Daddy By Decision

She was glad her ghost hadn’t remembered her. Of course she was.

But.

“So long, cowboy!” The sound of her last words lingered in her ears. Surely she hadn’t wanted him to stop her with a flood of for-old-times’-sake memories? Had she?

But, her unruly tongue running ahead of her brain, she’d called out, “So long, cowboy!” Had that been a note of challenge, of “gotcha” in her voice? Had she wanted him to recognize her? Had some deep perversity ruled her in that last second? Surely not.

But she’d called out. In that last, crucial second, she’d called out to him.

In the light from her headlights, he’d looked bigger, tougher. A little mean with his eyes narrowed like that, a little baffled but thinking hard as he’d stared back at her from the darkness. Even sitting yards apart from him, she’d felt the insistent beating of his will against her, his determination to solve the puzzle she represented to him. That insatiable curiosity, that inability to turn away from an unanswered question—that quality had made him a brilliant lawyer.

He’d been fearsome, his cross-examinations stripping away evasions until a witness sat as vulnerable as a deer caught in the cross hairs, waiting. And then Jonas Buckminster Riley would deliver the killing blow, gently, cleanly, so elegantly that the witness seemed almost to welcome the coup de grace that put finish to the relentless, unending questions delivered in Jonas’s chillingly polite drawl.

No, the Palmetto Mart cowboy in the cream-colored straw cowboy hat and scruffy jeans might be as curious as ever, but he was not the man she remembered. Long, rangy muscles and sloping shoulders replaced the reed-thin frame she’d known; that thin, hard body covered by suits so expensively sumptuous that one time, driven by some crazy impulse as she’d passed in back of him, she’d stroked the baby-soft fabric of a jacket left casually hanging on the back of his chair.

He’d known, of course. He’d looked up at her in that moment when her index finger glided against the sleeve, slipped inside to the lining still warm from his body, and lingered against the silk.

“You like that, huh?” he’d asked and smiled, his brilliant blue eyes blazing her into ashes.

Lifting one eyebrow, she’d run her finger carelessly over the lining. “A bit too uptown for me. But then clothes make the man, so they say.” Brushing her hands together, knowing he was watching her every twitch and movement, she’d walked away, into her own office, her heart slamming against her ribs with each step.

“Do they really? Say that?” His whispery drawl had tickled the hairs along the back of her neck, sent goose bumps down her arms, her chest. “And what do you say, Ms. Bell?” His smile turned edgy, his narrowed gaze assessing, as he swiveled his chair toward her and focused all his fierce intelligence on her, pinning her in the searing beam of his gaze.

She’d smiled in return, lifted one eyebrow, and shut her door, leaving his question unanswered.

She wasn’t that Jessica Bell anymore. That woman seemed alien to her now. If she were different now, so, too, must he be. Inside. Outside. They weren’t the same people at all. So why was her heart still pumping so hard she felt as if she’d run a race? What possible impact on her life could a chance encounter at the Palmetto Mart mean at this point in her life?

Diddly. That’s what.

She braked the car in the driveway. Home. Hers. One she’d bought and paid for by herself. Downstairs in the family room a solitary splash of blue-white from the television broke the thickness of the night. Skeezix lumbered out behind her, woofing and circling her, weaving in and out between her legs until she laid her hand on top of his head. “Quiet, dopey. You want to wake up the whole neighborhood?” Two different canine greetings answered Skeezix.

The front door opened. A tiny silhouette in the rectangle of the doorjamb tilted his head and scrubbed at his eyes. “Hey,” he said sleepily.

“Hey yourself, sugar.” She swung him up over Skeezix and into her arms. “It’s mighty late. Why aren’t you asleep?”

“Me and Aunt Lolly waited for you. But we was hungry, so we ate all the pizza. Ev’ry last bite.” He spread his arms wide and clasped her around the neck, his chubby bare arms tight against her. “Loofah chewed the cheese off the cardboard.”

“Bad dog.”

“She was hungry, too.”

“I guess that’s okay, then.” Jessie nuzzled the warm, sweaty neck of her son. “C’mon, sugar, let’s say good night to Auntie Lolly and get you to bed.”

“‘Kay.” His soft hair tickled her nose as he leaned against her and fixed her with eyes as blue as her own. “But I am not at all tired.”

“No?”

“Nope. Not sleepy at all.”

