An Unlikely Father

She stared down at her flat stomach before closing her eyes to the image that had been stuck in her mind all afternoon. Little bean. What did it look like after two weeks? She remembered a picture in a high-school biology book. It looked like a lima bean. A tiny round speck, one a person could barely see without a magnifying glass. It had no heart, no brain, no sense that its mother was contemplating…

“Aw, hell.” Helen went back to the door of the Lionheart. She had a bit of time to wait and hope for a damn miracle.

Stan looked up and saw her at the door. “You forget something, Helen?”

“No, I just changed my mind. It wouldn’t hurt to ask the boat mover where the Dawn is going. In the next few days I might think of something Donny left behind. Something important I’d need to contact him about.”

“I’ll keep a watch,” Stan said. “If I find anything out, I’ll let you know.”

Helen didn’t walk to the Suburban. She went into the vacant lot and stared at Donovan’s Dawn. The boat’s teak sides shone in the moonlight, testament to the weeks she and Donny had worked so hard. That had been a ridiculous dream, too, thinking she could take weeks away from Heron Point and sail around with Donny. Helen hadn’t been away from home for more than a couple of days in her life.

She’d been born in Micopee thirty miles away, and from the time her parents had brought her to the little cottage she still shared with Finn, she’d been as much a part of Heron Point as the giant cedar trees, the dozens of pelicans that squatted on all the old pilings, the sea itself. But the Gulf was ruled by the tides, so even the water moved to and from Heron Point more than Helen ever had. Maybe if Finn hadn’t lost the use of his legs, maybe if her mother hadn’t run off, maybe then Helen could have gone to college, made something of herself. But not now. And if she had this baby, not ever.

A cloud covered the moon, and suddenly the Dawn was a great hulking shadow of unfinished business just like Helen’s life. The sailboat stood on her supports, mocking Helen for believing in her, for believing in Donny. Finn was right, after all. Helen didn’t have a lick of sense when it came to men. She fell too fast and didn’t take long enough getting up before letting it happen again.

Well, not anymore. This time it wasn’t just her heart that was stomped on. This time the betrayal left her with a mountain of guilt about what she planned to do and a seriously wounded self-respect she’d never faced before. It wouldn’t be so easy to put the last three months out of her mind. This time it hurt.

Anger coiled inside her until she thought she would explode. Finding no outlet, she clenched her fists until her nails dug into her palms. She started to walk out of the lot, but when a shiny silver can by her feet caught her eye, she picked it up and rolled it between her hands. An innocent beer can. A weapon, a release. She hurled it at the sailboat. It pinged against the polished surface, hit the ground and rolled to the end of the lot. Tension ebbed from Helen’s shoulders. It felt good to fling her anger at the only tangible reminder left of Donny’s deception. She went to the garbage bin, picked up another can and threw it, too. Then another. Then many more.

She might have continued until the ache in her throat faded and her tears stopped flowing, except she heard men’s voices coming from the street behind her.

“Helen? Is that you?”

She froze. Just what she needed. Jack Hogan, Heron Point’s new chief of police and the man her best friend Claire was going to marry in a few weeks. She spun around and stepped into the shadows. “Hell, no, Jack. It’s not me, but I’ll clean up this mess somebody else left.” And then she saw who he was with and she couldn’t seem to speak another word. Her mouth dried up. Her lungs were incapable of drawing in air.

“That’ll be fair enough,” Jack said. He was still in uniform and she figured that technically he could nail her for vandalism. “Are you okay?”

“Dandy.” She stared at the sky, the dirt beneath her feet, anything but Jack and the man he was with, the town savior she’d nearly decapitated yesterday.

“It looks to me like somebody was picking on an innocent sailboat,” Jack said.

“Yeah, right. Not so innocent when you’re looking at it through my eyes. I see someone’s face very clearly on the side of that boat.”

Jack smiled. “I heard about Donny leaving. Sorry. But like I told Claire, you can do better.”

She huffed her opinion of his conclusion but mentally thanked him for saying it.

He turned his attention to Ethan Anderson. “I’d introduce you to our local fishing guide, Ethan, but I know you two met accidentally yesterday.”

“Yeah, we met,” Helen said. “Ethan sort of got in my way.” She managed to smile a little at the guy who was still dressed like he’d just gotten off the plane, in pressed pants and a blue oxford shirt. “You don’t need to arrest him, though, Jack. I’m not pressing charges, and I think he learned his lesson.”

“That’s generous of you,” Ethan said. He switched a foam takeout box from one hand to the other.

“Dinner?” she asked.

“Dessert.”

“Ethan and I just ate over at the Tail and Claw,” Jack said. “He’s waiting for a rental car to get here from the Tampa airport.”

