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Since Tracy, the woman who doubled as their secretary and dispatcher, was out to lunch, Quint picked up the receiver himself. “Sheriff’s office.”
This, Carl decided, would be a good time to go out to lunch himself. Maybe once he was back, Quint would have allowed the subject of Melinda’s return to die a natural death.
Mildly curious about the call, Carl found himself at the door, listening as Quint said, “Uh-huh,” “Hmm,” and “I see.”
He hung up just as Carl put his hand on the door-knob. “Hold up, Carl.” Carl turned to see Quint writing something on a piece of paper. “This one’s for you.”
This was nothing out of the ordinary. Unless it was something major, they took turns checking things out. “Domestic dispute?”
Quint finished writing and placed his pen down. “Nope.”
“Not a robbery, is it?” Though he liked Serendipity the way it was, there were times when Carl did want a little excitement that went beyond Sally McCormick’s grandfather Axel walking down Main Street wearing his rain boots and nothing else. “We haven’t had one of those since Billy Wesson took his old man’s car out for a joyride and the old man pressed charges.”
Quint allowed a slight smile to find a home on his face. “Nope.”
Carl’s wheat-colored brows drew together. Quint was playing this one very close to the chest. “Do I get a hint?”
“Think ‘cat’,” was all Quint said as he held out the piece of paper with an address on it.
Carl frowned as he took the paper from Quint. He scanned the address quickly. Recognition washed over him like a breath-sucking wave. He placed the paper back on the desk. “You go.”
Leaning back in his chair, Quint rested his feet on top of his desk. The personification of the immovable object. “Can’t.”
Where had this temper come from, Carl wondered as he struggled to keep it in check. He never used to be like this. “Why?”
Quint raised and lowered his shoulders. “I’m busy.”
Damn it, he was too old to be playing games like this. “Doing what?”
Quint’s grin grew wider. He wasn’t given to premonitions as a rule, but this time he had a hunch that things might actually work out for his cousin. If Carl didn’t suddenly turn mulish on him.
“Delegating.”
“Well, the guy you’re delegating to doesn’t want to take this call. You take it, I’ll take the next one. The next two,” he threw in obstinately.
But Quint shook his head as he tapped his badge. “No dice. This gives me the authority to tell you to take this call—unless you want off the force.”
He didn’t want off the force. Carl loved being a deputy, loved being there for the people, especially the children who seemed to take to him as if he was the embodiment of every single hero they had ever fantasized about. And he liked being that for them. Being the one who made them feel safe because he was around.
He stared down at the address on the paper. The place he’d been to too many times to count as a kid, then as a teen.
Her house.
Carl raised his eyes to Quint’s. “You know what this is, don’t you? It’s dirty pool.”
“No, it’s a cat in a tree.” Quint laced his fingers behind his head and rocked back in his chair. “And the cat is all yours. Mr. Whiskers, if you want to address him by his given name.”
Carl opened the door. Sheriff or no sheriff, he gave Quint a dirty look. “I’d like to address you by a name, but it wouldn’t be your given one. At least, not the one that was initially given.”
Quint laughed, the office absorbing the resonant sound. “I’ll tell Ma on you.”
His own parents were gone now. It concerned Carl every so often that the fact didn’t bother him, that their absence was nothing more than a vague notation on his brain. But his uncle and aunt, well, that was another story. Especially Aunt Zoe. All his fond memories of childhood centered around her and the long, wide kitchen table where everyone would gather—to do homework, to talk and, at times, to dream.
And now he was heading out to retrieve his dream’s cat. The world, he decided, was sometimes a very strange place.
Carl doubled back to get his hat. “If you talk to Aunt Zoe before I do, tell her that I’m really sorry her second-oldest son turned out to be such a sadist.”
“I kind of think she’d approve—if she knew,” Quint added before Carl had a chance to ask. What he’d been told was in confidence and Quint saw no reason, though they were all close, to share it with the others. If Carl wanted to share his feelings—as he clearly didn’t now—then it was up to Carl, not him, to say something. “Be gentle with the cat. It’s a Turkish Angora.”
“Right.”
A Turkish Angora cat. What the hell kind of cat was that, anyway? He wasn’t up on his cats, or most other creatures for that matter, either. To him, the animal species, other than horses, of course, because ranching was in everyone’s blood here, were divided into categories that bore just their names. Dog, cat, bird. He didn’t pay much attention to subvarieties. It was people, not animals, who had always caught his attention.
When he was younger, he’d liked hanging back and observing. Hanging back had always been safer in those days. Opinions, whenever he’d voice them, would like as not get him a wallop from a father who knew sobriety only fleetingly. It taught a guy to be closemouthed for reasons of self-preservation.