Jessie stumbled against Skeezix, who’d crowded in behind her as she closed the door. Gopher tilted over her arm and blew a kiss at the dog. “Night, Skeezes. Sleep tight.” Her son glanced shrewdly up at her. “Skeezes isn’t sleepy. Me and Skeezes’ll sleep better together, right?”

Laughing, Jessie scrunched him to her. “Is that so, sugardoll?”

“Yep,” he said with satisfaction as his head drooped against her breast and his thumb found its way to his small mouth. “That’s so.”

Waiting inside the arch to the family room, her neighbor and honorary aunt Lolly rolled her eyes. “He did take a long nap. But he’s been going nonstop since he woke up. Can you give me some of whatever you’re feeding him? So I can keep up?” Her bony freckled face was cheerfully rueful. “We’ve dug worms, we’ve walked the dogs, we’ve made brownies. And taken three baths. Lord love a duck, Jessie, how do you keep up with him?”

“Practice.” Jessie anchored Gopher higher on one shoulder and slid open her desk drawer, reaching inside for her checkbook. “Hang on for a minute while I carry him up to bed, will you? And then I’ll write you a check if that’s okay?”

“You don’t have to pay me, Jess. I told you, I love staying with Gopher. Anyway, what else do I have to do most nights?”

“Take the check, Lolly. It’s better this way. Your time’s valuable, too, you know, no matter what you choose to do with it.” With her hip balancing the weight of her son and one arm curled around his rear, Jessie scribbled on a check. If she didn’t, Lolly would be gone before Jessie could come back downstairs. “And who knows? One of these nights you might decide to go out and do something wild and crazy.”

“Oh, sure,” Lolly scoffed, her face crumpling into soft folds of humor. “You seen any gents looking for sixty-twoyear-old dates?”

“Sure, but you can go out with a guy for company. Doesn’t have to be a date.” Jessie shifted Gopher and handed Lolly the check. “And you have friends. You could go to the movies. Or to the theater over in Sarasota? Lolly, listen. Life’s too short to pull up the drawbridge and hide out forever. You’ve got a lot of years ahead of you. Enjoy them. Go out. Party. Even if the wildest you get is going to the DeSoto Salad Bar.”

“Maybe.” Lolly opened the door.

With Lolly, “maybe” meant “no way.”

Lolly stuffed the check inside her vinyl purse. “Jess, I’ll take Loofah and Mitzi home with me. You can pick them up tomorrow if you’re going to use them at the rehab center.”

“Right. I’ll come get them. I wanted to give Skeezix the day off. Loofah and Mitzi work really well. They’re sweethearts. The patients are crazy about them.” Jessie blew Lolly a kiss and headed up the stairs, Gopher murmuring in her ear all the way.

“I luuv Lolly. And I luuuv Skeezes and I love my mommy and Loofah—”

“I know, sugar, and I luuuv you.” She kissed his soft cheek where a red scratch testified to his busy day. “Let’s tuck you in bed and you can tell me all about your day.” Pulling back the faded purple dinosaur sheets, Jessie slid him under the light cover and shucked off her sneakers, climbing in beside him. “Oof, sugar, you’re getting so big.”

“That’s my job,” he told her sleepily. “Going to Sunny Days Early Learning Preschool, and coloring and getting big. I luuuuv Sunny Days.” He wriggled his rump into the curve of her arm and waist.

Curling him close to her, his tough little body radiating heat, Jessie shut her eyes wearily. “So how many worms did you collect for our fishing trip tomorrow, sugar?”

“Maybe seventy-leven zillion.” He half rose and kissed the underneath side of her chin, a sweet, damp press of not-quitebaby mouth that never failed to squeeze her heart.

“That should do the trick,” she said, hugging him tightly to her, this child, a child she’d never expected, hadn’t wanted yet would die for. Smoothing his hair off his forehead, she returned his kiss. Her child.

But it was Jonas Buckminster’s intense eyes she saw in the darkness as she drifted into sleep beside her son.

Sometime before dawn the phone rang in the stuffy room of Maxie’s Motel, dragging Buck out of a fitful sleep where he’d been running and running and running, chasing something, someone, the figure disappearing into shadows and mist In the dream where an iron band squeezed his heart, he’d needed to stop that figure, ask it—what? Something. He yawned. Sheets twisted around his naked body, wound in between his legs. Groggy, mouth dry, he fumbled for the phone, lifting it to his ear.

His brother T.J. spoke, the words fast and harsh. “Daddy’s in the hospital, Buck.”