Ethan looked at his watch. “It’s nearly ten o’clock. I’m only going to give them another few minutes.”

“I guess I’ll go on home, then,” Jack said. “You going to the hotel?”

For some reason, Ethan looked at Helen as if she could contribute something to his answer. “I think I’ll wait out here a little longer,” he said. “Tell Claire hi for me.”

“Will do.” Jack started to walk away. “Oh, by the way, Helen, Claire said if I saw you, I should remind you about Thanksgiving dinner. She’s planning to cook up a feast, and obviously she’s counting on you and Finn to come.”

Thanksgiving? Right now, the holidays were the furthest thing from Helen’s mind. “When is it?”

“Same as always, I suppose,” Jack said. “Fourth Thursday of November.”

“Oh, right. And what’s today?”

Jack chuckled. “The third Thursday. Gives you a week to mark the calendar.”

He said goodbye to Ethan and headed toward his vehicle. And Helen thought how lucky Claire was to have found someone like Jack. Solid. Dependable. And very rare.

After a moment, she turned toward Ethan. “Good luck with getting that rental car delivered. In a way, I feel somewhat responsible for you standing out here waiting for it.”

He smiled. “No offense, Helen, but once the new car arrives, I’m going to stay as far away from that truck of yours as I can.”

“No offense taken.” They stood without talking in the gloomy silence of a battlefield littered with beer cans. Helen figured she ought to start picking up the mess she’d created, but before she took a step, she heard the subtle squeak of the foam restaurant container.

Ethan held it out to her. “Do you like chocolate cake?”

ETHAN DIDN’T VERY often feel as if he walked a thin line between boardroom executive and idiot, but that’s exactly how he felt right now. What was he doing, standing here with a peace offering for a woman who’d been doing her best in the last two days to destroy two perfectly fine modes of transportation?

She peered over the edge of the box. “You’re giving me your dessert?”

He shrugged an indifference he didn’t feel and said, “Seemed like the quickest way to soothe the angry beast. I have to wait out here for my car. You’re here, too, and there are still a few cans in that trash bin.”

Her lips twitched. He hoped it was a hint of a smile and not the beginning of a snarl. And then she said something that in his experience was a predictably female reaction. “I’d do most anything for chocolate.” She stuck her thumbs in the waistband of her jeans and nodded down the street. “Come on. I’m not eating standing up.”

He followed her a block to where her Suburban was parked. She stepped up on the front bumper, turned around and sat on the truck. He noticed a slash of flesh through a slit in the knee of her denims. She patted the hood beside her and said, “There’s room.”

He looked at the seriously faded steel, taking in the gritty remains of road dirt, and, considering her occupation, who knew what else, and stared down at his perfectly pressed beige Dockers. And he remembered that during his tour of Heron Point today he hadn’t seen a business that was essential to a Manhattan male’s lifestyle—a dry-cleaning establishment.

She must have correctly interpreted his reluctance because she sort of smiled again and then gripped the edge of her shirt cuff and wiped a small circle beside her. “Don’t worry, Princeton,” she said. “In all my years in Heron Point, I don’t recall anyone ever catching something from the hood of a truck.”

Princeton? He thought about correcting her and saying he was a Harvard man, but didn’t think that would earn him any points. And that’s what he was here for, after all—to establish a good working relationship with the locals. For some reason, his father, head of Anderson Enterprises, had decided to invest in this quirky Florida island by buying an old, run-down resort, and he’d sent his son to see that the renovations went smoothly.

It helped that Archie Anderson’s chief security officer, Jack Hogan, had been in town a month longer than Ethan and had become something of a superhero to the two thousand people who lived here. In fact, Jack had even decided to stay once he’d fallen for the town’s mayor. But Ethan needed to relate to these people on his own, one at a time, if he had to, and despite the way he and Helen had met, he didn’t mind starting with her first.

He placed the toe of his Italian loafer on the bumper, hoisted himself up to the hood, and admitted to a grudging admiration of the old truck. The metal didn’t even groan when he sat his clean chino-covered posterior on top of it.

He handed the box to Helen. She took out the fork, poked through a quarter inch of creamy icing and brought up a wedge of cake to her mouth. While she chewed, she handed him the utensil. “There’s only one fork,” she managed to say. “I can always light a match and sterilize it between bites.”

Any sympathy he’d begun to feel for this teary-eyed woman who’d dropped a can in front of Jack like a guilty delinquent vanished. Helen Sweeney was about as vulnerable as a barracuda. And just as alien to a Manhattan guy who’d never been closer to a fish than the city aquarium. Unfortunately, what was unfamiliar was almost always fascinating, as well. And Ethan couldn’t take his eyes off Helen’s smart mouth as she chased a trail of frosting with the tip of her tongue.