An Unexpected Addition Page 3

  No wonder she’d done so badly in the convent.

  But she still didn’t have a great deal of use for Hank Mathison. No matter how belatedly concerned with his daughter’s welfare he was.

  No matter how unglued merely shaking hands with him over the rental contract had made her feel.

  No matter how often she’d had to shove him out of her sleeping dreams since.

  She’d never in her life met a man who’d ever made her feel unglued or even a tiny bit flustered, who’d ever had anything remotely to do with her dreams. She didn’t think she’d ever in her life since she was a moony sixteen even experienced that kind of dream. And she could do very well without them now, thank you just the same.

  Still, he had the softest, coolest, firmest right hand of any man she’d ever met.

  A pair of young llamas bolted through Kate’s patch of new transplants, interrupting her reverie, their soft-padded, two-toed feet neatly missing the unfledged trees. A pair of recently turned teenage boys followed close on their heels.

  “Ma, hey, Mom!”

  “Kate, Kate!”

  Not nearly so graceful or surefooted as young llamas—size twelve feet on a fast growing thirteen-year-old body made grace a thing of the future, if it arrived at all—Ilya, the younger of Kate’s foster sons, came to a halt in front of her. He wobbled precariously between transplants for a moment before unintentionally planting one oversize, unmanageable foot squarely on the fragile fir at her feet. She heaved an exaggerated sigh and made a face at him.

  “Thanks,” she said dryly. “That should firm the soil nicely. fWhere’s the fire?”

  “Excuse.” Carefully he removed his foot, bent and straightened the squashed bit of green. It listed hard to port. He eyed Kate, guilty and hopeful at once, falling back on accented English and foreign ingenuousness in self-defense. The fact he hadn’t possessed much of either since the start of his second school year here the previous fall didn’t faze him in the slightest. “It will grow?” A question and a statement.

  Kate leaned over to right the mashed seedling for him. “Is it broken?”

  Ilya inspected the fir’s twiggy shaft. “No?” Doubtful.

  Kate swallowed a grin. Amazing how convenient his lapses of English were. “Yes, you mean?”

  “Oh.”

  Crestfallen, the youth dragged a line in the dirt with the toe of his shoe. Beside him his best friend, Jamal, regarded Kate with a combination of fear and defiance—almost as though he expected her to strike Ilya for accidentally mushing a transplant.

  That was ridiculous, of course. The baby trees were quite literally about a dime a dozen; she and Tai always overplanted, knowing they were bound to lose a few seedlings to any number of things: Ilamas, deer, rabbits, insects, kids’ feet...

  With an inward sigh Kate plucked the ruined tree from the earth and set it aside, then pulled a replacement from the bunch left to plant. This wasn’t the first time she’d wondered about Jamal’s home life. Unfortunately without either an invitation to butt in or Jamal trusting her enough to confide in her—if indeed there was anything to confide—her overly righteous nature and bad experience had taught her there were a few lines better left uncrossed.

  Even though she would willingly, and had for other kids in the past. Wanna see the scars?

  With a silent snort of yeah, right, she got to her feet, handed the new transplant to Ilya, collected her spade and made a slit in the dirt. “So,” she said, “what are you two flying blind about?”

  “Huh?” Caught off guard by the lack of dire consequences, Jamal watched her, puzzled, skittishly poised for flight. Waiting for retribution to sneak up and cuff him none too gently on the back of the head, Kate guessed.

  Thoroughly unconcerned by contrast, Ilya knelt and fiddled the tree roots into the dirt gash. “We came to tell you the crias are loose.” All but a trace of accent had disappeared.

  “I noticed.” Kate stamped the earth around the roots, stepped the square blade of the spade in a few inches away, then leaned it forward to pack the dirt tighter around the base of the tree. A few feet the other side of the transplant line Maizie and Clarence regarded her with interest, undoubtedly storing information for future use. The saw among llama owners and breeders was: “Llamas are the second most intelligent creature after dolphins, which probably makes them smarter than people. They will change your life.” Absolutely true, all of it. Especially that last.

  She made a face at them, then looked at Ilya. “Anything else?”

