Daddy By Decision

Outside, damp air pressed against his skin, filled his lungs with heavy wetness. The air smelled of earth and kerosene from a distant plane. Low on the horizon, the golden moon cast fitful shadows across the concrete. He didn’t see the woman who’d intrigued him out of his funk, but headlights from a dark van suddenly switched on, blinding him, and he glimpsed a silhouette in the driver’s seat.

He knew it was the woman from the Palmetto. The engine idled, as if she were waiting, like him, indecisive, and Buck stood there, staring into the darkness of the van, his attention focused on that small shape behind the windshield. The lights from her van bridged the moonlit darkness between them, connected them in a curiously intimate way.

Brassy darkness and silence.

Heat rising from the dark pavement, the smell of cinnamon and jasmine floating on the wet air.

And the two of them at each end of that path of light, his blood pounding in his ears.

Shielding his eyes, Buck strained to see through the shimmering whiteness of the car lights. He needed to see her. Holding his hand up, he walked slowly toward her, from the darkness at the Palmetto’s exit into the lights of her van. Slowly, slowly, both hands hanging to his sides now, he walked toward her, blinded.

“So long, cowboy!”

The tinge of satisfaction in the throaty voice stopped him. Puzzled, he shoved his hat farther back on his head. As he did, the van reversed, smoothly turning toward the frontage road and the entrance to the highway. The left-turn signal winked triumphantly at him.

He could have loped across the parking lot and intercepted the car at the stoplight. But that edge of intimate hostility in her actions held him in place, thinking, as the light changed and the van turned left toward town.

She hadn’t been afraid of him. He knew that because she’d waited, watching him, even as he approached her. No, it wasn’t fear of him that caused her prickly wariness. Something altogether different. A kind of amused taunting, as if she’d proven something to herself.

“Well, well, well.” Shoving his hands into his jeans pockets, he watched until the red lights vanished into the hot darkness.

And then he smiled.

In the moments when his eyes adjusted back to darkness before she’d turned onto the frontage road, he’d seen the van’s license plate. Gopher 1. Not a license plate he’d be apt to forget.

Back in the Palmetto Mart, Frankie’s scowled warning greeted him. “I was watching you, mister. I’d a called the cops if you bothered Miz McDonald.”

“Good for you, Frankie,” Buck said gently, defusing the bristling animosity radiating from the spindly boy. “That was exactly the right thing to do. You did good.”

“Sorry if I was rude, man,” Frankie muttered, checking prices, “but I didn’t know what you was up to. And I wasn’t gonna let you hurt her.”

“That wasn’t my intention.” Buck handed over a twenty, took his change.

“It’s late. I didn’t know what you had in mind.”

Buck laughed. “To tell you the truth, Frankie, I don’t know what I had in mind, either. I was—interested, that’s all. Miz McDonald is an interesting woman.”

Frankie’s face reddened. “Yeah. She’s nice.”

“I’m sure she is. I could tell.” Buck watched Frankie’s face turn a brighter shade of beet.

“Yeah, well, I’m the night manager, and my customers are my responsibility. I take care of Miz McDonald when she comes in.”

Buck recognized the signs of a teenage crush when he saw one. Hell, he’d lived through T.J. and Hank’s frequent throes of love. Then T.J. met Callie Jo, and everything changed for both his brothers. Buck had always had his suspicions about Hank’s feelings toward Callie Jo, but Hank, the most open man in the world, could keep his own counsel when he wanted. Anyway, Hank worshiped Jilly and their kids, so the past was the past.

In the meantime, the bantam across from him was scratching for a showdown. Shoot, the kid wouldn’t break a hundred and thirty pounds, but his heart was in the right place. Buck tried not to smile. The kid didn’t deserve that.

“Nobody’s going to mess with her while I’m here.” Frankie squared narrow shoulders defiantly and tried to stare Buck down.

Looking away, casually, easily, he gave Frankie the move, letting the kid save face, the same way he’d yielded to the heat of his younger brothers when they’d been on the brink of manhood. “She’s lucky you’re in charge, Frankie. I could tell she likes your store. I’ll bet she comes here a lot?”

Frankie nodded.

“She must feel safe. With you around, watching out for her. And for the rest of your customers.” Sticking a finger through the plastic loops of the six-pack, Buck smiled, tipped his hat with a finger, and strolled toward the door. “Nice meetin’ you, Frankie. Take care now, hear?”

“Sure thing, man.” Frankie held his shoulders so far back Buck could have clipped them together with a clothespin.

Kids. Sheesh. Buck stepped outside into the steamy night. Rolling his head back and forth, he considered his choices. Maxie’s in town? Out to T.J.’s ranch? Or get in the Jeep and haul rear half the night south, back to Okeechobee and his own ranch and groves?

