Man of His Word

Marissa’s crooked little grin warmed Kimberly.

“Sure. Open that drawer there and hand me the phone book—”

But her request was interrupted by a knock on the door. They exchanged glances. Marissa held up her hands and in playful mock seriousness pronounced, “I didn’t do nothin’.”

Kimberly stepped to the door and stared through the peephole.

Daniel.

With shaking fingers, she unbolted the security lock and swung the door wide to allow the fire chief entry. “Daniel! I—I honestly wasn’t expecting you. Uh, come in!”

He didn’t budge from the threshold. Instead, he rested one hand on the doorjamb and shuffled a work-boot-clad foot before he said, “Actually...I just came by to— Uh, I was wondering. Would you two care for some supper?”

Kimberly was gobsmacked by the invitation. Was this his way of gearing up to tell them who Marissa’s birth mother was? Her thoughts were so weighed down with a blur of questions and pulsating hope that she couldn’t even give him an answer.

“Is it fast food?” Marissa blurted into the silence.

Regret etched his features. His rangy frame began turning away, as if they’d said no. “Uh, no. I wasn’t thinking of something quick. Sorry, I guess I didn’t consider what a kid might like to eat. I’ll leave you two to your—”

“I’m in!” Marissa bounced off the bed, the total antithesis of the pensive child she’d been a few minutes before. “Mom? You need your purse?”

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_f928dba9-1d92-5d59-b3c8-a2cb39f4c96f)

FOR THE FIRST few minutes in the truck, silence reigned. Yes, Daniel had switched off the radio as it blared a staticky sports talk show when they’d driven out of the parking lot, but after that, he didn’t offer much in the way of small talk.

The way he drove, his strong hands lightly gripping the steering wheel at precisely ten o’clock and two o’clock, his eyes flicking between the rearview mirror and the road ahead, the speedometer never straying above the posted speed limit, didn’t encourage Kimberly to attempt any conversation.

Marissa, she noted wryly, didn’t break the silence, either, despite her enthusiastic acceptance of Daniel’s invitation. Something about wheels turning on a vehicle signaled her to slap her earbuds in and listen to whatever was on her iPod. And as soon as she had slid into the crew cab seat of Daniel’s pristine truck, she’d done just that.

So Kimberly occupied herself with absorbing the sights. The town was small by Atlanta standards, but it was busy. The four-lane they were on, while not exactly choked with traffic, still held a good number of impatient five-o’clock drivers.

She watched as they passed by a host of fast-food joints and several casual dining choices—a steak house, a buffet-style restaurant, a Mexican place, something that looked like a mom-and-pop Italian pizzeria. Strip malls gave way to the downtown, its buildings showing signs of a recent facelift and heavy on planters filled with bright annuals, stores with colorful awnings and sidewalks with strips of deep redbrick.

When Daniel passed up the two downtown restaurants shoehorned among jewelry stores, boutiques and a bakery, something niggled in the back of her mind.

That something went to full-alert status as he made a turn onto a familiar-looking highway heading out of town.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

It took him a minute to respond, almost as if he didn’t register what she’d asked at first. “Oh! Didn’t I say? Sorry. Out to the farm. Is that okay? We’re having supper out there, and I thought...since it was Marissa...”

A peek over her shoulder netted Kimberly a quick averted glance from Marissa, but not before she had seen a flash of telltale curiosity. So. Marissa had been listening in on the conversation despite the earbuds.

Kimberly swiveled a bit in her seat to face Daniel. “Your mom won’t mind? We don’t want to intrude—”

He took a hand off the steering wheel, waved it to dismiss her concern. “No, Ma was all for it. And so was everybody else.”

“Everybody else?” Exactly what was she walking into? Kimberly didn’t mind standing up in front of thirty students to hammer the intricacies of English grammar into their heads, but she’d never been great at social gatherings.

She’d been a shy child who’d grown into a shy teenager, much to the disappointment of her social extrovert of a mother. Between working an unending series of low-paying jobs as a waitress or bartender and blowing off steam with her current group of party-hardy friends, her mother had pretty much left Kimberly to her own devices.

