A Vow to Keep

Whimsy, again. Where was that coming from? She had always considered herself so pragmatic. Not, she reminded herself, that a pragmatic woman would have purchased the faintly dilapidated little house behind her.

She kept the binoculars trained on him long after he was just a speck. That’s when she became aware of the miracle.

Happiness had eased into her, as sneakily as the morning light had chased away the darkness.

She contemplated the feeling for a moment, let the word roll through her mind. Only thirteen months ago her world had turned upside down, been broken to pieces as if picked up by a tornado and smashed back down. She remembered thinking on that black, black day, I will never again know joy.

Or that most dangerous of things, hope.

There was that whimsy again, because spotting the rare bird made her hope for a life where tiny surprises could delight, where cold grass could make her skin tingle with the simple awareness of what it was to be alive.

She had barely formed that thought when the hair on the back of her neck rose. She was aware, before she heard the softly cleared throat, that she was no longer alone in her backyard. Ah well, Linda chastised herself, that was a lesson about believing in happiness that she should’ve learned. It was like throwing a challenge before the gods, one they seemed all too eager to accept.

The intruder must be a murderer, she decided, just as her daughter had warned her when Linda had insisted on buying this little house, next to the bird sanctuary, in an old, old neighborhood where crumbling houses, such as hers, stood next to in-fills and add-ons and houses lovingly restored to dignity.

Mother. What are you thinking? You’ll be murdered in your sleep, Bobbi had said. As if dead bodies littered the quiet streets of one the oldest districts in Calgary. Though, of course, those scruffy young neighbors, tattooed and long haired with the pit bull and boards over their windows, had given Linda pause.

Well, she thought, with faint satisfaction, if her daughter was right about the murderer, at least Linda was not asleep. In her pajamas, though! Heart hammering, ridiculously embarrassed about the pink flannel printed with cartoon devils, she rose off her knees, stretched with what she hoped was a lack of concern—she was sure the criminal element could smell fear—and turned to face her fate.

Her heart stopped.

A murderer, she thought, would have been much easier to handle. She became aware that her pajamas were soaked nearly clean through from the frost, and she was afraid her breasts were probably doing something indecent.

From the cold. Not from him.

At least she hoped the reaction was from the cold. She folded her arms firmly over that area before he got any ideas.

Did he have to see her like this?

The pajamas, which had seemed to be making such a statement about the new her—not caring about the opinions of others, eccentric, free—when she had plucked them off the rack, now made her feel faintly ridiculous and all too vulnerable.

“Rick,” she said, hoping to load that single word with as much frost as what painted her lawn. He flinched, so she knew she had probably succeeded, and wondered why the success gave her so little satisfaction.

Rick Chase was six feet of utter male appeal. He was tall, broad-shouldered, the perfection of an impeccably cut suit, probably Armani, accentuated rather than disguised the sleek power of his build.

Gorgeous, she thought, almost clinically, a man of forty in his absolute prime. His features were masculine and clean, his chin faintly dimpled, those amazing eyes as green as the edges of still water, and just as calm. He was dressed for work—the suit charcoal-gray, the white shirt crisp, the tie silky and classy and perfectly knotted at the swell of his throat.

He was really the kind of man a woman did not want to see without her makeup and her hair done and a dress that turned heads. She reminded herself she had just been happy that she had not worn makeup in more than a month, happy with the new her.

Trust a man to wreck happiness without half trying.

She noticed for all the magazine cover perfection of his looks, his dark hair—devil’s-food-cake brown—was spiky and uncooperative, still wet from the shower. It wakened some rebel in her that wanted to press down the worst rooster tail, the Dennis-the-Menace one, with her fingertips. She noticed, surprised, there were strands of gray threaded through the rich brown.

How was it possible he was still unmarried, unattached? He had been divorced for more than seven years. And how was it possible she’d forgotten how handsome he was? Or maybe it was just that she had refused to think about it, her battle-scarred emotional self not needing a complication like the one that had just materialized in her yard. Even when he’d left message after message for the past thirteen months, she had refused to conjure the image of him. Somehow she had known it would make her ache. Make her feel as lonely and as pathetic as only a betrayed woman could be.

Betrayed by her husband, now dead thirteen months, and betrayed by this man who stood in front of her, her husband’s friend and business partner, who had known about her husband’s secrets and had never once…

Don’t go there, she ordered herself.

“Linda.”

They stood staring at each other as morning deepened around them. Across the river a horn honked and tires squealed.

She was aware of time standing still.

“You look like you’re frozen,” he finally said.

She resisted the temptation to look down at her chest to see if that’s where he was drawing his conclusion.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, not politely, either.

“I called this morning. When I didn’t get an answer I decided to drop by.”

Drop by, as if this was right on his way to work, which it wasn’t. Drop by, as if she had sent him her new address, which she hadn’t.

She was a woman who had felt the complete and humiliating sting of being too easily fooled. Now she felt she could sniff out a half-truth at five hundred yards.

“And what exactly is the reason for your sudden concern, Rick?”

Something in his eyes grew very cold, and made her shiver more than her frosty pajamas. She had known Rick for twenty years. Had she ever seen him angry? She was suddenly aware that there were facets to him that were powerful and intriguing, and it felt like a terrible weakness that she was suddenly curious…

“Don’t say that as if I haven’t been concerned all along,” he said with surprising force. “It’s you who has chosen not to return my calls. Because I respected that, does not mean I was not thinking about you.”

“Well, thank you,” she said, her tone deliberately clipped. “And you have chosen not to respect my need for space now, because—?”

He glared at her, raked a hand through the wet tangle of his hair. The Dennis-the-Menace tail popped right back up. He looked very much like he wanted to cross the ground between them, take her shoulders and shake her. But the temper died in his eyes, and he said evenly, “I need your help with something.”

Patting down that rooster tail, for one.

“You’re asking a woman who is out in her yard in her pajamas at dawn for help with something? You might want to rethink that.”

She had said it with mild sarcasm, but he chose not to be offended. Instead he grinned. Oh, she wished he would not have done that. The masculine pull of him was almost instant, more powerfully alluring than before. A smile like his—faintly reckless and unabashedly sexy—could build a bridge right over the painful history that provided such a safe and uncrossable chasm between them.

“I’ll take my chances. You never know when you might need the skills of a woman who’s handy with binoculars.”

She glanced down at the binoculars that hung around her neck.

“So, what were you doing? Spying on the neighbors?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she said, fighting down the impulse to explain herself. She was done with that. She was free to watch the birds at dawn if she damn well pleased, and offer explanations to no one. It was the new—and improved—Linda Starr.

“You’re shivering.” His voice was unexpectedly gentle. Pity? The new and improved Linda Starr did not want his pity; she wanted to be insulted by it. Instead his gentle tone touched the place in her where she least wanted to be touched. The place that said, in the darkness of the night when she could not outrun it, I want someone to care about me.

“The coffee is on in the house,” she said coolly. “You can come in and tell me what you want.”

And no matter what it was, she would say no to him.

She would say no because he was part of a world she was trying desperately to leave behind, and because he made her aware that while she thought she was being independent she probably only looked wildly off balance and possibly pathetic.