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“I hadn’t planned on anything. Besides, people do, you know,” she said, only to be cut off by an indignant hmmph.
“Give me one good reason why you can’t come up here.”
A harsh, startled laugh tumbled out of her mouth. But no excuses.
“Uh-huh, that’s what I thought. Look, my girls can’t get out here—Willa’s too busy and Lynette’s too pregnant—and I can’t go to either of their places without putting the other one’s nose out of joint, so I’m staying here, and I hate spending Thanksgiving alone. Gets too damn depressing, buying one of those pathetic little turkey breasts just for yourself. So, you wanna come out Tuesday or Wednesday?”
Galen felt the corners of her mouth lift. Right. Knowing Cora, she probably had a million friends she could spend the holiday with. But leave it to her to twist things around to make it sound like Galen would be doing her a kindness, not the other way around.
The house did suddenly seem extraordinarily empty. And quiet.
But…
She shifted in the chair, making it squawk again. “Oh, I don’t know… I’ve still got so much to do. About Gran’s stuff ’n’ that.”
“It’ll still be there when you get back, baby.”
True enough. “But what about getting plane reservations this late?”
“Hey, if it’s supposed to happen, the way will be made clear, you hear what I’m saying?”
Then the dog propped her chin on the edge of her basket, gave her doleful. Right. “I can’t leave the dog.”
“What dog?”
Galen let out a weighty sigh the same time the dog did. “This mutt of Gran’s.”
Doleful turned to indignant.
She tucked the phone to her chest. “Well, you are,” she said, only to realize she was justifying herself to a dog. An ugly one, at that.
“Last time I checked,” Cora said, “they allowed dogs in Michigan.”
Michigan. Crikey. Galen couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out of Pittsburgh, let alone to another state. Something suddenly leeched all the air from her lungs. “Oh…I don’t know. This just seems so last minute—”
“For heaven’s sake, girl—you ever hear of the concept of spur of the moment? Besides, you live alone now. You can do things just because, and nobody’s drawers are going to get in a knot about it. So. Tuesday or Wednesday?”
Galen stood up, stretched, looked around the bleak little room. Realized she could go. Or she could stay. It was completely her decision.
That, for the first time in her life, she didn’t have to answer to a living soul.
“I’ll…call you back after I make the reservations,” she said, then laughed, nervously, at Cora’s squeal in reply.
Mirroring his increasingly dreary mood, a cold light drizzle began to mottle Del Farentino’s truck windshield as he pulled out of the Standish’s driveway. Two days before Thanksgiving, with four clients wanting/needing/demanding Del complete their remodeling projects by this afternoon.
He shoved his perpetually too-long hair off his forehead, glancing at the dashboard clock. Ten-o-three. Not bad, actually, considering he’d had a devil of a time getting his four-year-old daughter Wendy dressed and out of the house this morning. Something about the purple sweater—which had been her favorite up until five minutes before he tried to get it on her body—being itchy, and she only wanted to wear the pink one, which was buried underneath several strata of dirty clothes in the laundry basket. It had not been a pretty scene, but the last thing he needed this morning was to be late for his eight o’clock appointment with the Goldens, potential new clients with a large house out past Shady Lakes.
Now there was a bright note. Hot damn, would he love to get his mitts on that one. A complete redo, not just a kitchen remodel or add-a-room project. The architect had been there—a youngish woman who understood how to blend practicality with innovation—and the plans made his mouth water. A job like this would be a real feather in his cap. Prove to the world he was more than a handyman. Not that he was complaining about all the smaller jobs that seemed to drift his way. Between Wendy’s special classes and what-all, not to mention full-time daycare, the kid ate up his income faster than a dog ate steak. Money was money, and he’d take whatever he could get. But it sure would be nice to move up to the big leagues. Which, if these people accepted his bid, just might happen.
