A Father's Gift Read online

  “Oh, boy.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Jack and Cassie followed the girls across the beach and into the woods. Jack was busy answering their million-and-one questions about the people at the picnic while Cassie just let the peace of Clements Woods bring back her common sense. She came here once or twice a month, mostly to check up on Romeo and Juliet, but also to put things into perspective. Since rescuing Juliet all those years ago, she’d felt she could see things more clearly here. See what was really important and what didn’t matter.

  But somehow her common sense wasn’t rushing back as she’d wanted it to. Instead of concentrating on how full her life was and how she didn’t need to add anyone or anything, she kept thinking how delightful the girls were. And how Jack was an old softy who wore his heart on his sleeve when it came to his daughters. Cassie liked that; liked that he wasn’t ashamed to let everyone know how much they meant to him.

  Then her thoughts were running off in even wilder patterns. Why hadn’t he ever married? If Daphne had left when the girls were one year old, he’d had five years to get over her and find someone else. Hadn’t he gotten over her? Or was he just not interested in marriage?

  Not that the answers were important to her, she assured herself. She didn’t care if he spent his life pining away for Daphne, or if he thought marriage was a plague to be avoided at all costs. This was just a friendly outing, not the start of anything.

  “You know,” Jack said, slowing down to let the girls go on ahead. “There are times I wish the girls were two-hundred-fiftypound linebackers.”

  Cassie wasn’t at all loath to leave her thoughts. “Why?”

  “Then I could make them do what I wanted.”

  She made a face at him. “Linebackers are usually the meanest and toughest guys on a football team and you were able to make them do what you wanted?”

  “You don’t think I could?”

  “Oh, I believe you.” And actually she did. He was lean but not thin. He was more like a panther, the explosiveness of his strength visible just beneath the surface of his skin. That was not exactly a neutral, uninvolved observation, though.

  “I just thought if we played around a little they’d see how much fun it was.”

  “Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t,” she said. “For the most part, parents aren’t the best teachers for their kids. Even if they’re experts in the field.”

  “Which I’m not, anyway. I can swim enough not to drown, but I’d never try teaching them.” His laugh was honest and straightforward but almost held a touch of panic. “I just wanted them to play in the water a little. I thought it would show them there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “But only if they’re willing to go in the water.”

  He nodded and they walked a bit farther. “It’s really nice here,” he said, glancing around at the woods that surrounded them.

  “Yeah, I like it.”

  “I hear there’s even a pair of swans that live on this lake,” Jack said.

  “Yep.” She squinted through the trees out at the water but all she saw were a few boaters on the serene surface. “I think there’re too many people around for them to come over here now.”

  “I suppose.”

  Would he appreciate the swans as she did? Would he see their magic and majesty?

  A young couple joined them, much to Cassie’s relief, and then a few law students. Just as well, Cassie thought. She had been about to tell him about Romeo and Juliet, about how special the swans were, and she should know better. Or at least, her head should. Opening yourself up to someone else, telling him all the little secrets of your soul, just gave him more ammunition when expectations weren’t met.

  Not that she was going to be around Jack long enough for there to be expectations. Her reticence was just a habit. A good habit. A safe habit.

  They reached the brick shelter where the kids’ nature walk was starting from. There were probably ten kids, ranging in age from about five to twelve, as well as a park ranger and two of her college-age guides.

  “You gotta stay here,” Mary Louise told Jack.

  “It’s just for kids,” Mary Alice added.

  “Cassie’ll take care of you,” Mary Louise said, then the two of them ran off.

  Just what did that entail? Cassie wondered, but said nothing as they watched the kids get separated into smaller groups and paired with a guide. She and Jack stayed until the kids were all trooping off down another path, then he turned to her.

  “I think volleyball’s next up,” he said.

  “Great.” That was what she needed—some invigorating exercise that would wipe all the silly dreams from her head and replace them with weariness. But they’d only taken a few steps toward the volleyball pit when she noticed he was limping. “Your knee hurting you?”

  “Why? Am I limping?”

  “A little.”

  He shrugged. “Things have been a little hectic the past month or so, what with the move and all. I kind of slacked off on my exercises.”

  “That’s not a good idea,” Cassie replied. “One way or another, your body will make you pay.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He stopped and glanced down at her left leg. “You’ve had some arthroscopic work,” he said, obviously noticing the tiny scars on the side of her knee.

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “I had some damaged cartilage removed when I was in college. No major injury. I guess I was luckier than you.”

  He frowned. “I don’t know about your luck in the past,” he said. “But I think I’m much luckier than you, right now. I’ve got a full-on view of your legs and you don’t. And let me tell you, they’re a mighty fine pair of stemware.”

  His compliment took her by surprise; he hadn’t seemed to be into joking and teasing. She felt a sudden warmth fill her cheeks even as pleasure filled her heart. She felt like a woman, an attractive woman. It felt good, but it also felt dangerous. It felt like she was leaving herself exposed to attack. She wasn’t good at this repartee stuff like Sam was. And she was absolutely terrible at handling compliments.

  “They keep me from falling over,” she said, trying to hide her embarrassment. “And they get me from here to there.”

