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A man obviously born to big trucks, he leapt into the driver’s bucket seat, hit the control for the hot air, settled back, slipped the clutch. Glancing into both side mirrors, he shoved the stick into gear and edged onto the highway.
Against her legs vented heat chased chills.
“Rub your hands together, then rub your arms.”
“W-what?”
“Hands, arms. Rub them. You’ll warm up quicker.”
The meager exercise coaxed her blood to pump, her skin to heat. “Thanks,” she said when her lips softened and her teeth stopped clattering.
“Welcome.”
He maneuvered to an easy speed. She said, “Is this normal weather for Oregon?”
Again, the slow smile. “For October. You’re lucky it isn’t raining. Where you from?”
“San Francisco.”
“Just visiting?”
“In a way.” The decision to come to this northwestern part of Oregon on a year’s leave of absence had seemed reasonable three weeks ago. Buying into her great-aunt Paige’s shop, two days ago, suddenly seemed rash. What did she know about running a quaint, run-down, artsy shop like Aunt Paige’s, with its candles and chimes, pottery and potpourri? Its shell-framed mirrors and flower-shaped lamps, quilted bags and cloth pictures?
She knew about reviewing case histories. Drug and child abuse. Runaways. Severed homes. She knew about mending people’s broken hearts, their jagged lives.
Or she had, once. Before Leo’s betrayal.
Yet, it felt right, this decision. She would learn. The Ph.D. packed in a Frisco storage locker had taught her about hard work and sweat years ago.
And if you fall flat on your face? She’d return to Frisco, to her family therapy practice. Even if it killed her to live in the same city as Leo and Lizbeth. Oh, God. Even now, seven months after she’d seen them on that California beach, Breena felt the white jolt of shock. Her husband and her sister. Kissing. His hands caressing Lizbeth’s body.
Breena’s stomach lurched. She gripped the armrest, holding herself in place. Holding the hurt, the pain in place. She couldn’t, however, contain seven years of marriage. The past lived and breathed inside her, while the future spread out like a road meandering into a fire-blackened forest.
“You okay?” The man beside her stared down the dark highway, narrowed in the headlights. His hands—big, broad, long-fingered—lay relaxed on the wheel.
She sat back, curled her own hands into her lap. “Yes, I’m—fine.” Now.
“You run out of gas back there?”
“No. I think something broke in the engine. There was a lot of clanging.” She perused the myriad dashboard devices. “I’ve never ridden in a Goliath truck. It’s quite an anomaly.”
He smiled. “Anomalies can still be safe.”
Did he mean his truck or himself?
Maybe he figured her an affluent city-dweller, testing out homey country life. Or a California sun-bum out for “an experience.” Because he had been kind enough to supply her a ride, she wanted to set him straight. But how? If she said, “I’m tired of the rat race,” he’d assume her rich and fabulous, dabbling in the eccentric backwoods. If she said, “I want a change,” he’d assume she’d opted for “experience.”
Oh, yes, she wanted small-town life, itched for change. But more than anything, she longed for permanency, acceptance. Far away from Leo and Lizbeth.
Against the black asphalt the tires harmonized with ‘Hey, Jude.’ The Beatles’ oldie calmed her edgy nerves.
“I couldn’t stay in Frisco,” she found herself saying. “And I don’t know that I can go back.”
“Sometimes it’s best to move away, then.”
She watched a dark band of trees slip by under the cool moon. A few homes appeared, huddled in the night, their yellow lights soft, inviting. “Misty River seems like a decent town to move to,” she murmured.
“It’s okay. Folks ’round here all know each other. That can be a blessing or a drag.”
Which will I be?
“If you stay,” he continued, “they’ll get to know you, too.”
“Some do already.” Their eyes met across the console. “And now you.”
“Yeah.” His mouth quirked. “Now me.”
She thought of asking if his family had lived here forever, if he had a wife, children. Small talk to pass the minutes.
The shop’s oval sign, a charming weave of words and ivy painted on wood hanging from wrought-iron tapestry, beckoned with welcoming, amber light. He slowed for the cramped, elm-lined street feeding into the older section of town.
“Let me off at the corner,” she told him. “I can walk the last block.”
She didn’t want him parking in front of the shop. She didn’t want her nosy neighbor Delwood Owens peering out his window across the street and seeing Seth Tucker, whom she believed to be a good and honest man, dropping the new woman in town off at her aunt’s shop on a dark, wind-tossed night. Most of all, she didn’t want Seth wondering why she wasn’t living in Aunt Paige’s house, but in back of a store, why she saw independence as an avenue to regaining her self-esteem—a phoenix rising from the cinders of a husband’s infidelity.
Apparently, Seth Tucker cared nothing of what she or the neighbors thought.
He pulled up along the curb, got out, rounded to her side and hoisted the bag from her arms before she could climb down. Slamming the door shut, he turned and walked her down the sidewalk, through the squeaky, little swing gate in the middle of the crumbling stone wall edging the front property, right up the beveled, pitted walkway—the one she was convincing her aged, arthritic aunt to repair—right to the house, as if it were the most natural thing for him to do. Perhaps it was. Perhaps women were a common commodity at Seth Tucker’s side.
The image unsettled Breena. She didn’t want this stranger to be a womanizer, like Leo, but a man of honor and decency. But what unsettled her most was that she cared. Why? After tonight, she’d be lucky if he remembered her at the local post office. The image savored regret.
He stopped by the porch steps. “Which door—here or back?”
“Back.” She followed the worn dirt path around the house. The glow of lights up and down the street ousted shadows; in the backyard, darkness was thick, black. The one-car garage and contorted old apple tree imprinted a Halloween mood.
A tart wind speared her jacket, shuffled her hair. She folded her hands under her arms. Seth wore no coat. Was he cold, this quiet, gentle bear of a man?
