just admiring what a good father he is to that little girl,” Ronnie mumbled.
“See?” Devin’s posture relaxed. “She was melting over the kid, not the guy. Her biological clock’s probably in countdown mode.”
She was going to clock the next person who used that phrase! Still, hard to argue without invalidating her own alibi.
“But Kaitlyn said you were looking at McDeere the way I used to look at my old Thunderbird.”
Devin shook his head. “As much as I adore your wife, Danny-boy, I think she’s off base. McDeere’s a decent sort, but a high school English teacher? Not the most manly job, reading Lord Bryan and Edgar Allen Poe to kids all day.”
“It’s Lord Byron,” Ronnie snapped. “And how is shaping the minds of today’s youth and, by extension, the future of our country, somehow inferior to selling wiper fluid? Just because he doesn’t spend his time belching or scratching or chasing skirts at Guthrie Hall like you…Jason McDeere is an intelligent, charming, good-looking man, and any woman in town would be lucky to have him.
“Really good-looking,” she added in a breathless afterthought, temporarily recalling those eyes and that smile instead of her audience: two brothers who were now gaping.
“Well, I’ll be,” Devin said. “Kaitlyn was right.”
A slow smile spread across Danny’s face. “Ronnie’s in l-o-o-o-ve.”
“We may have to screen him,” Devin said thoughtfully.
“You stay away from Jason McDeere or I will bludgeon you unconscious with a crescent wrench!” On the heels of that threat, Ronnie spun around and headed for the repair bays.
Her interfering, overprotective brothers knew about her attraction to Jason. What were the odds that they wouldn’t mention it to her equally overprotective father? Ronnie groaned, inhaling the scent of gasoline and industrial cleaners. Was it too late to fake her own death, skip out of town and start a new life far from Joyous?
Preferably, a life without siblings.
Chapter Three
“Wiseshine, Daddy!”
Even from his nearly unconscious state, Jason was able to translate Emily’s message of rise and shine—a phrase he’d made the mistake of using sometime in the past. Because she liked the sound of it, his nearly three-year-old daughter used it frequently, whether it was technically appropriate or not. It would be more appropriate now, for instance, if the sun were actually up.
He cracked one eye open. “Morning, sweet pea.” The digital clock on the nightstand said that it was 6:26 a.m. His little girl hadn’t grasped the concept of sleeping in on the weekends and loved to bounce out of her toddler bed first thing Saturday.
At times like this, he really missed the retired crib, where she’d been confined to playing with her stuffed animals until at least seven. Was it wrong to keep your kid behind bars so you could get an extra half hour of sleep?
Emily was struggling to hoist herself onto the double bed that dominated what had once been Sophie McDeere’s guest room. The lavender wallpaper with its climbing vines of faded flowers had hung in here since his father was a boy.
Jason scooped his daughter up next to him and reached for the remote control nestled between the phone and the clock. While he hadn’t bothered to bring the queen bed he’d once shared with his ex-wife to Joyous, he’d brought all the electronics, like the first-class stereo system, the DVD player and the large television that sat on the rose faux-marble top of a white wooden dresser.
Stifling a yawn, he smiled at his daughter. “How about I find some cartoons?” Maybe she wouldn’t mind if he watched them from behind closed eyelids.
“’Kay.” She snuggled closer, instantly agreeable as long as she got to be in his company.
As it so often did, the fact that he was all she had weighed heavily on his shoulders. Sometimes he worried that Emily was more clingy than other kids her age, but who could blame her? Her own mother, after months of an extreme postpartum depression, had shoved a crying baby into Jason’s arms one day and walked out, never to return. More recently, “Gran-Gran” had, as Emily solemnly put it, gone to live in the sky. It was entirely possible Em would grow up with a few abandonment issues. Hell, after the way his marriage ended, he had abandonment issues.
He’d been fully aware of Isobel’s depression and escalating panic that she wasn’t cut out for motherhood, but he’d been trying his damnedest to help her through it, to solidify them as a family. He’d failed.
He refused to do so again. We’ll make it work, kiddo. I swear I’ll do everything I can to be a good father. He dropped a kiss on the top of her head, breathing in the grape smell of her no-tears children’s shampoo. God, life should be like that. He should be able to protect this trusting little person curled into his side, be able to guarantee that everything would always come up smelling sweet, with limited tangles or tears.
For this morning, at least, she was coping better than him. While he spent twenty minutes worrying about all the ways he might potentially screw up as a parent, his daughter laughed—that unabashed, full-bodied sound that had taken him by surprise when she was a baby—at the antics of an animated rabbit and duck on the TV screen. Afterward, he made them a modest but healthy breakfast of cereal and strawberries.
“You get to see Zoë today,” he reminded her as he buckled her into her booster seat at the table.
The Spencers across the street had a four-year-old daughter. Emily had always loved having the older girl over or even playing in the Spencers’ yard when Jason stayed in view. It was only in the past couple of weeks that she’d consented to being in Mrs. Spencer’s care without Jason there; even then, he kept his cell phone within reach in case Em suddenly and vehemently changed her mind, the way children her age could. While people often referenced the “terrible twos,” he’d only seen real tantrums from Emily in the past month, and Wanda Spencer agreed that the worst trouble she ever had with Zoë was the transition from two to about four months after she turned three. Emily’s third birthday would fall just after Easter this year.
Today, Wanda was taking the two girls to see a new G-rated movie at King Cinema that was garnering rave reviews from parents. The outing would give Jason a chance to run by the hardware store and pick up his latest batch of supplies. Though he knew more about elements of myth than he did wiring ceiling fans, modernizing this house meant something special to him. His dad had been in the military, and the family had relocated from base to base throughout Jason’s childhood with Gran’s place serving as a touchstone, a nostalgic constant. During the winter they’d lived in Alaska, Jason’s mom had vowed that while she’d dutifully follow her husband all over the world during his career, once he retired, they were moving somewhere very, very warm. They now resided in Phoenix. With her only child out west and her husband passing away several years ago, Sophie McDeere hadn’t had much help keeping up with repairs on this place.
Until he’d returned to his lifelong refuge during the divorce proceedings, Jason hadn’t realized how much the house had suffered from neglect. He’d made it his unspoken mission to respectfully refurbish Gran’s place and, in the process, build a wonderful home for Emily. Of course, while he was learning as much as he could through various instruction manuals and painstaking trial, he didn’t have a knack for design. If he let Emily have input, she’d probably insist on pink for everything from the sofa