Damp gravel crunched underneath his tires as he pulled up in front of Cora Mitchell’s mongrel house, close to the center of town. It had a porch and some eaves and a gable or two and a couple of stories, more or less, but you couldn’t exactly call it anything. Except old. Cora, a long-widowed, vociferous, black earth mama in her late fifties, had worked her way up from temp to managing his step-mother’s Realty office. She’d recently bought the fixer-upper for some outrageously low price, only to discover the repair costs would be equally outrageous. Del pictured this project being on the periphery of his, or somebody’s, to-do list for years.
Cora was in a dither when he arrived, as only Cora could get herself into. According to Maureen, the woman was the epitome of order and decorum in the office, but for some reason—maybe because she’d be fixing up this house well into old age—this project seemed to keep her off-balance. This morning, she was a mess. Muttering something about a guest arriving that afternoon and she hadn’t yet gone to the store and did Del think the rain might change to snow, she barely allowed a glance in his direction as she tromped from room to room, eventually stopping long enough to shroud herself within a long woolen cape the color of a grape Popsicle.
From the basement, he heard reassuring clunks and clanks as his guys changed out her old furnace. They’d already tackled the leaky roof and the sagging living room ceiling where some overly enthusiastic soul had attempted to make a great room out of two smaller rooms by removing a load-bearing wall.
“Who’s the guest?” he asked.
“What?” Silvery eyes, startling against her dark skin, stared at him blankly for a moment. “Oh, you mean Galen,” she said, her breath frosting in front of her face in the cold house. They hadn’t intended on replacing the furnace until the spring, but the furnace had other ideas. Cora hooked the cape together at her throat. “Her mama and I were friends when our husbands were stationed in Norfolk, oh, Lord, more than twenty-five years ago, now. Galen and my girls used to play together, you know?”
She picked up her purse from the hall table, clicked it open, grunted, then clicked it shut again. “Anyway, Galen’s mama and daddy died in a car accident when she was maybe eight or so. Bill and I would’ve taken her ourselves, but whoever makes these sorts of decisions decided she should go with her grandparents instead. We kept in touch, though. The girls and I even went to Pittsburgh to see her, couple of times.” She hesitated, gazing at the doorknob, her brows drawn. “Strange, the way these things happen,” she said, more or less to herself, then looked again at Del. “In any case, I’m not gonna bore you with all the details, ’cause I know you got things to do and, God knows, so do I, but her grandmother died a couple weeks ago, and that was the only living relative she had left, so I strong-armed her into coming up here for Thanksgiving. Since I can’t get out to California this year to see the girls, you know, what with this house sucking every penny out of me like it is. And I didn’t figure there was any reason for her to just sit in that big old empty place of her grandmother’s down in Pittsburgh all by herself. I mean, can you imagine?”
Without waiting for Del’s response—clearly, one wasn’t expected—she tugged open the glass-paned front door and clomped out onto the slate gray porch, the surface marred with smudged workboot footprints. Del followed. The drizzle had turned to sleet, clicking on the porch overhang, bouncing like tiny white bugs off the winter-dry grass out in the yard; Del frowned, silently questioning the wisdom of Cora’s driving on what could easily become icy roads. He also knew better than to call her on it.
“So,” she said, her face smothered in breath clouds as she looked out over her whitening lawn. She yanked on a pair of driving gloves, taking her time smoothing them over her broad knuckles. “You gonna bring the baby to Elizabeth’s for Thanksgiving?”
Del stuffed his fingers in his jeans pockets, grateful he hadn’t yet removed his down vest if the woman was going to conduct a conversation outside. Elizabeth Louden Sanford was his stepsister, his father Hugh having married Elizabeth’s mother Maureen about a year and a half ago. To make things more complicated, Elizabeth’s husband Guy not only brought three children of his own to the marriage, but was the youngest of five sons. In what had to be either the world’s most courageous or dumbest moment, Elizabeth had volunteered to host Thanksgiving for everybody. At last count, Del’s father had said, the guest list was about to pass fifty, and still climbing.
