A Father's Gift Read online

  “You’re looking into my biological father for me,” she reminded. “That’s—”

  “That’s for the swimming lessons. What I’m talking about now is the plumbing gig.”

  “The pizza was fine,” she replied. “And you helped with the tree and tonight. You don’t owe me anything more.” She opened her door.

  “Go out with me tomorrow night. Someplace nice. Just you and me.”

  Cassie hung out there in space, half turned around in her seat, left foot in the car and right partway to the ground. She didn’t like being backed into a corner, but she also didn’t want to be mean to Jack. He was just trying to be nice. Wanting to give her a meal for a teeny little job.

  “We’ll go anywhere you want,” Jack said. “As long as it’s nice.”

  Cassie could feel a cramp coming on in her leg so she jumped out of the car. Just then, Ollie’s deep bark rumbled through the walls of her house, rolling down the sidewalk and out onto the street. Hot dog! Saved by the woof.

  “I really need to get in and let Ollie out,” she said, turning to Jack. “He’s been cooped up too long.”

  “Cassie.”

  His voice was firm and demanding. Her cheeks warmed as she thought of Jack being that way in other circumstances. Fortunately, Ollie barked again.

  “I’ll call you,” Cassie said hurriedly. “In a half hour.”

  “Cassie.”

  “I promise. If I don’t let Ollie out, he’ll tear the place to pieces.” She slammed the car door and ran for her house. It might be cowardly but it was safe.

  Ollie greeted her enthusiastically, barely giving her a chance to open the door. Holding him back with one hand, she waved with the other to Jack, indicating that all was well inside. Cassie didn’t breathe until his taillights disappeared up his driveway.

  Jack put the cordless phone on the kitchen table and opened the metro section of the newspaper, scanning the page for some article he hadn’t read earlier in the evening. Cassie wouldn’t call; he knew that. But just in case she did, he ought to be close to a phone. He read about a giant garage sale being run by a local church and a report from a city council meeting before he glanced up at the clock. He’d been home ten minutes.

  By the time he finished the accident reports for both South Bend and Mishawaka, it was fifteen minutes. Time enough to read the obituaries and the want ads, then to switch over to the entertainment section and a review of a new album by some group he’d never heard of. Two movie reviews and the announcement of a new restaurant opening were followed by a summary of local festivals—an egg festival in Mentone, a blueberry festival in Plymouth, an ethnic festival in South Bend, and on and on. These Hoosiers sure appeared to be festive folks.

  Jack glanced at the clock. Thirty-five minutes. He’d been right. She wasn’t going to call. He closed up the newspaper and tossed it back with the other papers, but refused to go to the window and see if her lights were still on.

  What was he supposed to do? Hog-tie her and force her to have dinner with him? He could see it now—Cassie tied up and thrown over his shoulder as he carried her into an elegant restaurant. Knowing Cassie, the minute he put her down, she’d be hightailing it to the door, even if she had to hop across the room. Or else, she’d be hightailing it over him, even if she had to hop all over his body to make him black-and-blue.

  The phone shrieked at him, splitting the silence of the night. For one endless second, he was frozen by surprise, then grabbed the receiver.

  “Merrill here,” he said.

  “It’s Cassie.”

  “Hi.” Brilliant conversationalist.

  “Hi.”

  Her voice did funny things to his breathing, made him want to turn off the lights and sit in the dark, clutching the phone like some high-school kid. He stood and walked over to the window, staring over at her house. The lights were on on the first floor. What room was she in?

  “Look, I really don’t think we should do dinner,” she said.

  “Why not?” He flicked the light off so that his reflection wouldn’t stare back at him. And so that she couldn’t see him.

  “Huh?”

  “Why not?” he repeated. “Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t.”

  “Give me one good reason why we should.”

  “Because I owe you, and Merrills—”

  “Always pay their debts,” she finished for him. “I know. But besides that.”

  “My conscience says I have to.”

