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How was she going to tell Matt there was a chance his daughter was suffering from anorexia?
It was Friday, and Matt was looking forward to a whole weekend off. He’d managed to plow through a mountain of backed-up paperwork and was out of work an hour earlier than usual. It was a beautiful afternoon. All day he thought about taking the girls for a short hike up at Safe Harbor Park, and there was still enough light left to do so. Russ Mitchard said the park had the best wilderness trails on the peninsula.
Matt had just cleared the front door of the church building when he ran into Justine. Literally. He managed to catch her before she fell. Her scent surrounded him and she felt wonderful in his arms as she stared up at him with an expression he couldn’t decipher.
“I’m…uh…I’m so sorry,” she said, stepping back, giving him no choice but to let her go.
“Not your fault I came barreling in here and knocked you for a loop. I was in a hurry to pick up the girls. I thought we’d go for a hike before the light fails.”
“Oh. But I really need to talk to you.”
The disappointment in Justine’s face gave him a shot of pleasure. “So come with us.” The words had just popped out of his mouth. Too late, he noticed her outfit. She wasn’t really dressed for a hike. She had on a long top and slacks made of a velvety soft material that was pretty but casual.
“I…no, you don’t understand. I need to talk about Leslie.”
Confusion assailed him along with a sense of disappointment that she only wanted to talk to him about his daughter. “Leslie? Is she not settling in? She said this was working out okay.”
“As far as I know it is. She’s been getting on just fine. It isn’t that she’s any trouble.” Justine paused. “It’s something else. Have you noticed her losing weight lately? A lot of weight?”
Matt frowned. What was she getting at? “Les is getting taller, that’s all. Her clothes still fit, so she couldn’t have lost weight. You wouldn’t know this because you don’t have kids, but every once in a while they shoot up and look thinner. I guess they don’t grow everything at once. At her age, I grew six inches in one summer and didn’t gain an ounce. I could hardly keep my pants up.”
Justine didn’t crack a smile. He watched as she took a deep breath. “Matt, I’ve found her lunch in the trash four days in a row. Earlier today when I asked her why, she said she doesn’t like what you pack but doesn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
Leslie normally packed all of the lunches, but he wasn’t about to tell Justine that. She seemed to be implying he wasn’t taking good care of his kids. Or that they were afraid to speak their minds.
Brother. He was batting a thousand lately. First Mary and Seth, two people he’d thought of as parents since marrying their daughter, had begun doubting his ability to raise the girls without their mother and criticizing his every decision. And now the first person he’d been attracted to since Diane’s death was calling him an incompetent parent.
“Leslie can say anything to me she wants,” he growled. “And she knows it. If she’d said she wanted something else for lunch, I’d have seen she had it.”
“I have no doubt of that. I don’t think she wants something else for lunch. In fact, Gina told me it’s Leslie who makes the lunches.”
“I don’t appreciate your questioning my children, Reverend.”
Justine stiffened. It was as if he saw a barrier form around her.
“I didn’t question Gina, Chief Trent. She offered the information in one of her sweet, running advertisements for a mother. I came to you with a concern for your child. Not to inspire an attack on my motives. I’m terribly afraid Leslie may have an eating disorder.”
Matt shook his head. There was nothing wrong with his Leslie. She was losing her baby fat. And she’d gotten taller. Hadn’t he said that already?
Justine stepped forward and put her hand on his forearm. He could see her concern for Leslie in her eyes and hear it in her voice.
“I’m not criticizing. A blind man could see how much you love those girls. But you can’t afford to be blind to their faults and problems. Matt, please don’t discount what I’m saying. Watch her. Carefully. If I’m right, and I pray I’m not, this can be very dangerous. Anorexia is insidious and it’s a silent killer.”
“Leslie’s fine,” he insisted.
Before Justine could once again rebut his assertion, the clamor of little feet sounded down the hall from the classroom wing.
Minutes later he had both the little ones with him and watched Leslie strolling along the hall and down the steps. All at once she looked so alone to him. Maybe watching her closely wouldn’t be such a bad idea. After all, the girls were in this program because he’d been worried about Les.
As they started to put dinner together, Matt made it a point to notice if Leslie really did pick at what they were making for dinner. He felt guilty and almost sneaky. As if he were spying on her.
