the Caribbean. Green blue. Pretty girl. You can’t miss her. Okay, this man is giving me a look like I don’t want to know how much this is going to cost me. I’ll see you back at the house.”
Well, that was that. Del hooked the phone back onto his belt, one eyebrow crooked. Red hair and green-blue eyes, huh?
“Mr. Farentino?”
Mrs. Allen was standing far too close, mouth pursed, hands clasped, one of those women to whom lipstick and a housecoat meant “presentable.”
“Does this mean you’re leaving? Before my stove is installed?”
“Now, Mrs. Allen,” Del said in his divert-the-potential-hysteria voice, flashing her his famous, and woefully unused, female-snagging smile. He fetched his vest from where he’d draped it over the back of a kitchen chair, slipped it on. “You gonna trust me here or what? I promise, Dan and Lenny’ll get you all fixed up, okay? By three o’clock this afternoon, you’ll be baking pumpkin pies in that baby, no problem.”
He was out the back door before she had a chance to point out the stove hadn’t even arrived yet.
Chapter 2
Where was Cora?
Swallowing down yet another surge of the nausea that had plagued her since the plane left Pittsburgh, Galen scanned the waiting room, already filling with passengers for the next flight out. She felt like a pack mule. Her purse strangled her diagonally from left shoulder to right hip, her carry-on bag and winter coat crushed the fingers of her right hand, while a beleaguered whimper floated up from the small plastic pet carrier clutched in the other. Amazing, how heavy it was, considering the animal in it weighed about as much as a hoagie. A small hoagie. A hank of hair had slipped out of its clip to torment her cheekbone, but if she put everything down, she’d never figure out how to pick it all up again. Underneath her five-year-old black sweater, she shivered. And not from cold.
All around her, winterized bodies swarmed and jostled each other, the cacophony of voices drowning out intermittent PA announcements and tinny music. Heavens—she hadn’t actually seen Cora in something like twenty years. Tears bit at Galen’s eyes as something close to panic tangled with the queasies. Baby whined again; Galen automatically offered some vague reassurance, as if the thing could hear, let alone understand, her.
She shut her eyes, hauled in a lungful of air. She’d been cloistered even more than she’d thought if a simple trip could throw her this much. True, she’d only flown once before—with Vinnie to St. Thomas for their honeymoon—but she was a grown woman, for heaven’s sake. Not a little kid. Her stomach heaved again; sweat broke out on her forehead, trickling down the side of her face.
“This is crazy,” she muttered to herself, beginning to re-think dumping at least some of her load before her fingers fell off. One corner of her lower lip snagged between her teeth, she craned her neck, her eyes darting around the terminal. Okay, Volcek. Get a grip. You’re just stressed and woozy. She’ll be here—
“Galen? Galen Granata?”
She jumped a foot at the sound of the deep masculine voice a foot away, whirled around to find herself face-to-chest with a ’63 Buick of a man, nicely packaged in plaid flannel and navy blue nylon. Her gaze drifted upward over a thick neck, a squared chin, a smile both tentative and cocky, and a pair of heavy-lidded, thickly-lashed, puppy-dog brown eyes that all but screamed Latin or Mediterranean or something equally threatening.
And then—oh, my—there was that headful of nearly-black hair at least three weeks past needing a haircut.
This was not Cora.
“I’m sorry,” rumbled the voice again. The kind of voice that, when you hear it over the phone, immediately conjures up, well, someone who looks like this. Except, in real life, you discover, eventually and with profound disappointment, the person attached to the voice really looks like Barney Fife. “I must have the wrong person…”
There he went again. Talking. Galen shook her head at the not-Cora, not-Barney-Fife person, which turned out to be a huge mistake. Served her right, she supposed, for holding everything down for two hours. But losing her cookies into a barf bag at thirty-thousand feet was just so…public. She wobbled for a second, both grateful and irked when a firm, large hand grasped her elbow. She caught a whiff of aftershave, and everything heaved inside her.
“Whoa—you okay?”
Reflex jerked her elbow from the man’s grasp, which was another mistake. Her coat and bag slithered and thunked to the floor as she clamped her hand over her mouth, her eyes going wide. The next few seconds were a blur as whoever-this-was scooped up her belongings, clamped one arm around her waist, and propelled her down the hall to the ladies’ room. She shoved the carrier at him, grabbed the carry-on, then lurched inside, narrowly missing a mother with toddler twins just coming out.
“I’ll wait here,” she thought she heard as the door whooshed shut behind her a split second before she catapulted into the nearest stall.
Well, that wasn’t a moment too soon. Del let out a sigh of relief, leaned against the wall outside the restroom door. He’d never seen anyone actually turn green before.
A redhead, Cora had said. Check. Caribbean-green eyes. Pretty girl. Can’t miss her. Check, and check, and hoo-boy.
Then a sardonic smile twisted his mouth. Yeah, right… Cora’s car skidded on the ice, she was stuck at the service station, she just couldn’t get anyone else to answer the phone…
Woman was about as subtle as Ru Paul’s makeup.
Of course, all the women he knew—and half the men—had been trying to fix him up ever since he moved to Spruce Lake, three years ago. Thus far, he’d been able to deflect everyone’s good intentions with either a grin or a glower, depending on his mood. But like the slow, torturous shift and grind and upheaval of the earth’s plates, so Del’s thoughts had begun to shift over the years, leading him to think that, mmm, well—he scrubbed a palm over his chin, hardly believing he was admitting this to himself—he might actually be open to the idea of marrying again.
Well. He’d finished the thought and his heart was still beating. But it was true. He was tired, dammit. Tired of trying to figure out his precocious, inquisitive, hyper daughter by himself, tired of having nothing but the TV to keep him company after she went to bed, tired of waking up alone. Not that he didn’t love his daughter with everything he had in him, mind, but…
But.
He let out a sigh loud enough to make some woman coming out of the ladies’ room give him a funny look.
Yeah. But.
What did he think, he could order up a wife from Spiegel’s or something? Criminy. Look how long it had taken him to find one woman willing to hitch herself to a guy smart enough to get a college education but not smart enough to use it, who clearly preferred living in near poverty—but, hey, calling the shots—than sucking up to some boss just for some minor thing like, oh, security. Like there was actually another woman on this planet that crazy?
One willing to take on, besides the promise of continued financial instability, the exhausting, often thankless task of raising someone else’s child?
Especially one as strong-willed and independent as Wendy.
Find