  Ilya grinned. “Tai said to tell you they tore the screen out of Mr. Mathison’s bedroom window and woke him up. He wasn’t very happy about it and he didn’t know we kept llamas. Tai thinks you’ll hear about it at breakfast.”

  Another face, this one an exact replica of Ilya’s older brother’s oh man, do I hafta? She sighed, this time aloud. “Put Maizie and Clarence back with their mothers and get in to breakfast. I’ll deal with Mr. Mathison.”

  Now if only she could figure out why she anticipated that prospect with such relish...

  There was something decidedly...bewitching about the place.

  He could feel it even through the fog in which he’d woken, could understand a little of what drew Megan here time and again, to hide in the shadows of Kate Anden’s always green trees. Pagan beliefs, he’d told Megan a long time ago, explaining the origin of the Christmas tree to her, held that trees that stayed green all winter had magical powers. Maybe it was his own fault she ran here from him. It was the stories he’d told her when she was a child.

  She was still his child.

  The scent of dew-laden pine, balsam, cedar and spruce, of fusty earth and trampled ferns and wintergreen leaves, sifted into his nostrils when he stepped out of the cabin onto the front porch. The trill of red-winged blackbirds warning each other of his passing, the songs of finches, bluebirds and swallows, the constant chant of the spring peepers and the other frogs that filled the woods and marshy areas deeper in—the chaos of sound blended and caught at his ears, filtered through his nervous system to settle a soul jangled raw by too much civilization, paperwork, politics, news...by too much Megan in crisis.

  The slur-sound of vegetation to his left made him start. Three deer shied and leaped away from the sough of his feet on the roadbed; he stared after them, lungs shuddering, heart pounding. It had been five years since he’d spent any time in the jungles of Colombia and Bolivia chasing cocaine farmers and their lords, and still his subconscious couldn’t feel safe surrounded by trees.

  With an effort, he stood still and breathed, letting scent and sound, the cool touch of shadow on exposed skin become an instant of peace he’d forgotten he’d been missing. Sweet solitude with no place he had to be, no responsibilities he had to face, no decisions he had to make that would affect anyone else’s life. Two blessed minutes to himself—a lifetime it almost seemed.

  If only he could figure out how to make it be enough.

  He moved forward, walking the rutted quarter-mile trail from the cabin to the house that he and Megan and their luggage had jounced down the night before in the car, trying to take in everything around him at once. He wanted, he realized with a sudden disquieting start, he needed something from this place not only for Megan but for himself.

  For him.

  The kitchen was huge and warm, richly scented with sizzling meat, coffee and carbohydrates, a true farm kitchen.

  Aromas dragging at his senses and making his insides gurgle in anticipation, Hank walked across the stone-floored mud room and rapped on the wooden screen door. When no one answered, he let himself in.

  Immediately to his left, a long, dark green-painted wooden table with matching benches sat before a bank of open windows framed by filmy-looking lace curtains. Around the table a boisterous group of boys of varying sizes, colors and ages straddled the benches helping themselves to platters of pancakes, toast and sausages; plastic gallons of milk and juice passed hand to hand to fill mismatched plastic movie and superhero glas
ses from sundry local fast-food restaurants.

  At the stove-top griddle on the far side of the kitchen stood two teenage girls in bright T-shirts and jeans with their hair ponytailed in vivid neon scrunchies. Without difficulty he recognized Li’s long black hair and creamy Asian skin, her slim, graceful hands shoveling pepper-speckled scrambled eggs into a bowl. She looked the way she always looked to him: pretty, healthy, mature beyond her years, sure of herself and her place in the world, clear-eyed, knowing and...innocent as opposed to naive. Beside her, the girl with the laugh-curved mouth, soft brown hair and naturalglow skin wielding the pancake spatula also appeared fit and uncomplicated, young, and if not yet entirely certain of her direction, then at least convinced that she would eventually find one.

  It took him a full thirty seconds and a startled heartbeat to realize the girl beside Li was Megan.

  Talk, laughter and an astonishing variety of gross mouth sounds floated around Hank, yet he heard nothing. Stunned, he stared at his daughter, wondering who she was, how she’d gotten the black dye out of her hair so fast, what she’d done to liven up her skin tone from the ghastly paleness she normally sported and why she never looked like this at home.