“Don’t you like dinner, Les?” he felt compelled to ask when he noticed how little of her meal she was actually eating. They all sat around the big maple table Diane had so lovingly restored. As far as Diane had been concerned, family meals were the center of the universe.
“Dinner’s fine, Daddy. But ham is a little fattening. I just don’t want to be fat. That’s all.”
That was the first he’d heard that she was worried about her weight. Maybe there was something here he needed to address. And maybe she had lost a little weight along with the inches she’d gained. On the walk, he had noticed Les just sort of floated along with a growing grace that made his heart ache and made him aware that his little girl was headed inexorably toward womanhood.
“Are you on a diet, princess?” he asked casually.
She shrugged. “Not really. I just like my clothes to fit loose. You know. Grandma’s no lightweight, either. When I get older, if I already eat right, I won’t have to worry that I’ll look like her. And I can look like the models in Pizzazz and Mystique.”
Matt sighed. America—a plastic surgeon’s paradise! Where men were supposed to be over-muscled and women were starting to look the same except for their out-of-proportion breasts.
“You know all those women don’t really look like that naturally, don’t you? Some have surgery and most of their photos are retouched.”
That got Leslie’s attention. Her head snapped up. “You think so?”
“Oh. Yeah. I saw it on a TV show about special effects. A graphic artist trims thighs, arms, hips, whatever the photographer wants slimmed down with the computer. It’s all smoke and mirrors. Your mother never dieted. She just ate healthy and let the good Lord take care of how she looked. And she looked wonderful. You will, too.”
Leslie tilted her head and frowned, clearly thinking about what he’d said. “You thought Mom was pretty?”
He could think of Diane now and remember her before the cancer. He smiled and knew it had a wistful quality. But that was okay. He’d never hidden his grief from the kids. They knew he missed their mom as much as they did. “She was perfect. Didn’t you think so?”
Her eyes shone and she nodded. “She was. Wasn’t she? Thanks, Daddy,” she told him with a sweet broad smile.
Matt gave a sigh of relief. Leslie was going to be fine. Justine had just panicked. Now all he had to do was apologize to the pretty minister for putting her in the crosshairs of his insecurities over single parenthood. He couldn’t believe how he’d spoken to her. And all because she cared about his daughter.
Chapter Four
Justine heard footsteps in the hall coming toward her office. She looked up from the lesson she’d prepared for her newly instituted Wednesday night youth service. While she was ready for a visitor, she wasn’t ready to find Chief Matthew Trent and his wide shoulders filling her doorway.
The quickened beat of her heart told her a forewarning probably wouldn’t have helped, anyway. To see Matt was to—and oh, how she hated admitting this even to herself—desire him. That he was in uniform didn’t help. What was it about men in uniform? And why didn’t being a minister exempt her from those kind of thoughts? They were entirely inappropriate, and besides that, embarrassing and inconvenient!
“Got a minute?” Matt asked, and Justine felt immediate contrition. The man was clearly troubled.
“Come in. What can I do for you?”
“A couple things, actually,” he said, sinking into the chair across from her desk. “I’ve been meaning to get over here to see you ever since Friday but, with one thing and another going on, my time’s been a little tight.”
“I noticed the girls weren’t at Sunday school. Frankly, I worried that I’d chased you all away.”
“Of course you didn’t chase us away. Gina was up sick all night Saturday, so we slept in. The reason I wanted to see you is to say I was wrong to snap at you on Friday. I’d like to apologize. You were just concerned for Les, and I overreacted instead of being appreciative that you’d worry about her.”
He raked a hand through his shock of dark hair. “I’m afraid I’m a little sensitive about the girls. I made the mistake of leaning heavily on my in-laws after Diane died. Then, when Cindy was taken—”
“Taken?”
Matt sat back and crossed his ankle over his knee. “I assumed you knew what prompted our move here. Cindy was snatched from the playground at school last spring.”
Justine’s hand flew to cover her heart. “Oh dear Lord. That’s horrible.”
He closed his eyes for a few seconds as if to banish the horror, then opened them and nodded. “We got lucky. A teacher who’d had Cindy in a previous grade happened to be leaving for a doctor’s appointment. She saw Cindy in the car crying. She knew me, and since I wasn’t the driver, she decided to make sure everything was all right. She drove her car across the street and blocked his car in. Better safe than sorry, she thought, and, of course, she was right. One of the male teachers saw what was happening, saw the vehicle turn around, and chased it on foot, hoping to get the plate number, at least. When the car had to stop, he managed to get the door open with Cindy’s help and pulled her out. The perp fled on foot, but the police had him in custody within the hour.”
