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“Look, for what’s left of tonight, you can stay here,” he heard himself saying. “The house actually used to be two self-contained units. It also used to be a summer rental. It’s all furnished. There’s linens in the closets. I’ve never even used the bedrooms down here. They’re across the hall.”
“You’re a complete stranger!”
“I admit it. Stranger than some.”
She managed a small, tired smile.
“There’s a lock on the door. Not that I’m in the habit of attacking people. In my underwear.”
He could tell that clinched it. The lock. Not his reassurances. The lock and the fact that she was tired beyond words and probably close to collapse.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“Whatever. In the morning, I’ll help you get your car straightened away, and find your house.”
“Shane?”
“Yeah?” He wished she wouldn’t have called him his first name. He didn’t want to be her friend. He didn’t even want to be her rescuer. He just didn’t have any choice.
“You’re making me very sorry I kicked you so hard.”
From behind the locked door, Abby listened to Shane go up the stairs, and wondered if she’d lost her mind. Not only had she packed every earthly possession that she cared about and trekked across a whole country with her baby, now she was under the same roof as a man she knew nothing about.
Well, not nothing exactly.
He had been a cop.
And she had never in her life seen eyes like that. It wasn’t the color, precisely, though the dark chocolatey brown was enormously attractive; it was the look in them. Intense, the gaze steady and strong and stripping.
It was those eyes that had kept panic from completely engulfing her when he had come up behind her as she tried to make her key fit in the front door. His front door.
While part of her had been screaming in pure panic—near-naked man lurking in the bushes at three in the morning—another part of her had registered those eyes and told her that the hard beating of her heart might not have a single thing to do with fear.
Naturally, she wasn’t going to listen to that part of herself. She was resigned to the fact that she was not a good judge of masculine character. Belle’s father being a case in point. Still, even when she’d been desperately trying to think of how to get by that formidable man who had trapped her there on that tiny porch, some traitorous little part of her had been staring at him in awe.
Registering every detail of him. His height, the width of his shoulders, the smooth unblemished skin, the clinging night mist showing off his impressive physique as surely as if he was a bodybuilder, oiled.
Because he had been tense, geared for action, he had seemed to be all enticing masculine hardness. Mounded pecs, the six-pack stomach, the ripple of sinew and muscle in his arms and legs.
She shouldn’t have been so surprised when he’d said he used to be a cop, because he had policeman hair—the cut short, neat and very conservative and the color of cherry wood. And there had been a certain authoritative hardness in his face, too. A look of readiness in the taut downturn of his mouth, the narrow squint of his eyes. He was a man who was prepared to do battle.
It was probably that strength, a core-deep thing, that had convinced her to take a chance and trust him. Her instincts told her that of all the places she could choose to stay tonight, admittedly limited, she would not find one safer than this.
Her adopted mother would, of course, be horrified. Poor Judy wanted life to be so neat and tidy. She had worked so hard to give Abby a decent home, even though she herself had been a single mother.
Judy had thought it was insane to go to the lawyer’s office, even more insane to accept the gift. What would she think of this latest twist?
The situation tonight, Abby reminded herself, had been desperate. What else was she going to do? Sleep in her car? If it was just herself, that might have been okay. But with Belle? It was a terrible night out there, damp and cold. Even her mother would understand why she had chosen to stay here. Wouldn’t she?
Abby went unseeingly through the plainly furnished apartment, found the first bedroom, lay her sleeping daughter in the center of the big double bed, and went to pull the drape. As she did, she realized she was facing the street. Miracle Harbor didn’t look at all like it had looked when she’d been here a month ago. It had looked so beautiful then, with its quaint, weathered houses lining steep, narrow avenues that all led to the ocean. The main street had redbrick shops, with colorful awnings, big picture windows looking out on the beach and the ocean they fronted.
Tonight, with the swirling mist, it looked more like a scene out of a horror movie, set in the fog-shrouded streets of Gothic London.
How could she have written down the address of the house she had inherited incorrectly? How could she?
And how could a town that had looked so cheery and welcoming in the light of day look so distinctly formidable at night?
And how could her traitorous car just give up like that? Of course, it was old, and she had asked a lot of it, carrying her across the country dragging all her earthly possessions along behind it. Maybe it was a miracle that it had made it this far before it had quietly quit.
