Colonel Daddy

“Yes ma’am, I’m a colonel.”

“Ooh, fascinating,” she murmured, then her gaze swept him up and down. “A shame you didn’t wear your uniform. I do so love a man in uniform.”

“I don’t usually wear it off base,” he told her and silently counted his lucky stars that he hadn’t worn it tonight, especially.

“As I said, a shame. Ah, well, jeans are nice, too.” She inhaled sharply, beamed a smile at him and tightened her grip on his hand. “I’m delighted Kate has a date. I’ve told her and told her, she’s too young to just sit at home all the time.”

Too young, Tom thought with an inward groan. At thirty-two, she was too young for lots of things. Including him. As he’d told her often over the past three years.

“You take me, for example.” Evie was talking again, tugging him toward Kate’s door. “Why, I’m almost never home. Tonight’s different, of course. The girls are coming over for a game of cards. We invited Kate to join us, but she said she had plans.” She actually batted her eyelashes at him. “And she certainly wasn’t lying.”

There was a gleam in Evie Bozeman’s eyes that had Tom wanting to call out the troops for backup.

From out on the street, a car horn sounded and Evie looked past him, thank heaven, squinted a bit, then grinned and waved. “The girls are here,” she told him, and tugged him around again to face the walkway.

Tom glanced over his shoulder at Kate’s unadorned door and wondered where the hell she was. Then it occurred to him that she might be watching all of this and thoroughly enjoying it instead of coming out to rescue him. As soon as that thought registered, though, he reminded himself that he was a colonel in the Marine Corps. He shouldn’t have to be rescued from a woman who had to be at least sixty-five.

Determinedly he tried to pull his hand free, but Evie held on in a grip that told him she’d done this before.

“Now, don’t run off, Tom,” she said, waving one arm in a wide arc, to hurry her friends along the flower-lined walk. “I want you to meet the girls.”

Surrendering to the inevitable, he followed her gaze to the four women hurtling up the walkway. Each one well into her sixties, they wore jeans or the same kind of tights Evie was wearing. Sweatshirts, T-shirts and running shoes completed the ensembles, and Tom had to admit they looked nothing at all like what he would expect from a bridge club.

“Girls,” Evie announced proudly, “this is Tom.” She paused for effect, then added, “He’s a Marine. A colonel.”

Tom shifted uneasily as four pairs of interested eyes turned on him.

“Where’d you find him, Evie?”

“My, what a looker!”

“Whose is he?”

“Can we keep him?”

This last from a tiny woman with carrot red hair and an eager glint in her eye.

Tom met that look and took an instinctive step backward. Where were all of the nice grandmotherly type women he’d known when he was a kid?

From behind him a door opened and he almost groaned in relief when he heard Kate say, “Tom?”

Taking advantage of Evie’s surprise, Tom pulled his hand free and made a quick move for the blond woman standing in the open doorway. He didn’t remember ever being so glad to see her as he was at this minute. The porch light glimmered on the lightest blond streaks in her hair, making the short, curledunder cut shimmer like silver and gold threads. The dress she wore was enough to destroy a lesser man, and the light, flowery scent he always associated with her enveloped him.

She smiled up at him as she closed and locked her front door behind her and his heart hammered against his chest. Yep, he told himself. Worse than a teenager.

An audible sigh of disappointment came from “the girls.”

“Hello, Kate,” Evie said brightly. “I was just introducing Tom to my friends.”

“So I see,” she said, and fought down a ripple of excitement that shook through her when Tom’s arm brushed against her. She didn’t even want to think about the look she’d seen in his eyes a moment ago.

“Going someplace nice, are you?” Evie asked, her gaze fastening on Kate’s dark blue, brushed-wool dress.

“I don’t know,” Kate said, shooting a look at Tom. “Are we?”

He rubbed one hand across the back of his neck. “I was thinking about the Pasta Pot.”

“Good choice,” Evie told him, then began to herd her friends toward her front door. “Have a nice night. And Kate? Maybe you can join us for cards next week?”

“I’d like that,” Kate said, smiling at the woman who’d become a friend in the past month.

“I didn’t know you played bridge,” Tom muttered.

Before she could correct him, her neighbor did it for her.

“Bridge!” Evie exclaimed on a laugh. “That’s for old women. We play poker, honey, down and dirty.”

“Poker?” Tom repeated, and Kate dipped her head to hide a smile.

“Five-card stud. Wimps and wusses need not apply.” She sailed into her apartment with a wave and a high-pitched “Toodle-oo!”

After a long moment of stunned silence, Tom muttered, “Now there goes a completely terrifying woman.”

The tension she’d felt all afternoon shattered, Kate looked up at him and laughed. “Wonderful, isn’t she?”

“Interesting,” he said, then confessed, “For a minute there, when ‘the girls’ arrived, I knew just what it felt like to be a nicely browned Thanksgiving turkey when dozens of hungry eyes are locked on it.”

Kate looked him up and down quickly, covertly and couldn’t really blame Evie and the others. He looked good enough to eat. Black hair with just a dusting of gray at the temples. A red knit shirt that stretched tight across his muscled chest and broad shoulders was tucked into the narrow waistband of a pair of jeans that hugged his long, truly great legs. No wonder Evie and her friends had briefly captured him. It wasn’t every day a gorgeous man wandered up that walk.

Something inside her quivered, like a guitar string plucked and left to vibrate. Kate swallowed hard and strived for a calm, easy tone in her voice as she said, “When I first moved in, Evie made me dinner every night for a week. Said I shouldn’t have to bother with anything other than unpacking because moving was such a bitch.”

He chuckled, and the sound brought back memories of black nights, starlit skies and soft music. She could almost feel his warm breath on her neck. Almost taste the champagne they’d used to toast each other their last night together. The night they’d made a baby.

A shriek of laughter rose up from next door, and Tom glanced that way, unaware of Kate’s spiraling thoughts. “She’s something, all right,” he said. “I look at her and try to imagine my own mother wearing that outfit.”

“And can’t?” she asked, dropping her keys into her purse and starting down the walk.

“Angelina Candello?” he asked as he followed her. “In neon? I don’t think so.”

“Angelina’s a beautiful name,” she said softly and waited for him to unlock the truck door.

“Yeah.” He held it open for her. “You would have liked her.”

“Would have?”

“She died about six years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”