At the back door, she pulled the key from her purse, took back her groceries. “Thanks again. You’re very kind.” She tendered a smile, hoped he didn’t expect to be asked inside.
He said, “I’ll call Bill, see if he can get a tow out to your truck.”
“Bill?”
“The Garage Center. He’ll need your keys as well.”
She shook her head. “That’s not necessary. I can phone the autobody shop.” She unlocked the door, flicked the inside light. “You’ve done enough already. I don’t want to impose—”
“You’re not. I’ve known Bill since we were kids. He’ll take care of your vehicle.”
His eyes told her if he called, the Blazer would be taken care of immediately. She needed the thing. Parked on the side of a highway all night, who knew what morning would bring? In some parts of Frisco, she’d be lucky to have an axle left. But this was small-town America where the worst criminal likely was a shoplifter.
“All right. Would you like to come in and use the phone?”
“I have my cell.”
Of course. She knew that.
He glanced toward the alley, where someone peered from a kitchen window. “Go on in. You’ll get chilled again.”
Handing over her car keys, she went, one hand gripping the edge of the door. “I appreciate this. Thank you, Seth.”
A scant smile. “My pleasure.”
She watched him walk away, then closed the door. Leaning her forehead against its wood, she exhaled the breath she’d been holding and shut her eyes.
For the first time in months, she didn’t see Leo’s face.
Seth pulled the pickup in front of the garage behind his house and shut off the motor and headlights. With the exception of the cooling engine, silence sang through the night. For several moments, he sat motionless, thinking about the woman. She was on the run. Whether from a husband, a lover or both, he didn’t know.
Forget it.
He had more than enough worry in his life.
And gray temples to prove it.
He turned his head toward the oversize, hip-roofed barn he’d converted into a workshop. A dark mammoth, the building squatted amidst the woods flanking his yard.
Damn, but he loved this eight-acre patch of heaven he’d bought two years ago. One day, it would go to Hallie to do with as she wanted. He wouldn’t fool himself into thinking she’d live on it. She’d sell, invest the profit into her dreams.
Guilt bit hard. He knew zip about her dreams, about things close to her heart. What kind of man—what kind of father—didn’t know his own child?
The half-there kind.
Except when it came to the monthly checks he paid his ex-wife to raise Hallie: ten years ago, he’d even set up a college fund for his daughter. Was college her dream? Maybe she’d rather play in a jazz band, or live in the Australian Outback. Or maybe, just maybe, she wanted nothing more than her family intact.
The notion had him grabbing his gear, shoving open the door where a cold, wet muzzle pushed its way into his hand.
“Hey, Roach, you old scab face,” he muttered, scratching the lumber-headed dog behind its good ear. “Missed me, didja?”
A hundred and six pounds of umber-furred dog frisked on pan-sized paws around Seth twice, then took off in a lopsided lope through the dark, to the back porch.
“Sit nice,” a young, female voice commanded.
Seth stopped. “Hallie?” Searching the shadows, he walked toward the small, indistinct bulk that was his fifteen-year-old daughter, hunkering on his back step. “What’re you doing here?” It was Friday night, two days ahead of his visitation schedule.
“Mom and I had a fight.”
Another fight. Great. Closer, he saw her cuddled into the beast that had adopted him on a night like this last winter. She stroked a hand over its thick coat, averting her eyes from the myriad questions in Seth’s.
“How’d you get here?”
“I walked.”
The hair on his arms rose. He lived two miles from town, down a secluded dirt road. “It’s dark,” he stated, unnecessarily.
“I know, but I couldn’t stand it anymore and my friend Susanne is going somewhere with her folks this weekend and Aunt Rianne has company and…and I wanted to come here.”
She swiped the back of her hand under her nose. Her face was a thin, pale shape in the night.
Vulnerable. Innocent.
Seth wanted to drop his lunch box, pick her up like he once had ten years ago, hold her against his heart. She was his little girl, his baby. But divorce and years of slow distancing stood between them.
You could still do something about it.
Like what?
Like get to know her again.
But will she want to know me?
He held out a hand. “Come on. Let’s go inside.”
She climbed to her feet without his assistance. He tried to ignore the scratch on his heart. In the confined mudroom, the dog headed for its dish in the corner and lapped water. Seth plunked his lunch bucket down on the kitchen counter. “Did you tell your mother you were coming here?”
Hallie frowned. “No.”
He nodded toward his office down the hall. “Call her.”
“She doesn’t care where I go.”
“Well, I do. Call, honey.”
The girl slipped out of her backpack, let it thud to the floor. “She was going out with jerk-o Roy-Dean.”
“Leave a message on the machine.” This time, he pointed. He didn’t want her on the kitchen phone where he’d hear her one-sided conversation with the woman he wished he’d told to hit the road sixteen years ago.
Young lunatic, that’s what he’d been, thinking with his tropical anatomy. Melody Owens had come on to him faster than a starved cougar. He’d been twenty-two. She’d been eighteen going on forty-six. Fooling the bouncers about her age. Fooling him.
He snorted. Admit it, Seth. You couldn’t keep your eyes off her, much less your hands. Or anything else, when all was said and done. At the time, she’d been the hottest bit he’d seen in his entire life. Oh, yeah. She had burned him good.
Three months of fun. Three months of sex. Then one morning, she’d stood on his doorstep, informing him she was pregnant. He still recalled gawking at her like a lummox. Sowing your oats didn’t mean forgetting safety between the sheets.
Except he had. Once.
Five minutes of play in the backseat of his old Impala had transformed into sixteen years of pain.
Not that he’d shirked the responsibility for what they’d done. No. Exit shock, enter love overload when, in mere months, a small toothless being with big blue eyes stared up at him. Seeing Hallie had sent his dreams into overdrive.
