Daddy By Decision. Lindsay Longford
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the low-lying moon, stretched in front of him. Truth was, he had nowhere he wanted to go, nothing pulling at him, no one to help him while away the lonely night hours. A light breeze tugged at his hat, filtered through the straw brim, brushed against his cheek like a feathery kiss. Scraps of paper on the concrete lifted, stirred, floated to his feet. One was a receipt from the Palmetto. He reached down to pick it up. Eggs, vanilla ice cream, milk.
Not hers.
He crushed the receipt between his fingers, holding it for a moment, staring off into the thick, empty night.
Impulse and the memory of red lights winking off toward town made him about-face back into the Palmetto.
Jessie’s hands were slippery with sweat on the plastic steering wheel. Even with the windows of the van down and the wind whipping in, perspiration pooled along her spine, slid to the waistband of her shorts. Skeezix, her shaggy mutt of undetermined origins with the temperament of an angel, eased up from the back. Sidling in next to her, he stuck his nose out her window. “Come on, you big lug. Scoot over to your own side, will you?” She pushed at the dog until he moved over and stuck his head out the passenger window.
She. wondered if Jonas Buckminster Riley had recognized her in spite of her careful attempts not to look his way. Even though he’d always been shrewd and fast on the uptake, a lot had changed in the last five years, most of all her.
He hadn’t recognized her. He would have said something if he had. But maybe not. A complicated man, he liked playing games. Tiny shivers slipped over her skin. And in her innermost soul, she knew it wasn’t fear running through her. The frisson skipping along her nerve endings was a remnant of another life, another Jessie, not this Jessie barreling down the highway in a van filled with the smell of dogs and take-out hamburger. She’d left that other Jessie behind, a long time ago.
As she unwrapped the cold hamburger and nudged it toward the dog, Skeezix moaned happily and pulled his head inside. She sneezed as dog hair drifted toward her. “Good dog! But you silly fool, why didn’t you eat it when it was hot?” She rubbed the dog’s head and scratched behind his ears. Slopping paper and hamburger bits over the seat, Skeezix collapsed onto her thighs with a wiggle of contentment. “Guess who I ran into tonight, Skeez?” Skeezix wiggled closer, his tongue lapping wetly against her cutoffs. “A ghost from my past, and you didn’t even let out a howl? For shame. Some dog you are. Would you have defended me if I’d needed you, you big mutt?” Skeezix rolled his head and thumped his heavy tail a couple of times. “Oh, sure, that’s what you say now. But where were you ten minutes ago, buster?”
She was glad her ghost hadn’t remembered her. Of course she was.
But.
“So long, cowboy!” The sound of her last words lingered in her ears. Surely she hadn’t wanted him to stop her with a flood of for-old-times’-sake memories? Had she?
But, her unruly tongue running ahead of her brain, she’d called out, “So long, cowboy!” Had that been a note of challenge, of “gotcha” in her voice? Had she wanted him to recognize her? Had some deep perversity ruled her in that last second? Surely not.
But she’d called out. In that last, crucial second, she’d called out to him.
In the light from her headlights, he’d looked bigger, tougher. A little mean with his eyes narrowed like that, a little baffled but thinking hard as he’d stared back at her from the darkness. Even sitting yards apart from him, she’d felt the insistent beating of his will against her, his determination to solve the puzzle she represented to him. That insatiable curiosity, that inability to turn away from an unanswered question—that quality had made him a brilliant lawyer.
He’d been fearsome, his cross-examinations stripping away evasions until a witness sat as vulnerable as a deer caught in the cross hairs, waiting. And then Jonas Buckminster Riley would deliver the killing blow, gently, cleanly, so elegantly that the witness seemed almost to welcome the coup de grace that put finish to the relentless, unending questions delivered in Jonas’s chillingly polite drawl.
No, the Palmetto Mart cowboy in the cream-colored straw cowboy hat and scruffy jeans might be as curious as ever, but he was not the man she remembered. Long, rangy muscles and sloping shoulders replaced the reed-thin frame she’d known; that thin, hard body covered by suits so expensively sumptuous that one time, driven by some crazy impulse as she’d passed in back of him, she’d stroked the baby-soft fabric of a jacket left casually hanging on the back of his chair.
He’d known, of course. He’d looked up at her in that moment when her index finger glided against the sleeve, slipped inside to the lining still warm from his body, and lingered against the silk.
“You like that, huh?” he’d asked and smiled, his brilliant blue eyes blazing her into ashes.
Lifting one eyebrow, she’d run her finger carelessly over the lining. “A bit too uptown for me. But then clothes make the man, so they say.” Brushing her hands together, knowing he was watching her every twitch and movement, she’d walked away, into her own office, her heart slamming against her ribs with each step.
“Do they really? Say that?” His whispery drawl had tickled the hairs along the back of her neck, sent goose bumps down her arms, her chest. “And what do you say, Ms. Bell?” His smile turned edgy, his narrowed gaze assessing, as he swiveled his chair toward her and focused all his fierce intelligence on her, pinning her in the searing beam of his gaze.
She’d smiled in return, lifted one eyebrow, and shut her door, leaving his question unanswered.
She wasn’t that Jessica Bell anymore. That woman seemed alien to her now. If she were different now, so, too, must he be. Inside. Outside. They weren’t the same people at all. So why was her heart still pumping so hard she felt as if she’d run a race? What possible impact on her life could a chance encounter at the Palmetto Mart mean at this point in her life?
Diddly. That’s what.
She braked the car in the driveway. Home. Hers. One she’d bought and paid for by herself. Downstairs in the family room a solitary splash of blue-white from the television broke the thickness of the night. Skeezix lumbered out behind her, woofing and circling her, weaving in and out between her legs until she laid her hand on top of his head. “Quiet, dopey. You want to wake up the whole neighborhood?” Two different canine greetings answered Skeezix.
The front door opened. A tiny silhouette in the rectangle of the doorjamb tilted his head and scrubbed at his eyes. “Hey,” he said sleepily.
“Hey yourself, sugar.” She swung him up over Skeezix and into her arms. “It’s mighty late. Why aren’t you asleep?”
“Me and Aunt Lolly waited for you. But we was hungry, so we ate all the pizza. Ev’ry last bite.” He spread his arms wide and clasped her around the neck, his chubby bare arms tight against her. “Loofah chewed the cheese off the cardboard.”
“Bad dog.”
“She was hungry, too.”
“I guess that’s okay, then.” Jessie nuzzled the warm, sweaty neck of her son. “C’mon, sugar, let’s say good night to Auntie Lolly and get you to bed.”
“‘Kay.” His soft hair tickled her nose as he leaned against her and fixed her with eyes as blue as her own. “But I am not at all tired.”
“No?”
“Nope. Not sleepy at all.”
Jessie stumbled against Skeezix, who’d crowded in behind her as she closed the door. Gopher tilted over her arm and blew a kiss at the dog. “Night, Skeezes. Sleep tight.” Her son glanced shrewdly up at her. “Skeezes isn’t sleepy. Me and Skeezes’ll sleep better together, right?”
Laughing, Jessie scrunched him to her. “Is that so, sugardoll?”
“Yep,” he said with satisfaction as his head drooped against her breast and his thumb found its way to his small mouth. “That’s