the puppies and popped them in the nearest exercise pen. Cash grabbed the third and did the same thing.

  Destroyer was already miserable. Being tortured by those little menaces was over the line.

  “You’ve got to do something with this dog,” Cash said, trying to pry his cuff from between needlelike puppy teeth. The dog let go and chased after the nearest curly tail. “From the minute Lisa picked up the girls, Destroyer’s been pacing, carrying around the girls’ toys. He’s got a whole pile of them in the living room now.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “That’s not the worst of it. He whines. He howls.”

  “He misses them.”

  Yeah, like he’d needed to drive all the way over here to pick up that newsflash. “I miss them, too. But I’m not being a great big baby about it.”

  The woman actually smiled, her eyes twinkling. “You’re jealous, huh?”

  “Jealous?”

  “I bet you wish you could whine and howl right along with him.”

  “I do not!” Cash snapped, then he grimaced. “But…I guess I can see where he’s coming from. It’s too quiet at home. That house is like a tomb. I was hoping you’d have some kind of dog toy or bone or…I don’t know, something to take our minds off…his mind off…”

  “Four days is a long time, huh?”

  Cash gave a wry chuckle. “And getting longer by the minute.”

  “Come on in. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  “No!” he said so quickly she laughed. “God, Rowena. Anything but that.”

  “There may be beer in the fridge in back. How about one of those?”

  “Got anything for him?” Cash said, nudging his lump of a dog. “Like a doggy tranquilizer or something?”

  “I’ve got another rescue I’m trying to socialize. Their mom.” She leaned over to pet the nearest pug’s wiggly hind end. “She could use a break from these little pirates. Motherhood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it, Lucy?”

  Cash could tell the moment Rowena realized what she’d said and how it might affect him.

  “Lucy’s been nursing them and they’ve been biting her nipples.”

  Nipples…now that was a word to get a man’s attention, Cash thought, trying to keep his gaze from straying to the swells beneath Rowena’s neckline.

  “Lucy adores her babies,” Rowena tried to explain, “but she’s sore and…well, how would you like it if somebody was teething on your tender parts?”

  That depends on whose mouth is involved. Cash reined himself in. That train of thought was going to end in nothing but trouble.

  “What I’m trying to say is that Destroyer can play with her in the play area, and you and I can—” She hesitated, and Cash remembered what they’d gotten up to the last time they’d been in a small, closed-in room together. Her breasts under his hands, his mouth finding the pearl-like tip. Need surged through him, and he turned his gaze away from her tempting curves, her slim waist, her legs, long and willowy in those jeans ripped out at the knee.

  What was to stop them tonight? From finishing what they’d started? They were two consenting adults who wanted each other. People had casual sex all the time, the devil on Cash’s shoulder tempted. Rowena had said so herself. Asked him why they couldn’t just give each other what they needed, a soft place to forget for just a little while.

  He needed to forget more than ever tonight.

  But generous as she’d be, Cash knew Rowena better now. His talk with her sister Bryony had dashed any illusions away. He didn’t want to hurt Rowena. Use her to get the physical release his body craved. Sometimes it was wrong to take a gift, even when it was offered.

  “Maybe I’d better go,” he said, his hand tightening on Destroyer’s lead. “I don’t know why I came here.”

  “To find something to distract you. And Destroyer. I’ve…missed you, Cash.” Her mouth looked so pink, so vulnerable, so tender. Needing to be kissed.

  He’d known she’d miss the girls when she left the gray house. That had been a given, the way she’d mothered them during the time Vinny had been gone. But Rowena missed him. Cash.

  Not the man he really was. The man she hoped he could be. But then, how often had Rowena been wrong in the past? Been bitten. More times than her sister could count. If Cash had had any delusions left about himself and his own inner darkness, his reaction to Lisa taking the girls was warning enough.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Rowena,” he warned. “Your sister was right. I am a user. I used you to watch my kids. I’m using you right now. Looking for something…”

  “Using has nothing to do with it. But neither you nor Bryony will ever see that if you don’t open yourselves up just a little. I care about you, Cash. And I know you care about me. More than you want to.”

  “Rowena—”

  “People help each other. That’s what they do. That’s how they get through times like these. Not because they have to, but because…I want to.”

  “You give too much. Too fast.”

  “And you don’t trust yourself to give at all.”

  Rowena was right on target with that one. He’d quit trusting anything too good, too perfect, too easy long ago. And it would be easy—damned easy—to fall in love with her.

  “I need to go before you do something stupid.” He said it so tenderly she smiled. He figured if he’d said that to her sister, the good doctor would have rearranged his face, like he deserved. Rowena laid her fingertips against his cheek.

  “Don’t worry, Cash. I won’t jump your bones—at least, not unless you ask me to. But I think I have managed to come up with something to take your mind off the girls being gone. And see that the kids have a wonderful surprise when they come home.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You could finish the tree house.”

  “No.” He could see his harsh refusal cut her, but what else could he say? It was too hard knowing Mac couldn’t climb it. Too bitter. The symbol of everything he’d lost when the car carrying his family was crushed.

  “Well, then…what if we painted your whole house?”

  She was serious. Dead serious.

  “We could pick colors the girls would love. You could do their bedrooms, the exterior. All of it. In four days, you could have it done if you worked like a crazy person.”

  “Three and a half days. I promised Potter I’d work part of his shift on Saturday so he could take his wife out for their anniversary. Fifteen years.”

  “That’s something to celebrate.”

  “It’s a goddamned miracle these days,” Cash scoffed.

  “You know there are marriages that work. Jake and Deirdre Stone seem happy.”

  Happy? The two of them were almost nauseating, they were still so much in love. Even before Lisa left Cash had envied his friend, wondering what it would be like to have a woman look at him like that.

  Well, now you know, a voice whispered inside his head. And it had only made things harder, knowing he didn’t deserve her.

  “Paint. We were talking about paint. And how long it would take me to put it up.”

  Rowena frowned, and Cash could see her mentally tallying up the time she thought it would take in her head. “If you’re filling in for Potter, you may need a little help. How about if I come over after the shop is closed? And Sunday’s my regular day off.”

  “You want to paint my house on your day off?”

  “Vinny would jump at an excuse to work
a few hours in the shop so that he could flirt with Miss Marigold. He’s almost convinced the woman she’s in love.”

  “Miss Marigold in love with Vinny?” Cash exclaimed.

  “She’s not in love with Vinny—at least not yet! Though I have to admit, I keep hoping. And Vinny certainly seems to like flirting with her. But I meant she’s in love with Elvis.”

  Cash shook his head. “That sweet old lady is an Elvis junkie? Please don’t tell me she’s got some blue suede shoes tucked in the back of her closet.”