A Child Of Her Own

“Darcie.”

“Well, bring Darcie by the studio tomorrow afternoon so she can meet the other girls in the beginners’ class, and we’ll show her what twirling is all about.”

“I don’t know if I can take time off from work tomorrow, but I’ll see what I can manage. If I can’t bring her, I’ll get my sister to.”

“You’re going to drop by with the estimate for the new heat and air system by tomorrow, aren’t you?” Lori Lee asked.

“Yeah.”

“Bring the estimate by at the same time you bring Darcie, that way you won’t be taking time away from your job,” Lori Lee suggested. “Since my Aunt Birdie owns the building, I’ll have her come over and talk to you while I show Darcie around the studio and introduce her to the other girls.”

“Yeah. Sure. Thanks.” Rick stood, walked over and picked up his coat. He slipped into it and lifted his toolbox. “See you tomorrow.”

“Yes, see you tomorrow. You and Darcie.”

She followed him, pausing when he opened the front door and turned to face her. “Look, Lori Lee, I know when I left this town, people were glad to see me go. I’d earned myself a pretty bad reputation.”

“That was a long time ago.” She could smell his sweat, not an offensive odor, just a rough, masculine scent that blended with the clean smell of his clothes and hair.

“I haven’t been a saint these past fifteen years, but I’m doing my best to settle down and provide a home for my daughter.” He stared into Lori Lee’s big blue eyes and felt himself drowning. If he’d known she had moved back to Tuscumbia, would he have come home? “Darcie is my main concern. Everything I do, I do for her.”

“I understand,” Lori Lee said.

He nodded, then turned and walked out the door and down the sidewalk to his parked minivan, Bobo Lewis Heating And Air-Conditioning printed on the side in bold black lettering. She stood in the doorway and watched him until he drove down Main Street and the van disappeared around the corner on Fifth.

She’d told him she understood his devotion to his child, and she did. If she had a little girl, she would make her daughter the center of her universe. But she could never have the one thing she wanted most—a child of her own. Regret knotted her stomach. Sorrow clogged her throat with unshed tears.

Lori Lee went back inside the studio, sat on the edge of her desk and flipped through her Rolodex, then made her first telephone call to cancel her private lessons for the day.

Lori Lee chopped up the pack of lunch meat into tiny pieces and dumped it into Tyke’s doggie bowl. The brindled Boston terrier jumped up and down, gazing at Lori Lee with huge brown eyes.

She set the bowl on the floor and petted Tyke on the head. “Here you go, baby. Eat up while I fix my supper.”

While Tyke gobbled up his meal, Lori Lee removed a single-serving casserole from the refrigerator and popped it into the microwave. As she waited for her dinner to warm, she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the round table that was dressed in lace and floral fabric matching the kitchen wallpaper.

Leaning back in the cane-bottom oak chair, she sighed. It had been a long day. She was tired, hungry and unnerved. She’d decided to wait until morning to tell Aunt Birdie the bad news about the central heat and air at the studio. She wasn’t overly concerned about the expense for her aunt, who probably had enough money to buy and sell the whole town. Birdie’s fifth husband had left her millions, and she’d been far from poor before Hubert Pierpont’s death. No, what Lori Lee dreaded was telling her aunt that Rick Warrick would be installing the new heating equipment and that he planned to enroll his daughter in the twirlers.

Birdie Guy Jackson Lovvorn Hill McWilliams Pierpont was a woman who loved men and simply couldn’t understand how her favorite niece had gone nearly six years without a significant other. As far as Aunt Birdie was concerned, dating didn’t count. A woman needed to be in love, and if she were in love, she should either be living with the object of her affection or married to him. Lori Lee fell short on all counts.

Aunt Birdie had been Lori Lee’s confidante as long as she could remember. She’d told her aunt things she’d never even told Deanie. And since her parents had moved to Naples, Florida, three years ago, after her younger brother Ronnie’s death, Lori Lee had become even closer to Birdie. Maybe it was her aunt’s big, warm heart or her zest for life that had always assured Lori Lee that Birdie would not only understand but sympathize.

If she had listened to her crazy Aunt Birdie’s advice when she was seventeen, Lori Lee would have acted on her feelings for Rick Warrick and ridden off with him on his motorcycle in the middle of the night. But Rick had frightened her, and she’d kept her distance, seldom even speaking to him. But in her dreams, awake or asleep, she had fantasized about being his woman.

She wasn’t a teenage girl anymore. She was an adult who had just turned thirty-two on her last birthday. She was old enough to know better than to allow her hormones to dictate her actions. And her hormones had certainly gone into overdrive this afternoon when Rick Warrick reentered her world

It wasn’t as if there weren’t men in her life. Actually there were more men chasing her than she knew what to do with, but not one of them made her stomach do flipflops or her blood sizzle with excitement. Ever since her divorce from Tory had become final and she’d moved back to Tuscumbia, there had been a steady stream of eligible, and a few not so eligible, men beating a path to her door. Several of those men had offered her marriage, but she had declined.

She’d been madly in love with Tory McBain, the big, handsome star quarterback for the University of Alabama, whom she’d married at twenty-two and divorced four years later. Their marriage had ended badly, leaving both her heart and spirit broken. But Lori Lee knew one thing for certain, she would never marry again until she could love someone else with that same kind of wondrous passion.

She supposed what upset her the most about being exposed to Rick’s rough and rugged brand of male sensuality was that she was still as scared of him as she’d ever been. The effect he had on her frightened her because it was stronger than anything she’d ever felt. Not even her love for Tory had been as powerful.