  Multiple personalities, his mind whispered, turning over possibilities in psychiatric jargon, searching for a pigeonhole. Schizophrenia. Manic depression and this is the manic part.

  “Morning, Mr. Mathison.”

  Brisk and breezy, Kate Anden strolled in to Hank’s astonishment, her flyaway, sun-kissed red-gold hair crossing his line of vision before the rest of her had a chance to. He looked at her.

  “That’s my daughter,” he said, adequate response lagging well behind the event.

  Kate nodded. “Different, isn’t she?”

  His mouth flattened, his wary gaze returned to his daughter. “I’m not sure that’s the word I’d choose.”

  “No,” Kate agreed without thinking. “It’s probably not. You probably chose schizophrenic.”

  Attention arrested, Hank turned to her. Not a pretty woman by any stretch of the imagination; she was hardly what he could call plain, either. She had a quality, a beauty-honesty forced him to call it that—that was almost feral: big teeth in a slight overbite in a mouth that was overly generous, both literally and figuratively; eyes of a pale tourmaline blue with dark rings around the irises and in the left a rust-colored freckle next to the pupil; skin both freckled and flushed from a life spent largely outdoors; hair that was thick and riotous with a blend of autumn colors, fuzzy and unruly and playful—at present, an unbound rufous chaos that whirled about her waist; a body both slim and overly lavish, seductive but demure because she gave her attributes not one second of regard, didn’t...play them up or take advantage of them or acknowledge them at all.

  She also had a smile that could halt a hungry tiger in its tracks, a throaty, infectious laugh and a voice that would soothe the most cantankerous drug lord he’d ever met. Which was why he’d never been able to deny Megan permission to come here and get lost and found among the hordes of Kate’s adopted children, foster children, exchange students and the multitudes of extras that drifted to her shores. When they’d shaken hands over the rental agreement on the guesthouse three days ago, he’d felt a shock from the center of his palm to the bottom of his toes—almost as if she’d hidden a practical joker’s buzzer in her hand.

  There’d been only skin between them, however. Hers hard and dry and impersonal, moisturized soft, but used to work. He shouldn’t have felt anything, but she’d made his hormones snap, crackle and fizz awake.

  Damn it.

  He had a daughter to worry about; he didn’t need to have his sleepy libido roused just now, and particularly not by a woman who couldn’t have been further from his type—hell, who couldn’t be further from any man’s type, he’d guess—than the saintly and pushy Kate Anden.

  He cast a glance at Megan, then back to Kate.

  “Be nice if things were really this simple, wouldn’t it?” Kate asked quietly.

  Caught off guard, Hank nodded, his eyes once again on Megan, his thoughts focused on her and far away at once. “Yeah, it would. But nothin’ ever is.”

  “You sound like you’ve got personal knowledge of that.” Crisp and doubtful. Unexpectedly...gentle.

  Drawn back from haunted places, Hank turned his head and stared at her. She viewed him, eyes frank and unwinking, blunt and psychic as she’d been four-and-a-half years earlier when she’d called him at his office to announce that he’d better stop on his way home and get some maxi-pads for Megan who’d started her monthlies a week after Gen’s death and had been borrowing pads from Li regularly for the five months since. And to inform him that Li, then barely twelve, was the one who’d had to instruct Megan in the whys and wherefores of a woman’s cycles and bodily functions and did Hank maybe want her, Kate, to pull Megan aside and correct any misinformation his daughter might have been given, since his daughter obviously needed someone to talk to and he, apparently, wasn’t it?

  He didn’t like Kate any better now than he had then, despite the fact she seemed to hold the keys to his daughter’s psyche—and probably because of it.

  The center of his right palm itched with memory anyway.

  He reminded himself that smoke didn’t have to mean fire. That gentleness didn’t necessarily equate with like, as in “I like you.” That desire didn’t have to be acted upon.

  Still, in the interest of even footing he ignored the sensation of being singed and went on the attack instead.

  “I knew you had a lot of kids, but these can’t all be yours.”

  As though she’d expected the move, Kate grinned at him. There was something faintly mischievous in the curve of her mouth, imperceptibly mocking, subtly inviting. A sense of humor he’d been unaware she possessed. A you’ve-changed-the-subject-butit-doesn’ t-matter-we-can-go-back-to-it-later.