  She laughed and his breathing grew even rougher. “Sleep with a light on and it won’t bother you.”

  “My conscience is tougher than that,” he protested. “So what’s your reason why we shouldn’t have dinner?”

  There was a long silence. Long enough for a car to go down the street, its lights sweeping away the darkness, then letting it fall back in place behind it.

  “I just don’t want any more complications in my life right now,” she said.

  “What’s complicated about eating?” he asked. “You on some weird diet program?”

  She laughed although exasperation came through pretty clearly, too. “I can’t explain it,” she said. “We’re just too different. We probably have all different expectations of life.”

  “I was just expecting some company for dinner,” he said.

  “See?” Her voice had a mocking tone, but he could sense something else there, too. “You’d want to eat and I’d want to be swept off my feet with wine and roses and poetry so that we fall in love and run away to some magical land far, far away, where we’d live happily ever after.”

  “What if I’m willing to do that when dinner’s over?”

  She laughed, but somehow he knew a door was closing. “We’re just not compatible.”

  This was all a lot of nonsense, he knew that. She wasn’t some starry-eyed teenager who was dreaming of love. She was an adult—a clearheaded, realistic woman who would pound the living daylights out of some man who tried to cart her off to some magical land. She would want to walk there at his side.

  But still, he had no idea what was really the matter.

  “Let’s just call it even and say good-night,” she said.

  “We’re not even.”

  “You’ll get used to the idea,” she replied and then the phone went dead.

  Jack stood there for a long moment, staring out at the darkness and holding the phone at his ear, listening to the mocking notes of the dial tone. After a moment, the lights in her house went out. He felt the strangest sense of emptiness, of loss. It was a weird idea, since he’d never had her in any sense.

  He walked slowly across the kitchen and hung up the phone. The house was dark and silent.

  She wouldn’t even take a damn dinner from him, let alone ask for anything else. And the more she refused, the more deeply he felt in debt to her.

  He was going to settle this. He had to.

  Chapter Six

  Cassie took a quick step back from her shower stall and turned her head to avoid the spray of water as Ollie shook himself. Since he was half-in, half-out of the shower stall, the bathroom walls, the sink and the floor got the benefit of his shaking. Not to mention her.

  “Why’d you do that?” she asked. “I’m not the one who needed a bath.”

  He responded by coming all the way out of the stall and shaking himself again, sending a finer spray of water all over her. It didn’t matter, though. She was already soaked from bathing him.

  “Come on, boy,” she said and draped an old beach towel over him, rubbing him vigorously. “Let’s get you dry so I can fix some dinner.”

  He seemed far less interested in food than in licking her face anytime it got near his.

  “You’re really determined to clean me up, aren’t you?” She stood and looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her T-shirt was soaked from struggling to bathe him, her shorts were damp, and her hair was all stringy and plastered to her face. “I think I look rather glamorous, myself.”

  Ollie wagged hi
s tail.

  “In fact, 1 wouldn’t be surprised if hordes of handsome men were pounding down my door this evening.”

  She pushed aside the unsettling knowledge that at least one handsome gentleman could have been at her door this evening if she’d let him, and went back to towel-drying Ollie. She’d done the right thing in turning Jack down. Maybe she was a little lonely now and then, but it was the price she had to pay for being safe.

  “So what should we have for dinner?” she asked Ollie, although the prospect of an empty evening stretching ahead of her had dulled her appetite. “Grilled cheese or hot dogs? Maybe I should just order a pizza, or I could scramble up some eggs.”

  Ollie was listening, or at least wagging his tail at her as she spoke, but then he stopped and looked away. After a moment of holding himself still, he ran out of the bathroom and down the stairs. She heard him barking from the living room.

  “Must be those hordes of handsome men,” she muttered as she grabbed up the wet towels and trudged after him. It was probably Sam wanting to drag her to the movies.