“I haven’t decided,” he finally said. “That’s a lot of people to subject a certain someone to. I’m just not sure…”
Uh-oh. Cora was giving him her Look. “I swear to Heaven, child—when they pass out the award for Overprotective Father of the Year, you’ll win, no contest. You really gotta do something about those trust issues weighing you down, you know? Wendy loves being with people. She’ll be fine, if Paranoid Papa will give her half a chance. Okay, baby,” she continued without waiting for Del’s response, since clearly, nothing he could possibly say was worth listening to. “I’m going on to the store, then out to the airport. I should be back by one at the latest. You need me for anything?”
Del swallowed a smile. Cora drove his guys to distraction. Knowing she’d be gone for three hours would probably make their day.
“Nah. I think we can manage. I’ll be in and out myself, though. What with the holiday coming up and everything, we’re busting butt all over town today.”
“Huh,” Cora said, not paying any attention. She glanced at her watch, invoked the Almighty’s name and vanished. Del yelled, “Drive carefully,” as soon as he was sure she couldn’t hear him.
He stood on the porch for a moment, thinking about the conversation. About Wendy. About his—yeah, he’d admit it—obsessive need to protect her. He supposed it was only natural, considering. Still, Cora was right. Putting Wendy into a new situation was always harder on Del than it was on his daughter. But even though his kid was a fighter—yeah, a champ!—and even though it would take far more than throwing her into a crowd of strange kids to knock her for a loop…
He let out a long, ambivalent sigh.
Two clients later, in the midst of assuring Mrs. Allen that her stove would indeed be ready to go by that afternoon, his cell phone chirped at him. He’d no sooner said, “Yo,” than he was assaulted by a torrent of words from one really mad woman. The connection wasn’t wonderful, but he made out several choice cuss words, an injunction against nature in general and ice storms in particular, and two very distinct phrases: “won’t be ready until late today” and “her plane’s due in forty-five minutes!”
“Cora?”
“Well, who the hell else would be calling you to go pick up someone at the airport?” That came through clearly enough.
Uh-oh.
“Cora—why on earth are you calling me? I’m backed up clear to Canada—”
“Baby, you think I don’t know that? And I’m really sorry, I am, but I’ve called everybody else I can think of and you’re the first person to answer their damn phone.”
Great.
“Cora, I—”
“Oh, thank you, baby! And I’ll make it up to you, I swear. It’s just that the child’s all broken up about her grandmother and everything, you know—?”
Del didn’t have the heart to point out the “child” had to be significantly over thirty.
“—anyway, you got something to write down the flight number?”
With a sigh, Del pulled out a small notebook and pen he always carried with him from his back pocket, duly recorded the information. Clearly, strong-willed females were part of his karma.
“So, what’s she look like? Galen?”
“Oh, Lord. I haven’t seen her in years. She sent me a wedding picture, though. Poor baby. She’s a widow, did I tell you? Oh! And another picture, maybe four, five years ago. Don’t imagine she’s changed much since then. Longish red hair. Dark, like she uses henna on it except this is natural. Real fair skin, some freckles, maybe, I don’t exactly remember. Kinda tall, I guess. Slender. Eyes like those pictures of the Caribbean. Green blue. Pretty girl. You can’t miss her. Okay, this man is giving me a look like I don’t want to know how much this is going to cost me. I’ll see you back at the house.”
Well, that was that. Del hooked the phone back onto his belt, one eyebrow crooked. Red hair and green-blue eyes, huh?
“Mr. Farentino?”
Mrs. Allen was standing far too close, mouth pursed, hands clasped, one of those women to whom lipstick and a housecoat meant “presentable.”
“Does this mean you’re leaving? Before my stove is installed?”
“Now, Mrs. Allen,” Del said in his divert-the-potential-hysteria voice, flashing her his famous, and woefully unused, female-snagging smile. He fetched his vest from where he’d draped it over the back of a kitchen chair, slipped it on. “You gonna trust me here or what? I promise, Dan and Lenny’ll get you all fixed up, okay? By three o’clock this afternoon, you’ll be baking pumpkin pies in that baby, no problem.”