Daniel seemed to thaw a bit. His eyes, that amazing sky blue, crinkled at the corners, his mouth curved up and his whole demeanor lightened. “I gotta warn you, it’s a brood of us. Ma had six of us, three boys and three girls, and so the house is always rocking. I hope you don’t mind kids, because there’s probably a half dozen around all the time.”

“Yours?” Was he married? She realized she was disappointed—and that she’d already checked out his ringless third finger without even being aware she had.

“Oh, no. My sisters’ kids—let’s see, there’s Taylor and Sean and the twins, and Cassandra, and—”

He kept reeling off names, and every additional one made her palms grow even damper. This sounded more like a family reunion than supper—and it turned her stomach into the headquarters for a butterfly convention.

Those butterflies were in mad midflutter when Daniel turned onto the bumpy driveway to the farmhouse. As he drove past the chickens, she shook off her anxiety to blurt out, “Why do you use a whole pasture for a single flock of chickens?”

“Well, it fertilizes the pasture. And then our cows eat the grass, and they fertilize it some more, and then we rotate out our crops. We try to do everything pretty much organic here—better for the land. My dad...my dad was a big believer in being a good steward to the land. It’s how he would have wanted us to continue.”

His hands tightened on the steering wheel, and his face became closed off. Kimberly wasn’t exactly sure what to say—it was obvious from Daniel’s tone and use of the past tense that the one person who wouldn’t be here was his father.

They had that in common, then...although Daniel’s father probably wasn’t a ne’er-do-well who spent more time in jail than on the streets like her dad, who had finally died in a prison knife fight. No, Kimberly decided as she slid out of the truck onto the carefully tended lawn—Daniel’s family seemed to be a different kettle of fish altogether.

They had parked around back, and Kimberly could see that the lawn around the back deck and tall white privacy fence was filled with cars and trucks—had to be nearly a dozen. Children scampered around the deck in swimsuits and shorts. A loud screech followed a sudden splash of water.

“Sean Robert Anderson! You are dead! D-E-A-D, do you hear me?” a woman yelled. “Because now that I’m good and wet, there’s no reason for me not to jump in and drown you, now, is there?”

A smaller splash signaled someone had gone in after the unfortunate soon-to-be-deceased Sean Robert.

“Wait, no— Aunt Cara, it was an accident. I swear— No, not the tickles, not—”

Laughter spilled out over the fence with its carefully tended rosebushes—not just from the boy and his aunt, but other people, too. For a moment, Kimberly was frozen in place by a potent mix of feeling wistful and bashful.

Daniel had gone on ahead, but must have sensed that she was no longer beside him. He turned, grinned and crooked his finger. “C’mon. I promise. They’re loud, but they don’t bite.”

Her breath caught in her throat at the way he’d beckoned her to come. Silly. But for a moment, she wished that he was more than just a polite guy with a secret or two to hide.

A screen door squawked open at the back of the house, off the deck. “Daniel? Did she and the girl come?”

It was Daniel’s mother, wearing an apron, her face flushed from the heat of the kitchen. Around her still more kids spilled out.

“I wanna see the baby! Can I see her?” a towheaded boy of about six asked.

Another, an older sister by the resemblance, rolled her eyes. “Logan, it’s not a baby. She’s my age. Uncle Daniel found her when she was a baby.”

Logan looked disappointed, then confused. “So why didn’t he keep her?”

By now, Daniel’s mother had cut the distance to Kimberly and Marissa in half. Kimberly’s feet started moving to the woman of their own volition—she found it impossible to resist her warm, welcoming smile and the twinkle in her eyes.

“It’s good to see you again!” his mother said in way of greeting, as if they were long-lost family members, not perfect strangers. “Thank you so much for coming out to eat with us—it’s not fancy, now, just plain fixin’s. And be sure to call me Ma, everybody does. If you call me anything else, I might not answer.”

“Thank you.” Kimberly’s tongue couldn’t wrap itself around any other words, but it didn’t matter, because in all the noise and laughter, Colleen Monroe didn’t seem to notice. She just put one arm around Kimberly shoulders, and the other around Marissa’s, and guided them to the deck.

“Hey, there,” Logan’s big sister said to Marissa. “I’m Taylor. You bring a swimsuit? No? Well, we look about the same size, and I’ve got a spare. What do you have on that iPod? Want to see my playlists?”