The road, glistening black under the low-lying moon, stretched in front of him. Truth was, he had nowhere he wanted to go, nothing pulling at him, no one to help him while away the lonely night hours. A light breeze tugged at his hat, filtered through the straw brim, brushed against his cheek like a feathery kiss. Scraps of paper on the concrete lifted, stirred, floated to his feet. One was a receipt from the Palmetto. He reached down to pick it up. Eggs, vanilla ice cream, milk.

Not hers.

He crushed the receipt between his fingers, holding it for a moment, staring off into the thick, empty night.

Impulse and the memory of red lights winking off toward town made him about-face back into the Palmetto.

Jessie’s hands were slippery with sweat on the plastic steering wheel. Even with the windows of the van down and the wind whipping in, perspiration pooled along her spine, slid to the waistband of her shorts. Skeezix, her shaggy mutt of undetermined origins with the temperament of an angel, eased up from the back. Sidling in next to her, he stuck his nose out her window. “Come on, you big lug. Scoot over to your own side, will you?” She pushed at the dog until he moved over and stuck his head out the passenger window.

She. wondered if Jonas Buckminster Riley had recognized her in spite of her careful attempts not to look his way. Even though he’d always been shrewd and fast on the uptake, a lot had changed in the last five years, most of all her.

He hadn’t recognized her. He would have said something if he had. But maybe not. A complicated man, he liked playing games. Tiny shivers slipped over her skin. And in her innermost soul, she knew it wasn’t fear running through her. The frisson skipping along her nerve endings was a remnant of another life, another Jessie, not this Jessie barreling down the highway in a van filled with the smell of dogs and take-out hamburger. She’d left that other Jessie behind, a long time ago.

As she unwrapped the cold hamburger and nudged it toward the dog, Skeezix moaned happily and pulled his head inside. She sneezed as dog hair drifted toward her. “Good dog! But you silly fool, why didn’t you eat it when it was hot?” She rubbed the dog’s head and scratched behind his ears. Slopping paper and hamburger bits over the seat, Skeezix collapsed onto her thighs with a wiggle of contentment. “Guess who I ran into tonight, Skeez?” Skeezix wiggled closer, his tongue lapping wetly against her cutoffs. “A ghost from my past, and you didn’t even let out a howl? For shame. Some dog you are. Would you have defended me if I’d needed you, you big mutt?” Skeezix rolled his head and thumped his heavy tail a couple of times. “Oh, sure, that’s what you say now. But where were you ten minutes ago, buster?”

She was glad her ghost hadn’t remembered her. Of course she was.

But.

“So long, cowboy!” The sound of her last words lingered in her ears. Surely she hadn’t wanted him to stop her with a flood of for-old-times’-sake memories? Had she?

But, her unruly tongue running ahead of her brain, she’d called out, “So long, cowboy!” Had that been a note of challenge, of “gotcha” in her voice? Had she wanted him to recognize her? Had some deep perversity ruled her in that last second? Surely not.

But she’d called out. In that last, crucial second, she’d called out to him.

In the light from her headlights, he’d looked bigger, tougher. A little mean with his eyes narrowed like that, a little baffled but thinking hard as he’d stared back at her from the darkness. Even sitting yards apart from him, she’d felt the insistent beating of his will against her, his determination to solve the puzzle she represented to him. That insatiable curiosity, that inability to turn away from an unanswered question—that quality had made him a brilliant lawyer.

He’d been fearsome, his cross-examinations stripping away evasions until a witness sat as vulnerable as a deer caught in the cross hairs, waiting. And then Jonas Buckminster Riley would deliver the killing blow, gently, cleanly, so elegantly that the witness seemed almost to welcome the coup de grace that put finish to the relentless, unending questions delivered in Jonas’s chillingly polite drawl.

No, the Palmetto Mart cowboy in the cream-colored straw cowboy hat and scruffy jeans might be as curious as ever, but he was not the man she remembered. Long, rangy muscles and sloping shoulders replaced the reed-thin frame she’d known; that thin, hard body covered by suits so expensively sumptuous that one time, driven by some crazy impulse as she’d passed in back of him, she’d stroked the baby-soft fabric of a jacket left casually hanging on the back of his chair.

He’d known, of course. He’d looked up at her in that moment when her index finger glided against the sleeve, slipped inside to the lining still warm from his body, and lingered against the silk.

“You like that, huh?” he’d asked and smiled, his brilliant blue eyes blazing her into ashes.

Lifting one eyebrow, she’d run her finger carelessly over the lining. “A bit too uptown for me. But then clothes make the man, so they say.” Brushing her hands together, knowing he was watching her every twitch and movement, she’d walked away, into her own office, her heart slamming against her ribs with each step.

“Do they really? Say that?” His whispery drawl had tickled the hairs along the back of her neck, sent goose bumps down her arms, her chest. “And what do you say, Ms. Bell?” His smile turned edgy, his narrowed gaze assessing, as he swiveled his chair toward her and focused all his fierce intelligence on her, pinning her in the searing beam of his gaze.