  Jack laughed. “I imagine that’s what the warranty says they’re supposed to do.”

  What a dumb remark she’d made! She wished she could hide in the bushes. She felt more like a junior-high kid than she had when she’d been in junior high. It wasn’t really true that she couldn’t handle compliments. People were always complimenting her. Nice catch. Good save. Great shot. But the people who did compliment her didn’t make her heart start sprinting.

  She tried to regain her composure as they walked the rest of the way over to the volleyball pit, but rather than join the crowd that was already splitting into teams, Jack just shook his head.

  “I think I’ll sit this one out,” he said. “My knee is thinking of locking up.”

  “Are you sure?” Cassie asked. She was disappointed that they wouldn’t be competing together although, for a moment, it felt like more than that. It felt like disappointment that she wouldn’t be with him. She really needed the volleyball to start.

  “You go ahead,” he said.

  Her feet wouldn’t move, though. Part of her wanted to go play, but it was the part that had been so uneasy at his compliments. It suddenly felt cowardly to play. And rude.

  “Want to take one of the pedal boats out instead?” she asked.

  “Pedaling around the lake’ll certainly keep my knee from locking up,” he said sarcastically.

  “I can do most of the pedaling,” she assured him, although she wasn’t sure where the suggestion had even come from.

  A few minutes later, she and Jack were sitting side by side in a little molded plastic boat, pedaling in unison as they eased their way out into the lake. It was pleasantly warm out on the water; the sun seemed to spark across the surface while glittery fish darted almost within reach. Jack’s thigh came close to h
ers with each downward stroke, and his arm had no place to go except around her shoulder.

  Maybe this wasn’t a good idea, she told herself. But the air was sunny and mild and the lake so peaceful and quiet, it seemed crazy to worry.

  “So were you as ornery as your kids when you were little?” she asked him.

  He looked startled, then began to laugh. “Hardly. My parents were as strict as could be. I had to toe the line.”

  “Somehow I can’t imagine you not slipping just a bit.” He gave her a strange look and she started to laugh. “Don’t all kids? I know I wasn’t perfect. I was always catching hell for something.”

  “Me, too,” he admitted, then turned a touch more serious. “Not so much from my parents, though. From teachers, other kids, their parents. I guess I had a chip on my shoulder the size of Montana. If anybody looked at me cross-eyed, I was sure they were putting me down. If they mentioned my parents, I was convinced they were mocking their lack of education or their low-end jobs. If they asked where I was from, I was certain they thought they were better than me.”

  “You were a proud little boy,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He looked away and again she got the sense that he had said more than he’d wanted. “Probably too much.”

  “I think it’s nice,” she told him. “A lot of kids would be ashamed of their parents or where they came from. Shows you have real strength.”

  He looked at her then, his eyes alive with some sort of fire that touched a hidden spot in her heart. She felt for a fleeting moment that she could bloom and grow in the heat of that gaze, that the walls around her heart would willingly fall. But then he looked away and common sense came back.

  “All that fighting actually helped me out, though,” he said. “In junior high, the football coach caught me in a brawl and invited me to come out for the team. I started out as a linesman, banging heads, but discovered soon after, that what I didn’t have in bulk I had in speed. They made me a running back and let me run with the ball as well as crash into people.”

  “But you still have the chip on your shoulder,” she said.

  He looked at her. Hard and deep. “Yeah,” he said after a long minute. “But I thought I’d camouflaged it some.”

  “A bit. Or maybe I’ve got one, too, and it makes me good at seeing others’.”

  “Kindred spirits.”

  She just shrugged and they sat in silence for a little while, drifting with the gentle current. A few ducks swam by while dragonflies with iridescent wings hovered above the shimmering water. She was feeling too close to Jack and too certain that she would regret it.

  So what if they had a lot in common? It didn’t matter a hill of beans in the long run. She was alone and better off that way, even if Fiona liked to remind them of the old woman’s prophecy when they’d rescued the swans. Fiona had gotten all moony since meeting Alex.

  Jack shifted in his seat, brushing her leg with his, and she awoke from her thoughts. The silence had grown too long.

  “How come you’re so easy to talk to?” Jack asked. “I haven’t ever told anybody all that stuff about my childhood.”

  She shrugged and looked at him. His eyes seemed to want to capture hers, and she turned away. “I think it’s Ollie,” she said. “He put a hex on me.”

  “I knew he wasn’t an ordinary dog,” he said with a laugh.

  His laughter disarmed her, caught her crazy heart off guard and she tried to reclaim her common sense. They were too alone here, sitting too close together. Next thing she knew, all sorts of dancing dreams would start weaving through her thoughts, making her lose sight of the shore.

  “We ought to be getting back,” she said. “The nature walk will be over soon.”

  “Sure thing.”

  They pedaled back toward the dock while Cassie told herself she was being silly. She could be alone with a handsome man in a tiny boat and not lose her heart or her head. Maybe she played too many sports; she always thought in terms of winning and losing. She could just be here and enjoy a new friendship. She might even find somebody she could talk to about her past, and about her father.

