Dreaming Of You: Bachelor Dad on Her Doorstep / Outback Bachelor / The Hometown Hero Returns

Connor winced. Gordon Sears had a voice that could cut through rock when he was calling a meeting to order. Connor shifted on his seat. Beside him, Richard half-grinned, half-grimaced in sympathy.

‘Now, are we all agreed on the winter plantings for the nature strip?’

There were some mutterings, but a show of hands decided the matter. Connor marvelled that it could take so long to decide in favour of hyacinths over daffodils. Personally, he’d have chosen the daffodils, but he didn’t much care. It certainly hadn’t warranted half an hour’s heated debate.

He glanced at his watch. It was almost Mel’s bedtime. He hoped his father was coping okay. He tapped his foot against the floor. He didn’t like leaving Mel with his parents two nights running. With his mother mostly confined to a wheelchair these days, he considered it too much work for his father. But Russell Reed adored his granddaughter. Mel put a bounce in the older man’s step. Connor couldn’t deny him that.

When they’d heard Connor was thinking of attending this evening’s town meeting, they’d insisted Mel spend the night with them. He bit back a sigh. It was probably for the best. He’d miss reading Mel her bedtime story, but it had started to become all too apparent that Mel hungered for a female influence in her life—a female role model. He’d seen the way she watched the girls at school with their mothers and his heart ached for her.

He was hoping his own mother’s presence would help plug that particular hole. At least it gave Mel a woman to confide in.

She needs a younger woman. He pushed that thought away. Two women had left him without backwards glances. He wasn’t going through that again, and he sure as hell wasn’t risking his daughter’s heart and happiness to some fly-by-night. He and Mel, they’d keep muddling along.

‘Now, to the last item on the agenda.’

That rock-cracking voice had Connor wincing again. Richard rolled his eyes at Mr Sears’s self-importance. Connor nodded in silent agreement.

‘Now, I believe most of you will agree with me when I say we most certainly do not want a tattoo parlour polluting the streets of Clara Falls. Those of you who are in favour of such an abomination, please put forward your arguments now.’

Mr Sears glared around the room. Connor shifted forward on his seat, rested his arms on his knees. This was the reason he’d come tonight.

Nobody put forward an argument for a tattoo parlour in Clara Falls, and Connor listened with growing anger to the plan outlined by Gordon Sears to halt the likelihood of any such development occurring in the future.

Finally, he could stand it no longer. ‘I don’t know if this has escaped everyone’s notice or not,’ he said, climbing to his feet, ‘but you can’t block a nonexistent development.’

Mr Sears puffed up. ‘That’s just semantics!’

‘No,’ Connor drawled. ‘It’s law.’

‘This town has every right to make its feelings known on the subject.’

Connor planted his feet. ‘If you approach Jaz Harper with this viciousness—’

‘No names have been mentioned!’ Mr Sears bluffed.

‘No names have been mentioned, but everyone in this room knows exactly who you’re talking about. Jaz Harper has made no move whatsoever to set up a tattoo parlour in Clara Falls. She’s come back to run her mother’s bookshop. End of story.’

He glanced around the room. Some people nodded their encouragement. Others shifted uneasily on their seats as their gazes slid away. Bloody hell! If Jaz were susceptible to the same kind of depression that had afflicted Frieda then… then she wouldn’t need the likes of Gordon Sears banging on her door and shoving a petition under her nose.

‘Connor is right.’ Richard stood too. ‘Last time I checked, this country was still a democracy. If you approach my client,’ he stressed those two words, ‘with a petition or with any other kind of associated viciousness—’ he borrowed the term from Connor, but Connor didn’t mind ‘—I will take out a harassment suit on her behalf. And, what’s more, I’ll enjoy doing it. She’s a local businesswoman who is contributing to the economy of this town and we should all be supporting her.’

‘I’ll second that!’ Connor clapped Richard on the back. Richard clapped him back. They both sat down. He watched with grim satisfaction as Gordon Sears brought the meeting to a close in double-quick time.

Mr Sears approached him as he and Richard stood talking by their cars. Connor could sense the anger in the older man, even though he hid it well. ‘If any such proposal does go forward to the local council, I want you both to know that I will use every means in my power to block it.’

‘I hope you’re talking about legal means,’ Richard said smoothly.

‘Naturally.’ Mr Sears lifted his chin and glared at Connor. ‘I should’ve known you’d take her side.’

Connor planted his feet. ‘This isn’t about sides. It’s about keeping Clara Falls as the kind of place where I’m happy to raise my daughter. A place not blinded by small-minded bigotry.’

‘Ah, your daughter…yes.’

His smirk made the muscles of Connor’s stomach contract.

‘I take it that you are aware Melanie has been seen leaving the bookshop with Jaz Harper every afternoon this week?’

She what?

Mr Sears laughed at whatever he saw in Connor’s face. ‘But, then again, perhaps not.’ He strolled off, evidently pleased with the bombshell he’d landed.

‘There’ll be a perfectly reasonable explanation,’ Richard said quietly.

‘There’d better be. And I mean to find out what it is.’ Now. ‘Night, Richard.’

‘Night, Connor.’

Connor climbed into his car and turned it in the direction of Frieda’s Fiction Fair.

He eased the car past the bookshop at a crawl. A light burned inside, towards the rear of the shop. His lips tightened. She was there. He swung his car left at the roundabout and headed for the parking space behind her shop.

He let himself in with the key Jaz had given him. ‘Hello?’ He made his voice loud, made sure it’d carry all the way through to the front of the shop. He rattled the door and made plenty of noise. He had no intention of startling her like he had last night.

‘Through here,’ Jaz called.

He followed the sound of her voice. Then came to a dead halt.

She’d started her picture of Frieda.

She was drawing!

He reached out and clamped a hand around the hard shelf of a bookcase as the breath punched out of him. She looked so familiar. A thousand different memories pounded at him.

She’d sketched in the top half of Frieda’s face with a fine pencil and the detail stole his breath. He inched forward to get a better view. Beneath her fingers, her mother’s eyes and brow came alive— so familiar and so…vibrant.

Jaz had honed her skill, her talent, until it sang. The potential he’d recognised in her work eight years ago—the potential anyone who’d seen her work couldn’t have failed to recognise—had come of age. An ache started up deep down inside him, settled beneath his ribcage like a stitch.

He wanted to drag his gaze away, but he couldn’t.

He found his anger again instead. What the hell was Jaz doing with his little girl? Why had Mel been seen with her every afternoon this week? And why hadn’t Mrs Benedict informed him about it?

His hands clenched. He’d protect Mel with every breath in his body. Mel was seven—just a little girl—and vulnerable… And in need of a mother.

He ignored that last thought. Jaz Harper sure as hell didn’t fit that bill.

Jaz exhaled, stepped back to survey her work more fully, then she growled. She threw her pencil down on a card table she’d set up nearby—it held a photograph of Frieda—then swung around to him, her eyes blazing. ‘I’m grateful for what you did earlier in the day—the loan of the computer, Mrs Lavender et cetera. You left before I could thank you. So…thank you. But you obviously have something on your mind now and you might as well spit it out.’

‘I mean to.’ He planted his feet, hands on hips. ‘I want to know what the hell you’ve been doing with my daughter every afternoon this week?’