He sat up, pulling free of sweaty sheets. “What? You’re kidding. He was fine today at Mama’s birthday party.”

T.J. paused, and Buck heard the unspoken words in the tension in T.J.’s voice. “I don’t know. No one’s said anything yet. I don’t know what happened, but Mama wants you here. Can you come?”

“Yeah. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

Static crackled between them. “Good thing you stayed over, Buck.”

“Yeah.” There was nothing more to be said.

Hanging up the phone, Buck rubbed his eyes. Hoyt? In the hospital? There must be a mistake. Tough, as strong as the oak tree on the Tyler ranch that now belonged to T.J., Hoyt was immortal. A man among men, the patriarch of patriarchs. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood couldn’t walk in his shadow.

Shrugging into jeans, Buck zipped and snapped with steady fingers while the air conditioner labored in the muggy air. Hoyt was going to be fine. Nothing else was possible. Jamming loose change into one pocket and his wallet into the threadbare rear pocket, Buck scanned the shadows of the room.

Funny, but he’d almost decided to drive back down to Okeechobee last night. Instead he’d stayed and checked the listings for McDonalds in the Tarpon City phone book. Too many to call, so he’d tossed the book on the floor and crawled into bed.

If he hadn’t stayed, he would have been out in the pasture, too far away to make it back to Tarpon City before late evening. Fate. Shaking his head, he grabbed the Jeep keys from the round table near the window.

On the scarred and peeling veneer of the bed stand, the toy car glittered in the predawn watery light, gold flecks sparkling in its bright red metal.

A quick flash of memory stilled him. The keys dangled from his slack fingers.

Her head bent away from him, that streaky hair curling and sliding every which way, she’d hesitated, her hand lingering on the toy. And, briefly glimpsed in the monitor, her squarechinned face with its wide mouth.

Like mist on the bayou, memory swirled gently through his brain. Picking up the toy, he frowned as he touched the smooth, sleek finish.

Chapter Two

Buck shut the door to his room and jogged to the Jeep through the dim parking lot where gray shadows lingered under cabbage palms and moss-draped oaks. Even before sunrise, heat radiated up from the black asphalt and thickened the humid air.

Twenty minutes later, he slammed through the automatic doors of the hospital and leaned over the fake plastic wood of the reception desk. “Hoyt Tyler? Room?”

Before the woman with the elaborate cornrow hairstyle could answer, a deep voice interrupted. “Hey, Buck. How many red lights did you run? Or did you scam a police escort?” Thomas Jefferson Tyler, Buck’s middle brother, punched him on the shoulder and draped an arm across Buck’s shoulders as he guided him to the bank of elevators. “You look like ten miles of bad highway.”

“How’s Daddy?” Buck wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. The expression in T.J.’s eyes unnerved him.

“Don’t know. He’s in intensive care. Internal bleeding, apparently. Anyway,” T.J. said, punching the Up button, “they’re running tests, Mama looks like hell, and the doctors aren’t saying anything. I’m just real glad the folks are here and not back in Seattle.”

“Yeah.” Studying his brother’s tightly controlled expression, Buck felt his stomach tighten. T.J. didn’t panic. Like all the Tylers, like Hoyt himself, T.J. was the calm in the center of the hurricane. But at the moment T.J. vibrated with clamped-down feelings, that unspoken urgency communicating itself to Buck, screeching at him like fingernails on a blackboard. “Can I see Daddy?”

“Sure. Every hour they let someone in for five minutes, but don’t expect much. I think they have him doped up. Hank and Mama are in the waiting room. Callie and Jilly are coming up later. They’re switching off with the kids and looking after the ranch. Everybody’s staying there until we find out what’s going on. You going to come on out and bunk with us?”

“Don’t think so.”

Watching the red lights blink at each stop, they rode up to the seventh floor in silence. Jamming his hands into his pockets, Buck turned off his whirling thoughts, let himself exist in the cocoon of metal and piped-in music. He found himself closing his fist around the miniature car he’d stuffed into his pocket at the last minute. Fingering its smooth surface like a prayer stone, he traced its unseen shape over and over.

In the intensive care waiting room, his mother sat waiting, her hands folded tightly together, her face gray-white. “I’m glad T.J. got hold of you. Hank’s with Hoyt. We brought him in ourselves. The ambulance would have taken too long.” Her voice was steady, her smile a brave slash of pink, but she didn’t unclasp her trembling hands.