“You must have been terrified for her.”
Matt nodded. “And that’s why I decided to move somewhere safer. My in-laws weren’t so understanding. They live about an hour the other side of Green Bay. Seth’s seventy now. He was never much of a driver, but now he hates driving through the city or on high-speed highways. And, of course, they’d gotten used to stopping in every day. I know this is a long drive, but they acted as if Safe Harbor were the dark side of the moon. I’d asked their opinion on so much for so long, they must have begun to think they had a right to dictate how and where I should raise the girls. They wanted me to keep my job with the FBI and have the girls live with them, visiting on weekends. I couldn’t even consider that.”
“After losing their mother, that would have been disastrous for them.”
Matt moved in his chair, visibly restless and tense. “That’s how I felt. Anyway, Ray called about the job in Safe Harbor, and I decided the move here would be better for all concerned. My in-laws objected and even told the girls their alternative solution without consulting me.”
“I can’t think that was right, and I, for one, think you made the right decision. As I said, the girls didn’t need to lose you as well as their mother.”
“Not to hear their grandparents tell it. They don’t think I’m capable of raising three girls alone.”
Justine could hear the hurt in his voice.
“Well, anyway,” he continued, “I’m proud of my relationship with my kids. We’re close. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for them. Nothing’s more important to me than they are. I’m a good father.” A note of uncertainty entered his voice.
“Of course, you are. I never doubted that for a moment,” she assured him.
“Right now, I am. Doubting me, I mean. Sort of, anyway.” He shook his head and sat straighter, dropping the relaxed cross-legged posture. “I don’t know. I thought I’d solved any problem with Leslie’s eating on Friday night. She admitted to watching her diet so she wouldn’t gain weight in her adult years. Diane’s mother is a little on the plump side, and I think it may have had Les worried. But then we had a long talk about dieting and the reality of retouched fashion magazine photos. She seemed to understand. Then last night, I caught her tossing her dinner in the trash.
“I confronted her about it, and before I knew it we were in a raging, door-slamming battle. She hates it here. Hates me for bringing her here. She should have stayed with Seth and Mary. She called me ‘stupid’ and ‘selfish’ among other things, the kindest of which was ‘dictator.’ She apologized later but…” He grimaced.
The man was heartbroken. “But you thought you were her hero and it hurts that she’s coming to see things about you she characterizes as faults.”
Matt blinked and stared at her. “How did you know that?”
“I’m smarter than the average minister because I’m a woman,” she teased, shooting him a grin.
The teasing did no good. Matt was just too upset to unwind that easily. “One of the things she really unloaded about is that practically every minute we’re together has something to do with chores. She’s right. Between trying to get completely moved in—my garage is still wall-to-wall boxes—and all the everyday things Diane would have handled while I was at work…” He sighed. “She told me later that she was just angry but… Justine, I’m not sure she meant it. I thought I knew my daughter.”
“I’m sure you do. More than the average male parent of a thirteen-year-old girl. It’s a very difficult period. So much changes in that year. I often feel sorry for those ninth graders. They don’t really belong in the junior high building nor the high school building. She’s growing up, Matt, and unfortunately that means growing away, as well. It’s a natural, albeit painful, process.”
Matt scrubbed his hand over his face. “I wish I were sure that’s all there is to it. Listen, I know it’s an imposition, but would you mind coming over for dinner one night soon and just sort of observing her? Maybe you’ll see something I’m missing. And maybe if she hears another woman in an informal setting talking about this dieting idea, she’ll see she’s going at it all wrong.”
Justine really didn’t think she’d be able to help, but didn’t want to close the door with a refusal. “It isn’t an imposition at all. I’m always here for the kids and their parents. Besides, it’ll save me cooking for myself at least one night.”
“Would tonight be too soon?”
“No. Tonight would be fine.”
He smiled broadly, his relief palpable. “Thanks.”
At six-thirty sharp, Justine pulled up in the Trents’ driveway and took a moment to send a quick prayer heavenward that she wouldn’t misstep.
She was only halfway up the walk when the front door flew open and Cindy and Gina spilled out with Matt trailing behind.
