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Love, Marriage And Family 101
Anne Peters
PARENT-TEACHER MEETING…Overworked teacher Hally McKenzie vowed that this year she would finally lose those five extra pounds and learn a new language–that is, until the gorgeous single dad of a troubled student turned to her for help.OR MARRIAGE AND INSTANT MOTHERHOOD?Widower Michael Parker was having trouble relating to his daughter, who had gone from pretty to punk almost overnight–and Hally was his last hope. But Mike found it difficult to concentrate when the beautiful teacher was near, for it seemed the only way to make his family whole again, was to have Hally become a permanent part of it!
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#uf116d488-d89f-50b3-8bcc-7f51a3cfd8a6)
Excerpt (#u34a49df8-cb9d-569b-8f90-be60a218c204)
Title Page (#u8515bad5-16dd-5251-ab39-7d7ced2ac9d2)
About the Author (#u6f3dcebb-68fe-582a-8ef3-d6edc4c43392)
Chapter One (#uc5154769-7278-5e8c-8b42-ecea61661f52)
Chapter Two (#u5f1ab9d5-8f78-5c06-975f-6e816299222c)
Chapter Three (#uca5c8562-e90e-590d-840a-6b7bc75e278f)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
October twenty-sixth marked Corinne’s fifteenth birthday.
It fell on a Saturday. An afternoon at the beach, complete with a picnic supplied by Hally, was planned.
Two nights ago, Corinne had made the final payback of the money she had “borrowed” from the cookie jar. She had earned it by cleaning Hally’s mother’s studio and washing her car every week, in addition to baby-sitting the kids next door every Monday after school. She was also getting paid now for doing chores at home.
Mike owed it all to Hally. The woman was subtly, but inexorably becoming a major presence in their lives. A friend to his daughter. But what to him?
It was a question that lately had been robbing him of sleep. Right along with, What did he want her to be to him?
Love, Marriage and Family 101
Anne Peters
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ANNE PETERS
shares her Pacific Northwest home with her husband, Manfred, and their aged dog, Adrienne. Anne treasures her family and friends, her private times, her creativity and, last but by no means least, her readers.
Chapter One (#ulink_54aae22d-3aef-5a75-bfc2-1ea0ea325f5f)
Mr. Michael John Parker was fifteen minutes late.
Through the glass partition of her socalled office—the only private office available—Halloran McKenzie glared at the large clock on the far wall of the school gymnasium, fingertips doing an impatient drumroll on her battered metal desk. It was her opinion that since she’d been accommodating enough to agree to a meeting after school hours, the least Corinne Parker’s father could do was to show up on time.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t have plans of her own. This was the first day of her aerobics class and it was due to start in forty-five minutes. She owed it to her hips and thighs to be there. Not to mention that Garnet Bloomfield would think she’d once again reneged on her commitment to lose those saddlebags.
Impatience urged Hally to her feet. She paced the confines of her cubicle, thinking it was a good thing she’d at least had the foresight to change into her workout gear. This way she could be out of here and on her way the minute she was done laying down a few pertinent ground rules to the father of her truant young student. Provided he showed up within the next—Hello!
Hally’s dark thoughts careened to a halt as, through the glass in her door, her eyes homed in on the man dodging the junior varsity basketball team’s practice shots as he strode hurriedly toward her office in the back corner of the gym. Well, well.
If that was Mr. Parker—and who else would be bearing down on her office at this hour?—then he was everything she’d ever imagined a typical corporate army’s top general to look like: grim-faced and pulled-up socks to the max.
In other words, precisely the kind of father most redblooded teenagers would feel honor-bound to rebel against, not that that excused Corinne Parker’s absences and chronic tardiness. It did throw some light, however, on the girl’s penchant for grunge fashion and hacked-off bleached hair. No doubt she wanted to spite a father who expected his fourteen-year-old to wear pinafores and Mary Jane shoes.
Who should know better than she?
Hally pulled back from the glass a bit lest the man catch her watching his approach. She was appalled by the strength and instantaneousness of the antipathy she felt toward him, a man she’d never met It had been years, after all, since she had been a rebellious fourteen-year-old with a father whose only resemblance to the man approaching her office lay in the sternly set facial expression, the immaculate business suit and flawless haircut:
All of which, admittedly, provided quite a startling contrast to the sweaty group of scruffy adolescents he was skirting with preoccupied grace and agility.
And to their coach, too.