Melinda Morrow felt overwhelmed.
She was trying, she really was. But there was just so much to do, so many details to attend to when it came to starting a new life from scratch that, at times, she couldn’t even catch her breath.
Well, not scratch exactly, she amended silently a second later. Starting from scratch would mean that she was alone and she wasn’t. She had Mollie, Matthew and Maggie and that was far from being alone or starting from scratch. That was starting with a full house, she thought. A fun house like the ones in the carnivals that used to come through Serendipity when she was a child.
There was no doubt about it. Her triplets kept her hopping.
They also kept her hopeful, she thought, grounding her in reality while holding out the promise of a wonderful tomorrow. She hadn’t known she was capable of loving as much, as strongly, as she found herself loving these three little half-orphans. Half-orphans because the man she had given her heart to in an almost-rebellious act of defiance wanted no part of the small beings he’d had a hand in creating. They were “all hers,” as Steve had said when he finally called it quits.
That was the humiliation of it, she thought, circling the giant oak tree again, looking for a path Mr. Whiskers could take down. She’d told everyone that it had been her idea to leave, that Steve had refused to grow up—and that much was true—but in truth it had been his idea to leave their marriage. She would have stuck it out, hoping that he was a late bloomer and would eventually catch up to her. That fatherhood would finally sink in instead of sinking what they had between them.
But it turned out that what they’d had between them were good times and a future that promised more of the same. Their life together wasn’t real. It was a fairy tale into which true responsibility was not allowed access. And, as it turned out, a fairy tale where the prince and princess had no place for children in them.
Steve had wanted to palm off the triplets on his parents, or her father, it didn’t matter to him who or if there was any love waiting to greet the children. When she’d told him that there was no way she was going to give her children up, even for a little while, Steve had said goodbye.
“And that,” she murmured aloud, looking up at the tree where her children’s beloved Mr. Whiskers was housed, “was that.”
So she’d returned home because she had nowhere else to go and little money to go with. And because of all the towns in the country, Serendipity was the one place where she knew she could safely raise her children. Since they were deprived of their father, she wanted at least that much for them. Melinda wanted them to be safe and feel safe.
The day-care center would be her way of getting back on her feet. If that, too, didn’t turn out to be a dream. At the very least, it would be putting her teaching experience to good use.
“Mama, Whiskers, Whiskers,” Mollie cried, pointing impatiently up into the oak tree. “Make him come down. Now.”
Melinda ruffled the little girl’s blond hair. “You have the makings of a first-class dictator, my love,” she told the oldest of her triplets. “We’ll get him down, sweetie, I promise.” Her hands fisted at her waist, she looked up at the tree. I’m just not sure how at the moment, that’s all.
Why was it a cat could go up a tree, but couldn’t come down?
Chewing on her lower lip, Melinda shoved her hands into her pockets and circled around the tree again slowly, thinking. She’d called the sheriff’s office, asking for help, but if no one showed up soon, she was going to climb up into the tree herself.
The way she used to, she thought with a half smile. When she’d been young and fearless and every day had been an adventure. The problem with growing up, she mused, was that you realized the consequences of your actions. If she fell out of the tree, who would take care of her children? Her father had taken them in, but she knew that was only temporary.
When had life gotten so complicated and difficult?
“Tell you what, let’s get you and the rest of the motley crew down for your naps and Mr. Whiskers’ll be back in the house, looking down his nose at you, by the time you’re up.”
Hands on the tiny shoulders, she turned her protesting daughter toward the back door and herded her into the house.
Melinda had bought Mr. Whiskers when Maggie and the others had fallen in love with him at the animal shelter, chanting “cat, cat,” over and over again until she’d broken down and brought the animal home for her children.
All kids needed a pet, she reasoned. Even a finicky one.
Mr. Whiskers was more Mollie’s cat than her siblings’, which explained why two-thirds of the triplets were holed up in front of the television set, glued to every word that a big yellow dog was saying.
An advertisement came on for the latest video games, blaring every word at her. Three sets of eyes grew huge as they watched the animation.
She should have gotten them a mechanical cat, Melinda thought belatedly. No kitty litter, no finicky behavior, no trees scaled.
Too late now, she thought.
She shut off the television set to a chorus of groans. “Naptime,” she announced. The groans intensified.
Shutting out all feelings except those that belonged to a deputy sheriff sworn to uphold the law, Carl rang the doorbell. He rang it two more times before he decided that the din coming from inside the house was completely drowning out the chimes of the doorbell.
Fisting his hand, he knocked, loud and hard. He wasn’t about to back away and leave. That would be cowardly and he’d never been that before. Mentally he called Quint a few choice names.