Hugging her and covering her hands with his much larger ones, Buck held her close to him. He didn’t expect her to collapse in tears. Bea Tyler wouldn’t. She did her crying in private. But her clasped hands trembled with a fine vibration that belied her outward calm and he felt helpless to comfort her. He folded himself into a sitting position next to her. “What happened?”

As his mother talked, sorting through her thoughts, her words slow and halting, Buck greeted Hank, his younger brother, with a nod. Stricken, all his sunshine good humor vanished, Hank seemed suddenly years older than he had the day before, reminding Buck of T.J. when he heard about his infant son’s diabetes.

A word here, a question there, thoughts sputtering into speech and trailing off, they finally abandoned the attempt and sat in silence, together but alone, while the clock moved sluggishly through the unending minutes until it was Buck’s turn to visit.

Entering the quiet room filled with the electrical whirring of IV pumps and flashing green monitors, Buck stopped. Tubes went down Hoyt’s mouth, nose, draped across the bed. Two bags of packed cells for blood transfusion hung on a pole beside the bed. As Buck stayed at the entrance, his hand on the curtain, Hoyt opened his eyes and glanced around.

Walking around the foot of the bed, Buck smiled. “Hey, Daddy. You gave us a hell of a scare.”

Hoyt’s gaze lit briefly on Buck before his eyelids drooped shut, closing Buck out.

Buck felt as though he’d been punched in the gut. He’d heard what his mama and brothers had told him, but even so, they hadn’t prepared him. Reality transcended words.

The only father he’d ever known had looked at him and not recognized him. Loss, enormous and incomprehensible, swamped him.

With his hand gripping Hoyt’s, Buck swallowed. Cast adrift, he clung to the weathered, rough hand of the man who’d raised him, who’d taught him everything, and it-was the longest, loneliest five minutes of his life.

Five minutes at a time, the day crept into late afternoon.

Buck felt the walls of the waiting room closing in on him, imprisoning him with each passing moment until he thought he’d throw something at the picture on the wall.

He’d volunteered to come back and spend the night at the hospital so that the others could go back to the ranch. Callie Jo and Jilly were coming for the evening, but then they would return home so that everyone could rest and regroup while he stayed guard. He convinced everyone that was the best plan. They all had family responsibilities. He didn’t.

In the meantime, it was going to be another three hours before he could see Hoyt again, and he seriously didn’t think he could take three more minutes penned up in the waiting room. He jerked to his feet. “I need a change of scenery. Some fresh air. Maybe a walk.”

Hank, T.J. and their mother looked up at him, their eyes as dazed as his must be. Maybe it was the way they all stared at him with the same blue-green gaze, maybe it was the restlessness that had settled in his bones some time past, but he felt like a kid on the other side of a fence. “I’m going down for coffee. Y’all want some? A sandwich? Mama, can’t I get you something?”

One after the other, like dominoes falling, they shook their heads. Once more he was struck by his brothers’ similarities to their mother and to Hoyt. And today more than ever before, Buck felt like the cuckoo in the robin’s nest.

He passed up the cafeteria, opting for the more private vending machine lounge. Leaning his arm against the cold drink machine, he rested his forehead on his arm, staring uncomprehendingly at the selections. The machine ka-chunked as he pressed the round red button. A can of cola rolled to the bottom. All he could see was Hoyt’s blank gaze staring at him and looking away.

Hoyt was only sixty-one. In the prime of life, he could still ride and rope with the best of them. Buck shut his eyes. Anger and frustration boiling up in him, he wanted to slam his fist into the machine.

He wanted to grab Hoyt out of that bed, rip all the tubes and machines off him and run hell-for-leather out of the damned hospital. Get Hoyt out into the fresh air at the ranch where he belonged.

But for the second time in his life, he was helpless.

And so he stayed there, breathing deeply, trying to block out all the anger and fury ripping through him. He wasn’t used to being helpless, and he didn’t like it one damned bit.

It was a faint, elusive scent that alerted him, a hint of cinnamon underlying flowers.

He lifted his head and stared straight into eyes as bright blue as his own, eyes that widened before going carefully blank behind round glasses that slipped down her narrow nose.

The black-and-white reflection in the Palmetto Mart monitor had been way, way off the mark—only a shadow of the real woman. In living color, her wide mouth didn’t need bright lipstick. Rosy pink and full, her lips curved deeply into small creases at the corners, a mouth made for laughing, for kissing. Falling to her shoulders in a mass of gold and brown, curls twisted into small corkscrews and tendrils.