He was out the back door before she had a chance to point out the stove hadn’t even arrived yet.
Chapter 2
Where was Cora?
Swallowing down yet another surge of the nausea that had plagued her since the plane left Pittsburgh, Galen scanned the waiting room, already filling with passengers for the next flight out. She felt like a pack mule. Her purse strangled her diagonally from left shoulder to right hip, her carry-on bag and winter coat crushed the fingers of her right hand, while a beleaguered whimper floated up from the small plastic pet carrier clutched in the other. Amazing, how heavy it was, considering the animal in it weighed about as much as a hoagie. A small hoagie. A hank of hair had slipped out of its clip to torment her cheekbone, but if she put everything down, she’d never figure out how to pick it all up again. Underneath her five-year-old black sweater, she shivered. And not from cold.
All around her, winterized bodies swarmed and jostled each other, the cacophony of voices drowning out intermittent PA announcements and tinny music. Heavens—she hadn’t actually seen Cora in something like twenty years. Tears bit at Galen’s eyes as something close to panic tangled with the queasies. Baby whined again; Galen automatically offered some vague reassurance, as if the thing could hear, let alone understand, her.
She shut her eyes, hauled in a lungful of air. She’d been cloistered even more than she’d thought if a simple trip could throw her this much. True, she’d only flown once before—with Vinnie to St. Thomas for their honeymoon—but she was a grown woman, for heaven’s sake. Not a little kid. Her stomach heaved again; sweat broke out on her forehead, trickling down the side of her face.
“This is crazy,” she muttered to herself, beginning to re-think dumping at least some of her load before her fingers fell off. One corner of her lower lip snagged between her teeth, she craned her neck, her eyes darting around the terminal. Okay, Volcek. Get a grip. You’re just stressed and woozy. She’ll be here—
“Galen? Galen Granata?”
She jumped a foot at the sound of the deep masculine voice a foot away, whirled around to find herself face-to-chest with a ’63 Buick of a man, nicely packaged in plaid flannel and navy blue nylon. Her gaze drifted upward over a thick neck, a squared chin, a smile both tentative and cocky, and a pair of heavy-lidded, thickly-lashed, puppy-dog brown eyes that all but screamed Latin or Mediterranean or something equally threatening.
And then—oh, my—there was that headful of nearly-black hair at least three weeks past needing a haircut.
This was not Cora.
“I’m sorry,” rumbled the voice again. The kind of voice that, when you hear it over the phone, immediately conjures up, well, someone who looks like this. Except, in real life, you discover, eventually and with profound disappointment, the person attached to the voice really looks like Barney Fife. “I must have the wrong person…”
There he went again. Talking. Galen shook her head at the not-Cora, not-Barney-Fife person, which turned out to be a huge mistake. Served her right, she supposed, for holding everything down for two hours. But losing her cookies into a barf bag at thirty-thousand feet was just so…public. She wobbled for a second, both grateful and irked when a firm, large hand grasped her elbow. She caught a whiff of aftershave, and everything heaved inside her.
“Whoa—you okay?”
Reflex jerked her elbow from the man’s grasp, which was another mistake. Her coat and bag slithered and thunked to the floor as she clamped her hand over her mouth, her eyes going wide. The next few seconds were a blur as whoever-this-was scooped up her belongings, clamped one arm around her waist, and propelled her down the hall to the ladies’ room. She shoved the carrier at him, grabbed the carry-on, then lurched inside, narrowly missing a mother with toddler twins just coming out.
“I’ll wait here,” she thought she heard as the door whooshed shut behind her a split second before she catapulted into the nearest stall.
Well, that wasn’t a moment too soon. Del let out a sigh of relief, leaned against the wall outside the restroom door. He’d never seen anyone actually turn green before.