  Ollie was frantic at the front door when she finally got there. “Oh, quiet,” she said. Sam was hardly reason to get quite so excited.

  Shifting the towels so her right arm was free, Cassie pulled open the door. It wasn’t Sam standing there. It was Jack, dressed in a suit and with his arms full of packages.

  “Hi,” he said and moved past her into the house, leaving a delicious scent in his wake.

  “Hi,” she said vaguely. She closed the door and trailed after him. Actually, after him and then Ollie. Maybe she should show that there was a difference between her and her dog.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked with a little bit of oomph in her voice.

  He put all the packages down on her dining-room table. “Bringing dinner,” he replied.

  She frowned at him, trying hard to ignore the seductive smells that had Ollie turning into a quivering mass of terrier. “I was just getting ready to go out,” she said.

  He looked her over, head to foot. “Logrolling or washing cars?”

  Her frown deepened. She’d forgotten how she looked and raked her hand back through her wet hair. “I just hadn’t changed yet.”

  “I see.” His gaze lingered—annoying her, teasing her, making her feel alive. “Well, maybe as you’re changing, you’ll want to nibble on a few things.”

  “I doubt it.”

  He ignored her as he pulled over one bag and peered in. “You have your choice of poached salmon with cucumber sauce or beef Wellington. Potatoes are twice baked and I can’t remember what the vegetable was. Some kind of green beans with a long fancy name.”

  Her knees were weakening but she fought it by digging her toes into the carpet. The dinners she’d been considering were just as good. She didn’t need him here to feed her.

  “I’m not really hungry,” she said.

  He pulled over another bag and whipped out a bottle. “A fine zinfandel to accompany your choice and—” he reached into his suit-coat inside pocket and pulled out a miniature rosebud that he handed to her “—a flower for the lady.”

  She had to take the tiny rose—it would have been rude not to—but it wouldn’t change her conviction that they were wrong for each other.

  “And lastly—” He took a piece of paper from another pocket and began to read: “‘Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m pretty hungry and hope you are too.’”

  Cassie burst out laughing. “Okay, maybe I am,” she admitted. “So what?”

  “Want to eat here?” he asked, nodding at the dining table.

  She tried glaring at him, but nothing seemed to dim that damn gleam in his eyes.

  “Want me to read another poem?”

  “Let me get cleaned up,” she said with a sigh. “It won’t take me more than a minute.”

  Still clutching her rose, she hurried back upstairs. Her heart was racing, but it had to be from laughing or rushing up the stairs, or from the exertion of washing Ollie. She frowned at herself in the mirror as she stripped off her T-shirt. Face it, she told herself. The racing heart, the shortness of breath, the idiotic grin on her face were all because of Jack.

  He was so real, so right, so damn stubborn. If only she had the guts to tell him straight out about her problem. Maybe he didn’t want any more kids, so it wouldn’t matter. Maybe he knew of some different better doctors who could make things right. Or, most likely, maybe he only wanted dinner so his conscience would leave him alone.

  She hurried into her bathroom and took a quick shower, then resisted the temptation to blow-dry her hair or put on makeup. She combed her hair and put on a clean blouse, dress shorts and nixed the shoes. Dinner companionship was what he’d said he wanted the other day, and that was all he was going to get. Not some fashion model to gawk at. She picked up her flower and went back downstairs.

  He had the table set by the time she got down there—tablecloth, dishes, silverware and wineglasses. And candles in his hand.

  “Ollie told me where everything was,” he said. “Hope that was all right.”

  “Fine,” she said and got candleholders from the side cabinet. “Ollie doesn’t use candles much so he probably didn’t know where these were.”

  “I suspected he had pyromaniacal tendencies,” Jack said.

  She laughed, feeling silly and giddy and nervous. She found herself wiping off her sweaty hands on her shorts as Jack put the candles in the holders. Ollie wagged his tail at her. As encouragement, most likely.

  “This is just for effect, I’m afraid,” he said as he stepped back.

