The Perfect Match. Kimberly Cates
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realized what had given her pause.
“I keep the first aid kit on the top shelf in my closet to keep it out of Charlie’s reach,” he explained. “That kid makes boxes of bandages disappear so fast I should’ve taken stock in the company.”
Rowena hated the niggling suspicion he rekindled. Neglected dogs and neglected kids often had the same markers to indicate they were in danger. More injuries than usual were at the top of the clues to look for. “Does Charlie get hurt that often?” she asked, trying to sound casual.
Lawless gave her a long look, as if he knew exactly what she’d been thinking. “No. She just has this thing about Band-Aids. She’s always afraid we’re going to run out.”
Rowena remembered Charlie’s big eyes filled with dread as she’d talked about tidal waves. Was there a good reason the girl was busy making disaster plans for their future trip to Florida?
“She seems…very worried for a child her age. I know it’s none of my business, but—”
“You’re right. It’s not.”
She’d hoped for some sort of insight, but she couldn’t exactly blame him for closing up tight. She was a stranger, after all.
“Listen, I should just go,” she suggested. “You’re being a really good sport about this, but you don’t want me here, and after this is little debacle I sure don’t want to be here.”
“You’re not going anywhere until I dress that cut. Move.” He sounded like a drill sergeant, and she doubted he’d hesitate to grab her arm and march her down the hall if she resisted. Instead, she let him herd her down the corridor.
As they passed what must be Mac’s room, the child howled for Cash to adjust the television. Rowena waited for him outside the door, her eyes finding a collage of pictures on the long sweep of wall, family pictures of the girls from babyhood until just a few years ago.
Rowena’s heart ached at the images she saw. Mac dancing in some kind of recital, her fluffy little costume making her look like a plump yellow chick. Charlie and Mac in doll-sized karate outfits. So Mac had been able to walk at one time. What had happened to change that? Rowena wondered. An illness? An accident?
She examined the center shot of the collage—an eight by ten. One of those family holiday pictures Rowena had always dreaded when she and her sisters had gathered at the family brownstone. It pictured the Lawless girls in matching Easter finery on the front steps of the gray house, ribbon-festooned wicker baskets clutched in their white gloved hands. Mac appeared angelic in rose-petal pink while Charlie looked as if the ruffles that made up her collar had developed sharp little teeth that were gnawing into her neck.
Behind the girls, Cash Lawless stood, sexy as hell in a black suit and Kelly-green tie, his crisp white shirt making his tan seem darker, his angular face all the more arrestingly handsome. But in spite of the formal clothes that fit his athletic body to perfection, something primitive glinted in his eyes—as if he were constantly aware danger could be right around the corner, and he’d damned well be ready to meet it.
The exquisitely beautiful woman standing beside him was ice to his fire. Hair blond as Mac’s framed the woman’s face, but she possessed none of the fairy-like charm that surrounded the little girl. Cool, poised and elegant, the woman’s face was reminiscent of a young Sharon Stone, stylish cream pencil skirt and a tailored jacket without a single crease skimming a figure Miss America would envy.
So this movie queen goddess clone was Cash Lawless’s wife.
Rowena didn’t know why the fact should bother her. No doubt it was a holdover from that whole “matching” curse Auntie Maeve had stirred up in her mind so long ago. Making people and animals fit where they belonged.
Obviously Cash Lawless had a strong opinion where Ice Goddess belonged. In his bed, underneath him, fulfilling all those fantasies the woman must have inspired in every other red-blooded man she met.
The kind of hot fantasies Rowena would never inspire. Sighing, she smoothed a hand down her own jacket, realizing the man would be hard-pressed to discern whether she had breasts or not beneath the flowing yellow cloth. Not that she wanted Cash Lawless to notice her breasts, she amended hastily. Or anything else about her except what a perfect pet Clancy would be for his lonely daughter.
Rowena peered again at the woman’s face in the picture, trying to probe beyond the one-dimensional image to the human qualities that ran far deeper. That made the woman a wife, a mother. One who seemed to have disappeared.
Was she the reason Charlie and Mac had seemed so terrified their father would leave them? What had happened to her? To them—the perfect little Stepford family in the Easter picture?
Rowena pulled her gaze away from the image and caught sight of a much smaller photo. It wasn’t one of those perfectly posed varieties. Instead, it looked a bit off-center, a little blurry. Charlie perched high in the forked branches of a tree, bracing a board while her father nailed it to what must be the floor of a tree house.
Rowena scarce recognized the child in the picture as the ghost who’d scowled into her shop window for weeks. Charlie’s eyes sparkled with excitement, her grin so wide and carefree.
Even more amazing was the difference in Cash’s face. Dressed in a faded Police Academy sweatshirt with the sleeves torn out of it, he looked ages younger.
He wasn’t even looking at the camera. His gaze fixed on Charlie’s face as if there was nothing in the world more beautiful to him than his child, or more important to him than this moment he shared with her.
Rowena felt a jab of envy. Making memories, Auntie Maeve had called times like the tree house moment captured on film. Rowena could still remember the spry old woman warning the ever-busy Nadine Brown that such opportunities were fleeting. Once gone, they never came again. Lost in her own wistful memories, Rowena was startled by Cash’s voice when he called out.
“This is taking a little longer than I thought. Head on back. Mine’s the room at the end of the hall.”
Rowena figured she could make a break for it, but if patching her up would make him feel better, she might as well let him. Besides, the man piqued her curiosity more than ever now.
The first two times she’d met him, he’d seemed so hard-edged, almost military in his need to be in control. But today with his disabled daughter, she’d glimpsed cracks in that facade. Saw in the desperation, the determination limning his face along with the sheen of sweat, a sense of isolation that yanked at her heart.
Hurts, Daddy… Mac’s tear-choked voice raked Rowena’s memory. I hate you when you hurt me…
I hate myself.
What must it be like for him? Suffering through Mac’s tears day after day? Realizing that no matter how hard he fought, there were some things beyond his power to control? And that one of them was his daughter’s pain?
Entering the room he’d indicated, she looked around, trying to connect the man to his surroundings. But again, the setting didn’t fit him, his room yawning spaces of emptiness broken up by even more clusters of family pictures that marked places where furniture must have been.
A double-sized box springs and mattress sat on the floor, the bed made up so precisely Rowena could have bounced a quarter off of the simple navy spread. A folding TV tray to one side held a windup alarm clock, yet another ugly lamp and a James Patterson novel splayed pages down somewhere toward the beginning, the one and only thing in the house that actually had a thick layer of dust filming its cover.
After a moment, Cash strode in. “First aid kit’s in the other room.”
She jumped, feeling as if she’d intruded in something painful, something private. “Right. I, uh, was just looking at your pictures. The one of the tree house in the hall is terrific,” she scrambled to explain, trying to break the sudden tension. “I always wanted a tree house when I was a kid. But my mom and dad weren’t big on that kind of stuff. You know,