The front door opened a few seconds later.
It was hard keeping his mind on his role and not on the woman in front of him.
The girl who had left Serendipity at eighteen was beautiful. The woman who had returned at twenty-five was stunning.
Finding his tongue, and the wits that were threatening to scatter from him like so many marbles on a board that had suddenly slanted, Carl said, “I’ve come about the cat.”
Chapter Two
In a single heartbeat, she was eighteen again, looking up at a young man she trusted more than she trusted anyone else in the world.
It took Melinda a moment to focus back on the present. On the three children clustered around her like chicks around a hen—if chicks could babble incoherently and cling—and on the man standing on her doorstep.
He’d filled out, she thought. A lot. And gotten taller, too. She remembered him a few inches taller than she was, now there seemed to be almost a foot’s difference between them. The thin shoulders were broad now, and the forearms she saw peering out from beneath the rolled-up sleeves were strong and muscular.
It couldn’t be him. And yet, it had to be. Carly. Carly Cutler.
Melinda realized she was staring and blinked, trying to rouse herself.
“Carly?”
It just didn’t seem fair. There should be some kind of law on the books about women who broke your heart getting more beautiful as time went by, Carl thought. It would have helped a little if she’d been tired and at least a tad worn, but she wasn’t. She was radiant. Except for her eyes. There was a sadness there, a sadness that wisdom gotten at too great a price brought.
He squelched the impulse to take his hat in his hand. That would have seemed penitent somehow.
Instead he gazed steadily into her eyes, reminding himself not to drown there. It took a bit of effort to succeed.
“It’s Carl now.”
“Carl.” She wrapped her tongue around his new, adult name.
Carl.
No, he wasn’t Carly anymore. There was no boyishness about the man who stood before her. The years had hardened his body and made his face leaner, bringing out cheekbones she’d had no idea had been there.
Nostalgia and a dram of sorrow seeped into her for the boy she had once known. She smiled at him, even though there was no smile on his face to greet her.
“No hello?”
“Hello,” Carl echoed civilly, then repeated what he’d said previously, as if it were a mantra that could keep him impervious to the light, airy charm that was Melinda Morrow. “I’ve come about the cat.”
Melinda half turned toward the back of the house, as if to look toward the backyard where the tree and the trapped feline existed in discord.
Still partially catapulted into the past, she tried vainly to ignore the urgent tugs on her clothes by the munchkins who surrounded her.
“You? But I called the sheriff’s office…” Why had he come in response?
Carly. She’d thought about him a great deal lately, thought about getting in contact with him more than a dozen times since she’d returned to Serendipity. Despite numerous friendships, he’d been the one she could always rely on. She’d even looked up his name in the telephone book to see if he still lived in town. He did and his number hadn’t changed.
Apparently, she thought, looking at him again, that was the only thing that hadn’t changed.
Every time she’d begun to press his number on the keypad, she’d aborted the call, afraid of what he’d say to her. Afraid that the hard feelings she’d left in her wake would still be there.
And now she stood looking at him like some wide-eyed schoolgirl instead of a woman with a college degree and three children to support.
“And the sheriff sent me,” he told her.
His answers were clipped, his voice almost nothing like she remembered. But then, Melinda supposed she deserved that.
Logic and merit notwithstanding, it still hurt to hear the cool tone. Especially since what she needed right at this minute, she admitted to herself, was a shoulder to lean on for just a moment, until she caught her breath and found her bearings.
Her eyes swept over him. She hadn’t noticed the uniform Carl wore, but now she thought it seemed made for him. “So when did you become a deputy sheriff?”
Before answering, he glanced at the blond trio that had all but sealed themselves to her body. All three sets of blue eyes were looking up at him inquisitively. Damn, but they were adorable.
Kids had always been his undoing. He’d always wanted a tribe of them himself, but without a partner, that didn’t seem as if it was ever going to happen.
Carl curbed the urge to squat down to the triplets’ level and ruffle their hair. Instead he answered their mother’s question.
“When Quint became the sheriff.”
“Quint’s the sheriff?” Melinda’s eyes widened in surprise at the information. She thought she’d vaguely recognized the voice on the phone, but couldn’t place it. Now she knew why. The town bad boy was now the sheriff. Would wonders never cease? “Quint Cutler?”
“That’s the one.”
Carl wanted to cut this short, not knowing how much longer he could just stand here, holding her at arm’s length the way he knew he should, the way she deserved. Wanting nothing more than to take her into his arms. There was always something about Melinda that got to him, making him forgive her unintentional slights, chalking it up to her just being Melinda. But he couldn’t do that now. They weren’t kids anymore.