  “You’re not allowed to carry matches, either?”

  “It’s light out.” He waved his hands about. “We can light them, but I don’t think you’ll notice much.”

  “No, I guess we won’t.”

  But it didn’t matter. She felt like a little kid who got taken to the circus. She felt like it was Christmas and her birthday and Halloween all at once. She was going to have a good time tonight.

  Jack had come around and pulled her chair out. She sat down, conscious of how close he was; of hands on the back of the chair that could be on her if she moved just so. Suddenly she was wishing that she had agreed to go out with him. There was something too seductive, too intimate about being here alone with him.

  “So which main course do you want?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “They both sound great. Can we split them?”

  “A woman of compromise,” he said and began opening packages and assembling the plates.

  “Not really,” she said with a laugh. “Just ask my sisters.”

  She caught just a glimpse of his quick smile that lit some sparks in her heart and turned, finding herself watching his hands as they opened cartons and distributed the food. They were strong hands, deft and sure. Hands that could be gentle. Hands that could be dangerous if they were allowed to roam where they would. Her skin suddenly felt on fire.

  She got to her feet. “I’ll open the wine.”

  It gave her something to concentrate on. Something besides Jack, that is. She opened the bottle and poured them each a glass. By the time she was sitting back down, Jack had the food distributed and a plate at each place. Ollie nudged her hand as if reminding her to share.

  “It looks delicious,” she said.

  Once they were both seated across the table from each other, he picked up his glass of wine. “To repaying one’s debts.”

  It was a safe toast. Better than any her addled brain might have come up with. She raised her glass. “To repaying one’s debts.”

  After a sip of the wine, she took a bite of her food. “Where is this from?”

  “The Royal House,” he said. “I never ate there, but I was told the food was good.”

  “I’ve never been there, either,” she said. “But it’s delicious.”

  The mention of The Royal House turned her pensive. She and her siblings had wanted to take Mom and Dad there for their twenty-seventh wed
ding anniversary some years back, but Mom had gotten wind of what was going on and killed the operation, saying it was too expensive for an ordinary anniversary. She’d said it was for something special like a thirtieth. They’d gone to the Riveria instead. Mom had died a couple of years later, just days before her thirtieth wedding anniversary. It just proved that one shouldn’t put off joy when it was offered.

  So did that mean she should be accepting Jack’s invitations?

  Cassie lifted her head and attention back to Jack. His eyes were a soft blue, like the waters of a pristine north-woods lake. Would it be safe to lean on him? Could she let her heart relax just a bit and trust that she wouldn’t regret it?

  “A penny for your thoughts.”

  No, better safe than sorry. But “sorry” had a lot of levels and sometimes she was sorry she didn’t have somebody just to talk to. Still, she wasn’t ready to take a chance.

  “Wow,” she mocked. “A big spender.”

  “All right,” he said, with a sigh. “I’ll go to a buck, but no higher.”

  As she stared at him, Cassie could see his eyes begin to darken. Should she tell him the story of her mother and how she never got to eat at The Royal House? Part of Cassie wanted to spill the story, but she just looked down at her plate.

  “I was just thinking how this is a lot better than grilled cheese.”

  He laughed. “It certainly beats the grilled cheese I’ve had so far in my life.”

  They ate in companionable silence for a time. Ollie sat next to her, his eyes glued to her fork, following its every movement. She smiled at his intensity and felt herself relax. This was nice. One time would be okay.

  “Your conscience should certainly leave you alone now,” she said. “This is great.”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel terribly satisfied.”

  “Maybe we should review just how little I really did.”

  “It wasn’t the actual work you did,” he said, his voice soft and low. “It was that you helped me out, even though I was a complete stranger. I was very impressed.”

  The look in his eyes made her uneasy, or maybe it was the tingling reaction in her stomach. She sipped at her wine, then sipped again. It went down so nicely and spread a sweet fire all through her blood. She had another sip.