Tempted By The Single Dad

He was in for a surprise this time. He was going to have to go, and that was that. She was in creative mode—or trying desperately to be in creative mode—and she knew how easily the muse could be derailed. She had a deadline to meet. She had to stand as strong as him. This cottage was hers, and she was not leaving it!

“I doubt an agreement that is satisfactory to both of us is possible,” she said.

“Thus the invention of contracts.”

With his contracts and his annoying confidence, Allie decided she didn’t like him at all. And that was a good thing. So much easier to make him go.

Wasn’t possession nine-tenths of the law?

She opened her mouth to tell him—Allie, show no weakness, particularly to a man like this—but before she could say a single word, he was back out the door. The screen slapped shut behind him, and she went to see what had caught his attention so suddenly.

His keys still hung there. Maybe she could pull them out, slam the door and lock him out? She could imagine, with some satisfaction, the astonished look of disbelief that would bring to his unfairly handsome features.

Childish, she told herself, but in the face of his arrogance, his absolute certainty that he was right and she was wrong, she could not help but feel a certain glee at the prospect.

But when she moved to the front door fully intending to remove his keys, she saw what had pulled him out of her house with such urgency.

Allie’s mouth fell open, her resolve evaporated and her heart dropped. Now what?

Just as Allie had first suspected, when she had seen Sam glance back out that door and hold it open, Allie’s home invader had not arrived alone. No wonder, even as he spoke to her, he had been keeping a sharp eye on the front yard.

He was now crouched beside a small boy, who was trying to unstick a red wagon that had gone off the concrete pathway, and had its two side wheels imbedded in the soft dirt of the somewhat neglected flower bed that ran beside it.

The child was adorable: he looked to be maybe three, with a head full of tangled blond curls and the sturdy build of a tiny wrestler. Dimpled legs poked out of denim overall shorts. The chubby legs ended in tiny hiking boots. He had on a red T-shirt, and a faded superhero cape, one hem drooping, was draped over his shoulders and tied under his chin.

The wagon contained a small suitcase and a stuffed toy of some sort. The child was determined to free it himself.

He furiously waved off Sam, who could have freed the wagon in less than a second. Sam stood back, hands up, in the universal sign of surrender.

Allie realized it might be just a wee bit petty to take delight in seeing the self-assured Mr. Walker taking his orders from a child.

The little boy grunted and pulled, but the wagon did not move. But the stuffy did. It lifted its head, gazed with a combination of adoration and long-suffering at the child—an expression nearly identical to the man’s, actually—then sighed, and put its head back down. Not a stuffy, then, but a dog. It looked like a cross between a cocker spaniel and a red feather duster.

Allie considered all of this. Finding accommodations would be hard enough in Sugar Cone in July. The complication of the dog and the child would make it impossible.

Which meant what?

She could harden her heart to Sam Walker. It would take effort, of course, he was one of those men who effortlessly caused softening in the region of the female heart. However, she thought she’d become rather good at hardening her heart to men, and particularly one like him, who seemed altogether too sure of himself.

But the little boy? And that moppet of a dog?

What was she going to say? Go sleep in your car? Go home where you came from? I don’t care about you, or your excitement about a holiday on the beach?

For all that she had been through, had she really become that person? Was she going to allow herself to be callous and hard?

It was a sensible approach to life, she tried to convince herself. She touched the ink-dark tips of her hair, as if to remind herself which way she needed to go if she did not want to be hurt any more.

But an attitude of complete cynicism did not feel as if it fit her, as much as she might have wanted it to. And her grandmother would not have approved.

Her grandmother had known this man. Possibly she had known him since he was a child. She had never mentioned a rental arrangement, but Allie had never visited her at this particular time of the summer, either.

It occurred to Allie there might be a Mommy somewhere, but a quick glance at the curb showed no one else coming from the car that was parked there.

She couldn’t identify the silver car, low-slung and sporty, beyond the fact that it was clearly expensive. The kind of car that a man who could afford a team of lawyers drove.