She was wearing some kind of loose green-blue dress with tiny, silly straps over a sleeveless white T-shirt, and the light ocean-colored material swirled around her bare legs as she stepped sideways, away from him. The dollar bill fluttered in her hand as she moved.

“We meet again, Miz McDonald.” Pushing away from the drink machine, he scooped up his can of cola and nodded once to her. He gestured with the can toward her dollar and watched those curves around her lips tighten as pink tinged the edges of apple cheeks. “Flush—and flushed today, I see.”

Her fingers clutching her dollar, her wallet-on-a-string drooping down her arm, Jessie wondered how fate could be so wicked. “Hmm,” she said and turned, walking steadily to the coffee machine, Jonas Buckminster Riley’s long shadow covering her as he followed.

“What brings you to Tarpon City Memorial Hospital?” His drawl curled around the question, putting a slight spin on it that made her wary.

“Now why would I tell you?” Jessie smiled sweetly at him and marched toward the coffee machine, her heart thumping sickeningly. She knew how Jonas could move panther-smooth from one unimportant question into a killing pounce.

“Ah, answering a question with a question. You’re either Irish or a lawyer.”

She didn’t stumble, didn’t stop, didn’t flinch. “And you can’t stop fishing, can you? Maybe the cowboy getup,” she said, gesturing toward his jeans and shirt, “is only camouflage, and you’re the lawyer?” She pleated her dollar. Had she gone too far? Drat her tongue.

“You didn’t answer my question.” He braced himself against the soup vending machine.

“No, I didn’t, did I?” Again Jessie managed her teeth-onedge-sweet smile. “How perceptive of you. To catch that. Oooh, I’m so impressed.” She batted her eyelashes mockingly.

She thought the sound she heard coming from him was a surprised snort. It might have been a cough. She hoped it was a cough.

“Once in a while I’m—perceptive,” he said with not an ounce of inflection in his melted caramel drawl.

Her mind ran through every possibility she could think of. He knew. He remembered. He didn’t remember anything and was simply on the prowl.

Except that Jonas never prowled. He’d never needed to. She believed he must have learned in his cradle that all things came to him who waited, because everything did come to Jonas, sooner or later. He’d never had to exert himself for attention. He’d been the man with the golden touch, the man everyone crowded around while he backed away from the attention.

And the more elusive he became, the more sought after he was.

“Cat got your tongue, Miz McDonald?” Moving from the machine, he settled himself comfortably against the wall and popped the top of the can, holding her gaze the entire time as he tipped the can back and drank from it. Beneath the mischief in his eyes, she saw the veiled curiosity, the interest that sharpened with each second she didn’t answer. “You surprise me.” Again there was a note of another meaning rippling beneath his comment.

Sun and age lines radiated from the corners of his eyes. Caught in the power of that gaze, breathless and dizzy, Jessie couldn’t look away. She felt as though he were willing her to answer him, to tell him everything he wanted to know, to wring her soul dry.

The artificial light of the lounge highlighted deep mahogany gleams in his thick hair, glimmered in the red-gold bristles that darkened his narrow, hard-angled face. Lowering the can, he hooked his thumb in the waistband of his jeans. As he shifted, the washed-thin fabric pulled across his flat belly andtightened against his thighs.

Jonas Riley had been born to wear tight, worn jeans.

Jessie’s dollar drifted to the floor, brushed her leg and broke the spell he’d spun. Her face burning, she stooped to pick up the bill, took a toe-deep breath and stood up. Turning away from him with a quick movement, she pressed her fist into her skirt.

He didn’t remember her.

But he was on the hunt.

Feeding the dollar into the coffee machine with shaking fingers, she tapped the coffee selections without even seeing what she was choosing.

“Don’t you want to know how I know your name, Miz McDonald?” He hadn’t moved, but his question shivered the hairs on the back of her neck. “I’d think you’d be—interested. Me being a stranger and all?”

In the metal and plastic of the machine, she saw his rangy reflection. He was studying her, frowning, definitely on the hunt. “Don’t you want to know, Miz McDonald? Aren’t you a little curious?”

Goaded, she whirled, her skirt whipping around her. “I don’t have to ask. I know. You were right behind me. You heard Frankie.” Coffee slopped onto the floor.