A redhead, Cora had said. Check. Caribbean-green eyes. Pretty girl. Can’t miss her. Check, and check, and hoo-boy.
Then a sardonic smile twisted his mouth. Yeah, right… Cora’s car skidded on the ice, she was stuck at the service station, she just couldn’t get anyone else to answer the phone…
Woman was about as subtle as Ru Paul’s makeup.
Of course, all the women he knew—and half the men—had been trying to fix him up ever since he moved to Spruce Lake, three years ago. Thus far, he’d been able to deflect everyone’s good intentions with either a grin or a glower, depending on his mood. But like the slow, torturous shift and grind and upheaval of the earth’s plates, so Del’s thoughts had begun to shift over the years, leading him to think that, mmm, well—he scrubbed a palm over his chin, hardly believing he was admitting this to himself—he might actually be open to the idea of marrying again.
Well. He’d finished the thought and his heart was still beating. But it was true. He was tired, dammit. Tired of trying to figure out his precocious, inquisitive, hyper daughter by himself, tired of having nothing but the TV to keep him company after she went to bed, tired of waking up alone. Not that he didn’t love his daughter with everything he had in him, mind, but…
But.
He let out a sigh loud enough to make some woman coming out of the ladies’ room give him a funny look.
Yeah. But.
What did he think, he could order up a wife from Spiegel’s or something? Criminy. Look how long it had taken him to find one woman willing to hitch herself to a guy smart enough to get a college education but not smart enough to use it, who clearly preferred living in near poverty—but, hey, calling the shots—than sucking up to some boss just for some minor thing like, oh, security. Like there was actually another woman on this planet that crazy?
One willing to take on, besides the promise of continued financial instability, the exhausting, often thankless task of raising someone else’s child?
Especially one as strong-willed and independent as Wendy.
Find another wife? Sure, why not? Piece of cake.
Let’s see…if Wendy was four and a half now, and she left home at eighteen, that meant…only thirteen and a half more years of celibacy.
That brought the old mouth down into a nice, tight scowl.
He jumped each time the restroom door opened. Three women gave him the eye, one looked as though she was willing to give him far more than that. Galen finally emerged, slightly less green but still frighteningly pale, hugging her carry-on to her stomach like a drowning woman a log. He thought she might have run a comb through her hair, splashed water on her face, if the damp tendrils hugging her temples and clumped eyelashes were any indication. Those incredible turquoise eyes met his; a flush swept up from underneath the baggy, high-necked sweater—black, severe, a startling contrast with her fair skin, the dark red hair.
“Thank you,” she whispered, a smile flickering over almost colorless lips.
“Rough flight?”
Her gaze darted to his, vulnerable and embarrassed. A breath-stealing urge to put his arm around her swamped him again; he handily fought it back.
She nodded, shifting from foot to foot. Even without makeup, her complexion was flawless, the skin as clear and fine as a teenager’s. Only the hairline creases bookending her mouth hinted that she was older. And yes, Cora, there were freckles. Just a few, nicely arranged.
“We hit—” she swallowed “—turbulence over the lake.” Another smile played peekaboo with her lips. Nice mouth, even if a bit on the anemic side. Geez…how long had it been since he’d noticed a woman’s mouth? Hell, since he’d noticed a woman’s anything? Or, in this case, everything.
At first glance you’d say, okay, sure, she’s pretty—definitely pretty—but in an ordinary way for all that, y’know? Just…average. Average height, average weight, averagely clothed in sweater and jeans. Very average hair, except for the color. Straight, parted in the middle, clipped back. Strictly utilitarian, right? On second glance, however, you’d say, “Hmm.”
On second glance, you’d notice the delicacy of her bone structure, the way one tawny eyebrow sat slightly higher than the other, that the loose sweater, the no-frills jeans, really didn’t hide what he suspected was a spectacular figure as much as she probably thought it did. That her ears were absolutely perfect. If red rimmed.
She held out her hand for the carrier. Short nails. No polish. No rings. “Here, I’ll take that back—”