But then she thought of what she had glimpsed in the man’s face, beyond the travel weariness, and it came to her. Not hurt, so much, and not loneliness.

It was a subject she was something of an expert on, enough that she could spot it in others. Loss. That is what was in the sharpness of his tone when he had told her that he, of all people, knew that life could turn on a hair.

Sam Walker knew some incredible, heartbreaking loss. That is what she had seen, naked in his eyes, before the veil had slammed down.

Of course, she probably had it all wrong. A divorce, plain and simple. In this day and age that would hardly cause a flicker. It was probably more the norm than not: marriage broken, daddy inheriting his kid for a week or two in the summer. What better plan than to head to the beach?

Allie sighed, and recognized it as a surrender. For tonight, anyway. She had two extra bedrooms. It was unlikely that a longtime tenant of her grandmother’s had morphed into some kind of ax murderer. And also unlikely that an ax murderer came with a child and a puppy in tow.

Plus, there was the unhappy existence of a contract to consider.

Maybe there was a bright spot in all this. Maybe she needed to suck it up and consider going beyond tonight. Maybe, particularly since her guitar was locked into an unfathomable silence, Allie needed to consider giving up two weeks of her precious privacy in trade for something she needed more desperately than solitude right now.

Money.

Sam Walker sensed the girl had come outside behind him before he actually saw her. Awareness of her tingled along his spine, as she pressed by him, somehow not touching him, though the walkway was narrow. She paused at where the wagon was stuck.

“Hi,” she said to Cody, who glanced at her, then ignored her.

She ignored him, too, none of that gushing over his curls that Cody and Sam were equally allergic to. Casually, barely seeming to move at all, she tucked her toe under the wagon, and lifted the stuck wheels back onto the walk. Sam noticed there was nary a protest from Cody, who trundled by her without acknowledging her help.

“I guess we can work something out,” she said. Her voice was reluctant, but her eyes on the child had softened with a sympathy that turned them a shade of violet that Sam felt he could look at—or get lost in—for a long, long time.

He shook the feeling off, but still could not seem to stop looking at her. His initial reaction, in the poor light of the hallway, after he’d realized she was not a boy, had been that she was barely more than a child.

She had tufts of very short blond, sun-streaked hair—really sun-streaked, not from a bottle—in a rumple around her head. While the rest of her hair looked natural, there was an odd half inch, right at the tips, that was a disconcerting shade of black, as if it had been dipped in an inkwell.

She was wearing a too-long T-shirt, damp in the front, suggesting a swimming suit underneath it. She had very long, sun-browned legs, but otherwise was tiny, the kind of person who would be chosen for the part of Peter Pan in a play. Or maybe Tinkerbell. Despite being Cody’s guardian for nearly eight months—all of them excruciating—Sam still wasn’t really up on his children’s stories.

Outside, the light dying, but better than it had been in the cottage, he could see she was not a child. At all. Maybe in her early twenties.

He could see, too, that she was the antithesis of the kind of women who populated his world. They fell into two categories: the very glamorous, with perfect makeup and salon hair, with manicured fingers and toes, and everything in between manicured, too. Those women wore designer clothes with casual flair, and tossed two-thousand-dollar handbags over gym-toned shoulders.

The other kind were his colleagues, professionals, as driven as he was, but as perfectly turned out as their glamourous counter parts, with a wardrobe of designer power suits and stylish eyeglasses.

Sam dated—occasionally—women from both those categories. Women sophisticated enough to understand that if they were looking for picket fences and happily-ever-after, he was not their guy.

But if they were looking for the kind of good time—travel, posh restaurants, good wine, galas, charity balls, premieres—that money could buy, they could hang out with him. For a while. As long as there were no demands and they didn’t get in the way of business.

This woman, with her blown-in-off-the-beach look, would not fit into either of those two convenient categories. He thought he had known women who were bold, but this woman who grabbed a statue named Harold and headed toward danger, instead of away from it, could redefine that word.

Next to any other woman he could think of she seemed, what? Distressingly real, somehow.