  They got the boat to the dock and, while a park employee grabbed hold of it, Jack climbed out, then reached back to help Cassie.

  “Am I allowed to do this?” he asked. “Or will you accuse me of controlling?”

  It took her by surprise, his remembering her earlier words. But, given the fact that she had said them in an attempt to ward off her attraction to him, she would rather he hadn’t.

  She held out her hand out to him and found his touch was welcome and warming, somehow sneaking all the way into her soul.

  “I’ll allow it this once,” she replied.

  “You’re too kind,” he said.

  That was something she’d never been accused of before, but the laughter on her lips died when she turned to face him. There was a fire in his eyes that startled her, heated her, caused a delicious tingling in the deepest part of her.

  He leaned closer, his lips brushing hers ever so gently. It was over almost before it began, so light and so fast that she might only have dreamed it—except for the yearning his kiss awoke inside her, the hunger for his touch, the need to come alive again. The memory of loneliness slipped away as the promise of sunshine beckoned.

  Where had these feelings come from? How could just one light touch destroy all the years of careful guardedness? This wasn’t what she wanted. This wasn’t what she was looking for. She was happy just the way she was. Wasn’t she?

  She pulled back and caught his eyes, so like the waters of Lake Michigan. Right now, they weren’t a calm blue, but halfway between gray and thunderstorm black. She saw all her own questions and confusion agitating the surface, and felt her own worries hanging in the air around them.

  “We’d better get over to that shelter,” she said quickly. “The girls could be back.”

  “True.”

  She hurried off the pier and onto the path as if a fire were pursuing her, nipping at her heels and threatening to engulf her if she slowed even a step.

  Chapter Three

  “‘And Mr. Bear lived happily ever after.’” Jack closed the storybook and the girls both sighed, leaning against him.

  “That was so good,” Mary Alice said.

  “Read it again,” Mary Louise added.

  This was a game they played every night, trying to postpone bedtime. He just put the book on the nightstand. “You guys should be tired,” he said. “You had a busy day.”

  “The picnic was fun.”

  “I like Cassie.”

  He felt their eyes on him, expectantly waiting for his response, and he looked off across their room. Shelves of stuffed bears and dogs and cats were staring back at him. They were all waiting for an answer, mocking his hesitation, smirking at the worries in his soul. Yes, he liked Cassie, all right. Maybe too much for his peace of mind.

  “Don’t you like her, Daddy?” Mary Louise asked.

  “Sure. Yeah. Of course,” he said quickly.

  “You acted funny when we took her home,” Mary Alice told him.

  “Like you did when you had a toothache.”

  Like when he had a toothache? “How did I act then?”

  “All funny,” Mary Alice said.

  “Yeah. Frowny and funny.”

  “I was frowny today?”

  “Kind of.”

  “And you kept looking at her.”

  “Like she took your ice cream.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “’Cause you didn’t have no ice cream.”

  He hoped the girls were exaggerating. Yeah, he hadn’t meant to kiss Cassie. And he certainly hadn’t expected to feel so drawn to her—that was the last thing he wanted. But he hadn’t wanted to be unfriendly or rude. He just wanted to be careful.

  “She’s not like Tiffany,” Mary Louise said, sticking her nose up in the air in imitation of Tiffany’s unfriendliness.

  “Or Zelda.” Mary Alice puckered her
mouth up and began kissing the air.

  Zelda had been a little overdemonstrative, Jack was willing to admit, and Tiffany hadn’t been too interested in the kids, but he’d only dated them a few times each. He was surprised that the girls remembered them.

  “Cassie’s not all fakey,” Mary Louise said.

  “No, she isn’t,” he agreed slowly. Was that it? Was that why he was so drawn to her, because he felt he could trust her?

  It wasn’t something that he wanted to think about, wasn’t something to ponder. It didn’t matter if he could trust her; he wasn’t looking for someone to trust. He wasn’t looking for someone, period.

  He would never forget that feeling of devastation when Daphne had left, that overwhelming anger. She had used him and then expected him to come crawling back, ready to do anything not to lose her. But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He had learned his lesson, though, and speaking of lessons…

  “You know, I was thinking about the summer,” he said. “Some of the other parents at the picnic were talking about day camps. I guess there’re some programs around that are pretty good, that have horseback riding and arts and crafts—”

  “And swimming?” Mary Louise demanded suspiciously.

  “We don’t wanna swim,” Mary Alice added.

  “We don’t wanna get drowneded.”

  This was getting tiresome. “Girls—”

  “Cassie could teach us to swim,” Mary Louise reminded.

  “She wouldn’t let us drowned.”

  This was getting scary. “Girls!” This was getting out of hand. “She can’t teach you two to swim,” Jack said. “She’s got other things to do.”

  “You could ask,” Mary Louise suggested.

  “You could say please,” Mary Alice added.

  Jack slid off the bed and turned back Mary Louise’s bedcover. “Come on, hop in. You two should have been asleep ages ago.”

  Mary Louise trudged over to her bed and slid under the covers. “You really could ask her, you know,” she coaxed.

  He pulled the covers back on Mary Alice’s bed and she climbed in. “Don’t you think she likes us?”