“Don’t knock the poor woman over, girls,” he called after them, as they both barreled into her, shooting greetings and queries a mile a minute. She put her arms around both girls and tried to answer.
“Now, let me see. Yes, I’d love to see your room, Cindy. And, yes, I’d love to meet your friend Binky,” she said, carefully taking a baby blanket that had seen better days. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to smooth it over her hand and turn it quickly into a puppet.
“Hello, Reverend Clemens,” she said, giving Binky a squeaky voice. “Hello to you, too, Binky,” she answered, quickly changing back to her own voice. “Gina’s my person. We’re very good friends,” Binky replied.
Gina giggled and took Binky back, clumsily fashioning the puppet around her own hand. “Will you be my friend, too, and maybe stay overnight? We have bunk beds. We’ll share. Won’t we, Gina?”
“Sure,” Gina continued in the high-pitched voice she’d assigned to Binky, then quickly corrected the tone, and giggled, saying “Sure” again in her own register.
Matt cleared his throat. “I don’t think, Reverend Clemens could—”
“I really can’t,” Justine said at the same moment. They both laughed in shared camaraderie and chagrin.
“Girls, let’s get inside before dinner burns…or our guest runs for her life,” Matt put in, after scooping Gina and Binky up in his arms.
He’d promised to fix ravioli in a red meat sauce that he called gravy, a term he said he’d learned from his Italian grandmother. His Mediterranean background wasn’t a surprise to Justine. His deep brown eyes, dark complexion and nearly black hair told an unmistakable tale of Latin roots.
Justine followed the crowd inside the farmhouse-design home. She found it a pleasant surprise after the way Matt had described the state of his garage. The living room was beautifully arranged. If the rest of his home looked as put together, she would know he’d been exaggerating.
“Matt, this is lovely. You have a real talent for decorating.”
A snort came from behind and to the left. Justine turned and found Leslie leaning in the doorway of a softly lit room next to the staircase. “Like Dad knows more than how to stuff a room full of furniture.”
“Les told me where to put what, what color to paint the walls and what to hang where,” Matt confessed. “Otherwise, nothing would have been hung up and the furniture would be arranged like a doctor’s waiting room. My back still aches thinking about moving everything around till my slave-driver daughter was satisfied.”
Mindful that a lack of self-esteem was reported to be a prime cause of eating disorders, Justine jumped on the chance to bolster Leslie’s sense of self. “You have quite a talent, Leslie. Maybe someday you’ll be an interior designer.”
The teen shrugged shyly. “Mom bought it all. I just said where to put it. And the paint color was common sense. It was no big deal.”
“Oh, you’re wrong. Really. It takes the right eye to know how to arrange things this nicely. And color is so easily off a shade. I know grown women who can’t do this well. Unfortunately, I head the list. Maybe you could lend me that eye of yours someday, if it’s all right with your dad. I hate the way my place is coming together. As your dad said, it looks like a doctor’s waiting room with the furniture lined up along the walls.”
Again Leslie shrugged, but she did stand a little straighter and taller. “Yeah. Sure. I could help.”
“I guess that means I’ll be moving furniture again,” Matt said, giving a deep theatrical sigh.
Leslie rolled her eyes. “Oh, Daddy,” she said with the kind of exaggerated disgust only a thirteen-year-old can do justice to.
Justine laughed. “So, where’s this authentic Italian dinner I was promised?”
Matt tucked the younger girls in bed and settled Les down at the computer in her room to finish the rest of her homework. Then, somewhat reluctantly, he headed back to the family room where Justine waited. He watched her lovely face in silent repose reflected in the window as she stared out at the darkened sky and took a sip of the tea he’d given her before going off to see to the girls.
For a moment Matt found himself unable to move—held in check by Justine’s beauty. But, he reminded himself, he needed something of more substance from this woman—this minister—than her captivating loveliness. With his daughter’s happiness at stake, attraction took a back seat to answers. Answers he needed but feared.
Matt took a deep fortifying breath before plunging ahead into troubled waters. If she said something negative, he didn’t know how he’d handle it. There was nothing more important to him than being the best of fathers. What would he do if he’d failed?
“Everyone’s all settled,” he told her before losing his nerve.
Justine turned and smiled, but there was a hint of nervousness in her expression. “Matt,” she said, almost as if she were surprised to see him there.
