A Gift for All Seasons

Deep breath. “I’d thought I could, you know, just buy some trees and things, hire someone to plant them. Until I got here and remembered I can’t even grow a Chia Pet.”

She thought his mouth might’ve twitched. “So how big’s the lot?”

“Three acres or thereabouts.” Another nippy breeze speared through the heater’s warmth, making April wrap the sweater more tightly around her. She’d never been here in the fall, had no idea how brutal the damp cold could be. “I’m turning my grandmother’s waterfront house back into an inn, so it needs to look halfway decent.”

Another twitch preceded, “The Rinehart place?”

“Yes. How do—”

“Small town.”

It was beginning to bug her that he kept his gaze averted. Especially since, as Sam had wandered out to help Lili select her pumpkin, the child was obviously okay. Patrick straightened, his arms crossed. “Got a budget?”

“Not really.”

His eyes met hers and she felt like she’d been burned. All the way to her girly bits. So inappropriate, on so many levels—

“A couple hundred bucks?” he said, once more focused on his daughter. “A couple thousand …?”

“Oh. I see. Sorry, I honestly don’t know. Even though … money won’t be a problem.”

The shock still hadn’t completely faded, how well-off Clayton had left her. She’d had to have the lawyer reread the will three times, just to be sure she’d heard correctly. Clay’s accompanying letter, however, she’d read herself.

“Yes, it’s all yours, to do with however you like. As you can see, I kept my promise, too.…”

“And yet,” Patrick said, “you were thinking of handling the project yourself?”

She laughed. “I think it’s pretty clear I wasn’t thinking at all. So anyway—I’m almost always around, so … maybe sometime in the next week you could come out, take a look?”

“I’ll have to check my schedule. But sure.”

“Great. Here.” April set her sunglasses and gloves on the counter to dig inside her purse for a business card, handing it to Patrick. He studied the card as though memorizing it, then pulled his own from his pocket.

“And here’s ours—”

“Daddy! I found one!”

“Be right there, baby,” he said, and April saw the tension slough from his posture … only to immediately reappear when his eyes once more glanced off hers before, with a curt nod, he walked away.

Odd duck, April thought, hiking up her shoulder bag as she tramped back out to her Lexus, a car that only five years ago she couldn’t have dreamed would be hers. She’d no sooner slid behind the solid walnut wheel, however, when she realized she’d left her sunglasses on the count er. This was why, despite her much improved financial circumstances, she never paid more than ten bucks for a pair. Because she left them everywhere.

Shaking her head at herself, she trudged back to the nursery, plucking them—and her gloves, sheesh—off the counter as she heard Lili’s musical, and irresistible, giggle again. Curiosity nudged her closer to the pumpkin display, where Patrick teased his daughter by pointing back and forth between two of the biggest pumpkins, saying, “This one. No, this one. No, this one. On second thought … I think it has to be this one.…”

Fortunately, his back was to her so she could watch unobserved, finding some solace in the sweet exchange, even though it scraped her heart. He’d ditched that silly hat, so she could see his dark, barely there hair, almost a military cut—

He abruptly turned, his smile evaporating when he saw her, his gaze crystalizing into a challenge …

… in the midst of the puckered, discolored skin distorting the entire right side of his face.

And God help her, she gasped.

Mortified, she stumbled out of the nursery and across the graveled parking lot to lean against her car, trying to quell the nausea. Not because of his appearance, but because …

Oh, dear Lord—what had she done?

Expelling a harsh breath, April slowly turned around, her eyes stinging from the ruthless wind, her own tears, as several options presented themselves for consideration, the front-runner being to get in the car and drive to, say, Uruguay. Except … she couldn’t. And only partly because she didn’t have her passport with her. So she sucked in a deep breath, hitched her purse up again and started her wobbly-kneed trek back toward the nursery. Because those who didn’t own their screwups were doomed to repeat them. Or something.

Sam chuckled when she walked into the office. “Now what’d you forget?”

“My good sense, apparently,” April muttered, then craned her neck to see into the pumpkin patch. “Patrick still here?”

“Just left,” Sam said, adding, when she frowned at him, “He was parked out back.” At her deflated grunt, he said, “Need anything else?”

The name of another landscaper?

But since that would have required far more explanation than she was willing, or able, to give, she simply shook her head and returned to her car, hunched against the stupid wind and feeling like the worst person on the planet.

Yeah, that was about the reaction he expected, Patrick thought with the strange combination of annoyance and resignation that colored most of his experience these days. What he hadn’t expected, he realized with an aftershock to his gut—not to mention other body parts further south—was his reaction to the cute little strawberry blonde. Which, while equally annoying, was anything but resigned.

A humorless grin stretched across his mouth. Guess he wasn’t dead, after all. Or at least, his libido wasn’t. Dumb as all hell, maybe, but not dead. Because, given how she’d recoiled, he was guessing the attraction wasn’t exactly mutual. And even if it had been, those rocks adorning her ring finger may as well have been a force field against any wayward thoughts.

What he did have to consider, however, was whether to follow through on the job bid himself, or hand it off to his dad or one of his brothers. God knew he didn’t need the temptation. Or the frustration. On the other hand, he thought with another perverse grin, who was he to turn down the opportunity to get up the gal’s nose? Yeah, he was one ugly sonuvabitch these days, but you know what? The world was full of ugly sons of bitches, and the pretty little April Rosses of the world could just get over it.

At the four-way stop that had come with the new development south of St. Mary’s Cove, Patrick laboriously stretched the fingers of his right hand, the muscles finally loosening after four years of physical therapy and innumerable surgeries. But at least he had his hand—

“Daddy?”

And at least his little girl had a father, pieced back together like a cross between Frankenstein’s monster and Dorothy’s Scarecrow though he might have been. A lump rising in his throat, he glanced in the rearview mirror at the main reason he was still alive. Not that he wasn’t grateful for the dozens of burn specialists and therapists and psychologists who’d done the piecing. But whenever the physical agony had tempted him to check out, he’d remember he had a baby who still needed him—even if her mother didn’t—and he’d somehow find the wherewithal to make it through another day. And another. And one more after that …

“C’n we give the punkin a face tonight?”

Patrick spared another glance for his daughter, out of habit, taking care to avoid his reflection.

“Not yet, baby,” he said, focusing again on the flat, field-flanked road, the vista occasionally broken by a stand of bare-limbed trees. “It’s too early. If we do it now, it’ll get soft and sorry-looking by Halloween.”

“When’s that?”

“Five sleeps.” He grinned in the mirror at her. To her, he was just Daddy. What he looked like didn’t matter, only what he did. And what he’d done, since her mother left, was make sure his daughter knew that he wasn’t going anywhere, ever again. “Think you can wait that long?”

“I guess,” she said on a dramatic sigh that reminded him all too much of Natalie, which in turn reminded him of Nat’s brave-but-not expression after he was finally home for good, only to watch his marriage sputter and die. Not really a surprise, after what had happened. As opposed to his ex’s decision to give Patrick full custody of their daughter, which had shocked the hell out of him.

“Where are we going?”

“Back to Grandma’s.”

The silence from the backseat was not a good sign. Patrick preempted the inevitable protest by saying, “Sorry, honey, I’ve gotta go back to work.”

Among the many blessings of being one of seven kids, most of whom lived within a few blocks of each other, was that there was always someone to take care of Lili. In fact, his mother and oldest sister Frannie—at home with four of her offspring anyway—usually fought for the privilege. His child was in no danger of neglect. But over the past few months, Lilianna had become clingy and anxious whenever Patrick left. Especially since his ex’s rare appearances only confused Lili, rather than reassured her.