Miracles, she thought, and turned from the window. She checked the corners and under the bed for spiders or webs, and finding none, tumbled into the bed beside her daughter, too tired to find the bedding. Miracles, she thought again with a sigh. Isn’t that why she had come here, really?
Some part of her wanted to believe, more than anything else, that this old world could still work a miracle or two.
She thought of the conditions of her inheritance, the inheritance that would allow her to give her daughter everything she wanted for her. A home, a safe place to grow up.
If you didn’t count perverts in the bushes. She giggled tiredly at the thought.
Of course, there were those conditions. One to live here in Miracle Harbor for at least a year. No problem. But two?
Preposterous. How could someone get married just for personal gain? What kind of marriage would that be? And given her history with Ty, Belle’s dad, she simply knew she couldn’t trust herself in the all important department of mate selection.
So, why had she come, uprooted her whole life, knowing she had no intention of fulfilling that second condition?
During her brief visit with her sisters, she had learned they had been separated at about age three. She had no memory of them, but Corrine said she had foggy memories of something. And Brit’s adoptive parents had told her she was three when she came to them.
Abby had come because she wanted to know her sisters better, had to know them, had felt as soon as she had seen them, a deep sense of having found herself.
And maybe, in some small, lost part of herself, she really wanted to believe in fairy-tale endings, wanted to believe in a place with a name like Miracle Harbor, maybe she could expect anything to happen.
Maybe it had already started, with her at the wrong house, and the car not starting, all things linked together, part of a larger plan.
For her.
And what about him? How would he fit into that plan?
He wouldn’t. He’d done the decent thing tonight, she suspected because his training would allow him to do nothing else.
By tomorrow, he would be part of her history, somebody she could nod to when she passed him on the street.
There had been mile-high barriers in that man’s cool eyes, and she felt no desire to try and penetrate that mystery.
But even if she did decide to try and fulfill that ridiculous condition placed on her gift, she would never pick a man like him. She wanted someone sweet and kind. Someone who would make a good father for her daughter.
A little pudgy fellow with glasses, who took lunch in a paper bag to his office.
Upstairs, she heard the groan of a bedspring, and felt the oddest little stir in her stomach. A stir that a little pudgy fellow with glasses would never be able to create.
Which was just as well. That stir, she knew, led to nothing but trouble.
Chapter Two
A streak of sunshine had crept through a crack in the drape, and lay in a stripe across her face, making her blink lazily awake. Abby stretched luxuriously, looked around the room. Even in the full light of day there was not a spiderweb in sight.
The furnishings were plain, in keeping with what Shane McCall had said about the house being a summer rental, but the room itself was lovely. High, plastered ceilings, wood floors, wide oak window casings.
Would the house that had been given to her as a gift by a complete stranger be as beautiful?
She thought of last night, and Shane McCall, and she felt, again, that funny little shiver of pure awareness.
“Abby,” she told herself. “You are now rested. You are immune to that man. You know the truth about another pretty face. Isn’t that right, darlin’?”
She reached out to pull her daughter to her, reached further, patted the mattress, and as the awful truth sank in, she sat bolt upright in bed. Only a little dent remained where her daughter had slept snugly beside her last night.
“Belle,” she called, leaping from bed, “where are you?” She fumbled for buttons on her homemade blouse that had sprung undone during the night, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. This place wasn’t child-proofed like her modest apartment in Chicago. “Belle?”
She raced into the next room. A chair had been pulled up to the door, the kind that had the twist style of lock on the handle. The door was now open into the hallway that led to the outer door and the kitchen they had been in last night.
Did the door to the outside have the same kind of lock? Abby tried to think from last night. She was sure the lock she had tried to fit her key into was a deadbolt. Even her precocious daughter would have trouble with that.
But, as she scrambled into the hallway, her heart sank. The front storm door wasn’t locked. It wasn’t even closed, a brisk, sea-scented breeze coming in through the screen.
“Belle!”
“In here.”
Only it wasn’t Belle who answered. It was him, his voice loaded with irritation.
She catapulted into the kitchen, and skidded to a halt.
Immune, she reminded herself.