Oh, for heaven’s sake! Moving away from the door altogether, Hally impatiently chastised herself for that disloyal observation. After all, Gilbert Smith was her…well, “boyfriend” would do as well as anything else. And when he wasn’t in ratty sweats and red as a beet from yelling at his team, Gil looked quite presentable, too. She on the other hand…
Hally glanced down at herself dressed in workout clothes and was suddenly irrationally self-conscious about her appearance. She wished she hadn’t changed clothes, after all. More, she wished she already weighed five pounds less so that she wouldn’t look as if she were stuffed into her leotard like a five-foot sausage into its casing. And though she scolded herself for these unprecedented and idiotic thoughts and feelings, she frantically cast around for something with which to cover as much of her lessthan-perfect shape as possible.
She spotted a denim shirt and snatched it up. She had one arm in a sleeve when, after a cursory knock, the door opened.
“Ms. McKenzie?” It was the GQ cutout, of course. Entering at her distracted nod, he introduced himself. “Mike Parker. Sorry I’m late. Traffic…”
“That’s all right.” Struggling to appear composed, Hally fought to get her other arm into a maddeningly uncooperative garment.
“Here, let me…”
Mike Parker was helping her into the shirt with efficient courtesy before Hally could do more than stammer a flustered, “Th-thank you.”
Up close, the man was physically even more imposing than he had seemed across the gym. He towered over her by a good head. Heat radiated from him—it had been ninety degrees out at noon and now it was certainly hotter. He smelled of clean male, starched linen and crisp aftershave. Hally stepped away from him the instant her shirt settled across her shoulders.
Excruciatingly aware of the glance with which he swept her leotarded frame, she retreated behind her desk and sat, all the while bemoaning her uncharacteristic lapse in professional appearance and demeanor. Ordinarily, given her lack of physical stature and—to her—terminally cute blondness, to establish credibility she always strove to dress and conduct herself with reserved dignity during first meetings such as this.
Very much afraid that in this case she had totally blown it, she tried to regain some lost ground with a cool smile and a hand gesture that silently invited her visitor to sit, as well.
He didn’t. Instead he disconcerted her anew by ambling over to the pegboard wall to study her displayed diplomas. Well, let him, she thought, trying for unconcern. She had, after all, graduated with honors. And anyway, this meeting was about him, not her.
“Mr. Parker.” Hally tightly folded her hands on the desk. Her posture was as erect as ever her mother could have wished it to be. “I’m afraid I have another appointment in a few minutes, so I’ll come straight to the point. Your daughter Corinne…”
“Is lucky to have you for a teacher,” her visitor disarmed her by interrupting. “If your credentials are anything to go by.” He went to the chair and sat.
Not sure how to reply to this double-edged compliment, Hally looked down at her folded hands. Noting whiteknuckled tension there, she willed herself to relax. She decided to forego a reply and to stick to the subject at hand.
“Corinne is a very troubled young woman,” she said. She forced herself to levelly meet the man’s eyes and was momentarily thrown off guard by the flicker of pain her words seemed to cause. It was masked so quickly by an expression of wary neutrality, however, that she decided she’d only imagined it in the first place.
Certainly his tone revealed nothing but skepticism as he said, “Isn’t two weeks a bit soon to make that kind of sweeping assessment, Ms. McKenzie? After all, Cory is not only new to Ben Franklin High, being a freshman, but new to Long Beach, too. We only moved here a month ago.
“I understand that,” Hally said. “And believe me, I’m not the kind of teacher or counselor whose first course of action is a complaint to the student’s parents.”
“I have only your word for that, though, don’t I?”
“No, Mr. Parker, you can check with the principal, too.” Hally kept her tone pleasant but firm. Parker’s bristling defensiveness, identical to every other parent’s reaction to criticism of their child, was exactly what she’d needed to relax and regain a professional perspective. This was familiar ground and she trod upon it with confidence. “I’ve taught here at Ben Franklin for seven years—”
“This isn’t about teaching, though, is it?” Michael Parker injected stiffly. “It’s about you psychoanalyzing a student you barely know and—”
“Mr. Parker,” Hally interrupted. She was not about to let him put her back on the defensive. “Quite aside from the fact that I do have a degree in psychology—”
“A bachelor degree,” Mike Parker said dismissively. “With all due respect, Ms. McKenzie, they’re a dime a dozen.”
“Nevertheless.” In spite of her resolve to remain unruffled, Hally began to seethe with resentment but didn’t bother to point out to the man what he already knew very well from looking at her diplomas—namely her Masters in English. “I have taught school for seven years and I don’t need to be a therapist to know that Corinne is having emotional problems beyond those related to a new environment”
Leaning forward, she drove home her point. “Are you aware, Mr. Parker, that out of the nine days school has been in session, your daughter has been absent four and tardy the rest?”
“Impossible.” Betraying emotion at last, Parker surged to his feet. “I personally drop her at the front steps of this school every morning. Let me see this.”
