He glanced toward the alley, where someone peered from a kitchen window. “Go on in. You’ll get chilled again.”
Handing over her car keys, she went, one hand gripping the edge of the door. “I appreciate this. Thank you, Seth.”
A scant smile. “My pleasure.”
She watched him walk away, then closed the door. Leaning her forehead against its wood, she exhaled the breath she’d been holding and shut her eyes.
For the first time in months, she didn’t see Leo’s face.
Seth pulled the pickup in front of the garage behind his house and shut off the motor and headlights. With the exception of the cooling engine, silence sang through the night. For several moments, he sat motionless, thinking about the woman. She was on the run. Whether from a husband, a lover or both, he didn’t know.
Forget it.
He had more than enough worry in his life.
And gray temples to prove it.
He turned his head toward the oversize, hip-roofed barn he’d converted into a workshop. A dark mammoth, the building squatted amidst the woods flanking his yard.
Damn, but he loved this eight-acre patch of heaven he’d bought two years ago. One day, it would go to Hallie to do with as she wanted. He wouldn’t fool himself into thinking she’d live on it. She’d sell, invest the profit into her dreams.
Guilt bit hard. He knew zip about her dreams, about things close to her heart. What kind of man—what kind of father—didn’t know his own child?
The half-there kind.
Except when it came to the monthly checks he paid his ex-wife to raise Hallie: ten years ago, he’d even set up a college fund for his daughter. Was college her dream? Maybe she’d rather play in a jazz band, or live in the Australian Outback. Or maybe, just maybe, she wanted nothing more than her family intact.
The notion had him grabbing his gear, shoving open the door where a cold, wet muzzle pushed its way into his hand.
“Hey, Roach, you old scab face,” he muttered, scratching the lumber-headed dog behind its good ear. “Missed me, didja?”
A hundred and six pounds of umber-furred dog frisked on pan-sized paws around Seth twice, then took off in a lopsided lope through the dark, to the back porch.
“Sit nice,” a young, female voice commanded.
Seth stopped. “Hallie?” Searching the shadows, he walked toward the small, indistinct bulk that was his fifteen-year-old daughter, hunkering on his back step. “What’re you doing here?” It was Friday night, two days ahead of his visitation schedule.
“Mom and I had a fight.”
Another fight. Great. Closer, he saw her cuddled into the beast that had adopted him on a night like this last winter. She stroked a hand over its thick coat, averting her eyes from the myriad questions in Seth’s.
“How’d you get here?”
“I walked.”
The hair on his arms rose. He lived two miles from town, down a secluded dirt road. “It’s dark,” he stated, unnecessarily.
“I know, but I couldn’t stand it anymore and my friend Susanne is going somewhere with her folks this weekend and Aunt Rianne has company and…and I wanted to come here.”
She swiped the back of her hand under her nose. Her face was a thin, pale shape in the night.
Vulnerable. Innocent.
Seth wanted to drop his lunch box, pick her up like he once had ten years ago, hold her against his heart. She was his little girl, his baby. But divorce and years of slow distancing stood between them.
You could still do something about it.
Like what?
Like get to know her again.
But will she want to know me?
He held out a hand. “Come on. Let’s go inside.”
She climbed to her feet without his assistance. He tried to ignore the scratch on his heart. In the confined mudroom, the dog headed for its dish in the corner and lapped water. Seth plunked his lunch bucket down on the kitchen counter. “Did you tell your mother you were coming here?”
Hallie frowned. “No.”
He nodded toward his office down the hall. “Call her.”
“She doesn’t care where I go.”
“Well, I do. Call, honey.”
The girl slipped out of her backpack, let it thud to the floor. “She was going out with jerk-o Roy-Dean.”
“Leave a message on the machine.” This time, he pointed. He didn’t want her on the kitchen phone where he’d hear her one-sided conversation with the woman he wished he’d told to hit the road sixteen years ago.
Young lunatic, that’s what he’d been, thinking with his tropical anatomy. Melody Owens had come on to him faster than a starved cougar. He’d been twenty-two. She’d been eighteen going on forty-six. Fooling the bouncers about her age. Fooling him.
He snorted. Admit it, Seth. You couldn’t keep your eyes off her, much less your hands. Or anything else, when all was said and done. At the time, she’d been the hottest bit he’d seen in his entire life. Oh, yeah. She had burned him good.
Three months of fun. Three months of sex. Then one morning, she’d stood on his doorstep, informing him she was pregnant. He still recalled gawking at her like a lummox. Sowing your oats didn’t mean forgetting safety between the sheets.
Except he had. Once.
Five minutes of play in the backseat of his old Impala had transformed into sixteen years of pain.
Not that he’d shirked the responsibility for what they’d done. No. Exit shock, enter love overload when, in mere months, a small toothless being with big blue eyes stared up at him. Seeing Hallie had sent his dreams into overdrive.
Dreams dumped in the mud of his marriage.
He, who worked earth and stone, who wore boots and dripped sweat, hadn’t been good enough. Not for Melody’s daddy, or her.
But her belly had cultivated his DNA. His sweet Hallie. Tying him forever to Melody.
He thought of the woman tonight— Breena of the crafts shop—and recollected her quiet, rueful voice. Her soap scent. Her long black hair. All, different from Melody. So damned different.
He strode to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. Forget the woman. Forget Melody. Only Hallie mattered.
In the fridge, he found a mixture of vegetables and leftover meat loaf and arranged them on a plate, then shoved the entire concoction into the microwave.