  A dare-ya

  He’d rented her guesthouse for how long?

  “They’re ours this morning,” she said

  Chapter 2

  She viewed him deadpan. Serenely serious.

  It took him a minute to register the ours. Too late. Irritating and enigmatic as he’d ever found her, she sashayed across to the spitting coffee maker before he could call her back without alerting the mob at the table, collected a mug from the hooks underneath a cupboard and offered it to him.

  “Coffee, Mr. Mathison?”

  “Sure.” Hank eyed her, out of his element, knots of ulceration forming in his stomach. A curious jigger of anticipation—not unlike the buzz of making a successful first connection on an undercover—doodled down his spine.

  Up until Gen’s death he’d been of the daredevil undercover DEA breed—necessary to the cause, but heavily monitored nonetheless—a risk taker, a cowboy who’d gotten juiced on bandying words, deeds and attitudes with the worst the world had to offer. A flea on the back of the drug-cartel elephant, he’d thought of himself incessant and irritating; unable to stop the elephant, but occasionally causing an itch serious enough to bring it to its knees.

  Still, none of that had prepared him for this.

  Of course, he thought wryly, none of that had prepared him to be Megan’s father alone on his own, either, and look how successful he was at that.

  He saw Kate set down the coffeepot and crossed to her while watching the impostor Megan laughingly pass a platter of pancakes and sausages to the boys at the table.

  She turned to him, clear-eyed and beautiful, the way he always wanted to see her. “Pancakes, Dad?”

  “Who are you and what have you done with my daughter?” Kidding. Suspicious. Putting his foot in it.

  She laughed, “Da-ad,” and returned to help Li at the griddle.

  Maybe he hadn’t stepped in too deep. And if they’d made this much progress overnight, maybe they wouldn’t have to even stay the whole summer.

  “How do you take it?” Kate asked.

  “An inch at a time,” he said honestly.

 
She gave him a straight face. “Your coffee?”

  “What?”

  He looked at her, chagrin caught up with him at the same time the conversation did. He’d stepped into that one, all right. This woman had a mean sense of humor, he’d have to stand on his toes in order not to get caught in it again. “Oh. No, I mean milk, no sugar.” He inhaled, consciously bringing himself back into the moment. It had been that conspiratorial ours, the intimation of you-and-me, when he was absolutely certain there wasn’t.

  Despite the return of the phantom fizz to the center of his right palm.

  “Thanks.” He accepted the mug she handed him and sipped, feeling awkward at the silence she didn’t appear to notice. He broke it. Idly. “What exactly does ours mean?”

  She grinned. “I wondered when that’d catch up with you.”

  “Not soon enough, apparently.”

  “You said you wanted this to be a working vacation.” Silent laughter was bright in her eyes. She enjoyed poking and prodding him. Relished spooning the previous week’s desperate pledges back at him with a shovel. “You said you wanted to get your hands dirty and be reintroduced to Megan and get to know her and forget about being a paper pusher with the DEA.”

  He gave her narrow-eyed scrutiny. “What, did you write our conversation down verbatim?”

  She offered him glib. “Photographic memory.”

  “For everything, or only what it suits you to photograph?”

  She looked at him, surprised by the question, the observation. She adjusted her view. Guarded.

  Thoughtful.

  “Touché.” she said and saluted him with her mug.

  He chalked a mental point in the air. Direct hit. score one. And he hadn’t even intended to.

  He also hadn’t realized that bandying words with the enemy would return so naturally—or feel so good—any place outside a sting operation. It had been a long time since he’d worked a sting. Being an assistant director for the midwest DEA, Detroit office, meant spending half his time trying to halt the off-loaders of drugs within American borders. The other half was spent trying to train educators, families and the local police in ways to prevent drug dealers from permeating an area—often a depressing and thankless task. He’d had to develop skills for the job that were unlike any he’d used on the front lines, to learn to play office politics and budgetary tunes, to control his enthusiasm for any single operation by ever bearing in mind the big picture. To play party pooper—often not so different from parenting a teenager, he’d discovered—when he’d always hated the guy who put the damper on his party, when he’d been the one working the street.