But she didn’t love Rick. How could she? She barely knew him. No, she didn’t love the man. She just wanted him—wanted him in a desperate, almost savage way she had never wanted anyone else.

Two

Rick set two bowls of vegetable soup beside the plastic spoons and paper napkins on the card table. He wasn’t much of a cook, but he made sure Darcie got three decent meals a day. A couple of times a week, they ate supper at his sister’s, but he tried not to impose on Eve more than he had to. She already did too much for them, and Rick accepted her help only for Darcie’s sake. In the two years since his ex-wife’s death, he had discovered just how difficult it was for a single man to raise a child alone. Especially a tiny, shy, insecure little girl who was just now beginning to trust him enough to believe he wouldn’t leave her.

When April had been killed in a car crash, along with her drunken boyfriend, Rick had had no choice but to take Darcie on the road with him. He’d been a construction worker most of his adult life, ever since he’d done his stint in the army. Seven years ago, he had wound up in Mercy Falls, South Dakota, where he’d met a barfly named April Denton. April had been a looker. Big blue eyes. Long blond hair. And a body to die for. The first time he saw her, he’d thought of Lori Lee Guy. There’d been a striking resemblance between the two, but where Lori Lee was a class act—a Southern belle with a pedigree as long as his arm—April had been cheap and flashy. They’d burned themselves out after a few weeks of passion, and Rick had moved on to another town and another woman. Then April had called him and told him she was pregnant. He hadn’t wanted to marry her, but in the end he had. He’d done it for the child, even though he hadn’t been sure, at the time, the baby was really his. No kid deserved to come into this world unloved and unwanted, as he’d been.

“Daddy, are the grilled cheese sandwiches ready?” Darcie asked.

“Huh?” Rick’s mind jumped from the past to the present. He picked up the metal spatula and flipped the sandwiches in the electric skillet. “Any minute now, sweetie. Go ahead and start on your soup if you’re hungry.”

“Shouldn’t I say grace first? They always say it at Aunt Eve’s before they eat.”

“Sure. Say grace.” Rick bowed his head.

“God is great, God is good. Now let us thank him for our food. Amen.” Darcie looked up at her father and smiled.

Her two front teeth were missing. He hadn’t known a damn thing about the tooth fairy until Eve had explained all about the mysterious spirit who gathered up teeth from beneath children’s pillows and left money in their place. Darcie’s two front teeth had cost Rick four bucks—two dollars a tooth. Eve had told him that front teeth were more expensive, and in the future a dollar a tooth would suffice.

Rick lifted a sandwich and placed it on a paper plate beside Darcie’s soup bowl, then repeated the procedure with his sandwich. He pulled out a folding chair and sat down across from his daughter.

“Am I going to have to stay over at Aunt Eve’s tonight?” Darcie slurped her soup, then took a bite out of her sandwich.

“I’m afraid so. I’ve got to work, and you’re just not old enough to stay out here in the apartment by yourself.”

Rick hated leaving Darcie alone several nights a week, but he had no choice. If he wanted to earn enough money to buy Bobo’s half of the business before the old man retired, he had to work a second job, if only part-time. His and Darcie’s future depended on him, on his making a place for them in the community and earning enough money to give Darcie the kind of life he’d never had.

He wanted his daughter to have every opportunity, and it was up to him to make sure she got the chances she deserved. If only the right people would accept her, allow her to become friends with their children and invite her into their inner circle, Rick would pay any price. But with his former reputation and past history hanging around his neck like an albatross, finding acceptance for himself and his daughter in Tuscumbia might prove an impossible task. But he sure as hell was trying. If they’d just give him a chance, he’d show the good citizens how much he had changed, how determined he was to be a good person, too. He’d do just about anything for Darcie’s sake.

“What kind of car is it you’re fixing for that man?” Darcie asked.

“It’s a 1959 Corvette,” Rick said. “And the man I’m restoring the car for is Powell Goodman. He’s a lawyer and a pretty important guy around these parts. His father and grandfather were both judges.”

“Aren’t you an important man, Daddy?”

Important? Him? To most people he was about as important as yesterday’s trash. “I’m just an ordinary guy, sweetie. A man trying to make ends meet and give his kid a better life than he had.”

Darcie scooted out of her chair, walked around the table and, standing on tiptoe, flung her arms around her father’s neck. “You’re an important man to me, Daddy. Very, very important.”

If Rick had been an emotional man, he might have teared up at his child’s sweet, loving proclamation. But Rick hadn’t shed a tear since he’d been younger than Darcie was now. He’d learned early on that nobody gave a tinker’s damn whether he was upset, lonely or hurt. Poor little A.K. Had his own parents ever loved him? Sometimes he wondered if his mother had given him only initials for a first name because it had been quick and easy, no bother for her. But by the time he was in junior high, all his buddies called him Rick, taken from Warrick. And to this day, he preferred the nickname over the solitary initials on his birth certificate.

Rick hugged his daughter, kissed her on her forehead and nuzzled her nose with his. She giggled gleefully. “Thanks, big girl. I think you’re a pretty important person, too.”

“Snooky-nose me again, Daddy.” Darcie pressed her tiny button nose against her father’s long, lean, hawkish nose.

She loved to play what Rick had dubbed “snooky-nose,” where they rubbed their noses together. He repeated the nuzzling, then lifted her and set her down in her chair. “Eat your supper, young lady. I’ve got fifteen minutes to eat, clean up our mess and get you over to Aunt Eve’s.”