But really that rush of relief that her daughter was here and not happily exploring the streets of Miracle Harbor, getting closer and closer to the ocean, seemed to have lowered her defense system again.
She was suddenly not sure she had registered his full impact last night. Just looking at him made her feel hot and flustered, like a woman who had a sign flashing on her forehead that said: I Need A Husband. Desperately.
He was a man who didn’t seem to like much clothing. This morning he had on navy blue running shorts that showed off tanned, muscular legs, and a flat, hard fanny. A grey sweatshirt with some sort of police emblem on it stretched tight over the broadness of his chest, sleeves cut off at the shoulder so that every inch of his powerful arms were on display.
Could a woman look at that and not wonder what it would be like to be held by him? Only if she wasn’t human!
He had a white towel strung around his neck and his hair was dark with sweat, curling at the tips even though it was so short.
His facial features, she decided, were nauseatingly perfect. High cheekbones, straight, strong nose, faintly jutting chin. He hadn’t shaved yet today, and for some reason that only made him look better, faintly roguish, untamable.
She knew all about this kind of man. They could have anything, and they took it. And when they were done they threw it back.
Only one thing stopped her from hating him completely—the look of muted panic that was in those amazing dark eyes as he surveyed her daughter.
“What does this kid eat? We’re about out of options, here.” He snapped this at her, like a military man on a mission that was about to fail.
Abby dragged her gaze away from him. Belle was settled happily on top of a stack of books on a chair, at a kitchen table covered with cereal boxes and bowls.
“You mean she’s sampling everything?” Abby asked, aghast.
Her daughter took a regal bite of the offering in front of her, which looked like chocolate covered raisins in milk, swallowed, frowned and pointed autocratically at her next choice.
Which he, heartthrob of the universe, rushed to get for her.
“What are you doing?” Abby said, folding her arms across her chest. As if that would protect her. From what?
Her desire to laugh that’s what, she told herself firmly. At the sight of one hundred and ninety pounds of one hundred percent menacing, masculine ex-cop being commanded by a baby.
“I’m feeding the kid.” He glowered at Abby.
“Why?”
“When I came in from my run, she was just coming out the door of your suite. I tried to stuff her back in, but she wasn’t having any of it. She announced she was hungry, and she damn well expected me to do something about it.”
“In those words?” Abby couldn’t resist teasing him.
“She doesn’t need words! All she needs to do is screw up her face and show me her tonsils! When I told her to go back to Mommy, she yelled at me. Loudly.”
“Belle!”
“Not a bad girl,” Belle said, anticipating what was coming. “Belle bad?” she asked Shane and blinked at him with sweet coyness.
“Yes!” he said, but when Belle blinked again, he said, “Maybe not bad. Just stubborn, strong-willed, loud and fussy.”
“She is not fussy,” Abby addressed the only accusation that was not totally accurate. “She’s taking advantage of you.”
“A two-year-old?” He paused in his pouring of yet another sample into a bowl and drew himself to his full height, which was formidable, at least six feet, and gave Abby a disdainful look. “That seems unlikely.”
“Really, you didn’t have to feed her. You could have come and got me up.”
“I thought of that.” He added milk to the bowl, paused thoughtfully, and then added a sprinkle of brown sugar.
“And?” she asked, watching as he pondered for another moment, then dropped another dish of sugar on the cereal.
“You looked done in last night. I thought maybe you needed to sleep. Also, given that I promised you a secure room, I didn’t think you’d appreciate waking up with a strange man hovering over you.”
The very thought made her mouth go dry, actually. Did he have to be so devastatingly attractive?
Suddenly an uncomfortable reminder of what she must look like shot through her. Her hand flew to her hair. She could feel it standing straight up, and not in those cute little spikes she could accomplish with a tub of gel and a lot of patience. She glanced down at the rumpled clothes she had slept in. The buttons were done up crookedly on her blouse.
Naturally, he looked like he was ready for a photo-shoot, even with the shadowed face, and sweat forming dark stains on his sweatshirt.
“One black shin is enough,” he told her, with a side-long look from under sooty, tangled lashes.
Abby looked at the leg she had kicked last night. It was sporting a rather large purple and blue bruise. Somehow, she doubted a kick would have been the first thought that would have come to her mind if Shane McCall had been the first thing she saw this morning.
