shifted in his seat, which brought him a little closer to the mysterious woman dressed like she owned a ranch instead of a body shop. She sat stone still, staring out the window at the streets of New York City.
She placed her hands flat on her thighs, a position he’d noticed in his office. At the same time, she took a quiet, deep breath and exhaled. She was the picture of serenity.
“So, where’d you learn to be a mechanic?”
She flashed him a vile look. “I’m not a mechanic.”
“That’s good,” he replied, placing a friendly hand on top of hers and adding an assuring pat. “I don’t trust mechanics.”
She picked up his hand and removed it from hers. “I don’t trust lawyers.”
He laughed. “But you didn’t answer my question. How does one train to be a…collision repair expert?”
“Trade school. I apprenticed in Sacramento for a while, then worked in Reno. We opened the shop about a year ago.”
We? His gaze instinctively dropped back to that unadorned left hand. “Is your husband in the same business?”
“I don’t have a husband.”
Another earthquake casualty? “Ah. I just assumed when you said ‘we’ that you meant you and your husband.”
“You assumed wrong.” This time a smile teased the corner of her lips. “The we was Katie and me. She was my business partner.”
“My sister worked in a body shop?” He couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice.
She plucked an imaginary thread from her jeans, her smile threatening to get wider. “I can’t let you go one minute believing that.” She looked up, a hint of mirth sparkling like gold dust in her eyes. “She couldn’t bear to set a pedicured foot in the work bay, and the sound of a sander sent her running with her hands clamped over her ears.”
He wasn’t sure he liked that, either. It was unimaginable for a McGrath—male or female—to act like a sissy. “But she was your partner.”
“She was my business partner. But we had two separate businesses in the same building, under the same corporate name. Buff ‘n’ Fluff.”
A hearty laugh escaped before he could stop it. “Buff ‘n’ Fluff? What kind of business is that?”
She shrugged, as though she’d heard the question a million times before. “Auto body repair is Buff—a common term for a metal rough out. And Fluff is a beauty salon.” She feathered her own hair with two fingers, some auburn locks fluttering over her shoulder. “Fluff, like blow dry. It’s a cosmetology term. That was Katie’s end of the business.”
“She was a hairstylist,” he noted, an image of a woman slowly taking shape in his brain. An image he didn’t want to have.
“She was a cosmetologist,” Jo corrected. “Hair, face, nails. Anything related to beauty—that was her specialty.”
Cam tried to erase the vague sense of a female version of his dark-haired younger brothers, but he couldn’t. The vision had taken hold. Damn. He’d really rather not dwell on a person he’d never meet.
“So I take it you’ve never been to a professional baseball game before.”
She turned her head toward him at the sudden topic shift. “Our business sponsored the Sierra Springs Little League last year. Does that count?”
He laughed again. “No wonder you thought it was dull as dirt.” The comment still smarted. How could anyone not see the poetry in baseball? He supposed someone who banged fenders for a living might overlook the elegance of a well-turned double play. “This is a little different. This is Yankee Stadium. It’s the Mecca of all baseball.”
“If you say so,” she agreed slowly, her little bit of a Western twang delighting his ear. “Seems like a lot doesn’t happen for nine innings, then all of a sudden hell breaks loose and ten runs come in and it’s over. Then someone’s crying.”
He chuckled again, her description of a Little League game bringing back a whole bunch of memories. “Haven’t you ever heard? There’s no crying in baseball.”
“Whoever said that never saw an eight-year-old get his front end walloped with a hard ball,” she said, looking out the window again. After a second, she turned back to him, a questioning expression on her face. “Would you like to know about your mother?” she asked quietly.
He regarded her for a long time, vaguely aware that there just wasn’t enough air in the closed-in cab. Her gaze was demanding, her lips slightly parted as she waited for his response.
He leaned in enough to almost feel her warm breath near his mouth. She didn’t move.
“No.” With one finger, he tapped the shadow of a cleft in her chin. “Would you like to know where our seats are?”
She raised that gorgeously arched eyebrow again but didn’t move. “No. I’ll just be surprised.”
“Pleasantly,” he promised, backing away to give her a little breathing space. He’d made his point.
“Did you bring that envelope?” she asked.
He patted the pocket of his suit jacket. “Yep.”
“Good. I need to get to the airport in time to make my flight. And I expect to have it with me.”
And she’d made her point, as well.
This could be a very close game tonight.
When the cabbie dropped them off at a busy street corner, they stood in the shadow of a massive structure. The streets around them teemed with people and hummed with energy.
How the blazes did this happen, Jo thought with a flash of panic? Yankee Stadium wasn’t in her plan.
Ever since Mother Earth had caused a seismic shift in Jo’s priorities, her plan was to adopt the child she already loved. She’d assumed it would be simple. Callie’s father had long before relinquished parental rights, wanting to hide from the fact that he was a married weasel who made promises to Katie he’d never keep.
And for a while, everything progressed smoothly. She’d waded through a sea of endless paperwork, passed the prodding interviews, charmed the Child Services bureaucrats, restructured her shop, her home, her very life. Until Jo’s mother sat her down and broke the story of Aunt Chris’s secret life before she’d come to Sierra Springs.
Stunned and saddened, but undeterred, Jo had spent hours quite literally digging through the debris that was Christine McGrath’s life. And more hours slogging through the Internet for information on her sons, then wrestling with what was the appropriate, safest, right course of action.
In the end she was sure she knew what that was. Katie was gone, and so was the woman Jo grew up calling “Aunt” Chris. But somehow, for some reason, an infant had survived nature’s rumbling fury, and Jo was willing to do absolutely anything to be sure Callie was safe and protected and loved.
Even