Hally reflexively shrank back as he reached across the desk and snatched up Corinne’s file. But though she had tensed to object to his high-handedness, she took a deep breath instead and held her tongue.
Let him see for himself the lengths to which a child will go to defy an overly controlling parent, she thought snidely.
And was ashamed of her pettiness the moment she saw the betrayed and thunderstruck expression with which the girl’s father thumbed through the ream of obviously forged handwritten excuses in the file.
After several minutes of heavy silence, he muttered something harsh and succinct. He tossed the folder down on her desk. He turned away from Hally’s gaze, one hand rubbing his mouth, the other clamped to the back of his neck. After a moment he dropped both hands with an audible sigh and the set of his shoulders lost some of its starch.
“I’m sorry,” he said, flicking Hally a dark, sideways glance that, combined with the emotion-rough timbre of his voice, shook her up a lot more than it had any right to. “I had no idea….”
“I understand.” Hally felt oddly self-conscious suddenly in the presence of this man’s bewilderment and hurt, as if she’d trespassed on some private moment of grief. She felt bad, too, about her initial snap judgment of him. The unsettling resemblance she thought she had discerned between him and her father had long since been dispelled. She knew now that they were nothing alike. Mike Parker, whatever else he might or might not be, cared about this daughter. Whereas James McKenzie….
Well. Hally shook off the disturbing comparisons. Who knew? Feebly, she gestured to the phony excuses in the file. “Could anyone else have written these? A grandmother, or—”
“No.” Mike Parker went to his chair and heavily dropped into it. With his elbows propped on spread knees he bent his head and, his features taut with strain, stared fixedly at the fisted hand he cradled in his other.
Because they were extremely large hands, Hally stared at them, too. Raw-boned farmer’s hands, they struck her as incongruous, sticking out as they did from the sleeves of an unmistakably hand-tailored suit. And they presented another difference between this man and her father whose hands were graceful and slim—the hands of a surgeon.
“Cory and I are alone, Ms. McKenzie.”
“Yes…” It was in the file, of course. She glanced at his face. It was shuttered, devoid of emotion. Still, Hally’s marshmallow heart went out to him even as her mind, after a quick glance at the clock, registered the fact she’d have to cut this conference short right now if she hoped to make her aerobics class on time.
But, of course, she wouldn’t. Couldn’t. They hadn’t resolved anything yet. She sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” His glance acknowledged her sympathy, but his tone made it clear he wouldn’t welcome pity, in case that was offered, too.
It wouldn’t have been. Mostly because Michael John Parker looked too tough in spite of his polish to be in need of it, or welcome it. His nose had clearly been broken at some point in his past and never been properly set, giving him the kind of face—interesting rather than handsome—that would draw second glances from men as well as from women. Second glances…but very little empathy.
Yet, Hally, though she fought against it, was filled with it. She’d always been a bleeding heart. “How long since…”
“A year.” He spoke curtly, still staring at his hands. It was obvious he didn’t relish her questions and resented the necessity to answer them.
Hally sighed and stifled a need to apologize. After all, she wasn’t idly prying, she was doing her job. Unfortunately for Michael Parker, it required that they communicate beyond the customary impersonal chitchat of strangers.
“Corinne is your only child?”
A mute nod confirmed what hadn’t really been a question anyway. No siblings were listed in the records, and something about the girl’s solitariness and oddly mature self-possession marked her an only child.
“And the two of you had no problems prior to your move to Long Beach?”
“I didn’t say that”
“Then you did have problems?”
“Doesn’t every family?” Mike looked up from his hands with a dark-eyed glare of resentment.
“Mr. Parker.” Struggling for patience, Hally took a deep breath and quietly let it out. “I appreciate how difficult this must be for you…”
“Do you?”
“Well, y-yes….”
“How?”
“Well, I….” Thrown off balance, Hally momentarily faltered. Her earlier empathy waned in the face of his tightlipped challenge. Affronted, she angled her chin. “Are you baiting me, Mr. Parker?”
“Not at all.”
“Then what was the point…”
“The point, Ms. McKenzie, is that I very much doubt you can have any idea what it’s like to lose your mate and suddenly find yourself on your own with an adolescent child you think you know but don’t.”
On his feet again, Mike paced the few steps of Hally’s confined office space with the same agitation and pent-up violence her cat, Chaucer, displayed in his carrier during trips to the vet.
“I’m at my wits’ end here, Ms. McKenzie.” Parker’s tone was low, but fierce. “And what I need from you is help, not simpering platitudes about knowing how I feel.”
He grabbed the edge of the desk and pinned her to her seat with his eyes. “You don’t know squat about how I feel.”
